Koons' Rabbit appears to warmly embrace our consumer lifestyle while, at the same time, coolly appraise the shallowness of a civilization devoid of deeper meaning.
Jeff Koons - Rabbit (1986)
Friday, November 18, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
why movies often are not high-brow
Movies have never been, with rare exceptions, a highbrow medium. They rejoice in the visceral, the gaudy, and the vulgar. And this has been held against them by critics who prefer the still gray ma,r of the brain to the whirling kaleidoscope of the screen. 16 be sure, there have been art-house movies, with big words in them, and obscure plots, and little in the way of rush and throb; but this has always been a minority taste—movies today are as philistine as they have ever been. Movies revel in sensation and emotion (often the cruder, the better); deep abstract thought is not their thing. They are a sensory (and sensational) medium, inarticulate, nonverbal, dazzlingly in love with spectacle (the circus is not dissimilar). Brutality and disorder, death and destruction— these are their frequent themes. There is nothing more cinematic than the sudden shock of a fearsome predator lunging into the screen, eliciting a gasp of surprise from the audience. Even a "sophisticated" filmmaker such as Ingmar Bergman deals in raw emotion, conflict, and violence of the spirit. This is surely why those of a certain cast of mind have always disapproved of the movies (as they have rock music and, before that, jazz). They rightly sense the anarchic flow of some of our most—what shall I say?—basic emotions (I won't say "animal" because animals don't in general enjoy explosions and knife fights). They correctly discern that movies don't as a rule engage the higher mental faculties.
However, I am here not to condemn this trait of film, but to explain it. Sleep science has shown that the brain is selectively activated during dreaming: the parts that control sensation, emotion, and movement are as active as they are in the waking state, but the parts that sustain reasoning and self-reflection are dampened down. Thus J. Allan Hobson writes: "We can see that, when the brain self-activates in sleep, it changes its chemical self-instructions. The mind has no choice but to go along with the programme. It sees, it moves, and it feels things intensely but it does not think, remember, or focus attention very well ."12 Later he says: "The reason that dreams are so perceptually intense, so instinctive and emotional, and so hyperassociative is because the brain regions supporting these functions are more active. The reason that we can't decide properly what state we are in, can't keep track of time, place, or person, and can't think critically or actively is because the brain regions supporting these functions are less active."3 Now these results from the study of the dreaming brain must pique the interest of the student of film, for they are eerily reminiscent of what is obviously true of film. Just as the higher intellectual and critical faculties are diminished during dreaming sleep, so the movie watcher is operating at a psychological level at which the higher mental faculties are not in play or are in abeyance. The parts of the brain that are most active in movie watching are connected to sensation, emotion, and movement; and these crowd out the more abstract conceptual functions of the brain. If we call the parts of the brain that are responsible for sensation, emotion, and movement the SEM brain, then we can say that in movie watching it is the SEM brain that is primarily recruited; the critical and reflective faculties are (largely) offline.
The self that is childlike, instinct-driven, and sensation-fixated. This I distinguish from the critical self, which is reflective, language-driven, and conceptually fixated. (Think Jekyll and Hyde, roughly) My hypothesis is that the base self is upper-most in the dreaming state (the self subserved by the SEM brain) and is also calling the shots in the movie theatre, while the critical self takes a well-earned rest. To put it more pointedly, the crassness of movies is a function of the brain regions that are activated during them, which overlap with the regions of the brain that are active during dreaming sleep. Can we explain the lowbrow character of movies by the fact that it is the dreaming brain that is primarily activated by them? As the physiology of sleep tells us, the brain can be selectively activated, with some parts active and others quiescent. According to the present hypothesis, in the movies the brain likewise shifts its patterns of activation. The preoccupations of the sleeping brain—fear, appetite, wish, and delirious fantasy—are also the preoccupations of the mass movie audience. The movies chemically alter the brain in the direction of its dreaming mode: that, at any rate, is the hypothesis. During sleep the SEM brain wakes up, as it were, and with it the base self, while the critical self snoozes; I am suggesting that something similar might be true for the state of semisomnolence known as watching a movieThursday, September 15, 2011
art is both commodity and artifact
So, what is the fascination with interdisciplinarity all about? 'The art critic Harold Rosenberg once published a book called The Anxious Object. The title was a reference to the art of the sixties—Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. Rosenberg thought that those art objects were anxious because they were uncertain of their own identity. They kept asking themselves questions like, Am I a work of art, or just a wall of Polaroids? Am I a sculpture, or just a pile of bricks? More existentially: Am I an autotelic aesthetic artifact, or just a commercial good?
What causes anxiety to break out in a work of art? Self-consciousness. Maybe, in the case of the academic subject, self-consciousness about disciplinarity and about the status of the professor—the condition whose genealogy I have been sketching in this chapter—is a source of anxiety. That status just seems to keep reproducing itself; there is no way out of the institutional process. And this leads the academic to ask questions like, Am I an individual disinterested inquirer, or a cog in a knowledge machine? And, Am I questioning the status quo, or am I reproducing it? More existentially, Is my relation to the living culture that of a creator or that of a packager? 'The only way to get past the anxiety these questions cause is to get past the questions—to see that they are bad questions because they require people to choose between identities that cannot be separated. A work of art is both an aesthetic object and a commercial good. That is not a contradiction unless you have been socialized to believe that it must be.
art is both commodity and artifact
So, what is the fascination with interdisciplinarity all about? 'The art critic Harold Rosenberg once published a book called The Anxious Object. The title was a reference to the art of the sixties—Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. Rosenberg thought that those art objects were anxious because they were uncertain of their own identity. They kept asking themselves questions like, Am I a work of art, or just a wall of Polaroids? Am I a sculpture, or just a pile of bricks? More existentially: Am I an autotelic aesthetic artifact, or just a commercial good?
What causes anxiety to break out in a work of art? Self-consciousness. Maybe, in the case of the academic subject, self-consciousness about disciplinarity and about the status of the professor—the condition whose genealogy I have been sketching in this chapter—is a source of anxiety. That status just seems to keep reproducing itself; there is no way out of the institutional process. And this leads the academic to ask questions like, Am I an individual disinterested inquirer, or a cog in a knowledge machine? And, Am I questioning the status quo, or am I reproducing it? More existentially, Is my relation to the living culture that of a creator or that of a packager? 'The only way to get past the anxiety these questions cause is to get past the questions—to see that they are bad questions because they require people to choose between identities that cannot be separated. A work of art is both an aesthetic object and a commercial good. That is not a contradiction unless you have been socialized to believe that it must be.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
art is storytelling
Why should anyone want to buy a Cezanne for $800,000? What's a little Cezanne house in the middle of a landscape? Why should it have value? Because it's a myth. We make myths about politics, we make myths about everything. I have to deal with myths from 10 AM to 6 PM every day. And it becomes harder and harder. We live in an age of such rapid obsolescence.... My responsibility is the myth-making of myth material—which handled properly and imaginatively, is the job of a dealer—and I have to go at it completely. One just can't prudently build up a myth.
- Leo Casteli
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
change to pop art
Arriving in the art world at a time when Abstract Expressionism was the dominant paradigm, Johns and Rauschenberg reacted against what they considered the exaggerated emotional and philosophical claims of the older painters for their art. Rauschenberg later recalled that "The kind of talk you heard then in the art world was so hard to take. It was all about suffering and self-expression and the State of Things. I just wasn't interested in that, and I certainly didn't have any interest in trying to improve the world through painting." Similarly, Johns explained that "I'm neither a teacher nor an author of manifestos. I don't think along the same lines as the Abstract Expressionists, who took those sorts of things all too seriously." Instead of self-expression, the two young artists wanted to find new ways to use art to reflect everyday life. Rauschenberg famously declared that "Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)" Johns echoed the same idea: "I'm interested in things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality. I'm interested in things which suggest things which are, rather than in judgments."
The brash and iconoclastic Rauschenberg made a number of symbolic attacks on Abstract Expressionism. In 1953, he literally erased an Abstract Expressionist work. After obtaining a drawing from Willem de Kooning for the purpose, Rauschenberg carefully rubbed out the image, then framed the smudged sheet and hand-lettered a label, "Erased de Kooning Drawing, Robert Rauschenberg. "In 1957, Rauschenberg mocked the supposed spontaneity and uniqueness of the Abstract Expressionists' work by making two collage paintings, Factum I and Factum II, that appeared identical, even to the drips and splashes around several large brush strokes. Most damaging, however, was Rauschenberg's innovation of a new form of art. In 1954 he began to attach real things to his canvases, in order to make his paintings independent objects rather than illusionistic representations of them: "I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't. I want it to look like something it is. And I think a picture is more like the real world when it's made out of the real world." Rauschenberg named these three-dimensional works "combines," and they became so influential for successive generations of younger artists, many of whom were eager to break away from the traditional two-dimensional picture and the sanctity of traditional art materials.
Robert Rauschenberg - Factum 1 and Factum 11 (1957)
Single Most Important Work by Each Artist
Experimental (age):
Brancusi 52, Bird in Space
Kandinsky 46, Der Blaue Reiter
De Kooning 46, Excavation
Mondrian 71, Broadway Boogie-Woogie
Pollock 38, Autumn Rhythm
Rothko 54, Red, White and Brown
Conceptual (age):
Braque 26, Houses at L’ Estaque
Braque 29, The Portuguese
Duchamp 30, Fountain
Johns 28, Three Flags
Malevich 40, Suprematist Composition: White on White
Matisse 37, Joy of Life
Oldenburg 32, The Store
Picasso 26, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Rauschenberg 34, Monogram
Warhol 34, Marilyn Monroe Diptych
most important works of 20th century
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)
Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)
Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International (1919)
Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937)
Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956)
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)
best artists
Old Masters:
Experimental: Jan van Eyck, Masaccio, Giorgione, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Vermeer.
Conceptual: Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Titian, Hals, Velazquez, Rembrandt.
19th Century:
Experimental: Degas, Cezanne, Monet, Renoir.
Conceptual: Courbet, Manet, Gauguin, Van Gogh.
Modern:
Experimental: Pollack, De Kooning, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Rothko, Mondrian
Conceptual: Johns, Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Matisse, Malevich
Post 1975:
Cindy Sherman, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Ansejm Kiefer, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rachel Whiteread, Matthew Barney, Richard Serra, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince, Julian Schnabel, Jeff Wall.
experimental vs conceptual
Robert Frost was an experimental artist who believed in following the traditional rules of his art strictly. He famously denounced a deviation from those rules that was becoming increasingly popular among modern poets by declaring, "I had as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down." When another poet objected that you could play a better game with the net down, Frost replied that that might be so, "but it ain't tennis." For Frost, the essence of poetry lay in the craftsmanship that allowed the poet to express himself within the constraints created by traditional meters, and he worked within their discipline throughout his life; as Robert Lowell observed, "He became the best strictly metered poet in our history.
Ezra Pound was Frost's antithesis, a conceptual artist who had no qualms about breaking traditional rules. In a characteristically brash and definite early statement of his credo, Pound declared, "I believe . . . in the trampling down of every convention that impedes or obscures ... the precise rendering of the impulse. One such convention was traditional meter. Many years later he looked back with satisfaction on the revolution he had promoted in modern poetry in his youth, and marked, "To break the pentameter, that was the first heave." Pound understood the problem of communication that existed when the brilliant young conceptual artist faced the older and wiser experimentalist: "A very young man can be quite 'right' without carrying conviction to an older man who is wrong and who may quite well be wrong and still know a good deal that the younger man doesn't know.
Frost and Pound highlight the contrasting attitudes of the experimental and conceptual artist. To the experimentalist, a conceptual innovation may simply be perceived as cheating; so for Frost free verse was illegitimate, and could have no possible justification. In contrast, to the conceptual innovator, breaking the rules of an art may have a positive value if it achieves a desired end; so for Pound discarding the convention of traditional meter was to be looked on with approval, as the creation of a new and better form. A basic difference underlying this disagreement involves whether the artist believes in the existence of a definite goal that can actually be achieved. For a conceptual artist there is a specific goal that is within reach, and the end of achieving it can justify the means used to do o. In contrast, for the experimentalist the goal is imprecise and probably unachievable, and since the end cannot be reached there can be no justification for attempting to do so with illegitimate means.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
definition of pomo
Postmodern art -- Any art that is conscious of the fact that it is, in fact, art.
Or any art that is conscious of the fact that it is, in fact, product.
Monday, July 18, 2011
value inversion
Andreas Gursky - 99 Cent II Diptychon (2001)
The work became famous as being the most expensive photograph in the world when it was auctioned at Sotheby's on February 7 in 2007 for a price of US$3.34 million.
museums compete with mass media
As mass culture became steadily more spectacular and immersive - with larger high-definition TV sets and vast cinema screens, with the enclosed and carefully calculated spectacle of the shopping centre or theme park - art had to compete. It could do so, as we have seen, by feeding off the allure of mass culture while adding its own aesthetic and estranged edge. It could compete by reversing the norms of mass culture: to take video as an example, it could produce slow, portentous pieces without camera movement, narrative, or obvious meaning, to set against the standard moral tales and visual incident of TV. It could provide impressive, nonfunctional objects and environments that, unlike those of the mall or resort, were not geared to selling (or at least not to the vast majority of their viewers).
- Julian Stallabrass
mystical bullshit
I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.
- Pierre Bourdieu
Thursday, July 14, 2011
the original facebook profile pic
Hans Holbein - The French Ambassadors (1533)
Oil paintings were one of the first objects to enter the magical world of branding. We often forget that most oil painting done before the rise of Romanticism was done by journeymen who were told where to paint, how to paint, and especially what to paint. Then their works were often discarded or painted over because the canvas was often more valuable than the images. That's one reason why frescoes were so popular. They were cheap and easy to reuse. As the English critic/novelist John Berger argued first in his BBC television shows and the companion text Ways of Seeing, oil painting became so popular precisely because it was one of the few ways to tell stories about yourself (self-branding), and once you lost interest or were gone, the painting essentially lost value. Now, of course, just the opposite is true. The age of a painting often generates part of its perceived value. In fact, the patina itself is an augmenter of value as it testifies to weathered age.
making things special is what museums do
"Reverence for the experience will replace reverence for the object."
"All department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores."
The museum experience, like the religious experience it mimics, is carried in an aura that implies the unique. There is no copy. That's its brandstory. In other words, art is the story we tell about an object and getting the object into the museum is an important part of the story. Perhaps, that's why the museum and the machine develop concurrently. They depend on each other. If the machine says, let's make the same thing over and over, the museum says let's not.
The museum experience, like the religious experience it mimics, is carried in an aura that implies the unique. There is no copy. That's its brandstory.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
culture is signaling identity
art is about aspiration. art is a means of becoming who one wants to be.
i want to be classy. therefore i should listen to opera. i love opera now.
i want to be cool. therefore i should listen to rock. i love rock now.
i want to be sophisticated. therefore i should enjoy abstract impressionistic art. i love rothko now.
technology killed Art
To Walter Benjamin (whose "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" encapsulates early modernist anxiety), originality was the be-all and end-all of culture. Repetition denies the very concept of the unique. From the Greeks, who knew only founding and stamping, to the woodcut and graphic art of the Renaissance, to movable type and lithography, to photography, then to film and sound film, the central concept of "authenticity" was being effaced. In a melancholy aside, Benjamin even notes that the worst staging of Faust is superior to the best film version of Faust in that the stage play more nearly imitates the first performance at Weimar and hence expresses Goethe's intent. Art loses its aura of ritual once secularized; its cultic value and fetishist power are depleted when shared with the hoi polloi. Mechanical reproduction means mass production, and mass distribution means mass consumption, and anything that the rabble has is, by definition, without value. Beneath this cultural Ludditeism lurks the dog-in-the-manger mentality of exact1y that kind of elite that the Marxists supposedly abhor. But Benjamin has a point: if everybody hears Beethoven, then Beethoven becomes vulgar. Print the Mona Lisa on a washcloth too many times and she loses her allure. As Huysmans observed, "The loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdygurdies make it their own.” Familiarity even breeds ignorance. We all know that the William Tell overture precedes The Lone Ranger, not Rossini’s opera.
Art is all about exclusion, artificial scarcity.
Art is show business. Authenticity is irrelevant. A copy is as good as the original. Is it compelling, have I pulled the veil over the audience and persuaded them of its value? Is the NARRATIVE there?
The story makes it special...it re-sacralizes the copy, the Eucharist: bread/wine is the Museum/Critics: art
Friday, July 8, 2011
conclusion of the good, beautiful, and the true
Indeed, for many young people (and some who are no longer young), the actual truth value of statements is no longer privileged. These persons are interested principally in authenticity (Does the speaker seem real, committed, engaged?) and in transparency (Does the speaker reveal where he or she is coming from, or does she dissemble or hide?). Should these trends continue, then sheer truthfulness may become less important. Still, the idea of transparency rests on the assumption that there is an underlying truth, which one either foregrounds or shields. Transparency depends on—indeed presupposes—tests of truthfulness. In the end, a position that brackets truth harbors its own destruction, if not its own self-contradiction.
Moving on to our second virtue, we have survived the period in which "beauty" was effectively banished from the lexicon of "art talk." (To be sure, it was never banished as a personal experience, as can be testified by anyone who has ever eavesdropped on visitors at a museum of fine arts, a national park, or a venerable tourist attraction.) For nearly all individuals, emanating from nearly all groups, certain objects and experiences—family portraits, evening entertainment, athletic contests, high art—will continue to hold a special place, a place in which interestingness, memorability of form, and pleasurable feeling somehow come together and invite further exploration. However, the kinds of experiences that are judged to be beautiful, by individuals and by groups, will vary, often unpredictably, because the history, culture, technologies, and
Before the fact, who could have predicted the revolutionary effects of of Picasso's paintings, T. S. Eliot's poems, Igor Stravinsky's compositions, Martha Graham's dances—and the speed with which they absorbed into the canon? In other words, I would put my money on the Survival of Beauty long before I put my money on the Science of Beauty. At the same time, beauty per se has probably relinquished, for all time, its preeminent position in determining membership in pantheon of Great Art.
Our notions of goodness, in the individual moral sense, are far entrenched than our conceptions of beauty. What we expect of friends and neighbors, and what they expect of us, has not fundamentally altered over the centuries—though we are perhaps more tolerant in some ways and less tolerant in others. In an era of many weak and virtually unrestrained mobility, we may well be less accountable than we once were; but the basics of the Golden Rule and the Commandments need not be recalibrated.
The realm of "the good" is threatened by antipodal forces: a mindless absolutism, on the one hand, and a feckless cultural relativism, on the other. We cannot legislate goodness from on high, but we also should not throw up our hands in resignation and simply declare "Whatever." Postmodernist critiques are appropriately cautionary and occasionally devastating, but they cannot be allowed to become decisive. The digital media can play a positive role in exposing us to a range of alternatives, in presenting for debate the diverse views of "the good," and in modeling practices that have proved effective beyond our borders and outside our consciousness. An abundant supply of "best practices" on the part of the media may be necessary, but it cannot suffice.
Ultimately, we require a deep and continuing dialogue between citizens, on the one hand, and media practitioners (who aspire to be professionals), on the other. To the extent that citizens call for broad and well-rounded presentations of alternatives, this message pressures or frees media to be even-handed and comprehensive. But to the extent that citizens do not fill their roles responsibly—are indifferent or fixated on celebrities or interested only in dredging up support for their opinions and prejudices—the media will simply expand the fog of ignorance and prejudice.
the definition of art
Increasingly, aficionados of the arts seek out material that is interesting, engaging, exciting, and unexpected, reacting positively when material that satisfies those desires is present. Many artists have responded to this demand—and perhaps they have helped to create it—by fashioning exotic objects or carry out sensational activities and making sure that these activities are 'performed in galleries and observed by critics. At times, and for some people, the object or experience may be awful; at other times, for other persons, it is awe-inspiring. But at the very least it elicits interest.
Why create interesting objects, or perform interesting actions? A whole branch of experimental aesthetics documents how, whenever a sight or sound becomes familiar, individuals avert their eyes or tune out. And, as a contrast, when deviation from the "new norm" emerge, these attract attention instead, unless they have become so complex that they cannot be assimilated. But once the new stimuli become familiar, they too lose the capacity to command attention. Therefore, to maintain interest, one must continually raise the ante, though not always in the same direction. That is, when interest in A has piqued, one moves on to B, and then to C, but sometimes a return to A proves more attractive than a continuing movement in the direction of D, E, and F. In a version documented frequently by experimental psychology, over time individuals prefer to look at polygons with increasingly many sides (say, more than twelve or twenty) until a peak is reached, at which point preference reverts to simple, classic geometric forms having a small number of sides.
These "trajectories of interest" transcend the experimental laboratory and emerge across the range of art forms. Consider the evolution over the centuries of serious orchestral music. Following the classical work of the Mozart-Schubert era, romantic composers like Berlioz, Wagner, and Liszt began to challenge the supremacy of tonality. Then, in their respective ways, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg created alternative systems of sound. Thereafter, as twelve-tone classical music became ever more complex and recondite, minimalist forms of music—constituting the sharpest possible contrast—gained in attractiveness. In the words of minimalist composer John Adams: "In comparison to the flamboyantly Baroque display at the New Complexionists [a self-styled intricate musical style of the middle of the twentieth century], the matter-of-fact notation of my own music was like a pup tent squatting next to the Chartres Cathedral. I had to move away from this setup and had to remind myself of how the notion of 'complexity as progress' is in fact a posture, an intellectual house of cards and always has been." Comparable forms of minimalism arose in the literary arts (Samuel Beckett) and in the graphic arts (Donald Judd), with much the same line of justification as that proposed by Adams.
Interestingness in itself, of course, is not particularly symptomatic of the arts—if it were, then mere newsworthiness would qualify an object or product as artistic. For me, this stretch does not compute—a single symptom signals neither a disease nor an objet d'art. But once the element of interest is embodied in a form or format sufficiently powerful or evocative that it will be remembered in that form, one has clearly moved toward the arts. In this way, we approach the possibility of experiences of beauty.
Conceptual art provides an intriguing example. It might seem that conceptual art is about an idea, and it suffices just to repeat or paraphrase that idea. But that is not the case. In One and Three Chairs Joseph Kosuth presents a chair and a photo of that chair alongside a dictionary definition of a third in a whimsical version of a classroom punishment of earlier decades, John Baldessari has his wayward pupil repeatedly write: I will not make any more boring art. In each case, a potentially interesting idea-what is a chair, how to avoid boring art—is wedded to a format, that is itself memorable, even unforgettable.
Joseph Kosuth - One and Three Chairs (1965)
John Baldessari - I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971)
With memorability of form, the artist distinguishes herself from an epistemologist or an exhibitionist. An intriguing example comes from the contemporary performance artist Marina Abramovic. In one of her flagship performances, Abramovic sits motionless in a chair facing whichever visitor to the gallery chooses to sit in the second chair; the visitor can sit as long as he likes and the artist remains essentially immobile for seven hours. This unusual behavior certainly elicits interest. While anyone with fortitude could assume the Abramovic role, this artist takes consummate care in selecting the color and style of her costume, her head and hand positions, the expression on her face, her bodily posture. Not only does Abramovic stimulate us to reconsider what it means to attempt to have a relationship to a startlingly unreactive fellow human being; her appearance and behavior often remain unforgettably poignant for the participant and those who view the encounter. More casual, informal, or ill-considered choices could undermine the effectiveness of the artistic performance. Just as actor Laurence Olivier long "owned" the role of Hamlet, Marina Abramovic sets the parameters for others who would hope to emulate her seated performance.
The third antecedent of the experience of beauty is the impulse, the inclination, the desire to encounter again, to revisit the object, scene, or performance. What I'll term the invitation to revisit can arise from each of several factors: One likes the experience, one has curiosity to learn or to understand better, or one has a feeling of awe—which can derive from wonder, scintillation, overpowerment, or uncanniness. Absent a desire on the part of an audience to revisit, an experience does not qualify as beautiful—immediately or ultimately.
pomo and art
In the West, the arts themselves have meandered, or sometimes deliberately ventured, in directions distant from a traditional notion of beauty. In the West and increasingly elsewhere, the high arts no longer try to document reality faithfully: That assignment has long since been assigned to the realms of photography and audio recording. The high arts no longer feature poems that neatly scan, or musical compositions that contain textbook harmony and regular beats; nor do they give pride of place to literary works with a classic "heroic" plot comprising a protagonist, an obstacle, the obstacle overcome, and an ending in which all—or at least the good guys—live happily ever after. Importantly, these artistic trends unfolded gradually, over many years. Far from being a consequence of postmodernism, they were catalytic in its emergence and its choice of name.
This state of affairs across the arts has led to a dismissal, on the part of many authorities, of the concept of beauty. Consider the testimony of fine-arts scholar Laurie Fendrich: "We who live in this speedy, diverse, more or less democratic society are, deep down, fairly suspicious of beauty. Beauty is based on a hierarchy that labels some things undeniably 'beautiful' and others irretrievably ugly. Most serious, inventive, and 'alive' contemporary artists do not want merely to reiterate elements of this established hierarchy." And indeed, post- modernist sympathizers like Fendrich are justified in challenging "beauty" as the sine qua non of all artistic experiences. But we should not, dismiss the concept because of the particular powers that happened to invoke or to banish it.
true, beautiful, and the good
Our classical virtues have been pummeled by developments in our era. In the West, in recent decades, conceptions of the true, the beautiful, and the good have been subjected to considerable, perhaps unparalleled, strain from two unexpected quarters—both quite new: the ideas that we describe as postmodern and the ever-expanding, ever more powerful digital media.
From one angle—a philosophical one—postmodern critiques emanating from the humanities have questioned the legitimacy of the trio—the good, the beautiful, and the true. According to this skeptical account, assessments of what is true or beautiful or good reflect nothing more than the preferences of whoever holds power at a given moment; in a multicultural, relativistic world, the most to which we can aspire are civil conversations across often irreconcilable divides. And so, for example, the mild postmodernist might challenge my characterization of Impressionist art as beautiful, claiming that I am just yielding to an account of painting that, by an accidental set of circumstances, has come to dominate textbooks. The more aggressive postmodernists would throw out the term beautiful altogether—claiming either that the concept is meaningless or something even more venal: shorthand for stating that I have ascribed to myself the right to determine merit. So, too, my statements about truth and about goodness would be seen as arrogant, subjective, or meaningless.
From a quite different angle—a technological one—the new digital media have ushered in a chaotic state of affairs. Thanks to their predominance, we encounter a mélange of claims and counterclaims; an unparalleled mixture of creations, constantly being revised; and an ethical landscape that is unregulated, confusing, indeed largely unexamined. How to determine what is truth—when a statement on Wikipedia about who I am and what I am doing can be changed by anyone at any time? Or when we can all present ourselves on social network sites any way we want? Or when blogs can claim without evidence or consequence that the current American president was born in Kenya? How to ascertain what is beautiful—when a photograph by a once acknowledged master can be endlessly edited on Photoshop, or when judgments of works of art rendered by a majority vote are given more weight than those offered by experts? How to arrive at goodness—the right course of action—when it is so easy to circulate unsubstantiated rumors about another person's private life, or when nearly everyone downloads pirated music even though it is technically illegal to do so.
relativism in art
Just as these eras yielded very different kinds of human beings, they also valorized very different works of art, with contrasting notions of beauty, ugliness, sublimity, and bathos. Just compare public art such as Civil War monuments of the past (the solid and stolid military figure mounted on his favorite horse) with the Vietnam War Memorial (a list of over fifty-eight thousand names arranged on two rectilinear black-granite walls). It is as difficult to imagine nineteenth-century viewers being moved by the Vietnam memorial as it is to imagine contemporary viewers savoring an equestrian rendering. Likewise, in the eighteenth century, residents of France considered mountains to be repulsive. According to historian Graham Robb, "To those who gave the matter any thoughts, mountains—and the people who lived there—were remnants of the primitive world." Similarly, novelist Orhan Pamuk describes how differently tourists and residents of Istanbul experience the city: "A cascade of domes and rooftops, a row of houses with crooked window casings—these things don't look beautiful to the people who live among them; they speak instead of squalor, helpless hopeless neglect. Those who take pleasure in the accidental beauty of poverty and historical decay, those of us who see the picturesque in ruins--invariably were people from the outside."
art as lie
Of all lies, art is the least untrue
- Glaubert
Many knowledgeable people speak of the truths of the arts,of a work of art as being true to life, or even of great art as laying bare the deepest truths of the universe. Returning once again to the realm of statements, some commentators have proposed a felicitous way of thinking about works of art—as "authentic" or "inauthentic." We should not think of plays or poetry or paintings as attempting to capture life in the manner of a physicist or a reporter. Rather, we should think of these works of art as capturing some aspect of life, the world, the human condition, in a way that is effective and powerful and (as I'll argue) beautiful—even if the particular vehicles happen to have been contrived or invented out of whole cloth. I resonate to the words of Pablo Picasso:
We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
mediated reality
Warhol's Marilyn Diptych shows us that when media becomes our primary reality, we lose sight of the distinction between illusion and reality; we feed on surrogate, second-hand experience. The media gives us the illusion of knowing directly, when in fact we encounter only what passes through it selective filter. Reality is mediated for us by someone else; we can know nothing directly.
Friday, June 24, 2011
modernism / postmodernism
Discussions of the arts, design, fashion and sub-cultures during the late 1970s and early 1980s were notable for the frequency with which the terms/concepts 'pluralism' and 'post-modernism' occurred. Before these concepts can be defined it will be necessary to examine, briefly, the earlier term/concept 'modernism'.
Modernism was an aesthetic ideology which developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and which informed the thinking and practice of many radical artists. Modern architecture, art and design encompassed a variety of movements, styles and groups. While they did not all share the same checklist of essential characteristics, certain assumptions and principles did recur:
1. Modernists reacted against the blandness, sentimentality and historicism of the academic art of the nineteenth century. They also rejected the stylistic anarchism and eclecticism typical of Victorian art and design on the grounds that a new age of machines and technology had been born which demanded a fresh beginning. Some modernists thought it was essential to create a new style, based upon such engineering principles as 'form follows function' and the dictates of new materials, machines and methods of construction; others believed that any art and design based on such principles would be styleless.
2. Since modernists believed a new age had dawned - the modern age - they insisted on a break with the past, with history and tradition. Experiment, innovation, novelty and originality became overriding values as far as the shock troops of modernism - the avant-garde - were concerned. 'Rebel, reject what has gone before' became the rule which new generations of artists were expected to obey. Soon this became a tradition in itself (which explains Harold Rosenberg's paradoxical phrase 'the tradition of the new').
3. Some modernists rejected ornament on the grounds that it was superfluous and a residue of primitive habits such as tattooing. They preferred geometric to organic forms; they espoused the values of simplicity, clarity, uniformity, purity, order and rationality. Others sought to rejuvenate modern art by appropriating the styles and motifs of 'primitive' and exotic arts (tribal art, Japanese art, the art of the insane, naive art, folk art, and so on).
4. Modernists rejected national, regional and vernacular styles. They favoured an international style because, in their view, the tenets of modernism were universally applicable.
5. Modernists were orientated towards the future. Some were inspired by utopian visions and socialist ideals and wished to sweep away the old order in order to create a brave new environment which would in itself improve human behaviour. They saw themselves as experts who knew best, and as a consequence tended to impose their architectural and town planning solutions on the masses without regard to popular tastes, and without any consultation. Some impressive modern buildings were constructed but the cruder, cheaper, system-built tower blocks and public housing estates which appeared in the 1960s were hated by those condemned to live in them.
By the 1960s disillusionment with modernism had become widespread. On the one hand, it was a success: despite its revolutionary rhetoric, it had become the official culture of the ruling elites in western democracies; it was preserved in the very museums the futurists had sworn to destroy; it was now an orthodoxy. On the other hand, it had failed: the disasters of modern architecture; the rapid turnover of art movements and styles of little or no substance, typical of the post-1945 period. At this point, the term 'post-modernism' began to gain ground.
As Chafles Jencks, a leading architectural historian and theorist, has explained, the term 'post-modernism' signifies a half-way house: it is clear what is being left behind, but it is not yet clear what is replacing it.(The label does not supply any information about the characteristics of the works subsumed by it.) Jencks went on to argue that in the post-modern era, modernism continues - he employed the expression 'late modernism' - but it loses its dominant position as the authentic style of the modern age and becomes simply one style among a range of styles from which artists can choose.
What then were the recurrent features of post-modernism? As one might expect, they reversed or modified many of the tenets of modernism:
1. The modernist idea that there was only one authentic style for the modern age was rejected in favour of the idea that a plurality of styles - some old, some new - existed. Eclecticism, hybrid styles became fashionable again. No one style appeared to be dominant.
2. History and tradition - including the history of modernism itself - became available again; hence, 'retro-style', recycling old styles, the use of 'quotations' from the art of the past, parodies and pastiches of earlier works.
3. Ornament and decoration made a comeback.
4. Complexity and contradiction (the title of a highly influential book by the American architect Robert Venturi) and ambiguity were the values which replaced simplicity, purity and rationality. Mixtures of high and low culture, fine art and commercial art styles were encouraged as a way of producing buildings with multiple meanings capable of pleasing audiences with different levels of sophistication and degrees of knowledge.
5. In post-modern architecture and design, issues of form, space and function became less important. Architecture and design were regarded as 'languages' or sign systems capable of communicating messages. Pleasure was emphasized by means of playfulness, humour, bright colour and ornament.
6. A basic characteristic of art - intertextuality - was heightened in postmodernism. 'Intertextuality' is a term used mainly by literary theorists to signify the fact that most literary texts allude to, cite or quote, other texts. Aesthetic pleasure is often to be derived from the inter-textual play of different styles within, say, a collage.
primitivism nude
A cubist monumentality which leaves little room for the eroticism of previous depictions of the nude
Fernand Leger - Le Grand Dejeuner (1921)
transition toward abstraction
...which originally seems merely childish
Henri Matisse - La Conversation (1912)
modernist ideas
Arnold Schoenberg and his followers invented an atonal music which, rather like cubist painting, refused to coordinate the work by reference to central tonal organizing points, so that the hierarchy of chordal relationships that had ruled for centuries had been abandoned, and a new freedom of association between sounds had been invented.
As Schoenberg and others rewrote the previously accepted tonal grammar of music, so Mondrian and his colleagues sought a syntax for painting that would be independent of local mimesis, and yet, like Schoenberg's music, close to a "more fundamental reality."
For the modernists, the canon of past art is always available for reinterpretation, imitation, and even parody or pastiche. 'To me there is no past and future in art', said Picasso.
Like a daily newspaper, the paradigm of cubism, and the idea of the city, is the site of simultaneous happenings which we can only juxtapose with one another.
Monday, June 13, 2011
inauthentic realism
Wall's pictures makes us conscious we are looking at an image rather than an unmediated incident.
media-saturation
Considered as a whole, pop exemplifies a mixed response to mass culture: some examples appear to celebrate consumer products and media stars, while others indicate a critical, analytical response. The term 'pop art' encompasses a wide variety of paintings, sculptures, prints and collages produced by professional artists who used popular culture and mass media material as sources of iconography, techniques and conventions of representation. Pop art can be characterized as a meta-art or meta-language (a meta-language is any language used to talk about another language) in that it takes as its object of scrutiny not reality perceived directly but existing representations of reality and in the realms of graphic design, packaging, the cinema, etc. The fact that the pop artists did not follow the impressionists and work directly from nature is an acknowledgement that, for modem city dwellers, 'nature' - in the sense of fields, trees and mountains - has been almost completely replaced by a humanly constructed world of buildings, interiors, motorways, signs, posters, newspapers, magazines, films, radio broadcasts, television transmissions and computer simulations. In short, billions live in a media-saturated environment.
"action" painting
Roy Lichtenstein - Little Big Painting (1965)
In 'Little Big Painting,’ Lichtenstein’s subject-matter is a detail of brushwork from an action painting. Action painting was a sub-category of abstract expressionism, the dominant art movement of the post-1945 period. At one and the same time, Lichtenstein pays homage to his forebears and renounces them by parodying their stylistic mannerisms.
Abstract expressionist painting was emotional, intuitive, spontaneous, autographic, personal, serious and morally committed - in short, a 'hot' or romantic style. American pop painting, by contrast, was unemotional, deliberate, systematic, impersonal, ironic, detached, non-autographic and amoral - a 'cool' or classical style. In action painting the violent, direct brushstroke was the sign of an existential authenticity; Lichtenstein's painting presents us with the sign of the sign of authenticity. As a result, the mark is drained of all energy, its movement is frozen, it is transformed into a decorative emblem. The paint-thickness and substance of the original is denied by Lichtenstein who makes the stroke even more two-dimensional so that it does not sit on the surface of the canvas in the same way - it becomes more illusionistic. Lichtenstein takes a small detail and inflates it. He thereby implies that action painting has become overblown, that its pictorial rhetoric no longer carries conviction. The automatism of action painting, he seems to be saying, has become automatic.
By using the conventions of representation derived from graphic design, Lichtenstein presents us with brushstrokes which appear to have undergone mechanical reproduction and processing. (This suggests that his source material may have been a reproduction of an action painting rather than an actual action painting.) The pop painting looks mechanical but the irony is that it too was painted by hand - only Lichtenstein has gone to great trouble to hide the fact. Another irony: a painting whose subject-matter is brushstrokes is executed in such a way that the minute brushstrokes which formed the image are disguised.
Lichtenstein's strategy was to translate the 'language' of abstract expressionism into the 'language' of graphic design. 'Non-commercial' fine art appears to have become commercial applied art. Again, the implication is that by the 1960s abstract expressionism had become hopelessly commercialized and mediatized, and therefore it had ceased to deserve its high moral and artistic status. It is relevant to add that the leading action painter, Jackson Pollock, was one of the first American artists to benefit from the full mass media treatment - an article and picture spread in Life magazine (8 August 1949). In an analysis of the marketing of the abstract expressionists, Bradford Collins has argued that they were sold on the basis of a bohemian legend. It is evident from the above analysis that some knowledge of painting and the history of American art since 1945 is required before the iconoclastic implications of 'Little Big Painting' can be understood. To generalize: works of art whose subject-matter is other works of art, or which employ self-referential devices, are likely to appeal mainly to an artworld audience, to those knowledgeable enough to be able to grasp the references and in-jokes. Works of art that take as their subject matter familiar media images, in contrast, have the possibility of being appreciated by people without specialist knowledge.
Whaam!
Roy Lichtenstein - Cup and Saucer (1966)
In these sculptures representational conventions are foregrounded and/or made literal. Lichtenstein's intention is to focus our attention on the artist's 'language', the 'how' rather than the 'what', the form rather than the content. In interviews he has stated that it was the abstract qualities of form, colour and the means of depiction that appealed to him about comic strips rather their content. Lichtenstien's work is figurative, and yet it is a subtle kind of abstraction or formalism. For most viewers, however, the content of his work is still important.
'Whaam!', a painting which freezes the decisive moment of violent conflict between two jet fighters, is one of Lichtenstein's most famous works. War comics - the source for 'Wham!' and several other, related paintings - utilize an emblematic style which precludes any sense of the actual horror and suffering of war. Lichtenstein's method of reworking such imagery pushes it even further towards the decorative. Both are examples of what Raymond Williams once called 'the culture of distance': the audience is distanced, shielded from the reality of war by the antiseptic style of representation. Viewers who can imagine what death in air combat must be like may well find the contradiction between 'Whaam!'s' violent content and the cheerful, decorative manner with which it is depicted, chilling.
Roy Lichtenstein - Whaam! (1963)
fragmented self
When I first laid eyes on the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris, for example, I was drawn to Leonardo da Vinci's small masterpiece by the famous smile and struck by how the face before me appeared unified and immediately recognizable. Yet I knew that behind that familiar face was an illusion. I thought of Picasso's portrait of Dora Maar, who was the artist's muse, model, and lover. Picasso's fractured perspective creates facial features that have seemingly unnatural relationships and proportions. Most of us find da Vinci's Mona Lisa much closer to the way we normally perceive the world than Dora's disjointed planes. But the brain makes us who we are from a jumble of components that are fragmented and distributed through the cortex and thalamus in a way. that is analogous to the way Picasso sometimes painted.
Pablo Picasso - Portrait of Dora Maar (1937)
Monday, May 16, 2011
music is about identity, not pleasure
When it comes to improving our purchases of music, we must grapple with the Love of the New. Most people buy only very recent music, rather than mining history for the very best music of the entire past. Niche fans—such as in classical music—tend to focus on recently released or rereleased recordings, even when the composition is old. Like everyone else, they are excited by the new arrivals in the marketplace. Some people really do just want Verdi and Mozart, but this is part of the reason why classical music is well under 5 percent of the market in recorded music releases.
Every now and then rereleases make a big splash. The Beatles' catalog was rereleased circa 1976, and many of the songs were hit singles again. But such successes are the exception and not the rule. Buddy Holly's "Every Day" was one of the most charming songs of the
early 1960s. James Brown's "Bewildered" was some of the most powerful two minutes of music of the twentieth century. Both are accessible and easy to appreciate. Yet there is no push to rerelease either song on a widespread basis to compete for hit status. There are plenty of rereleases, including recordings by these artists, but they are targeted for sale to a relatively small number of aging baby boomers or collectors. No one tries to make these songs major hits again.
Presumably music company executives do not think that either song would bring in much additional money. The profits would not be worth the marketing expenditure.
Most of the music in the
In many cultural markets—most of all in music—many of the buyers seek artistic secession. That means liking something new, or at least liking something that will appear new to one's peers. This secession does not occur every year. If Nirvana reaches peak popularity in 1994, people who start listening to "cool music" in 1995 need not reject Nirvana. Nirvana is associated with the school class one year ahead and of course with slightly older siblings. While youthful feelings toward the slightly older are decidedly mixed, there is a strong element of emulation and some degree of toleration. The two groups simply are not that different. Nirvana can remain cool one year (or more) past their peak popularity.
But as the years accumulate, Nirvana loses acceptable status. For the class of 2004, Nirvana was loved by the twenty-seven-year-old guy just finishing his MBA. Or perhaps they are loved by "the loser pumping gas," or by "the guy who runs the produce department." How cool is that? Suspicions set in. At some point Nirvana is no longer a good means of establishing one's identity. Many current fans of indie rock like Nirvana as an ancillary interest (after all, they did inspire later indie acts, such as The White Stripes), but few stake their identity on the group.
A few hipsters will invest their entire identities in the idea of "retro," such as wearing 1970s bell bottoms or listening to ABBA. But this is best thought of as rebellion against all other time periods, and a new and more radical form of difference, rather than wishing to take on the true vibes of the chosen retro attachment. Few of these people enjoy the TV shows or the cars from that same period, except as an occasional source of amusement.
For those who don't believe that music markets are largely about identity, how is it that musical tastes are so predictable? Take a girl who is twenty years old, grew up in suburban
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