BretLudwig
November 16th 08, 07:40 AM
What is art?
>>"In The Nation, art critic Barry Schwabsky, an American living in
England, writes:
In recent decades the philosophy of art has been much preoccupied with
the enigma of why a given object does or doesn't count as a work of art.
Since the challenge of Duchamp's Fountain and other readymades, according
to the Belgian writer Thierry de Duve, the form of aesthetic judgment has
undergone a shift: from "this is beautiful" to, simply, "this is art." For
the philosopher, art status is like a light switch, either on or off. But
the everyday art world is nothing like that, which is why the sociologist
Howard Becker complains that the philosopher's art world "does not have
much meat on its bones." For Becker, as for artists, collectors and
critics, whether something is a work of art or not is the least of it. In
the sociologist's art world, hierarchies, rankings and orders of
distinction proliferate. Status and reputation are all, and questions
about them abound. Why does the seemingly kitschy work of Jeff Koons hang
in great museums around the world while the equally cheesy paintings of
Thomas Kinkade would never be considered?...
The same kinds of question could be asked in other fields, but in the
art of the past hundred years or so such questions have been of the
essence: art is the field that exists in order for there to be contention
about what art is. And such questions are not just for the cognoscenti;
they've caught the fancy of a broad public as well. Once the man in the
street saw a Picasso painting and said, "My kid could do better." Today,
that child has grown up and is bemused but no longer outraged to read that
a shark in a fish tank is worth a fortune but has been generously loaned to
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now he admires, at least grudgingly, the
clever scamp who could orchestrate that, and finds the whole affair rather
interesting to talk about--even if the object itself might not, he
suspects, be much to look at.
The idea that the man in the street talks about Damien Hirst or anyone
else of his ilk is a very London-centric notion. On my walks, I drop in
sometimes at the two local art galleries, which sell mostly to mid-level
entertainment industry people concerned with impressing other
entertainment industry people. Neither gallery would touch a stuffed
shark. They sell mostly representational or quasi-representational
paintings by living artists that are fairly attractive -- stuff that would
be pleasant (or at least tolerable) to have in your house. There's more
professional visual talent in LA -- directors of photography, set
decorators, costume designers, editors, special effects directors,
lighting men, etc. -- than probably anywhere else in the world. And the
contemporary art scene is of little interest here.
This is not to say that at the high end of the LA social scale, the values
of the contemporary art world are not upheld. For example, LA's
community-leader-for-life, billionaire real estate developer Eli Broad,
has used his vast wealth to scar the city with his hideous artistic
taste:
This is the enormous sculpture that Broad paid to have implanted outside
the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. From one angle, it looks like
a chicken's skeleton made out of old airplane parts. I guess its prominent
position is supposed to be an "ironic" reference to Los Angeles's historic
role in the airplane industry. It's a whole bunch of twisted airplane
parts scrambled together like the worst airplane crash in the history of
the world. My father, a stress engineer at Lockheed, spent 40 years
squinting at microscopic photographs of metal fatigue precisely to prevent
beautiful airplanes from turning into abortions like this -- because in the
real crashes he investigated, where he spent weeks picking parts out swamps
and wheat fields to figure out why the plane went down, intertangled with
the metal bits were scraps of human flesh.
Schwabsky goes on to allude to the fact that the question of what get's
called "art" in our culture is less philosophical than sociological:
One unusual aspect of the art world--at least among the people who buy
art rather than make it--goes unmentioned by Thornton, although a number of
her interlocutors subtly allude to it: the fact that, at least in the
United States and England, art's collectorship is heavily Jewish, and
perhaps to a lesser extent, so is its "administration." Consider that in
London, the unprecedented intensity of interest in contemporary art might
never have happened were it not for the efforts of two men, both Jewish:
the Iraqi-born collector Charles Saatchi and Nicholas Serota, the director
of the Tate Gallery. One collector compares an evening sale at Christie's
to "going to synagogue on the High Holidays. Everybody knows everybody
else, but they only see each other three times a year, so they are
chatting and catching up." A Turner Prize judge compares art to the
Talmud: "an ongoing, open-ended dialogue that allows multiple points of
view." Thornton observes the director of Art Basel, the world's most
important contemporary art fair, making his round of the stands: he
shmoozes his clients, the dealers, in French, Italian and German, and,
Thornton observes, "I believe I even heard him say 'Shalom.'"The
implicitly Jewish ethos surely feeds into the feeling that the art world
is somehow set apart, part of the establishment perhaps but only "in a
funny sense."
It's important to keep in mind that the Museum of Modern Art in NYC is a
high WASP creation -- the founding committee met in John D. Rockefeller
Jr.'s living room.
Still, it's not just Jewish buyers, but also Jewish critics, too, who
determine "what is art" these days, as Tom Wolfe pointed out in his
wonderful little book The Painted Word a third of a century ago. Rather
than write about three famous gentile painters of the 1940s-1960s,
Pollock, Rauschenberg, and Johns, he wrotes about the three Jewish
critics, Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg, respectively, who explained
why we should care about them.
And for awhile, Americans did care about contemporary art. Time and Life
used to run detailed coverage of the New York art scene when I was a kid.
But now, the near-universal opinion in America is that contemporary art of
the airplane crash sculpure variety is not just a joke, but an unfunny
joke, so nobody pays any attention anymore. Now that Dave Barry has
retired, I almost never hear about the British Turner Prize anymore in
American publications.
I suspect that one reason that the contemporary art scene in Britain is
going stronger than in America is because Britain has fewer Jews, so
contemporary art got a later start as a big whoop-tee-doo, so the public
hasn't gotten quite as sick of it yet.
The basic problem is that Jews tend to be cognitively stronger with words
than with images, so they are better at making up theories about why a
stuffed shark is art rather than determining which art objects are
beautiful and which are not. (To see how stark the ethnic cognitive divide
is, look at lists of nominees for the Oscar in Best Cinematography vs. the
Oscar nominees for Best Adapted and Best Original screenplays.)
When artistic status is largely determined by critics and collectors who,
on average, come from a culture where people are cognitively stronger with
words and numbers than with images, who are better at making up verbal
theories than at painting pictures, you get in-joke art for people who
want other people to notice that they are smart enough to get the joke.
My pet peeve, of course, is that golf course architecture, which functions
exactly like a traditional art form, is never considered "art." (The
pictures are from the Cypress Point Golf Club, designed in the 1920s by
Alister MacKenzie.) Golf course architecture has had its ups and downs,
but it hasn't driven itself into a ditch like contemporary art. For once,
the WASP upper class, which runs the United States Golf Association,
didn't lose it head. It kept sending the U.S. Open back to the great
pre-1930 courses, keeping alive old standards of excellence.
Thus, here's the last course designed by Mike Strantz, the remake of the
Monterey Peninsula Shore Course, before his death at age 50 in 2005 (golf
course architecture has needed a romantic hero who died young):"<<
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-is-art.html
--
Message posted using http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/group/rec.audio.opinion/
More information at http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/faq.html
>>"In The Nation, art critic Barry Schwabsky, an American living in
England, writes:
In recent decades the philosophy of art has been much preoccupied with
the enigma of why a given object does or doesn't count as a work of art.
Since the challenge of Duchamp's Fountain and other readymades, according
to the Belgian writer Thierry de Duve, the form of aesthetic judgment has
undergone a shift: from "this is beautiful" to, simply, "this is art." For
the philosopher, art status is like a light switch, either on or off. But
the everyday art world is nothing like that, which is why the sociologist
Howard Becker complains that the philosopher's art world "does not have
much meat on its bones." For Becker, as for artists, collectors and
critics, whether something is a work of art or not is the least of it. In
the sociologist's art world, hierarchies, rankings and orders of
distinction proliferate. Status and reputation are all, and questions
about them abound. Why does the seemingly kitschy work of Jeff Koons hang
in great museums around the world while the equally cheesy paintings of
Thomas Kinkade would never be considered?...
The same kinds of question could be asked in other fields, but in the
art of the past hundred years or so such questions have been of the
essence: art is the field that exists in order for there to be contention
about what art is. And such questions are not just for the cognoscenti;
they've caught the fancy of a broad public as well. Once the man in the
street saw a Picasso painting and said, "My kid could do better." Today,
that child has grown up and is bemused but no longer outraged to read that
a shark in a fish tank is worth a fortune but has been generously loaned to
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now he admires, at least grudgingly, the
clever scamp who could orchestrate that, and finds the whole affair rather
interesting to talk about--even if the object itself might not, he
suspects, be much to look at.
The idea that the man in the street talks about Damien Hirst or anyone
else of his ilk is a very London-centric notion. On my walks, I drop in
sometimes at the two local art galleries, which sell mostly to mid-level
entertainment industry people concerned with impressing other
entertainment industry people. Neither gallery would touch a stuffed
shark. They sell mostly representational or quasi-representational
paintings by living artists that are fairly attractive -- stuff that would
be pleasant (or at least tolerable) to have in your house. There's more
professional visual talent in LA -- directors of photography, set
decorators, costume designers, editors, special effects directors,
lighting men, etc. -- than probably anywhere else in the world. And the
contemporary art scene is of little interest here.
This is not to say that at the high end of the LA social scale, the values
of the contemporary art world are not upheld. For example, LA's
community-leader-for-life, billionaire real estate developer Eli Broad,
has used his vast wealth to scar the city with his hideous artistic
taste:
This is the enormous sculpture that Broad paid to have implanted outside
the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. From one angle, it looks like
a chicken's skeleton made out of old airplane parts. I guess its prominent
position is supposed to be an "ironic" reference to Los Angeles's historic
role in the airplane industry. It's a whole bunch of twisted airplane
parts scrambled together like the worst airplane crash in the history of
the world. My father, a stress engineer at Lockheed, spent 40 years
squinting at microscopic photographs of metal fatigue precisely to prevent
beautiful airplanes from turning into abortions like this -- because in the
real crashes he investigated, where he spent weeks picking parts out swamps
and wheat fields to figure out why the plane went down, intertangled with
the metal bits were scraps of human flesh.
Schwabsky goes on to allude to the fact that the question of what get's
called "art" in our culture is less philosophical than sociological:
One unusual aspect of the art world--at least among the people who buy
art rather than make it--goes unmentioned by Thornton, although a number of
her interlocutors subtly allude to it: the fact that, at least in the
United States and England, art's collectorship is heavily Jewish, and
perhaps to a lesser extent, so is its "administration." Consider that in
London, the unprecedented intensity of interest in contemporary art might
never have happened were it not for the efforts of two men, both Jewish:
the Iraqi-born collector Charles Saatchi and Nicholas Serota, the director
of the Tate Gallery. One collector compares an evening sale at Christie's
to "going to synagogue on the High Holidays. Everybody knows everybody
else, but they only see each other three times a year, so they are
chatting and catching up." A Turner Prize judge compares art to the
Talmud: "an ongoing, open-ended dialogue that allows multiple points of
view." Thornton observes the director of Art Basel, the world's most
important contemporary art fair, making his round of the stands: he
shmoozes his clients, the dealers, in French, Italian and German, and,
Thornton observes, "I believe I even heard him say 'Shalom.'"The
implicitly Jewish ethos surely feeds into the feeling that the art world
is somehow set apart, part of the establishment perhaps but only "in a
funny sense."
It's important to keep in mind that the Museum of Modern Art in NYC is a
high WASP creation -- the founding committee met in John D. Rockefeller
Jr.'s living room.
Still, it's not just Jewish buyers, but also Jewish critics, too, who
determine "what is art" these days, as Tom Wolfe pointed out in his
wonderful little book The Painted Word a third of a century ago. Rather
than write about three famous gentile painters of the 1940s-1960s,
Pollock, Rauschenberg, and Johns, he wrotes about the three Jewish
critics, Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg, respectively, who explained
why we should care about them.
And for awhile, Americans did care about contemporary art. Time and Life
used to run detailed coverage of the New York art scene when I was a kid.
But now, the near-universal opinion in America is that contemporary art of
the airplane crash sculpure variety is not just a joke, but an unfunny
joke, so nobody pays any attention anymore. Now that Dave Barry has
retired, I almost never hear about the British Turner Prize anymore in
American publications.
I suspect that one reason that the contemporary art scene in Britain is
going stronger than in America is because Britain has fewer Jews, so
contemporary art got a later start as a big whoop-tee-doo, so the public
hasn't gotten quite as sick of it yet.
The basic problem is that Jews tend to be cognitively stronger with words
than with images, so they are better at making up theories about why a
stuffed shark is art rather than determining which art objects are
beautiful and which are not. (To see how stark the ethnic cognitive divide
is, look at lists of nominees for the Oscar in Best Cinematography vs. the
Oscar nominees for Best Adapted and Best Original screenplays.)
When artistic status is largely determined by critics and collectors who,
on average, come from a culture where people are cognitively stronger with
words and numbers than with images, who are better at making up verbal
theories than at painting pictures, you get in-joke art for people who
want other people to notice that they are smart enough to get the joke.
My pet peeve, of course, is that golf course architecture, which functions
exactly like a traditional art form, is never considered "art." (The
pictures are from the Cypress Point Golf Club, designed in the 1920s by
Alister MacKenzie.) Golf course architecture has had its ups and downs,
but it hasn't driven itself into a ditch like contemporary art. For once,
the WASP upper class, which runs the United States Golf Association,
didn't lose it head. It kept sending the U.S. Open back to the great
pre-1930 courses, keeping alive old standards of excellence.
Thus, here's the last course designed by Mike Strantz, the remake of the
Monterey Peninsula Shore Course, before his death at age 50 in 2005 (golf
course architecture has needed a romantic hero who died young):"<<
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-is-art.html
--
Message posted using http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/group/rec.audio.opinion/
More information at http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/faq.html