The weather has finally warmed up a bit out here, so I went for ride thinking about art as the perfect whore. Clay is way too boring and never fights back.
But thinking some more, what else is practically a frictionless surface? Money and writing. So the three whores of civilization: money, writing, and art. I don't think the fact that these systems co-evolved with civilizations everywhere is exactly an coincidence. Nor do I think it is some mysterious inner essence that makes all three extremely difficult to theorize, encapsulate as ideas. These are part of the essential tools for creating an urban culture and sustaining it with its divisions of labor and partitioning of wealth and power. When I say art, that is merely a stand in for all so-called visual arts from everyday decor and minor visual decorations on tools to painting and architecture. Money for example would seem somehow less of whatever money is, if it were not for all the fancy decorations. Why is that? How does merely designing the surface detail of a coin make it worth something, when an random rock would do the same job?
See, the visual arts create these aspects of culture, creat their visual domain and we go around with these in our mind as if they were somehow as real as water, dirt, or sky. I suppose money isn't a good example because it is too confusing, to close to an identity with our belief systems to be extracted out.
Okay, so here is an art history version.
>From about the 1920s to the late 1970s, the US high bourgeois created
an urban culture that will go down in the history books right along
side the English, French, and German haute bourgeoisie of the 19C, and
the Italian city state aristocratic class of 16C. It depended on the
confluence of historical conditions in economics, politics, and
demography that brought this class and its culture into a position of
overwhelming domination. The arts of the period reflect both its
ideals and daemons just as earlier bourgeoise and aristocratic class
arts reflected theirs. We are living in the eclipse of the ascendency
of that class and its achievements. Whatever in the conditions that
held it together as a coherent and dynamic historical entity has
dissolved as have many of the cultural institutions that produced its
most characteristic arts. Abstract Expressionism was one of more than
a dozen of these styles, and painting itself was only one of a
multitude of their art forms.
What makes AE such a signature, such a perfect register for the high bourgeois of the period, is the ability of the style to both be and express in the rich and tangible quality of the materials themselves the quintessential mark of this culture--its extreme valuation of individual existence. In addition to this heighten emphasis on a unique point in all of space and time, that inhabited by the individual ego, there is also that other characteristic of the class and its concrete condition--a heighten sense of momentum, of pure velocity and absolutely instantaneous transformation from one point to another. It was a class of pure power, whose weapon of choice was the thermonuclear warhead, delivered on the head of a rocket. No class culture ever reached this pace of change, scaled these heights of domination, or shaped the very direction of history so thoroughly before. All of that power is communicated in perfect resonance, as the dynamic and enormous sweep of brushes loaded with colors, which streak across literally yards of canvas. The scale of these works in the later period reached mural proportions and are easily as overwhelming to look at as the Renaissance and Baroque masters of those earlier eras in which virtually all the power and resources of a society could be directed by a single class who also recognized itself as constituting such a coherent, central and directed power.
Well, you get the idea. This is essentially Tim Clark's thesis on AE which he started to deliver in a retrospective of the New York School shown here about two or three years ago. I embellished it and dropped the various pomo references he used. I hope he puts it together and gets it out with good illustrations.
Chuck Grimes