"Almost always, of course." Why, "of course"?! Because you find it a matter of course that artists and art cognoscenti should be playing their own little game in their own little corner? "That's art for you"?
"However the reason is simply that many audiences don't know to which theme in our now vast histo-mythological collections, the objects and the experiences they provide are supposed to engaged." -- "Simply", he says! And that's okay, is it? The appreciation of art is *supposed* to be a non-aesthetic experience, based on knowledge of our vast histo-mythological collections?
"Their ignorance is simply a product of the often purposeful omissions of mass cultural productions that have left the missing pieces out." -- Eh? You're sounding like our President.
"In short, such exhibitions are directed at the lore of artists and art affectionados." The exhibitions are directed at the lore, are they, not at the aficionados themselves? Honestly, Chuck...
"If those tales and their thematic history are part of mass culture, then they are shared and accessible. If not, then they are an enigma." --This touches on the idea that launched this thread: that art has, regrettably, become even more enigmatic than it was when it was associated with cult. Art has become its own religion. This is a direct result of the fact that the talking heads have hijacked the practice of art, reshaped it in a way to make it able to be talked about, which is to say promotable, and therefore saleable. And the result of that is that those who understand and value the aesthetic-sensuous experience (i.e., most human beings) are in the ludicrous position of believing themselves to be naive when they love a tenderly painted landscape, a beautifully designed collage, a lusciously formed sculpture, and are revolted by a magotty cow's head under glass.
Artists chasing ideas, and even more, the slavish appreciation of artists chasing ideas, that's what's naive.
The theme, the lore, the tale, the political statement -- the concept, in other words -- should not be allowed to constitute the work of art. The aesthetic-sensuous experience is something ignorant of "missing pieces of cultural productions"; and being in the know, culturally speaking, should have absolutely nothing to do with whether one can enjoy the art in a work of art. Conceptual artists and artmongers notwithstanding, aesthetic-sensuous expression is precisely the activity, in any culture, that escapes the ruling discourse. Though all art makes its mark within the culture that produced it, is conscious of and reflects that culture, the art in anything (whether an IBM ad or a Rembrandt) is unspeakable. Art *an sich*, though it may be shanghaied for instrumental purposes, has always been, will always be a dialect *without* an army and a navy.
But here's Tom Stoppard to entertain, if not to persuade you. This was passed on to me from another LBO-er who's been following the discussion:
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Making it by Tom Stoppard
A couple of days before the annual dinner of the Royal Academy of Arts, where I was to propose the toast for the guests, I telephoned for guidance.
"So, what is the form with these speeches?"
"Start off with a joke or two, then get into your theme, and end up by saying something nice about the RA."
"My theme?"
"Ideally, something controversial."
"But I've got nothing controversial to say."
I needn't have worried. The next Friday morning I was on the front page of the Daily Telegraph as the man who attacked Tracey Emin*, just like Munnings had attacked Picasso at the equivalent dinner half a century earlier. By Sunday, my remarks had been promoted to a 'denunciation of modern art', illustrated by a drawing of me daubing 'Rubbish!' on a work by Damien Hirst**, whom I hadn't mentioned. In the Independent on Sunday, Janet Street-Porter called it an outburst provoked by pique at theatre's not being 'incredibly popular' like modern art. Meanwhile, the Mail on Sunday had been chasing me, presumably having marked me down as the sane voice of Middle England.
All this was dispiriting, because my 'theme' had had nothing to do with modern art in general or even with abstract art as such. I had used my speech to suggest that a fault line in the history of art had been crossed when it had become unnecessary for an artist to make anything, when the thought, the inspiration itself, had come to constitute the achievement, and I would have been pleased to see this phenomenon get an airing in the column inches which were devoted instead to parading the death of shorthand.
I had decided to keep value judgements out of it, and I think I succeeded (I was speaking off the cuff) but the instructive thing about the press coverage and the letters I have received is that merely to describe the phenomenon ("An object can be a work of art just because the artist says it is") is to be taken to be attacking it.
There are historical reasons why this should be so. In classical Greek, the idea of the 'artist' is covered by several words, all of which carry the sense of skill, manufacture, technique, expertise, etc. Demiourgos, 'one who works for the people', might be used for cooks as well as for sculptors. The first meaning of poietes was 'maker'. T. S. Eliot would have been a poietes who made poems. I drag him in because The Waste Land was dedicated to 'the better maker' ('il miglior fabbro')*** Ezra Pound and that is a notion of art I understand. I grew up with it. As with poets, so with artists. From Praxiteles to Pollock (not to stop there), the artist was somebody who made something.
The long shift towards subjectivity, first intellectualized by the German Romantic philosophers as Nature expressing itself through the inspiration of the artist, historically gave escalating offence to the older ideal of art as the pursuit of objective truth, and yet the personal action of a unique and necessary maker of something remained part of the meaning of the word 'artist', whether his name was Klimt or de Kooning.
This is what has been jettisoned, not furtively, not in cabals or garrets but in triumph, in national galleries, in the Venice Biennale where this week one of the exhibits temporarily escaped notice, being an empty room with green walls. At its present extreme, a work of art may be no more than a mental act, complete at the moment of inspiration "Eureka! An empty room painted green!" There is nothing to make. Where there may be something to make "Eureka! A scaled-up reproduction of a toy! A photograph torn from a newspaper! Framed tinfoil!" technicians can do the making, or the shopping.
How new is this? When did it stop being true that an artist is somebody who can do something more or less well which the rest of us can only do badly or not at all?
If I were a conceptual artist, or a minimalist, I might answer that it was never true, or rather, never the point; the real point was that the artist made us see things we wouldn t otherwise see, and look at things in a new way, and that what I called a fault line was the realization that this could be achieved differently, not by being good at making something, but perhaps by relocating a familiar object in an unfamiliar context, or perhaps by removing the idea of skill from those shrines to skill known as art galleries. Thirty years ago at the Tate, I interviewed for a television film an artist who shaded sheets of cartridge paper edge to edge with a lead pencil. He disclaimed any special ability at shading. "But does that mean I could just as well do one of these for myself if I wanted?" "Yes, of course."
Well, it is coherent. From the repudiation of the traditional idea of value, sprung on us by Duchamp's urinal 84 years ago, we have come to put a value on repudiation.
And yet, there is a problem. In Peacock's novel Headlong Hall, two sparring landscape gardeners, Milestone and Gall, are trying to impress the client:
Milestone: Sir, you will have the goodness to make a distinction between the picturesque and the beautiful. Mr. Gall: I distinguish the picturesque and the beautiful, and I add to them, in the laying out of grounds, a third and distinct character, which I call unexpectedness. Milestone: Pray, sir, by what name do you distinguish this character when a person walks round the grounds for the second time?
But now, recalling the Academy dinner, I remember blurting "I've been walking round these damn grounds since 1917", so it is not true that I succeeded in keeping my opinion out of it entirely. I regret this, because my opinion is too untidy to be laid out in an after-dinner speech, let alone a Hirst-and-Emin-bashing headline. Hirst's shark seems to me a different kettle of fish from Hirst's polka dots, the one a disturbing piece for which the artist was a necessary intermediary, the other devoid of personality, sans teeth, eyes, taste, everything. As for Emin, a recent interview by Lynn Barber forced one to take her more seriously than her art alone, in my case, had any hope of doing: the interview as apparatus.
What that reiterates is that conceptual art is exactly what it says it is. It is thought exhibited, thought bodied forth ("Eureka! The plinth repeated upside down and transparent!") But so is a Turner, he of the Prize. So is art itself. The thought varies in profundity. The rest, the making, is, or was, the hard part.
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*Tracey Emin works: http://www.bway.net/~modcult/teprints.html **Damien Hirst: "The central thrust of Hirst's work has been an exploration of morality, a traditional theme which Hirst has updated and extended with wit, verve, originality, and force. [...] He is best known for a series of works in which dead animals are presented in forms ironically appropriated from the museum of natural history rather than of art. His use of dead animals can provoke strong emotional responses. In a sculpture called A Thousand Years, houseflies hatched, lived, and were killed by an 'insectecutor', an electric fly zapper." http://www.apple.com/applemasters/dhirst/ ****"Il miglior fabbro" actually means "the best maker" -- cjs.
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