I guess the problem I see with the point of view urged by Perl is similar to the problem faced by the left, whatever that is, -- it's all critique and no prescription. What Is To Be Done? As one of the other Bearded Ones asked, and he thought he had the answer for his time and place. So in art did the modernists and their critic acolytes, Greenberg, Rosenberg, that ilk. And maybe they did. But just as the Other Bearded One's answer did not prove portable of effective in other times and places, but we lack and political equivalent, we also lack any artistic answer/alternative to the "anything goes" (postmodernist?) post Warhol aesthetic that supplanted and succeeded the modernists (abstract expressionists and the like). Hochkultur, Perl says, is determinedly intolerant, insistent on standards. Maybe. But who today can propose a set of standards and seriously expect them to stick?
Maybe all that is left of Hochkultur is the distinction between what gets into Moma and the Whitney and the tony galleries and drives up action prices at Christies and what sells on 6th St. for $125.00 if you can get your friend to hang it in his coffee shop, or maybe slick commercial art that pays better but lacks pretension to Meaning, just is loaded with commercial appeal. Who today (to translate the example into music) would bother to riot at a new piece of strange sounding modern music, or, or that matter, turn out for it, family and friends aside?
The problem isn't that some of the new painting/sculpture or music, for that matter, etc. isn't beautiful or moving or terrifying or deep, at least as much as Jackson Pollack, say, but that there's no generally accepted standard against which to say that them as guard the gates judge works that have these qualities to better than whatever gets into the tony galleries or the Whitney or auctions for loads at Southby's. In fact, no one is really guarding the gates any more. Are,a s Warhol said, is what you can get away with. (Maybe, as I think Baudriallard infamously suggested, the 9/11 destruction of the twin towers is a vast piece of performance art.)
Bets are that Donne called this one long ago, "Tis all in peeces, all coherence gone." Yeats said the same sort of thing in his borderline modernist Slouching Towards Bethlehem: the center cannot hold. There is no center.
I sort of suspect that any attempt to impose aesthetic standards at this juncture is sociologically doomed -- sorry, Hilton Kramer, you're Too Late. It takes a society that is less liberal (in the sense of embodying a wild diversity of conflict values and viewpoints), that has more in common in the value of values, that the one global capitalism has created, for any group to propose standards and make 'em stick. People will still do visionary, deep, and brilliant art, and you may find that at Mo ma or on 6th St, but whether those criteria are what counts is a matter of personal taste.
So it's not that there's no stuff that is being made that is good by various traditional standards, it's just just a preference for work that satisfies those standards is idiosyncratic and no more defensible objectively/intersubjectively, sociologically speaking, that a preference for most of the schlock you find at the Whitney or Moma. It will take changed conditions before a new Franz Kline or a new Clement Greenberg can tell us What Is To Be Done and make it stick.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Jan 30, 2007, at 12:44 PM, Charles A. Grimes
> wrote:
>
> > You're going to explain this crisis more.
>
> Ok, here's Jed's article. Yeah, I subscribe to The
> New Republic <blush>.
>
> Doug
>
> ----
>
> The New Republic - February 5, 2007
>
> What money is doing to art, or how the art world
> lost its mind.
> Laissez-Faire Aesthetics
>
> by Jed Perl
>
> I.
>
> The art world has never been so well-oiled a machine
> as it is right
> now. Auction records are toppled practically every
> month, the big
> international contemporary art fairs have produced a
> new breed of
> high-end shopaholics, and in New York's West
> Twenties the crowds
> streaming through the galleries are the most elegant
> on earth. This
> art scene, which has been fattened and massaged and
> emboldened by a
> boisterous stock market, is certainly a spectacle.
> So it's no wonder
> that last fall both Vanity Fair and W got on the
> bandwagon, devoting
> special issues to the visual arts. In a Vanity Fair
> feature on "the
> auction mystique, the new collectors, and the
> passion driving it
> all," Tobias Meyer, who is with Sotheby's, argues
> that the nosebleed
> prices being paid for new work in the auction rooms
> reflect a
> "democracy of access." What Meyer regards as a
> democratic principle
> will strike others as an old-fashioned overheated
> free-market
> economy. Vanity Fair's editors seem quite taken with
> this pay-as-you-
> go democratic spirit: they find another example in
> the video
> portraits that Robert Wilson, the stage designer, is
> now offering to
> anybody who can cough up $150,000, a sum that the
> magazine says "is
> peanuts in today's through-the-roof art market." As
> a come-on, Wilson
> has done something rather undemocratic, turning out
> videos of movie
> stars, among them Brad Pitt, who landed on the cover
> of Vanity Fair
> with Wilson's ah-sweet-mystery blue light playing
> over his bare torso
> and white boxer shorts.
>
> Of course it didn't take the fall of 2006 to tell us
> that big money
> likes flash-in-the-pan art, or that we are in a
> period--and it's
> certainly not the first one--when art and fashion
> and Hollywood are
> often indistinguishable. Amid the gold-rush
> atmosphere of recent
> months, however, something very strange has emerged,
> something more
> pertinent to art than to money--a new attitude, now
> pervasive in the
> upper echelons of the art world, about the meaning
> and experience and
> value of art itself. A great shift has occurred.
> This has deep and
> complex origins; but when you come right down to it,
> the attitude is
> almost astonishingly easy to grasp. We have entered
> the age of
> laissez-faire aesthetics.
>
> The people who are buying and selling the most
> highly priced
> contemporary art right now--think of them as the
> laissez-faire
> aesthetes--believe that any experience that anyone
> can have with a
> work of art is equal to any other. They imagine that
> the most
> desirable work of art is the one that inspires a
> range of absolutely
> divergent meanings and impressions almost
> simultaneously. I used to
> be bemused when Lisa Yuskavage, whose lesbo-bimbo
> figure paintings
> were featured at the David Zwirner Gallery in
> October, was praised
> for channeling, all at once, Disney cartoons and
> Giovanni Bellini's
> altarpieces. And I did not comprehend how admirers
> of John Currin,
> who defies accusations of misogyny by making the men
> in his paintings
> every bit as repulsive as the women, could believe
> that he is both
> the direct descendant of Cranach the Elder and a
> raunchy comic in the
> Mad magazine tradition. My problem, I now realize,
> is not only that I
> am looking for consistency, it is that I persist in
> imagining that
> there is such a thing as inconsistency. The
> paintings by Currin and
> Yuskavage that are now going for hundreds of
> thousands of dollars are
> engineered for an audience that believes that a work
> of art can
> satisfy radically disparate and even contradictory
> attitudes and
> appetites, and satisfy them consecutively or
> concurrently-- it hardly
> matters. A painting is simply what everybody or
> anybody says it is,
> what everybody or anybody wishes it to be.
>
> The collectors who made sure that John Currin's show
> in November at
> the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue was sold out
> even before it
> opened believe that it is their privilege to respond
> to anything at
> any time in any way they choose. When they hang a
> Currin on the wall,
> they are given permission--more than that, they are
> given the right--
> to appreciate this oilcloth horror as a painterly
> painting as
> exquisite as a Velázquez, or to enjoy it as an
> incompetent high-
> kitsch send-up of classical painting, or to assess
> its value as
> social commentary, or to laugh at it as a piece of
> Dadaist stupidity-
> for-stupidity's-sake. Or they may enjoy their Currin
> as a financial
> trophy pure and simple, proof of their buying power.
> Or they may
> regard it as an object of delectation, in much the
> way that they have
> been instructed by some
> art-historian-turned-art-consultant to enjoy
> a Bonnard. They can have it every way. They
> experience no conflict.
> And Currin gives them enough cunningly mixed signals
> that the
> possibilities seem endless. It hardly matters that
> what Currin
> doesn't know about figure painting would fill
> volumes, since his
> collectors know even less, if that is possible.
> (What precisely is it
> that Currin doesn't know? For starters, he does not
> understand that
> volume in representational painting can be--and to
> some degree, must
> be--generated through the power of contour as a
> two-dimensional
> expression of three-dimensional experience.)
>
> I recognize that the taste for Currin and Yuskavage
> is in part a
> continuation of developments that are now a
> generation old. The what-
> the-hell attitude with which the new high-end
> consumers of art
> confront the whole question of meaning will strike
> some as
> reminiscent of the mentality of a number of
> collectors in the early
> 1960s. Back then, there was a whole group of big
> spenders who were
> turning their attention from Abstract Expressionism
> to Pop Art and
> boasting about how much fun they were having now
> that they had
> sloughed off the serious themes of the mid-century
> abstractionists.
> And it is hard not to see the in-your-face kitsch of
> Currin and
> Yuskavage as an extension of the ironic fascination
> with incompetence
>
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