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8445. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 6/9/2007 4:36:18 PM Orwell was writing in the 1940s. Already that attitude was old hat: it had definitively entered the cultural bloodstream with the Dadaists shortly after the turn of the last century. What those folks didn’t know about "challenging" and "subverting" conventional taste and attitudes wasn't worth knowing. In essentials, they pioneered all the tricks on view in "Wrestle"--the sex, the violence, the tedium, the presentation of everyday objects as works of art. The difference is that Duchamp was in earnest: "I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into to their faces as a challenge," Duchamp noted contemptuously, "and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty." No wonder he gave up on art for chess. Duchamp mounted a campaign against art and aesthetic delectation. In one sense, he succeeded brilliantly. Only the campaign backfired. Once the aloof and brittle irony of Duchamp institutionalized itself and became the coin of the realm, it descended from irony to a new form of sentimentality. I do not have much time for Marcel Duchamp; in my view his influence on art and culture has been almost entirely baneful; but it is amusing to ponder how much he would have loathed the contemporary art world where all his ideas had been ground-down into inescapable cliches, trite formulas served up by society grandees at their expensive art fetes in the mistaken belief that they are embarked on some existentially or aesthetically daring enterprise. Perhaps Duchamp, aesthete that he was, would have savored the comedy. I suspect his amour-propre would have caused him to feel nausea, not amusement.
Why is the art world a disaster? The prevalence of exhibitions like "Wrestle," of collectors like Marieluise Hessel, of institutions like the Hessel Museum and Bard College help us begin to answer that question. Their very ordinariness enhances their value as symptoms. In part, the art world is a disaster because of that ordinariness: because of the popularization and institutionalization of the antics and attitudes of Dada. As W. S. Gilbert knew, when everybody's somebody, nobody's anybody. When the outre attitudes of a tiny elite go mainstream, only the rhetoric, not the substance, of the drama survives.
That's part of the answer: the domestication of deviance, and its subsequent elevation as an object of aesthetic--well, not delectation, exactly: perhaps veneration would be closer to the truth. But that is only part of the puzzle. There are at least three other elements at work. One is the unholy alliance between the more rebarbative and hermetic precincts of academic activity and the practice of art. As even a glance at the preposterous catalogue accompanying "Wrestle"--accompanying almost any trendy exhibition these days--demonstrates, art is increasingly the creature of its explication. It's not quite what Tom Wolfe predicted in The Painted Word, where in the gallery-of-the-future a postcard-sized photograph of a painting would be used to illustrate a passage of criticism blown up to the size of its inflated sense of self-worth. The difference is that the new verbiage doesn't even pretend to be art criticism. It occupies a curious no man's land between criticism, political activism, and pseudo-philosophical speculation: less an intellectual than a linguistic phenomenon, speaking more to the failure or decay of ideas than to their elaboration. Increasingly, the "art" is indistinguishable from the verbal noise that accompanies it, as witness the little red band that surrounded the catalogue for "Wrestle." This "work" was by Lawrence Weiner and read: "An Amount of Currency Exchanged from One Country to Another." The point to notice is the usurpation of art by these free-floating verbal clots, full of emotion but utterly lacking in what David Hume called "the calm sunshine of the mind."
A second element that helps to explain why the art world is a disaster is money--not just the staggering prices routinely fetched by celebrity artists today, but the bucket-loads of cash that seem to surround almost any enterprise that can manage to get itself recognized as having to do with "the arts." The presence of money means the presence of "society," which goes a long way toward explaining why yesterday's philistine is today's champion of anything and everything that presents itself as art, no matter how repulsive it may be. If tout le monde is going to an opening for Matthew Barney at the Guggenheim, you can bet your bottom black tie that the nice lady next door who gave MOMA $10 million will be there, too. The vast infusion of money into the art world in recent decades has done an immense amount to facilitate what my colleague Hilton Kramer aptly called "the revenge of the philistines."
A third additional element in this sorry story has to do with the decoupling of art-world practice from the practice of art. Look at the objects on view in "Wrestle": almost none has anything to do with art as traditionally understood: mastery of a craft in order to make objects that gratify and ennoble those who see them. On the contrary, the art world has wholeheartedly embraced art as an exercise in political sermonizing and anti-humanistic persiflage, which has assured the increasing trivialization of the practice of art. For those who cherish art as an ally to civilization, the disaster that is today's art world is nothing less than a tragedy. But this, too, will pass. Sooner or later, even the Leon Botsteins and Marieluise Hessels of the world will realize that the character in Bruce Nauman's "Good Boy, Bad Boy" was right: "this is boring."
8446. judithathome - 6/10/2007 2:31:17 AM It's not quite what Tom Wolfe predicted in The Painted Word, where in the gallery-of-the-future a postcard-sized photograph of a painting would be used to illustrate a passage of criticism blown up to the size of its inflated sense of self-worth. The difference is that the new verbiage doesn't even pretend to be art criticism. It occupies a curious no man's land between criticism, political activism, and pseudo-philosophical speculation: less an intellectual than a linguistic phenomenon, speaking more to the failure or decay of ideas than to their elaboration.
It may not "quite" be that but it is perilously close. 8447. prolph - 6/10/2007 7:49:16 AM yes, wizard you are right, Are you publishimg the above ?--i hope so.patsy 8448. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 6/10/2007 4:18:58 PM Indeed, Judith!
Patsy, the above was published in the current edition of The New Criterion.
8449. wabbit - 7/3/2007 1:25:50 PM It's been a busy month for me and I've fallen far behind in my Mote reading. I just finished reading the Kimball piece - thank you for posting that, WoW. I remember getting into a debate in grad school about who was the most influential artist of the 20th century. The bulk of the debate vacillated between Picasso and Matisse, but I thought Duchamp was, for better or worse, more influential. It's a shame the irony was lost so quickly. A former teacher told me that when she was getting her MFA at Yale, she wanted to paint landscapes, but was told point-blank she would not receive a degree unless she painted something more "avant-garde". She said she essentially threw paint onto canvas, figuratively speaking, ending up with work she hated, but it got her a degree. What a shame. Her landscapes were beautiful. 8450. wabbit - 7/3/2007 1:27:33 PM RIP Beverly Sills.
Beverly Sills, the acclaimed Brooklyn-born coloratura soprano who was more popular with the American public than any opera singer since Enrico Caruso, even among people who never set foot in an opera house, died last night at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.
The cause was inoperable lung cancer, said her personal manager, Edgar Vincent.
Ms. Sills was America’s idea of a prima donna. Her plain-spoken manner and telegenic vitality made her a genuine celebrity and an invaluable advocate for the fine arts. Her life embodied an archetypal American story of humble origins, years of struggle, family tragedy and artistic triumph...
8451. alistairConnor - 7/5/2007 9:59:07 PM Another obit :
George Melly, jazz singer, anarchist, Liverpudlian, Surrealist, tart.
I read his autobiography, "Owning up", and recognised him as a kindred spirit. Missed a chance to see him perform when I was living in London in 1987, good lord that's 20 years ago. A colleague's father managed a pub in Deptford where Melly was appearing, he invited me but I turned him down out of sheer misanthropy. 8452. judithathome - 7/5/2007 10:12:05 PM Boots Randolph died this week, too. 8453. betty - 7/7/2007 3:40:04 AM oh I would give my kingdom for a good landscape.
8454. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 7/7/2007 4:13:42 AM Prescient as always, wabb!
Will these do, betty?
8455. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 7/7/2007 4:17:47 AM Adored the Melly obit, btw--thanks, ac. 8456. judithathome - 7/7/2007 6:02:21 PM Wiz, I love those...ink wash? 8457. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 7/7/2007 9:18:45 PM Thanks Judith; no those were actually black ink solarplate intaglios of some watercolor studies of a Tuscan tower complex near Siena that I've been working up lately. It's called: Montarrenti and these are views of the back.
Here's a watercolor: 
8458. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 7/7/2007 9:25:12 PM As you may have noticed, I've been a bit hung up on this place for awhile . . .
8459. wabbit - 7/7/2007 11:17:07 PM Gorgeous. 8460. betty - 7/8/2007 3:16:33 AM Wiz, those are lovely. and I can see why you would be hung up.
I love her landscapes. 8461. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 7/16/2007 3:50:57 PM 8462. wabbit - 7/22/2007 12:55:34 AM How cool is that?! 8463. wonkers2 - 8/2/2007 3:53:23 AM Walker Evans, or is it? 8464. wonkers2 - 8/12/2007 1:14:49 PM Was Elvis a racist like jexter?
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