Put another way, when everything is designed to shock middle-class bourgeouis sensibilities, nothing does.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nThat\u2019s part of the answer: the domestication of deviance, and its subsequent elevation as an object of aesthetic\u2014well, not delectation, exactly: perhaps veneration<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nWhich is, to step out of the world of visual art for a moment, what makes so much post-Ellington jazz music so utterly unbearable, and what made most serious “classical” music of the 20th\u00a0century positively unlistenable.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\u00a0As even a glance at the preposterous catalogue accompanying \u201cWrestle\u201d\u2014accompanying almost any trendy exhibition these days\u2014demonstrates, art is increasingly the creature of its explication [which is fun for satirists! – Ed<\/em>]. It\u2019s not quite what Tom Wolfe predicted in The Painted Word<\/em>, 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\u2019t even pretend to be art criticism. It occupies a curious no man\u2019s 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 \u201cart\u201d is indistinguishable from the verbal noise that accompanies it,<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nHow true is this?<\/p>\n
What is <\/em>the easiest way to satirize art these days – to actually attempt satiric art, or to caricature the manner of an “artist”\u00a0or “critic” describing things?\u00a0<\/p>\n\nA second element that helps to explain why the art world is a disaster is money\u2014not 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 \u201cthe arts.\u201d The presence of money means the presence of \u201csociety,\u201d which goes a long way toward explaining why yesterday\u2019s philistine is today\u2019s champion of anything and everything that presents itself as art, no matter how repulsive it may be…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 \u201cthe revenge of the philistines.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Take a meander around Loring Park or Lowertown or Uni-Raymond sometime;\u00a0start talking with “artists” about how much of their time they spend chasing grants to pursue their “art”.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
\nA 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 \u201cWrestle\u201d: 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\u2019s art world is nothing less than a tragedy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
It was always an abstraction to me, of course – I have little background in visual art; I inherited the family’s music and writing genes.\u00a0 But it smacked me in the head one day in 1987, when my sister and I were at the Walker Gallery, at a “minimalism” exhibit.\u00a0 I was looking at some “minimal” piece of work, and stepped over what looked like some construction material – a diagonal swatch of tartan sponge (think wrestling mat material) lying against the wall on the floor.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A guard\u00a0 hurried over. “Sir, don’t step on the art!”<\/p>\n
I looked around, confused.<\/p>\n
“Sir, you’re standing on the art”.<\/p>\n
No.\u00a0 I was standing on a piece of tartan foam that had earned somebody with an MFA a whole bunch of money – but it was “art” in the sense that Alban Berg was “music”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But there is, one wants to believe, hope:\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nBut 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\u2019s \u201cGood Boy, Bad Boy\u201d was right: \u201cthis is boring.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
And it really, really is.<\/p>\n
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
(Via Jeff Kouba at TvM<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It may have been the greatest piece of arts criticism ever written – on the topic of “Gates”, by Christo, one of history’s great works of art, which draped Central Park in orange banners.\u00a0 The critique cuts relentlessly and yet obliquely to the core, and yet hovers uncertainly yet fiercely (or perhaps neo-fiercely)\u00a0at the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","category-culture-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}