A while ago now, but, please…help us:
In case you hadn’t heard, Tilda Swinton has been sleeping at MOMA. Encased in a glass box, the actress, best known for her roles in films such as Burn After Reading and Moonrise Kingdom, has shown up to exhibit her virtuosic napping skills twice over the past week, and “performances” will apparently continue throughout 2013′
Photo set here.
MoMA’s mission statement:
‘Founded in 1929 as an educational institution, The Museum of Modern Art is dedicated to being the foremost museum of modern art in the world.’
Brian Kelly, our author, finishes darkly, chiding MOMA:
‘Such irresponsibility portends the degradation of cultural institutions, the shirking of their instructive responsibilities, and the corruption of artistic judgment from a metric of aesthetic merit to one of capitalist value.’
They’re trying to get people in the door. Maybe they could put her in that Damien Hirst tank filled with formaldehyde, the one with the shark.
Marketing, fame, entrepreneurial spirit, high and low culture.
Hmmm….
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On that note: Banksy, the mildly talented, ironic/iconic graffiti artist tries to shock you awake to how the world really is.
It’s not Disneyland, it’s ‘Dismaland.‘
Get it?
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I admit I find Disney theme parks to be rather sentimental recreations of nature, civilization, and storybook themes. There’s a lot of kitsch in them thar walls.
Clearly, though, many people love them. They provide families with a place to go and spend time with their kids, and provide the kids a safe place to explore.
They’re a business, operating for profit. I get it, but I don’t really care.
I can understand that a Frenchman, living in the shadow of Euro Disney, consuming a local wheel of perfectly aged cheese might have a different set of concerns, and perhaps some valid concerns, but I still don’t care that much.
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So, why ‘ironically’ target Disney, copying their model of people paying to wander through rather sentimental recreations of nature, civilization and storybook themes?
Artists often want your attention, usually to have shaped your imagination in a slightly different way, or to make see the world anew by creating something beautiful enough that your reasons can’t justify your aesthetic pleasure.
So, ironically, and with politics infused, Banksy has deigned to get your attention by making something shockingly modern and urgent, globally just and socially conscious enough to direct your attention to the world as it really is.
Deep man, deep.
Surely, while highlighting the problems artists have always had with money and patronage, Banksy has no commitment to post-Enlightenment ideas that offer rather sentimental recreations of nature, civilization and storybook themes…still haunting the landscape like so many abandoned theme parks that few people care to visit.
What a sad use of the imagination and relatively little in the way of artistic technique to back it up.
Conservative Briton Roger Scruton suggests keeping political and aesthetic judgments apart in the humanities:Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment
Also On This Site: Philosopher Of Art Denis Dutton of the Arts & Letters Daily argues the arts and Darwin can be sucessfully synthesized: Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’
How might Nietzsche figure in the discussion (was he most after freeing art from a few thousand years of Christianity, monarchy and aristocracy…something deeper?), at least with regard to Camille Paglia. See the comments: Repost-Camille Paglia At Arion: Why Break, Blow, Burn Was Successful
From NPR: Grants To The NEA To Stimulate The Economy?…From 2 Blowhards-We Need The Arts: A Sob Story
Two ways around postmodernism, nihilism?: One is Allan Bloom Update And Repost: ‘A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche / Strauss Connection’…A structure in the desert…not even a city Update On LACMA, Michael Heizer And The ‘Levitated Mass’-Modern Art And The Public;..where is modernism headed? Via Youtube: Justin, The Horse That Could Paint…