Andy Warhol

Modern Art Skepticism & Kids In Bad Neighborhoods-Don’t You Want To Be Cool?-Links to Tom Wolfe, Robert Hughes & Isaiah Berlin

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From our rather reasonable AI overlords: ‘Common skepticism is a healthy critical attitude towards dubious claims, while philosophical skepticism challenges foundational knowledge and the justification for belief itself, demanding proof for everything, a stance few people adopt in daily life.’

I knew a philosophic skeptic, he was smarter than me & fun, but, man…what an asshole.

Commoners have good reasons to be skeptical when it comes to modern art:

Bananas duct-taped to walls seems like bullshit.

‘Titled Comedian, the humoristic piece can be considered a challenge to the sometimes-absurdist nature of the art market and the art collecting world. “To me, Comedian was not a joke; it was a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value,” said the artist in an interview at the time. “At art fairs, speed and business reign, so I saw it like this: if I had to be at a fair, I could sell a banana like others sell their paintings. I could play within the system, but with my rules.”’

Who can forget the transcendent darkness of this photo (the shock-concept and the celebrity overshadowing the skill/visual impact).

‘He immersed a crucifix he bought in an antique shop in his own urine.‘

Fellow commoners, we have as a counterpoint, rather beautiful, innovative classics like Falling Water, by Frank Lloyd Wright. A pain in the ass to maintain, but still a place for the genuine:

As I see the world: We have beliefs, and we’ve usually locked them away beyond critique. So has most everyone else. Some beliefs have more truth in them than others.

We use shared beliefs to form and maintain relationships. We use them to get stuff and give other people stuff. We rely on shared beliefs to organize events/clubs, workplaces, and hierarchies of judgment and knowledge, without killing each other. Shared beliefs regulate and help us navigate our emotions, as well as our personal, interpersonal and social behavior. We outsource much of our thinking to shared beliefs, while forgetting they’re even there. We’re often proudest of passing our beliefs on if we think they’re true, lasting and important.

The rub is the relationship these beliefs have with truth, and knowledge. A modern rationalist might say something like: ‘We have access to enough scientific and economic knowledge to run the government, and effectively plan your life. (M)an is something holy, and we’ve only just begun perfecting (M)an. Go ahead be creative and vote for the $1 billion arts package or else.‘

A typical Catholic might say something like: ‘Let’s check in with Canon Law. The Pope is closest to God, then the Cardinals, then the Archbishops etc.’ We’re only redeemed through Christ. So….that’s what art should be doing. Capiche?

What if a radical questioning of belief becomes the norm, around which people are…still believing?

What, then, do people actually believe?

What do artists, often radically questioning belief while making stuff, actually believe?

Those increasingly ridiculous artist statements? Some curious mix of irony, doom and nihilism all the way down? Modern mysticism?

A digression: Let’s say a kid in bad neighborhood, at a vulnerable age, joins a gang. He gets protection, savage discipline and access to stuff. The gang serves dark masters of the soul of course (in our case: How to rob specific makes/models of cars and sell them for parts, leaving a trail of harm, making the kid violent and dangerous).

Let’s also say the same kid in a bad neighborhood, on weekends, hangs with his uncle. His uncle fixes cars. Our kid learns to honor something within himself, other people, and the world. Like his time with the gang, life unfolds as a series of challenges, struggles and possibilities. Yet, his lifespan probability opens from twenty-two to sixty-four. Much better of parts of the kid’s nature come forwards. People drive their cars away, grumbling over the price and the delays…but, still.

Clearly, one path is better for the kid, the neighborhood and the rest of us?

Surely?

Now, what if, at school, that same kid is particularly talented, smart and sensitive? What if he is guided by someone towards personal self-expression, and even the eventual self-doubt, poverty and emotional rollercoaster of a typical artist’s life?

Shouldn’t the kid at least be taught how to notice things? how to describe how a good painting looks? how to draw? how to draft? how to mix paint?

Surely?

These days, it seems we find ourselves in a ‘post, postmodern landscape.’

What is this curious, Western belief to ‘blank-slate’ everything? How can it be true that the kid’s emotions are a reservoir and his reason a man-made, oppressive dam? That he just needs to make a dark, mixed-media video collage and he’s arrived?

It seems making simple moral judgments in real-world scenarios raises serious questions about the Romantic/Modern/Postmodern projects.

The case for the visual art over the primacy of concept/idea: Lets say you’re looking at John Singer Sargent’s ‘Lady Agnew Of Lochnaw‘ (somewhere between realism/impressionism). You’re not looking at merely the idea of painting (good paintings already have ideas in them).

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Maybe you want to touch her skin? How did he paint like that? Look at the color and light. What is the artist saying? This painting took six sittings, but, arguably, a lifetime and maybe the better elements of a civilization to achieve.

A simple case: The Duchamp/Warhol line (concept/idea over visual communication/technical skill) warrants tremendous common-sense skepticism (I’ve gone a little deeper…but you get the point). Enough already.

Bananas duct-taped to walls and crucifixes dunked in piss are not just wasting our time, perhaps they’re harming our imaginations.

There are so many reasons to doubt so much bullshit within modern/postmodern thinking, while at the same time learning from the good.

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Tom Wolfe went on the T.V. with William F Buckley (too political for my taste) to discuss his book: ‘The Painted Word.’

At min 5:39 Wolfe argues the following (one part of the art/money/celebrity feedback loop):

‘It’s really a religious thing. One thing I didn’t say in The Painted Word, that I should have said, is that art today, is the religion of the educated classes. I don’t mean that by analogy, it isn’t like being a Baptist in 1870, it is being a Baptist in 1870.’

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From Art vs Machine: Here is a video making the case that Jackson Pollock achieved something, but it wasn’t really the innovative use of drip-paint.

Maybe it was kinda beautiful in its own way? Romantically Primitive?

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Also, are Robert Hughes criticisms’ of Andy Warhol’s art really blocked by YouTube?

Making a hero of the androgynous anti-hero is orthodoxy these days, but also pretty tired (the Warhol to Bowie line seems over-rated):

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What came before modernism/postmodernism? Why the below video might be worth listening to (min 34:22):

‘There was a great turn towards emotionalism. There was a sudden interest in the primitive and remote; the remote in time and the remote in place. There was a outbreak of craving for the infinite’ 

A movement emerged, about 1760–1840, which has deeply affected our conceptions of the Self, Art, heroes and villains, and most importantly, what makes life worth living.

Isaiah Berlin’s take on Romanticism:

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Repost-Ah, Look At All The Lonely People-‘Jeff Koons Is Back’ Via Vanity Fair

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Full piece here.

-Koons gets the Annie Leibovitz treatment (an unfortunate photo at the link).

-This is not a commentary on Koons’ art, some of which I like well enough, it’s a much worse beast; another attempt at cultural criticism.

In the talk around Koons, what often stands-out to me is how much talk there is about Koons himself, and the search for meaning in all that talk. The concept of artist-as-individual is nothing new; an isolated Self, quite apart from society, mining his interior life and experiences in order to represent beauty, meaning, and some attempt at expressing universal truths through his work and craft. This is unsurprisingly part of what all artists do, and the extreme individuality of this process is what Western artists somewhat consciously have been doing for a few centuries now, from musicians to writers to sculptors, from romanticism to modernism to post-modernism and beyond.

The fact that Koons is doing this with such relentless self-promotion and while also courting celebrity is arguably a much more ‘modern’ phenomenon. A certain amount of melliflous, abstract bullshit seems part of the Koons’ game, as if you’d walked onto a used-art lot as Koons tours you around, asking what’s-it-gonna-take-to-get-you-into-one-of-his-pieces. He offers you an invitation and a return to part of your Self. He can make you whole again within the work produced by his Self.

Jeff Koons is a brand.

Perhaps this is what it takes these days to make a living by schmoozing with wealthy art-buyers, but in some ways, it has a distinctly American feel. High and low culture mix in a highly commercial, utilitarian way. The urge to merge abstract art and the avant-garde with mass, pop-culture is expressed. Fame and meta-critiques on fame, celebrity, money, and the Self amplified for all the other Selfs to see has implications for much of our culture, I suspect.

As to establishing Koons’ bona fides enough to merit attention by Vanity Fair, here are a few quotes from the piece:

Everyone’s getting in on the bullshit!

“Jeff is the Warhol of his time,” proclaims Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director.’

You need an L.G.B.T. blessing to be truly avant-garde these days:

‘The reference to Curtis ties Koons to the last true avant-garde—a pedigree the artist likes. Curtis, who refused to be called a drag queen, was a pioneer of the L.G.B.T. movement and, like Candy Darling, was made famous by Warhol’

And:

‘What Warhol and Koons do have in common, though, is an uncanny ability to nail an image or an object so that it catches the Zeitgeist.’

Partially true, perhaps, but what if the Zeitgeist is nothing but a leafy suburb full of good schools, intact families, and moderate lives? Isn’t this why some youngish people (ahem…many hipsters) often leave their small towns and suburbs looking for meaning, group membership and purpose in what can end-up vaguely collectivist and vaguely individualist lives in cities?

Everyone’s an artist, these days.

Also, you must establish modernist credentials for the brand:

‘Koons’s job at MoMA gave him the opportunity to immerse himself in the history of modernism, in particular the ideas of Marcel Duchamp, who changed art history by showing how everyday objects, or “readymades,” could be elevated into the realm of art, depending on context. Duchamp’s theories were a revelation to Koons.’

Yes, dear reader, Piketty and Brecht in the same paragraph:

‘Barbara Kruger, the artist whose unsentimental pronouncements have been cutting to the chase about the art world for decades, says “Oh boy” when I call to discuss Koons, whom she has known since they both were starting out in New York. She needed to think about it and later wrote me: “Jeff is like the man who fell to earth, who, in this grotesque time of art flippage and speculative mania, is either the icing on the cake or some kind of Piketty-esque harbinger of the return of Brecht’s ‘making strange.’

And finally, while I have no quarrel with neurosicence, pop-neuroscience is often a repository for the modern search for legitimate experiences and theories of the Self:

‘Dr. Eric R. Kandel, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, was so impressed with the show that he e-mailed Koons afterward. I asked Kandel why. He explained, “I have been interested in the ‘beholder’s share,’ an idea that came from the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl. It involves the concept that when a painter paints a painting or a sculptor makes a sculpture it is not complete unless a beholder, a viewer, responds to it.”

Kandel adds, “When you looked at the sculptures you saw yourself embedded in the gazing balls. Artists sometimes put mirrors in works, but they don’t design the work so that you find yourself in the arms or chest of a statue, which is what Jeff did.’

Go and find your Self and be made whole, dear reader, within Jeff Koons’ work and the Jeff Koons brand, and try and tell the dancer from the dance.

————————

Koons’ Made In Heaven only amplifies that sound, blurring the line between art and porn, private experience and public show, innocence (so easily corrupted) and naive, narcissistic indulgence.

I suspect Made In Heaven explores previous themes of high and low that were already emerging in his kitsch work, fleshed out in pieces like Michael Jackson And Bubbles, Winter Bears and on this site: ‘St John The Baptist’.

Some quotes from Koons:

‘This type of dislocated imagery is what motivates people. They’re amused by it, but they have a lot of guilt and shame that they respond to it. I was trying to remove that guilt and shame.’

Another quote which highlights an idea of some import to the nation:

‘Coming from a suburban, middle-class background, as he did, he felt that there was something, if not dignified, at least, too easily discarded about this kind of imagery and this kind of sentiment.’

Roger Scruton says keep politics out of the arts, and political judgment apart from aesthetic judgment…this includes race studies/feminist departments/gay studies etc.: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

Goya’s Fight With Cudgels and Goya’s Colossus. A very good Goya page here.

Joan Miro: Woman… Goethe’s Color Theory: Artists And Thinkers…Some Quotes From Kant And A Visual Exercise

A Reaction To Jeff Koons ‘St John The Baptist’

Denis Dutton suggests art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

 

Ah, Look At All The Lonely People-‘Jeff Koons Is Back’ Via Vanity Fair

/ chr1 / Leave a comment

Full piece here.

-Koons gets the Annie Leibovitz treatment (an unfortunate photo at the link).

-This is not a commentary on Koons’ art, some of which I like well enough, it’s a much worse beast: Another attempt at cultural criticism.

In the talk around Koons, what often stands-out to me is how much talk there is about Koons himself, and the search for meaning in all that talk. The concept of artist-as-individual is nothing new: An isolated Self, quite apart from society, mining his interior life and experiences in order to represent beauty, meaning, and some attempt at expressing universal truths through his work and craft. This is unsurprisingly part of what all artists do, and the extreme individuality of this process is what Western artists somewhat consciously have been doing for a few centuries now, from musicians to writers to sculptors, from romanticism to modernism to post-modernism and beyond.

The fact that Koons is doing this with such relentless self-promotion and while also courting celebrity is arguably a much more ‘modern’ phenomenon. A certain amount of melliflous, abstract bullshit seems part of the Koons’ game, as if you’d walked onto a used-art lot as Koons tours you around, asking what’s-it-gonna-take-to-get-you-into-one-of-his-pieces, yet with soothing, professional demeanor, offering an invitation to return a part of of your Self to you and make you whole again within the work produced by his Self. Jeff Koons is a brand.

Perhaps this is what it takes these days to make a living by schmoozing with wealthy art-buyers, but in some ways, it has a distinctly American feel as well. High and low culture mix in a highly commercial, utilitarian way. The urge to merge abstract art and the avant-garde with mass, pop-culture is expressed. Fame and meta-critiques on fame, celebrity, money, the Self amplified for all the other Selfs to see has implications for much of our culture, I suspect.

As to establishing Koons’ bona fides enough to merit attention by Vanity Fair…here are a few quotes from the piece:

“Jeff is the Warhol of his time,” proclaims Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director.

Everyone’s getting in on the bullshit!

‘The reference to Curtis ties Koons to the last true avant-garde—a pedigree the artist likes. Curtis, who refused to be called a drag queen, was a pioneer of the L.G.B.T. movement and, like Candy Darling, was made famous by Warhol’

You need the cultural legitimacy of an L.G.B.T. blessing to be truly avant-garde these days.

‘What Warhol and Koons do have in common, though, is an uncanny ability to nail an image or an object so that it catches the Zeitgeist.’

Partially true, perhaps, but what if the Zeitgeist is nothing but a leafy suburb full of good schools, intact families, and moderate lives?  Isn’t this why some youngish people (ahem…many hipsters) often leave their small towns and suburbs looking for meaning, group membership and purpose in what can end-up vaguely collectivist and vaguely individualist lives in cities?

Everyone’s an artist, these days.

Establishing modernist credentials for the brand:

 ‘Koons’s job at MoMA gave him the opportunity to immerse himself in the history of modernism, in particular the ideas of Marcel Duchamp, who changed art history by showing how everyday objects, or “readymades,” could be elevated into the realm of art, depending on context. Duchamp’s theories were a revelation to Koons.’

Piketty and Brecht in the same paragraph:

‘Barbara Kruger, the artist whose unsentimental pronouncements have been cutting to the chase about the art world for decades, says “Oh boy” when I call to discuss Koons, whom she has known since they both were starting out in New York. She needed to think about it and later wrote me: “Jeff is like the man who fell to earth, who, in this grotesque time of art flippage and speculative mania, is either the icing on the cake or some kind of Piketty-esque harbinger of the return of Brecht’s ‘making strange.’

And finally, while I have no quarrel with neurosicence, pop-neuroscience is often a repository for the modern search for legitimate experiences and theories of the Self:

‘Dr. Eric R. Kandel, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, was so impressed with the show that he e-mailed Koons afterward. I asked Kandel why. He explained, “I have been interested in the ‘beholder’s share,’ an idea that came from the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl. It involves the concept that when a painter paints a painting or a sculptor makes a sculpture it is not complete unless a beholder, a viewer, responds to it.”

Kandel adds, “When you looked at the sculptures you saw yourself embedded in the gazing balls. Artists sometimes put mirrors in works, but they don’t design the work so that you find yourself in the arms or chest of a statue, which is what Jeff did.’

Go and find your Self and be made whole, dear reader, within Jeff Koons’ work and the Jeff Koons brand, and try and tell the dancer from the dance.

————————

Koons’ Made In Heaven only amplifies that sound, blurring the line between art and porn, private experience and public show, innocence (so easily corrupted) and naive, narcissistic indulgence.

I suspect Made In Heaven explores previous themes of high and low that were already emerging in his kitsch work, fleshed out in pieces like Michael Jackson And Bubbles, Winter Bears and on this site: ‘St John The Baptist’.

Some quotes from Koons:

‘This type of dislocated imagery is what motivates people. They’re amused by it, but they have a lot of guilt and shame that they respond to it.  I was trying to remove that guilt and shame.’

Another quote which highlights an idea of some import to the nation:

‘Coming from a suburban, middle-class background, as he did, he felt that there was something, if not dignified, at least, too easily discarded about this kind of imagery and this kind of sentiment.’

Roger Scruton says keep politics out of the arts, and political judgment apart from aesthetic judgment…this includes race studies/feminist departments/gay studies etc.:  Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

Goya’s Fight With Cudgels and Goya’s Colossus.  A very good Goya page here.

Joan Miro: Woman… Goethe’s Color Theory: Artists And Thinkers…Some Quotes From Kant And A Visual Exercise

A Reaction To Jeff Koons ‘St John The Baptist’

Denis Dutton suggests art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’