Robert Hughes... where did you go?

Robert Hughes was a critical genius, which he made evident in his use of plain language to weave elegant and complex relations between things. He was a writer first, a content expert second… or should I say… a content expert by way of being a writer. He was committed to language as the tool by which to condense complex meanings from observation. That is the essence of poetry, and Hughes was surely a poet of critical thought. The content experts of academia don't (as professional practice) condense complexity from observation. Instead, they explode complexity by reworking existing academic formulations. They don't go back to nature, they don't judge the point at which bone grinds on earth, and they do not grasp the nature of things in themselves. That is for men like Hughes. That is why he is great, and that is why he is so often marginalized and parodied by those who want to locate themselves within the privileges of academia or the art world.

What I appreciate most about Hughes, is that despite however negative his assessment of the current scene gets, he is not cynical about the prospects for art. He is simply strong enough to accept that the entire scene may be missing the larger meanings of art, both historically and personally. Perhaps history will judge him to have missed the point of the current postmodern malaise. Time will tell. But Hughes doesn't hedge his bets, he doesn't waffle on his judgements. That takes courage, commitment, belief, judgement. Balls.

The emperor of culture is indeed naked. But knowing that is not enough. If one then follows that observation with endless railings against the cultural hegemony that underwrites the yes-man-ism of the emperors courtesans, then one is falling into a counter-punching relationship with a social power that has no historical or moral authority. Calling out such bankruptcy, and throwing some punches at it is necessary. But to engage in an perpetual analysis of the emperor's nudity is to (unwittingly, and by implication) sanction it and give it relevance. I don't know where to draw that line. It isn't always obvious, and the persistence of said nudity seems to require endless rebuttal arguments, lest our silence be confused with acceptance.

But the talking does need to end at some point. This is difficult for the critic, I suppose, whose very purpose is to carry on discourse. But for artists themselves, the critical engagement can end. The emperor and his cultural context can be called out, critiqued, and rejected. An opening can be clawed out thusly… an opportunity for an alternative. But nature abhors these vacuums, so unless one is ready to fill that space with something else, that big pile of bullshit will just slough back down and burry these efforts.

We fill that space with positive proposals, with new theories, by championing things that make sense, and by making art that makes sense. Hughes is inspirational on this point. At the end of his critical writings, or at the end of his video segments, when he looks into the camera and summarizes so clearly, and draws us into the confidence that rational men share… one can feel very primed to break free from all the troubling errors of the world. Hughes is already there. He passes judgement, turns away from the camera, and is done. We should be as brave.

The significance of Hughes is not simply what he says, but the way he says it, and the quality of the man behind these things. If the medium is the message, then Hughes was truly a message unto himself, the literal embodiment of the courage to draw the conclusion, and to move on. He is bigger than all the wrong ideas he sees so clearly. He is bigger even than his own opinions, great as they are, tied to his character, yet like all living things, they tremble in the cold light of day. His content and his medium are one. But whereas the content of any man's life must end, the lessons of his medium (his character) go on.

The sadness of the critic, so isolated in time, is that his course may be run whence he has so clearly understood these things. The endgame outlasts their prime, rendering them easy targets to the new breed eager to make their reputations by picking the bones of the old. But such derivative musings soon fade, leaving the world hungry for something real... and maybe the spirit of Hughes can reincarnate in the form of someone with intelligence, wit, and honesty. We shall see, I hope.

But the artist only moves forward, and must, else surrender the field to the very thing Hughes revealed. If the artist wants to honor the idealism of Hughes and react against the bullshit of cultural hegemons, then they must act like a man. They must have the courage to construct something, to assert it, and then step back and let it breath. Like Hughes himself… know it, say it, and then be still.

Hard Rock Absurdity

Click, click, click… ahhhhhh….. the Palladia music channel is showing Pink Floyd in concert. Something recent, as they are all old. They're playing "Breath" from Dark Side of the Moon. I really loved that song. But honestly, I loved the version I had on an old, blue Memorex mix-tape in 1982.  There's something about the clickity-clack of the cassette experience that felt more real than the effortless remote-control experience that channel-surfed me to this moment. And sure, cassettes are old and don't sound so good anymore. But they sound a lot better than this shit.

Jazz musicians get cooler with age. Blues musician get cooler with age. Rock musicians do not. They get worse… much worse… all the way bad. Having suckled at the GIANT TEAT of popular fame for so long… having milked it so dry… having toured and toured and packed stadiums and had breakups and outrageous personal histories… and in general having passed through every stage of mega-stardom stupidity… they arrive on the other side culturally exhausted and meaningless.

The flame that burns twice as bright may certainly burn half as long, but in the case of rock stardom, it burns ten times brighter… and the intensity of the burn not only consumes every resource within the artist, but exhausts those resources completely. In the end there is nothing left… only the burnt ash cinders of their Stratocasters. In time there arises undead from that tumultuous grave the endless string of periodic mega-tours… the rock star afterlife. Arrogant, self-aggrandizing vanity projects before a middle aged fan base all too eager to shell out big bucks for tickets.

Such scenes are cultural in this sense… that they actually happen in our world. But they are very middlebrow. They reflect the commodification of the music, and the inability of the viewer to find any thing new in the world, such that they have to reengage the past to stave off boredom in the present. It's a symptom of what the culture lacks, not culture itself. Or, by that logic... it's a culture defined by what isn't there.

Click, click, click… ahhhhh…. there's David Gilmore again… in front of massive outdoor stadium crowd.. singing something-or-other. The stage is completely black, spotlit dramatically from above as he crouches over his guitar like a sorcerer staring into a crystal ball. A full orchestra in the wings lays down lush thematics, as the smoke machine constructs the necessary mythology.  Jesus H Christ!!! If the psychological weight of Dark Side had ANY MEANING AT ALL… it is all lost in this venue. How can you sing "Money" with any integrity to 50,000 fans who paid big bucks to sit in a stadium to hear you sing about the absurdity of money?

Roger Waters should write an album called The Dark Side of the Dark Side of the Moon. But nobody really wants to hear that either. Late career albums describing the down side of fame are an embarrassment… like middle aged men crying on the shoulders of their twenty-one year old girlfriends, while she texts friends behind his back. They should just date someone their own age. And if that's too boring, then maybe they're too boring too. And so all the boring shit in the world gets recycled onto the Palladia channel… Pink Floyd, Bad Company, Queen, and so on. There they stand in pudgy splendor, extending every song to opus lengths worthy of Springsteen at his most boring, as the crowd goes wild upon the inevitable crescendo and thunderous last note.

I think I have more admiration for Blue Oyster Cult playing "Don't Fear the Reaper" before 300 people at Hershey Park, than the Stones doing their 10,000th performance of Jumpin' Jack Flash at the Superbowl. Why don't they just produce a hologram of the Stones playing Satisfaction and play it 24/7 in every town square in America. It could be the new national anthem. And every time you looked at it a sensor would register your eye movement and deduct 99 cents from your EYE-tunes account. Ha ha.

Click click click… ahhhhhh… Oh my god... Palladia is now showing a Rolling Stones video. I watch with the sound off in order to deconstruct the visual logic. In the video, The Stones are playing in some super-cool dive-bar aesthetic, squeezed onto a tiny stage being very Stones-ey. The club patrons are young and beautiful... essentially they are models hired for the video shoot. Their lithe sexual bodies gyrate in languid dance moves. We are to understand that The Stones have seduced them with music and attitude. Such is the power of The Stones to channel the primal desires of every generation.

Mind you... we are not supposed to think the patrons know that these are The Rolling Stones. The Stones are playing it as if they are just some ordinary band on stage... but that they are so inherently cool that even kids FORTY YEARS younger than them ignore the age difference and make a psychic and sexual connection with them. This includes connections with Keith Richards, who hides his craggy face behind sunglasses that have some kind of silver bangle dangling off the side. At one point he smiles devilishly, revealing crooked teeth. Ron Wood winks to a girl, who is transfixed. Of course, Jagger dances directly into the camera, essentially breaking the 4th wall, and letting us know that he knows we're watching. He aggressively engages the video viewer... because Mick cannot be seen without seeing you first.

REEKING PHONY PATHETIC

Every major rock act will (when interviewed) express the desire to get back to their roots and play small clubs…. just like when they started out. But such conceits on materialize as fantasy within music videos. When it comes to reality, they only every play the largest stadiums possible. The bands usually claim it's an unfortunate compromise required to allow all of their fans to see them. But the truth is that within the culture of the music industry, it is a sign of weakness and failure to take a step back from profit maximization.

Top acts become top acts through ambition and business savvy. They do not accept anything less than what they can get. They do not walk away from the big payday in order to pursue a project like playing smaller venues. As required, they will pull the old amps out of storage and call forth their old manager, who awakens from his disco-slumber to begin hard-balling everyone in sight for max money.

When the whole corporate, big money, mass media juggernaut finally rolls into your town and delivers the guitar god onto the smoke filled stadium stage... and as the 100 foot high monitors show images of the performer who is too small to see from 80% of the seats... then nothing is left to complete the absurdity than that the performers will muster all their practiced earnestness to sing socially conscious songs derived from ideologies so far in everyone's past as to be non-existent.

Click click click… ahhhh…. It's the end of the world, as we know it.

Throwing up my Naked Lunch

I read Naked Lunch based on it's reputation, on a long, drunken plane ride to San Francisco about ten years ago. At first it was slow going, as my mind groped for some feature of the story upon which to construct my understanding… like searching for a handhold in the dark, on a cliff. But any hold you find lasts only a paragraph or two. Even within the span of sentence your handhold crumbles, and you slide down… desperately flailing your arms about in the hopes that the next moment or sentence will provide something to grab hold of. But all grips are fleeting, and you are left pinwheeling through a series of false features that promise security, but never deliver.

After about the eighth beer, the inhibitive presumption of a rational universe melted away, and I could meet Naked Lunch where it truly existed… as a feverish, non-rational, evacuation of mental content from a mind gone haywire.  Naked Lunch is the topographical description, in literary terms, of a mind lost in drug addiction. It is a series of flash-backs, fragmented memories, and random associations dancing on the surface of the totality of one man's drug addled experiences. It is like an electroencephalogram… those electrical patterns that indicate brain function, but that don't describe what one is actually thinking about. We see the neurons firing… we see the lightning bolts of electricity shooting around the brain.. but what does it mean... what is the lab rat actually thinking about?

But even that neurological simile is inaccurate, since we presume that the electrical patterns could (if we learned how to interpret them) provide us with insight to some underlying idea of what the brain is thinking about. But when the underlying brain activity are insane flights of fantasy… an extreme products of volition… the trail of causality goes cold. The insane is always constructed from the ruble of the sane, collaging appropriated fragments into some representation. Presented with this representation, we do the only thing a human mind can do... we look for meaning. And that is the first mistake.

We cannot turn off our minds when we read Naked Lunch. All we can do is suspend that part of the brain that searches for answers. It's not really possible, but getting drunk is a useful approximation. Perhaps dropping acid would be better. But ultimately, it is an impossible task. At the very least, we must be conscious to read Naked Lunch… we must be lucid enough to comprehend the words. We could reduce our minds to such a low level that we view the letters of the words as simply graphical symbols... where they become opaque ends in themselves, not the transparent mechanism of ration thought. But we cannot go all the way there. We must still consider the words as having intended conceptual meaning. In the end, it is impossible both to write a work of total nonsense, and to read a book of total nonsense.

But you can get really close. Naked Lunch gets really close. In face, as a matter of epistemological clarity… you might assert that Naked Lunch is the standard by which nonsense texts could be judged. It is as nonsensical as humans can get in language. Since words are a product of reason, their use (like the appropriation of fragments from the real world) imbues writing with some content that can be interpreted… from which some conclusion can be drawn. 

But I never drew any conclusion from Naked Lunch, other than what I say here about it.  Perhaps that is the truest test of nonsense… that after it is all said and done, there is nothing to say other than that nothing was said. 

*****

A question always arises in reviews such as this, where we wonder if something isn't being given unearned legitimacy through the act of saying it has no legitimacy. This may be so, in which case the review ends up not being about the inherent relevance of the work, but of the social relevance that has grown up around it. This book has become celebrated for various reasons, and is therefore taken seriously, despite it's apparent lack of meaning. This is  completely maddening to the objectively minded, who presume a book (or any work) should derive it's meaning by how well it channels some aspect of reality, and not by having become cool or popular through some unspecified social mechanism.

Such social relevance (like celebrity status), once achieved, is long endured. Oddly enough, the less objective the social status, the brighter it glows, and the more maddening to consider by the objective minded... who in their protestations keep the spotlight on the very thing they wish to ignore.

I undertook to read Naked Lunch because I had heard so much about it. After a few pages I had the distinct impression that it was going nowhere. After a few more pages I knew it was going nowhere. But being trapped in a plane with a beer in my hand left me few options but to read on. I was determined to finish the book, despite the pain induced by plowing through page after page of incomprehensible writing. I just wanted to be able to say I read it. I wanted to know absolutely that I it made no sense. I didn't want to run into a future conversation where some jack-off tells me... "Oh, but it is the last 50 pages that are really great".

So I have the dubious status of being able to assert with conviction that an apparently incomprehensible book is in fact incomprehensible, or nearly so... and perhaps I could dissect it to reveal something about it... which leaves me wide open to the charge of taking it too seriously. Which is true from an objective point of view, but not from a social point of view. The need to understand nonsense doesn't stem from reality... it stems from society.

For example... might know that the emperor is naked, and choose to not participate a the public display of fawning over his new clothes... but if we live in such a society we are not immune from the effects of those social attitudes. To understand society, we have to at least focus our attention on the products of social attitudes, such as the high regard given Naked Lunch. The awareness that they are meaningless is the first thing that comes to mind, and on the basis of this you could turn away from it and announce that it is meaningless, and just continue on with one's personal agenda in life.

But if you can stomach to analyze it further... if you can choke back the bile in your throat... if you can handle thinking about something beyond the moment it is immediately relevant to your life or to objective reality... then you can enter the realm of the social. It's a creepy place for someone who is inherently individualistic and ego driven. And oddly enough, when you take "the social" seriously for what it is... you can hear in it the echo of yourself... or maybe more accurately... you can hear in yourself the echos of what society has wrought... because society has wrought each of us. No matter how closely guarded and and nurtured one is about themselves as a unique individual, we are all in large measure the product of society. To be ignorant of the social forces active in ourselves is to mistake those social influences for our own... to assume that the entire content of our soul has been constructed by us through a closely guarded screening of reality, when in fact the very screen we filter through is itself constructed for us by the society we grow up in.

Investigating the apparent nonsense of social product is not about celebrating nonsense, but of gaining some familiarity the socially sanctioned canon of nonsensical works. Kind of like the inverse of the "Great Books" of western civilization. Presumably we read the "Great Books" in order to familiarize ourselves with the history of great thoughts, and absorb them into our lives. Just so, perhaps we need to read the "Un-Great Books", not so much to absorb them, but to purge them from ourselves... because if they have been socially sanctioned, they have NO DOUBT helped shape social attitudes, and have thus found their way into our souls.

I'm sure this essay seems like yet another unwarranted rationalization of nonsense. It even reminds me of that. It reminds me of how art critics can write thousands of pages trying to understand a Jackson Pollock drip painting, yet have few words to describe the apparently sane and rational works of Michaelangelo. It seems like yet another affirmation of the idea that language, thought, analysis, art, and expression are continually poured into the broken and obscure parts of life. How many poems are written about being happy, or about a day where everything was reasonable? How many songs capture the spirit of a solid 8 hour work day where you were really productive?

If everything has to reduce to reason and logic and personal goals... then just become a scientist I suppose, or some equivalent. I pseudo-support Naked Lunch not in itself, but for what it stands for to me... and maybe this is part of it's social sanction... that it represents a rejection of the conformist insistence on things making sense. It is a form of passive resistance to the aggressive and pervasive power of reason to always demand that we draw conclusions 24 hours a day. It is very post modern... it is very Dada-esque in it's subversion of the sane.

In this respect I can see it representing certain popular attitudes that at least some people have. These being... the desire to subvert... the need to reject the cackling of conventional social attitudes despite their apparent rationality... the need to assert yourself against authority even at the cost of forgoing reasonable gains you might otherwise achieve. One trades off reason for something else in those situations. In so doing I think I see, from my external point of view... the presence of social attitudes toward reason and authority that have their genesis in such apparently inane movements such as Dada or Beat poetry, and which have been delivered into your consciousness by social processes that you had no control over.

What do butterflys have to do with poetry?

What do butterflies have to do with poetry? I don't think the word butterfly occurs even once in the entire Norton Anthology of Poetry. Poetry generally comes in one of two forms... either a lyrical record of struggle... or as a greeting card.

What does it mean to lead a poetic life. If the history of poetry is any indication, the poetic life (at least the life of the poet) is one of tragedy... of endless struggle against the forces of sorrow, loss, alienation, and death.... and the afterlife!!! Granted, there are some moments of unbridled joyfulness, but such moments are few and far between.

Joy doesn't seem to offer the intellectual heft that draws the poet into the life long search for expression. I have often wondered about this... why so few artists (in general) do not take "happy-happy-joy-joy" as their theme. I think it is because happiness is an end in itself... it doesn't need to be figured out or expressed... it only needs to be experienced. Expression serves as psychic therapy for the wounds inflicted on us by society, by life, and by ourselves... the pain of which torments us and begs to be understood... to be fixed... to lead us to some elusive happiness, where expression ends, and pure experience begins. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

"But not so, how arrives it joy lies slain, and why un-blooms the best hopes ever sown... crass causality obstructs the sun and moon, and dicing time for gladness casts a moan..."

And so on and so on.

So when one references the poetic life.. is it the Hallmark version, or the "To be or not to be" version. And even though I have put a pejorative spin on those choices... where the "Hallmark" version is seen as weak minded and banal... I should say I am totally fine with that choice. Why shouldn't someone live in a Hallmark world.. a world of looking deeply into each others eyes while saying (or thinking) thoughts such as "Your eyes are liquid pools of mystery"... or "Our bodies exploded with the joy of newfound love"... etc. Such experiences are exquisite, even if their expression seems silly... seems embarrassing… like watching ones parents make-out. I sometimes think that the truly beautiful experiences can only be understood in the act of experiencing them... that is... in our minds... such that expressing in words is to rob them of identity.. to turn it into a set of cliched physical acts that don't add up to how it felt. In such a case, the most intimate and spiritual sexual encounter becomes the equivalent of two dogs doing it in the side yard. Sad but perhaps true.

The life of the poet is not the same as the life of the reader of the poem, the painter is not the same as the viewer of the painting. The creator is not the spectator. The actor is not the audience.  Is this poetic life one of creative expression, or the life of consumption... and does this consumer cast about for verse that reaffirms their worldview... which is the all too frequent tendency in consumer driven, on demand world we live in. After all, why should anyone trouble themselves in the life... all too short a time we're here. And yet without such troubling, there would be no poetry. When art buckles and folds to the consumer demands of such pressure, when it conforms itself to the expectations of the audience, it ceases to be art... it becomes entertainment... and poetry is no different than television.

Poetry, poetry, poetry... why bother to suffer at it's hand at all.

"Tis true the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale
But take it if the smack is sour
The better for the embittered hour
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul's in my soul's stead
And I will friend you if I may
In that dark and cloudy day"

What makes a city a music city

It's interesting how some U.S. cities are known as music cities. Cities such as Austin, Memphis, Chicago, and New Orleans are music cities. What makes these cities music cities, whereas a city like Philadelphia is not?

To think about this, I look at the analogous situation of the theater. What makes New York a theater city? The obvious answer would be that it has Broadway, with its big time theaters. But other cities have a large theater houses, and they aren't theater cities. What New York has is not just more large theaters, but many smaller theaters off Broadway. It is this grass roots presence that makes a city a theater city. 

Any city can build a grand theater, and usually do. Philadelphia has the Kimmel Center. Does that make Philadelphia a theater city? I don't think so. When I go to the Kimmel center, I leave feeling like I just consumed high end architectural luxury, complete with high ticket price, parking garage fee.... and a night-on-the-town, dinner and drinks, dressed-up, upper-middle class consumptive attitude.  I do not like the feeling that culture costs 100 dollars per experience.

Philadelphia is not a theater town and it is not a music town, and building palaces dedicated to music and theater will not change that. When you consider what makes Austin or NYC or Memphis or Chicago music towns... it isn't that they have giant music venus (though they do)... but that the spirit of music is alive and well in all the small venues. That is where the true culture resides.

As Robert Henri says in the opening paragraph of his "The Art Spirit".... "Museums of art will not make a country an art country. But where there is the art spirit there will be precious works to fill museums."

I could also ask, what makes a city an ART city? A great museum? If you put the Metropolitan museum of art in Las Vegas... would that make Vegas the art capital of America? Sadly, I think it might... and it wouldn't take long to put a thousand room hotel over top of it, and slots in the lobby... and take a cab right from the airport.

If small venues are the key to being an art city, and if the "art spirit" is required to sustain small venues... then what exactly is that art spirit?  I'm not sure I know what the "art spirit" is in essence, but I can think of an example that seems to exemplify the art spirit. The example I have in mind is that of New Orleans, and it's small music venues.

In New Orleans, there are a lot of small music venues where many different types of bands play. Some of these places are simply bars, with an area for the musicians to stand in. The musicians play for tips, it seems, as often there is no cover charge at all. I get the impression that the proprietors support the presence of the musicians not because it profit-maximizes their business, but rather, that it is simply what they do. Having musicians play live music in your bar is just how things are done. In this regard then, the presence of the musicians is part of the culture. It is part of the culture because culture is really only made up of the things that people do without thinking about it. Culture is the unquestioned, the pervasive, the given. Culture is all those things that do not change, and thus provide a stable identity to a place. This cultural attitude toward music is exists in some cities, but not in others.

In a non-music city, the presence of musicians in bars is not a given. In a city like Philadelphia, the bar owners only use musicians if they can bring in revenue. If they can't, the bar owner will use a jukebox, PA system, or karaoke machine to pump music into their bar. And not even this is a commitment to music, because if the bar owners could make more money by not having those things, then I'm sure they would do that instead. In short, bar owners in non-music cities do not consider having live musicians to be a given. They don't have the music culture.

The commitment to music found in a music culture isn't so much something that the members of that culture consciously choose day by day. The commitment is actually simply present in the culture, and no one much questions it. It is culturally induced. This commitment is what allows the music and musicians to live and thrive in these cities.

Aesthetic Packaging

Aesthetic packaging. The layers of polish and finish that art objects undergo in order to make them digestible to the general public.

art that looks like it's packaging.

art that is conceived of as packaging

While walking around inside a Sears department store looking for an air conditioner, I noticed that all of the separate items for sale are each imbued with their own unique stylizations, which are designed to attract the eye of the consumer. For example, you only ever see spoons that have a pattern embossed on the handle... bowls are usually painted with a very particular design... stereo speakers are stylized with beveled edges and chrome touches, or unique grill cloth covers with emblems on them... and so on for most everything. It is hard to find anything that has no stylization.

It reminded me of the history of advertising in the auto industry, probably back in the 1940s. In order to differentiate their cars, manufacturers began to "stylize" the cars, where stylization was in terms of surface details. The cars themselves could be very very similar, often including mass produced engines and chassis. But from the consumer point of view, they were different because they were stylized. This meant that the relevant difference from the consumers point of view existed at the superficial level... either the consumer was superficial, or they could be persuaded to become superficial. 

Stylization was a shift of focus from the utility of the object, to the perception of the objects superficial qualities, and thus it ushered in the era of marketing... which has grown in sophistication and persuasiveness to where it is today. It is not necessary to love or hate advertising to see the truth in this remark. We only have to observe the power of the media to sell us all manner of objects and ideas.

Getting back to the Sears store... with all of it's stylized objects. It occurred to me that when an object is stylized, it becomes an end in itself, and therefore has a hard time functioning as a means to some further end. For example, we would hardly think to purchase lumber that had carvings on its surface. What would happen if we made a table out of it.. and all these fragments of the carvings intruded into the design of the table.. of which they had absolutely no connection. 

We see the wood (rightly) as simply a raw material.. a means to an end. Yet when we purchase the myriad of objects that we desire in our lives... we are forced to purchase them with stylization already attached to them... which is to say they cannot function (very easily) as means to an end.. they are fully evolved ends in themselves... every object is king.

The marketplace creates this situation, in as much as the reality of modern marketing requires that objects be sold in terms of these stylized features. People seem to prefer spoons with grape-leaf patterns on the handles, rather than spoons with a simple handle.

The market cannot sell us anything that we don't (at some level) desire, or that we cannot (by some logic) be led to desiring. In as much as our subconscious desires and unspoken belief systems are not at a conscious level of control, we are vulnerable to the marketing forces, whose purpose is to draw them to the surface as the basis for purchase decisions. It is true that if some marketer plays on my need to feel loved, and on that basis I purchase his product, that the marketer has not coerced me. However, the marketer has played a negative role in my life.

Reflections on American Museums

One of the interesting issues that comes up when you study art is the issue of museum culture. After all, the art we see (in person) comes to us by way of museum visits... and so the rationale and thinking behind museums impacts what we see, and how we see it. The history of museums in America begins with the formation of vast fortunes in the 19th century, by certain families. The wealth generated was so vast that these families were released from any normal economic concerns, and entered the stratosphere of wealth, where the only question became HOW to spend the money.

These newly super-rich Americans looked to European royalty for examples of what to own and how to live. They built immense mansions on 5th Avenue, reminiscent of palaces. They built summer homes in Newport. They dressed and ate and comported themselves in a generally regal fashion... and in general lived a life that denied the democratic roots of American culture... the became the upper class. Very European. And when it came to art... they turned to the art of the Renaissance as being symbolic of their position in society. Renaissance paintings had served the powers of the church and state in Europe for centuries, and now the super rich Americans wanted to claim that legitimizing influence for themselves.

Thus began the great "looting" of Europe of it's great art treasures by super-rich Americans who were out to prove themselves worthy of their money. Emissaries were sent out to locate, authenticate, and procure artwork. This drove prices to unheard of levels, which propelled the European art dealers, who were only too willing to get rich on American art-materialism. Wealthy Europeans did not have the same view of art. The art they had might have been in their families for generations.... like furniture. It did not have the same connotations that it had to the Americans, and so they did not bid against Americans in buying it.

These facts, and many others explain one basic fact of American art culture... that it is loaded with examples of Renaissance art.... and this art serves as the foundation for most of the great museums in America. We take it for granted that when we go to the museum, we will see paintings of Christ on the cross by some Italian painter from the 15th century. We may not even wonder what such a painting has to do with our culture, our lives, our view of the world. We don't even get that chance, because we don't get to wonder what the point of a museum is... because all we ever see are museums constructed in the same way.

The second major factor in our museum culture, is the 19th century idealism among these super-rich, that art could have a civilizing and cultivating affect on the lower classes. This is (for the most part) a conceit amongst the rich that the lower classes need civilizing at their hands, and that their art collections can do it. The construction of the major American museums flowed from this idealism. They were built as marble palaces to house the collections of the rich, for the betterment of the poor. This "democratic" view of art still prevails everywhere. Every museum justifies itself in terms of bringing art to the masses. I suppose this isn't a problem per se, but it turns into a problem when you step back and consider how it all actually goes down in real life.

In real life, the typical American doesn't really understand art... and doesn't (therefore) really care about art. Art is not taught (in any meaningful way) in most grammar schools or high schools.. or even college.  We are a visually illiterate culture. Our visual culture is not derived from drawings and paintings and sculptures... but by television, the computer, and mass media in general. Mass media images do not challenge the viewer to interact (the way that fine art does)... they require only a passive absorption. Americans become good at (if you can use the word "good" for conditioned response) grasping the message embedded in images (typically meant to convey specific meanings, such as buying a product or accepting something as "sexy"). But Americans are lousy at understanding fine art. One might wonder why fine art museums would even matter to Americans... in as much as they get their fill of the images that matter to them, by simply switching on the TV.

Museums of fine art exist in the American cultural landscape as oddities... the last bastion of things that are supposed to matter, but really don't to most people. Visitors enter the museum the way they enter a church... oddly aware of how out of sync the whole place compared to the rest of the world. Museums themselves are constructed  like churches... large spaces, marble that is cool to the touch... over-sized rooms... everything out of scale to humanity. The art work placed on white walls... no context for the art... no clue as to where and how it was originally meant to be seen in. A total abstraction. Art ripped from it's historical context.. like an angel floating on a cloud... the idealization of a human spirit ripped from it's bodily circumstances and considered as pure spirit. We are meant to kneel and somehow commune with the art. But being visually illiterate, we are left to wander around on sensory overload, scanning the walls like we channel surf the TV.. .waiting for something "interesting" to grab our attention. I suppose that if (in any museum room) there was a flat-panel TV showing ESPN... that many people would gravitate toward that. The other alternative to viewing at the museum, is to conscientiously read all the cards on the wall that explain the art.. or else get the headphone tour and listen to someone with a slightly British accent tell you what's up.

Given the disconnect between fine art (old masters fine art, I should say) and real life... one wonders how museums continue to attract visitors. They do so (of course, through promotion)... and a big part of promoting the museum is by putting on BIG SHOWS that can be promoted well. Certain artists are BIG NAMES. Picasso is obviously one. He is like the Tom Cruise of art, in that his work in a show guarantees people will show up. The same goes for other BIG NAMES... Dali, Wyeth, Pissaro, Van Gogh, etc. One could ask if this is a meaningful artistic experience... but one does not get the chance to ask that... an in fact the point is moot. Americans love spectacle... they love the BIG THING.. they love Superbowls and march madness and the world series and being number one and skimming the best of the best from a list of BEST THINGS that is set before them in the passive TV-Based world we live in. We are more obsessed with consumption than with understanding what we consume. For museums to offer up the same experience dressed as art, is a natural outgrowth of all this.  In a sense, consumption of socially constructed products IS what american culture is about. Materialism in all it's glory.

But...AH... something is lost. The thing that is lost is suggested to us in those moments during our museum visit, when we become bored. When we wander around the big rooms not knowing what to do. Or when we go to the Dali or Picasso  show, and stand in line to get in... and stand shoulder to shoulder in a crowd to see innumerable works of art produced 100 years ago by someone we know little of, from a culture we aren't part of... and we can't even get a good look at it... and even if we could, we are too visually illiterate to make much of the opportunity.

But what are the alternatives? As I said before, this state of affairs really reflects American mentalities... so there is not really an alternative. But we might ask, how could it really be better. I don't know for sure. As an art student, I know that I would rather see a greater variety of works on the walls. I know I don't want to see the same collection on the walls every time I show up. The typical museum has 5 times more stuff in storage than they exhibit. I want to see that stuff too. I want to see more drawings and fewer paintings, since drawings are revealing of many artistic impulses. I would like the art to be easier to get to. I wish that there wasn't just one super large museum, but that there were smaller museums that were scattered in different locations.

I think about the metaphor of the theater in NYC. Of course you have Broadway, with its big time theaters. But you also have lots and lots of smaller theaters off Broadway. So I ask the question... "Is New York a great theater town because it has big theaters, or because it has many small theaters?"  When I go to the Kimmel center, I leave feeling like I just consumed high end architectural luxury, complete with high ticket price, parking garage fee.... and a night-on-the-town, dinner and drinks, dressed-up, upper-middle class consumptive attitude.  I do not like the feeling that culture costs 100 dollars per experience.

Philadelphia is not a theater town and it is not a music town, and building palaces dedicated to music and theater will not change that. When you consider what makes Austin or NYC or Memphis or Chicago music towns... it isn't that they have giant music venus (though they do)... but that the spirit of music is alive and well in all the small venues. That is where the true culture resides.

As Robert Henri says in the opening paragraph of his "The Art Spirit".... "Museums of art will not make a country an art country. But where there is the art spirit there will be precious works to fill museums."

So what makes a city an ART city? A great museum? If you put the Metropolitan museum of art in Las Vegas... would that make Vegas the art capital of America? Sadly, I think it might... and it wouldn't take long to put a thousand room hotel over top of it, and slots in the lobby... and take a cab right from the airport.

At any rate, it's interesting. You go to the museum looking for insight into the world... and you may get it.. but maybe not what you expect. You think you're looking out a window.. but in many ways its simply a mirror reflecting a distorted image. The consideration of that image... the consideration of the nature of that distortion... goes a long way to understanding what the hell a museum is really about, or not about.

Despite all that, I do enjoy going. These critical comments flicker on and off in my mind like a neon sign, but that's ok. They keep me sane in these somewhat insane situations.

( 4/13/2010, on the occasion of seeing the Picasso show)

Writing style VS. Thinking style (from my critique of Donald Kuspit's book The End of Art)

The issue of writing style vs. thinking style arose in my mind as I read Donal Kuspit's book "The End of Art". It was a difficult read overall, due to Kuspit's manner of writing. I found myself wanting to critique his writing style. Other online reviewers have noted it as pretty bad. One reviewer referred to it as "leaden", which is funny. But when I think about it, I'm not even sure that he has a writing style. Rather, he has a "thinking" style that you become aware of through his writing, so there is a tendency to describe his thinking as a writing style. I think this is a mistake.

I have a metaphor in mind to describe the difference between a thinking style and a writing style. Imagine a person who is kind-a crazy... who walks around mumbling to himself the names of the presidents of the united states. Imagine he does this over and over again. Now imagine that this person is asked to write down his thoughts. Probably he will write down the names of the presidents of the united states over and over again. This will produce long sentences with lots of commas between the names. When we read this, we might be inclined to conclude that this writer has a ponderous and wordy "writing style"... when in fact the answer is that he is simply crazy, and that his writing is simply in the service of his craziness.

Could this crazy person be tutored in "proper writing style" so that he didn't write lengthy sentences that go on for a paragraph, and that simply list the presidents of the united states over and over again? No, he could not, because his crazy manner of thinking is the dominant factor in how he writes. In fact, to change his writing he would have to change the way he thinks. In other words, to not write crazy, he would have to stop being crazy.

We have to stop blaming "writing style" for the craziness we read. We have to hold the mind of the author responsible. We have to recognize that it is "thinking style" that is the culprit. When we don't, we end up in the strange situation of blaming writing style for what confuses us, but attributing non-confusing writing as being from the writers mind. In other words, the author (his thinking style) gets credit for anything he says that makes sense, but the blame is passed to "writing style" when things don't make sense.

Is Kuspit crazy? Well, no, not really. If he mumbled the names of the presidents of the united states over and over again we would say he is. But he doesn't. What he does do is mumble and intone the names of one intellectual after another, in the form of attributions of quoted material, that he constructs into run-on sentences. Nothing seems edited or streamlined or culled or reduced to it's essence, or abstracted. We bear witness to the totality of Kuspit's consciousness as he performs a core-dump of his brain.

And what a brain it is! It's chock full of knowledge. He knows all about Kandinksky, and all about Duchamp, and all about all kinds of modern artists. And he knows all about what lots of other critics say about these artists. And he knows all about what Hegel said, and Kant, and Plato and Aristotle. He knows all about what all these postmodern, post-art artists said and did. And even though I'm saying this in a semi-mocking tone, I don't mean to suggest he doesn't know this stuff. I think he does. And when he mixes it all together into page after page of dense references and attributions that he pulls from this sea of knowledge... I'm sure I'm not gonna tell him he doesn't know what he's talking about.

But although he knows what he's talking about, I don't think he knows what he is saying. He just seems to be talking non-stop. He doesn't mumble the names of the presidents of the united states like the crazy guy does... but on a higher intellectual level, I think he's performing a similar act of craziness. Of course, when you are an educated art critic, you aren't called crazy. Perhaps you are called "difficult", or "dense", or "involved", or "deep". Those are all polite ways of not dealing with the underlying.... uh... insanity?

There is of course the tired, old counter argument to what I'm saying, which is that Kuspit's intended audience is other academics and intellectuals who expect this kind of writing style. That's the kind of argument that grid-locks critiques of post-modern writing, wherein some hypothetical "intended audience" legitimizes even the most incomprehensible writing. It's also an ad-hominem attack on the critic, who is cast as not-smart-enough to understand the writing.

The clarity of writing directly impacts the clarity of the ideas expressed in writing, for if it did not, we would have to admit that there is a disconnect between the form of writing, and the subject of the writing. That is, we would have to accept that there is a disconnect between the WAY something is written, and the MEANING of what is written. This makes no sense.

Conversely, the clarity of the meaning directly impacts the clarity of the writing, for if it did not, we would have to accept that confused ideas could be expressed in a clear and direct fashion. But we don't see this in practice. In practice, confused ideas are typically hidden inside dense, incomprehensible wordplay.

To summarize the combinations of writing and meaning, I would say...

Clear Writing + Clear Ideas = Ideal
Clear Writing + Confused Ideas = Doesn't really exist
Confused Writing + Confused Ideas = post modernism
Confused Writing + Clear Ideas = Doesn't really exist

I know someone is going to think, "Who cares if the writing is verbose, as long as the ideas are clear". Unfortunately, the last category above (verbose writing, clear ideas) is a nebulous category. If the form of writing impacts the meaning of the writing, then to some degree the poor writing drags down the meaning, and so the ideas are never completely clear. I think that this is the case with Kuspit. I say that his ideas are clear enough, but the truth is, they are only just clear enough to keep me somewhat satisfied, and to struggle through his foggy writing. In fact, the fog of his writing makes his ideas (when they appear) seem more satisfying than if there were no fog at all. His writing withholds clarity, making you desperate for it... so that when it occasionally appears, you devour it, and feel satisfied. But this is not the as being clear.

As mentioned above... his ideas seem clear when they emerge from the fog. But the very fact that the fog is included in his writing makes it impossible to understand his writing in it's entirety.

Like I said before, Kuspit indulges in verbose writing practices. I assume this is due to some academic background that he can't escape from. This practice not only impacts his writing (verbose) but also his general mindset. He seems unable to consistently take a position, preferring instead to use a constant stream of attributions to other thinkers to support marginally important ideas.

Here is a made up example that dramatizes the point. I might say the following in my own voice...

"It was a really nice day, so I decided to go for a walk and enjoy nature for a while".

Now, if I Kuspit-ize that sentence, I would write it as follows...

As Hegel noted, "Being on the occasion of a day finer than it's antecedent"... I likewise noted my own moment self-same, and so, as Aristotle noted in Posterior Analytics, between consideration and action lies choice... I just so did choose to go for a walk... and in so doing did I thus, as William Morris advised, "Drew deep into my breath the full measure of the natural world". And this went on for a temporal and spatial interval.

Now obviously, I exaggerate and use fanciful examples... but you get my point. Kuspit employs this approach consistently. It's mostly annoying. And draining. And when you do finally parse from it's complexity the underlying idea of... "It was a really nice day, so I decided to go for a walk and enjoy nature for a while", your mind is tired in a way that robs that sentiment of the direct expression it deserved. Ideas and art and people deserve to be presented directly, not mediated through a series of intellectual filters, whose purpose is all to do with habituated writing styles of intellectuals.

Verbiage is a bad thing. It is defined as an overabundance of words, so in one sense, reducing the number of words can reduce the verbiage. This assumes that the same idea can be communicated in fewer words, and that this reduction will be clearer. Sometimes this is possible, but sometimes the only way to reduce the number of words is to make the expression even more terse and difficult to comprehend.

If a reduction in words it too terse, then the writer should use MORE words. The expression should be fleshed out into more words, more sentences, etc. Make it longer, but clearer. This is often possible.

Kuspit needs to strive for clarity through fewer words, or more words. He also needs to stop couching every little thought in terms of attribution to other intellectuals. So this book suffers mightily from these poor practices. However, it is not fundamentally incomprehensible, and the ideas contained in it are of interest... so go knock yourself out and read it.

By the way, I'm sure that someone might note that this review... where I'm so critical of Kuspit's verbose writing... is itself verbose at times. This is true, too... I could have done a better job of condensing in some spots, and expanding in others. But this is no contradiction. It simply points out that great writing requires time and energy, and my alloted time is up for now.

The Artist and The Viewer

I was thinking about the relationship between the artist and the public. I came up with two very different ideas about it all. The first one I'll "The artist and the viewer"... and the second I'll call "The artist and the public". The idea of the viewer is an abstraction of any single person who views art. The idea of the "public" is an abstraction of all the people who look at art.

Artist & The Viewer.

It seems to be an accepted truism in art, that the reaction of the viewer is important. One way in which it is important is in selling artwork to individuals, right? Because they won't buy it if they don't like it. But even beyond this, the reaction of the viewer seems to be integrated into the very idea of why art exists at all. We hear of the power of art, or the purpose of art, etc.... as being the communication of some effect into the mind of the viewer, or into their emotions, or psyche, etc. We hear too about the therapeutic affect of art, or the ability of art to raise the consciousness of the working man, or to give visions of pure aesthetic beauty to those whose lives are ugly. And so on and so on.

These ideas all place the position of the viewer as very dominant, even more dominant than the artist who creates the work. I was wondering if this situation derives historically from the growth of individualism and democracy in Western European thought. As more and more aspects of the world are delivered over to the governance of the common man (with great success), it seems that the common man (in the noble sense of the free individual) becomes the locus of meaning of things in the world. When the world becomes a marketplace on which not only goods and services, but ideas and attitudes are exchanged in a continual flow... then the agents of that exchange (the individual) seem to be the makers of meaning. They make meaning individually, and those meanings accrue through various social mechanism to become the "social meanings". In such a world, it becomes difficult to speaking of "meaning" apart from "social meaning", and the two become one, and a social-metaphysics results.

I could hardly call social-metaphysics evil, considering that the marketplace itself is a social-metaphysical thing. But the truth of the market is the truth of all the individuals brought together by a market mechanism that reflects supply and demand. The truth of the market is knowledge of socially metaphysical groupings. No problem there. But, not all truth is social metaphysical. We don't have a social mechanisms to determine what people think that "2 + 2" equals. It is understood that some kinds of knowledge is validated in other ways, and that the role of the individual is to "learn" those facts... those truths.. those meanings.

[An aside]
I was thinking that things must have been different during different periods of art history. For instance, were classical Greek sculptures made to achieve therapeutic affects for Greek citizens? Did the viewers of these sculptures talk about "what they got from them".... or "how they made me feel". Were they built for the purpose of bringing beauty to the masses, and making the working man's day more spiritual?

Was Notre Dame Cathedral built with the point of view of the common person in mind? Did the architect care about their reactions? Would those who built it stand in front of it later, and eavesdrop on public opinion in order to feel justified?

Probably not, to both of these examples. I think that the meaning and purpose and justification for art in past epochs must have been along different lines. In our own day we couldn't imaging discounting the common man from our estimation of what we're doing. And I'm not talking about "human consciousness" in some abstract way, as I'm sure considerations of human consciousness informed the making of all art... but did so by informing the construction of the ideologies out of which the art sprang.
[end of aside]

So where does art fit in? Is art a kind of truth that forms only in the mind of the viewer, or is the truth of art something that exists on it's own.

The idea that the truth of art is in the mind of the viewer leads to problems. For one thing, it biases artistic perception toward the reaction of the viewer. This leads to the further problem of figuring out why people react as they do. If one subjective reaction is hard to swallow, what do you do with countless subjective reactions. Obviously, all these subjective reactions will cancel each other out to a large degree, and will lead to the kind of skepticism that is popularly explained as cultural relativism. Varying subjective reactions to art (or anything) will be explained as stemming from the differing cultural backgrounds of the viewers, such that no-one can claim knowledge of the art work. Since the artist is not immune from the conditions of cultural influence, they too become simply another subjective voice... despite the fact that they created the art.

Another problem is that the individual viewer has no guidance in viewing art. They are told that their gut reactions are all important starting points. How does one go from "gut reaction" to "informed viewing"? Not easy. Informed viewing requires a process of learning. But more than that, it requires a re-statement of the relationship between the viewer and the thing viewed. To embrace informed viewing, the viewer must draw their gut reaction into question to some extent. They must come to understand that reaction is a complex process wherein their emotions and their knowledge work together, such that they can change their reaction by becoming more informed viewers.

BUT... what is it that they can be "informed" about. What exactly is the "learning" that a viewer can undertake? Of course, we know the types of things that can be learned, so that question is rhetorical. The point is this... that to say that someone learns something about art is to say that some truth about art exists beyond simply reacting to it. This means that reaction and knowledge are not the same thing.

So, there must be some truth to art, and that truth can be made to exist in any particular work of art. This truth has to be put there by the artist. This all seems to make sense... but like I said in the beginning, the bias toward always considering art from the point of view of reaction... and the strong tendency of modern democratic society to legitimize art based on what viewers make of it... these things distort what is going on.

Of course, the danger in supposing that art can ignore the viewer, is the idea that art can rely solely on assertions of meanings by the artist (or art establishment)... which I take the phenomenon of conceptual art and post modern art to be... where no aesthetic qualities even exist to be reacted to, and the viewer substitutes belief for reaction. Basically, you're told what to think, and what your reactions should be in regard to.

I realize that the dichotomies discussed above smacks of a false alternative. We could say that the truth isn't solely "in the viewer" or "solely in the art"... or solely anywhere for that matter. We can say that all truth is a relation between viewer and viewed. But how that epistemological abstraction solves the problem, I don't know.

Given the dichotomy as it exists, I get the impression that one can go in one of two directions (reflecting these dichotomies). One can make art that is viewed favorably by the viewing public without requiring that the public do anything but "react" to it in a natural fashion. The "public" could be everyone in society, or it could break down into smaller groups, such as lovers of landscapes, or abstract art, etc. In fact, it can break down into any number of groups EXCEPT one... it can't become the sophisticated insiders who make up the post-modern artworld's upper echelon. Because that group doesn't react, it buys into ideology.

This dichotomy sucks, as dichotomies always do.

If there does exist an "art world" that has an ideology... then why not participate in it? If one could stomach producing conceptual art, at least one could reap the benefit of having your art viewed other than via gut reaction. You can assert what your art means, and be taken seriously. Your claims would be part of the viewers mind. You could exist in a high-minded fashion among other high-minded people, and feel like you actually knew something. The problem is, I find these ideologies lacking... and can't believe them, much less align myself with it simply for some careerist benefits.

So, you reject such group nonsense, and you are isolated. Sure, you have your own ideology and your own standards, but you have no public that gives a crap about such things. The only thing you can be sure of that the public knows, is that they "like what they like, and know it when they see it". It's an honest statement, but depressingly narrow in actual fact. Just as relying on "gut" reaction gives no guidance to the viewer... delivering your art to these "gut reaction" viewers gives no guidance to the artist. I suppose artists cultivate a style of work that they can consistently sell, and that's that. But what does "consistent sales" have to do with artistic truth? Potentially very little.

I suppose that the way out of this dichotomy is to stick to your guns... produce work that you can verify to yourself has meaning... and to cultivate a following among some informed people who both believe in what you're doing, and who react favorably to it based on such belief. This presumes too, that the belief is rational, and not simply that you cultivate your own brand of artworld nonsense. This seems like a very idealized solution, the kind I love to identify, but the kind that experience has taught me seems never to exist... or for very long.

It reminds me of how it's difficult to find rational people who can discuss philosophy. People who can do so are not group oriented, and so drift in and out of view. And even when you can nail them down to a time and place, their natures cause them to argue to narrower and narrower points of distinction, so they break apart soon enough over differences, rather than on their 99 percent of agreement. There is NO GROUP POWER in such things, and so they cannot be the basis for movements or institutions or a market, etc.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking about the artist and the viewer. The topic of the artist relation to the public at large is the other idea I was thinking of... but I don't have that written down yet.

Sarah Palin, MaxHeadroom, and celebrity culture

I think I just figured something out.

I noticed that Sarah Palin has a new reality type show on TV called Sarah Palin's Alaska. I haven't watched it, but the commercials I've seen for it show her and her family doing stuff in a semi-wilderness setting. Obviously it is a way to keep the candidate in the public consciousness. If a candidate simply bought TV time for the same purpose, they would be seen in the same poor light that Ross Perot was back in the 90s. Not to mention that it would cost a fortune.

I suppose Palin's ability to host such a show is underwritten by the public's desire to watch her. She is no different from any other celebrity in this way... famous for being famous. And that fame has a political heft that far outweighs the ineptitude that was in evidence in the last election.

Here's another observation... I was in a book store tonight and I think I saw Sarah Palin's face staring out from any number of shiny hardback covers, or other visual products, available for holiday shoppers. How it is that she is such a (literally) visible character is strange, considering that she isn't an elected official anymore, and that she was held up to public ridicule in the last election.

Another observation: While surfing the web, one is inevitably subject to being hit with advertising, or news stories, or entertainment-news stories, and various other types of promotional stuff. As a high speed surfer of the internet, one is tempted to just assume that the virtual billboards you zoom by are simply random images with no pattern in them. But over the course of a week or so, you will experience a gradual crescendo of focus on many of those “random” sightings.

For example... Sarah Palin's daughter (Bristol) participated in Dancing With The Stars, the reality show. I only knew that because it started showing up on the internet. At first, it shows up as an innocuous passing reference on something like (for example) the AOL login screen. A few days later it might show up as a slightly longer story on some other web page.. and then you'll see reference to a video on youtube... and then you’ll see a TMZ reference to it a few days later.. and finally you'll see that she will be dancing for her life tonight at 8pm. By the time the full focus of an internet “exposure cycle” has hit your consciousness, your curiosity is so piqued that you have the sense that it is a “must see TV”. Not only has your interest been piqued to the pointless life of Bristol Palin, but you're kept always in mind of Sarah Palin.

And so it goes, day after day, week after week. I keep noticing the same crescendo of engineered interest in thing after thing. No doubt there are forces at work behind the scenes orchestrating this phenomenon. They aren’t devious forces.. it is simply the advertising and promotional industry doing what they do behind the scenes. In fact, they are just doing what they’ve been doing since the beginning of mass media... which is creating public interest.. because public interest has economic value.

Public interest in a person raises that person to celebrity status, which makes them valuable. And like any asset, you must first invest capital to develop it. You have to spend money to make money, and in the mass media celebrity industry, the investment is in exposure. Which brings me back to what I think I discovered about Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin is a right wing celebrity. She is a huge asset on the political balance sheet. She might seem like a liability in terms of intelligence or fitness for national leadership... but she holds enormous potential. Why? Think of what Arthur Jensen told Howard Beale in the movie Network. Beale (the TV anchor man) asks Jensen (the money behind the network) why he chose him to preach his corrupt corporate message... Jensen replies... “Because you’re on TV, dummy... Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.”

So if you wonder why the right looks to Palin as a potential party leader in the years ahead, no doubt the reason is... “Because she’s on TV, dummy”.

When Sarah Palin can materialize in mass media at will... when she masters television, “the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in this whole godless world” (to quote Howard Beale again).... then “who knows what shit will be peddled for truth” (Beale again). And so on and so on.

Of course, we know the shit that is peddled for truth. The shit is Sarah Palin.

But in the virtual world of mass media, there is no Sarah Palin. She is just a face. She’s no different than MaxHeadroom, other than the fact that we know MaxHeadroom is artificial, whereas we assume Sarah Palin is real. The real force isn’t the celebrity... the real force is the power of the media to make celebrity, and that power is financed by interested parties that we never see.

Sarah Palin is on TV... and except for genuine news stories... nobody gets on TV without someone behind the scenes investing money in it... and that money is goal directed. The very fact that Sarah Palin is so exposed right now means that she is being invested in, and the scale of that investment suggests that she is being targeted as a presidential candidate.

The disturbing and sobering thought in all of this is not that a dummy like Palin could be president, but that the machinery of mass media makes this... and things like this... a reality, every day of the week, in every possible aspect of culture.

Lost In Translation... Reflections on an e-card...OR... The Christmas Card in the age of Mechancial Reproduction

I received an electronic christmas card (back in December). The e-card I received showed a horse drawn sleigh full of Christmas presents being drawn down the street of a (presumably) olde-english townscape, while snowflakes fell and a traditional Christmas carol (the holly and the ivy) played in the background.

As I watched, I had a strong emotional response to it...which was, I felt deeply how absurd it was. I hadn’t felt this way about an e-card before. This is not a put-down of the person who sent it to me. Everyone sends e-cards these days, and up until today I had never considered them absurd. They’re not as nice as a traditional card, I supposed... but hey, it’s the thought that counts.

The sense of the absurdity that I felt was no doubt due to some readings I have done in the past few years... readings in “art theory”. The first one that comes to mind is Walter Benjamin’s well known essay from 1936, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. In this essay Benjamin discusses how, with the advent of photographic reproduction of art, that the work of art thus reproduced loses it’s aura, and it’s authority. Aura and authority are derived from it’s singularity and uniqueness of the object, and both of these qualities are lost in reproduction.

Benjamin goes on to consider the implications of this shift away from the original to a copy. Being a Marxist type of social critic, he seems intrigued by the “democratization” of the image... of how reproduction allows it to been consumed by “the masses”... and of the loss of the singular authority of the artist and art object. Etc, etc. His conclusions are less interesting at this point than the observation about loss of aura and authority.

The other reading I had done was this book that I am just reading now, called “The End of Art”, by this art critic Donald Kuspit. In this book, he argues that art has entered a phase that he refers to as post-art. He sees contemporary art as no longer being concerned with any of the issues that previous art (both modern art and more traditional art) had been occupied with. He traces the nature of this shift from Duchamp to the present day.

Part of his argument involves the aforementioned democratization of art that occurs due to photographic reproduction. The stripping away of the aura and authority of the original is consistent (in his view) with other factors that had been delivering art to the masses in order to legitimize it. He sees art as having lost it’s authority in general, due to conceptual attacks on it by (originally) Duchamp, and later by conceptual artists starting in the 1960s. Having lost it’s authority as a meaningful individual experience, the art object is forced to be “relevant” in some social or political way.

The issue of mechanical reproduction of art comes up all the time in readings on art, and they always cite Benjamin’s original essay. Having come upon this issue times in readings, I have thought about it a lot, and was convinced of the truth of it. However, I have never had a strong, visceral reaction against photographic reproduction. Sure, I’ve had moments where I was aware of the disconnect between the original and the copy, but I’ve never had the break-through moment of deep realization of what it truly means to rob something of it’s aura, originality, and uniqueness.

Perhaps it’s because I was raised in a culture of mechanical reproduction, and an age of technology. I am not at the plugged-in level of today's youth.. not by a long shot. But still, things like television shows, commercials, billboards, magazines, digital photography, internet, computer graphics, and art history books filled with little tiny pictures... these all seem normal and above suspicion to me. As did e-cards.. until today.

As I watched the e-card dance across the screen, I was struck (as I said) with the absurdity. It is not absurd in terms of what it is, but in what it pretends to be. It pretends to be the original. But it is not an actual card. What is lost in the translation?

A real Christmas card can be held and felt and occupy real space in your world. A real card comes to the house in an envelope, delivered by the postal worker. The real card was chosen by the sender, and required physical effort to locate, select, and purchase. The real card has handwriting in it that comes from the tip of pen that had to be pressed into the paper, which gives evidence of the person sending it. The real card has an address on the front written by an actual hand, and a stamp that was licked. The real card was processed at the post office, and bears evidence of the machines and processes that deliver it to your door. A real card has to be opened, removed from it’s envelope, and read... then set down somewhere to observe. At some point you are forced to consider what to do with the card. Presuming you throw it out after the holidays, you can see the real card as having a life span of several weeks, and as having passed through the hands of many people on it’s way to you.

The e-card has none of these qualities. The e-card is a phantom projection of a real card... a projection of the mind, based on memories of real cards. The e-card has only two properties... the first is that it is symbolic of a real card, and can thus function to put us in mind of a real card.... the second is that it is convenient to send and receive.

If we imagine a time in the future where real cards are made obsolete by e-cards, so much so that people stop having actual experiences with real cards... then we can see that the symbolic property referred to above (the invoking of a memory of a real card) will be lost. At that point, all that will be left is convenience. But convenience is not a property unto itself, but a property of something. When the “something” is gone... the convenience loses it’s meaning.

So I was feeling very directly that the e-card had no meaning other than what I projected... which was a dim memory (at best) of the tangible meaning of a real card. I could see (also) how this is true of mechanical reproduction of art. Such reproduction is a terrible necessity if the objective is to make viewing of art convenient, but which trains the mind to see art as a photographic image, and in that sense no different from the countless images we see every day. Art loses it’s singularity, it’s uniqueness, and it’s authority. It becomes subject to the laws of mass distribution and mass consumption, which change the nature of the art object.. changing it from “art object” to “image of art object” to eventually simply “image”... then “bitmap”... to “digitial information”... to “information”.

And so on, and so on.... until POOF... it's gone. Then the world has to be reborn and recreated by primitives, in the real world.