Striking and Juvenile

Martin Kettle of the Guardian, comments how Classical music could even become the new rock'n'roll - After decades of modernist tyranny, composers want to be popular again, plus-or-minus 50 years after its composers dwindled and vanished from the minds and record collections of much of the public:

"...For the general public, he argues, classical music ceased to exist by 1950... At some point in the past half-century, classical music lost touch with its public.

At the start of the 21st century, we can see what went wrong more clearly. What went wrong was western European modernism. Modernism is a huge, varied and complex phenomenon, and it took on different qualities in different national cultures. But an essential feature, especially as Van der Merwe argues it, was to turn music decisively towards theory - often political theory [emphasis added] - and away from its popular roots."

With popular music so burned out, perhaps classical composers could somehow find acceptance again in the coming century. Time will tell. Kettle can't discuss this sad state of affairs without a riposte on a source of some of the problems in music following the "tyranny of modernism", the visual arts:

"But at least classical music has come up for air, and is asking the right questions. This is more than can be said of some of the visual arts, where the dislike of the public remains as striking and juvenile as ever. Even this, though, will not last. The need to create something beautiful that excites the public and goes beyond its experience is too strong to be frustrated indefinitely. It would just be nice to think it might resume in our lifetime."

At the core of Conceptual art is a sneering disdain for the public that is going to remain as "striking and juvenile" as ever for the foreseeable future-- it's not like thousands of MFA graduates are going to admit that their work is crap, take 5 to years to learn to draw, or enter a field more suitable to their talents, like garbage collection.

Slippery Slope to Regression

A cutting essay, The Slippery Slope of Hope by John Link, 2004, notes that

"New York was much more likely to invalidate good new art than to validate it. That should have been obvious to anyone with an eye who merely noted what was hot and what was not. Clem [Greenberg] could not accept this evidence because he stoically believed in the ultimate power of the best art. Nor will most artists accept it today. They would much rather be in the next Whitney Biennial than recognize the decline it represents."

How true. Cultural "authorities" and academia persecute good art. They suppress anything that challenges the orthodoxy of their ideology. 45 years of serious investments by collectors, also, will not be deaccessioned by any admission that anti-art is worthless, nor that the "oppressed" class of anti-artists have supplanted their "oppressor", the talented, real artists. Grad school Dadaists who would "rather be in the next Whitney Biennial" are little goose-stepping lemmings dumb enough to believe anything that they are told in the schools, without question, and never view it as regression. "Tolerance" of bad art is merely glorifying the worst artist in the class, as is precisely the case in every winner of the Turner Prize and most recipients of "grant money".

"Nothing is forever. Blow-outs are fueled by euphoria, not fundamentals. Some of the most prominent work that drives the final rush to the top does not have legs and becomes the source of the break-up that finally destroys the movement. Duchamp was Modernism's poster child but his legacy led the collapse into what we now call Postmodernism.

"The regression of the past 40 years may continue beyond our lifetimes. That does not make it impossible to make good art, but it does mean good art is not likely to prosper, and recognition for it will be scanty. Good art may be forced to live "underground" for a couple of centuries, in far-off pockets, just as culture lived by the efforts of the Irish monks in the Dark Ages. "Tolerance" is reserved for bad art and good art is persecuted by cultural authorities. This is not conducive to a golden age of culture, which has thus been put on hold. Elliott and Prechter teach that only when we are really convinced things will never get better, do they have a chance of turning around. We are not there yet; too many believe cultural salvation is just around the corner. We are sliding down a "slippery slope of hope".

Bad Art vs. "Real" "Art"

Here is a cartoon on Bad Art vs. "Real" "Art" [Image - opens in new window] .

As per the caption "*Actual over-heard quotes", and the double scare quotes of the cartoon's title, most of the job of the satirist was done by the mainstream academic artists, galleries and museums themselves.

Guns Don't Make Bad Art, People Do

1960s avant garde darling Chris Burden, who made a name for himself in the post-Yoko Ono world of challenging art by having himself shot, and his wife Nancy Rubins, "world-renowned artists, great creative forces", are throwing a hissy fit and resigning from their jobs as UCLA commissars of art indoctrination over an incident which crossed the line. It involved a gun. It wasn't even a real gun, it didn't fire real bullets, police find no evidence of any type of actual weapon nor ammo discharge, but something far more heinous has driven our art heroes out of the academy-- the mere simulacrum of the appearance of owning a hand gun.

Burden, an anti-materialist, capitalist-bashing "performance" artist turned "sculptor", lived up to his ideals with his former anti-materialist salary of $128,300 for teaching brainless lemmings at UCLA how to make non-art.

Ah, the "irony" that Jurassic "radicals" from the 1960s have come full circle and revealed their true colors. They have morphed into the figure of the evil Dean Wormer from National Lampoon's Animal House. [Ominous soundtrack music, Dean Wormer's face turns beet red] "...Alright, Delta House, I know that one of you delinquents left that dead horse in my office, and for that you were placed on DOUBLE, SECRET PROBATION. But this incident with the fake gun... I can't take this atmosphere of fear! I quit!!!"

2 Artists Quit UCLA Over Gun Incident
By Mike Boehm, Times Staff Writer

Internationally known artists Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins have retired abruptly from their longtime professorships at UCLA in part because the university refused to suspend a graduate student who used a gun during a classroom performance art piece, a spokeswoman for the artists said Friday.

"They feel this was sort of domestic terrorism. There should have been more outrage and a firmer response," said Sarah Watson, a director at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, which represents Burden and Rubins. "People feared for their lives."

Neither Burden nor Rubins would comment when contacted by The Times. They submitted their retirement paperwork Dec. 20, over the school's winter break.

The handgun incident occurred Nov. 29 at UCLA's graduate art studio annex in Culver City.

The brief performance involved a simulation of Russian roulette, in which the student appeared before the class holding a handgun, put in what appeared to be a bullet, spun the cylinder, then pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger, according to one student's account that was confirmed by law enforcement sources. The weapon didn't fire. The student quickly left the room, then the audience heard a shot from outside. What ensued is not clear, but police said no one was hurt.

The incident prompted investigations by university police and the dean of students' office into whether the student violated criminal law or student conduct codes. There is some confusion over whether the gun was real.

The Los Angeles County district attorney's office determined Friday that there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal misdemeanor charges, spokeswoman Jane Robison said.

Lawrence Lokman, UCLA's assistant vice chancellor for communication, said the dean of students' office was continuing to investigate whether university rules against weapon possession were violated, which could lead to disciplinary action. University officials said no action had been taken and that the student was continuing his studies.

Lokman said students can be suspended immediately, without the usual process of hearings and appeals, if the dean of students' office considers them a safety threat to themselves or others. In this case, he said, after an assessment by "qualified psychological experts," the dean's office determined that suspension was not warranted. Watson, however, said Burden and Rubins felt that the student should have been suspended while the investigations were continuing.

Burden made his name in the early 1970s with influential and controversial performance art. In his best-known piece, "Shoot," performed in a Santa Ana gallery while he was a graduate student at UC Irvine, Burden had an assistant stand 15 feet away and shoot him in the upper arm with a .22-caliber rifle.

Watson said Burden's work was controlled and that the audiences never felt in jeopardy. The UCLA case is different, she said, because it was a surprise action and "there was genuine fear."

Even before the incident, Watson said, Burden and Rubins were unhappy at UCLA because of budget cutbacks and bureaucratic issues that "got in the way of them adequately running an art department." Burden headed the new genres program, which includes performance, installation and video and digital art; Rubins oversaw sculpture instruction. What they perceived as university officials' lack of urgency about the handgun incident, Watson said, "was sort of the last straw."

Burden, 58, and Rubins, 52, are married. He had taught at UCLA since 1978, and she since 1982. Burden stopped doing performance art in the late 1970s and transitioned to sculpture, often making pieces that reflect on political issues or creating erector-set-like works inspired by the world of civil engineering.

Rubins is known for huge assemblage works made from parts of scrapped vehicles and appliances, including a sculpture of steel wire and old airplane parts that dominates an outdoor plaza at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles.

Burden, whose annual salary was $128,300, and Rubins, who earned $88,300 per year, both were scheduled to teach courses and advise master's degree candidates during the current winter quarter and coming spring quarter — duties Carolyn Campbell, a spokeswoman for the School of the Arts and Architecture, said are being assumed by other faculty members.

University officials provided no details about the handgun performance, which took place at the Warner Building, a warehouse-like structure where graduate art students have studios.

The student who did the performance is Joseph Deutch, 25, according to the campus police log entry on the case. Campus police said that in the course of the investigation, Deutch handed over a gun that was not a real firearm. Robison, the district attorney's spokeswoman, said there was "insufficient evidence to show a gun was discharged or any bullet fired."

Barbara Drucker, who chairs the art department, and Ron Athey, a visiting instructor who taught the course and was present during the performance, conducted a meeting at the Warner Building a week after the incident to dispel rumors and allow students to air any concerns, as well as to emphasize rules against possessing weapons on university property, a university spokeswoman said. Athey, known for piercing and cutting his body as a form of performance, did not return calls.

A graduate student who attended the meeting said a few students expressed safety concerns but more were alarmed that the university, if it disciplined the artist, would be cracking down on freedom of expression.

UCLA has 11 remaining tenured art professors. Those contacted declined to comment about their colleagues' retirement; others did not return calls or referred them to university spokespeople.

Christopher Waterman, dean of the School of the Arts and Architecture, said Friday that he didn't foresee the art department losing stature despite the abrupt loss of professors he described as "world-renowned artists, great creative forces."

"Change is a natural thing, and we're looking forward to conversations" about strategy for shaping the department's future in the search to fill the two vacant professorships, he said.

Could it be that Burden's own gun stunts decades ago were "in control" and the audiences "felt no fear" because they already knew what was going to happen? And that the viewers already knew that if they pretended to be "challenged" by this "shocking, trangressive" joke known as a "performance", it would make a safer-than-watching-TV version of Dadaist subversion?

Life Imitates Trash Imitates Blog

Wasn't I just posting about something like this, in the Impossible to Parody department? This is spooky. The garbage men of Frankfurt should learn they are in the wrong racket-- as much as they're paid to haul away garbage, the City of San Francisco will pay them far more to put trash back:

A Makeover for Trash; Now, It's Art
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
Published: January 26, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 25 - The air-kissers with the interesting eyewear were all there. It was the art opening of the season, and the cognoscenti gathered to sip chardonnay and wax poetic about the work on display at one of the city's most prestigious galleries: the dump.

"It's very textural, very architectonic," said Hector Dio Mendoza, a sculptor from San Jose, speaking of his 15-foot plastic foam tree, a work of haunting, austere beauty representative of what might be called the Trash Can School. "I love the way light reflects off the Styrofoam."

Mr. Mendoza holds one of the most coveted positions in the San Francisco art world: one of three current artists in residence at the San Francisco Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center, a fragrant 44-acre font of inspiration otherwise known as the dump. About 500 gallery-hoppers attended the most recent opening, last Friday night, venturing about eight miles south of downtown to a service road lined by seagulls in Hitchcockian thousands.

The open studio was the seasonal highlight of a program that gives a rotating roster of jury-selected artists access to the city's garbage.

The key words here are religion and dogma:

Founded in 1990 by a local artist and administered by Norcal Waste Systems, the company that picks up and recycles San Francisco's garbage, the program has become a bona fide phenomenon here. It is deeply expressive of a place where recycling is practically a religion and personal expression and environmental politics are urban dogma.

Artists like Mr. Mendoza set up shop in a studio at the dump (items that cannot be recycled wind up at a landfill east of the city). Decked out in fashionable steel-toed boots and hard hats, they comb through 75 tons a day of eclectic debris - discarded CD boxes, dead microwave ovens and the like. The resulting artwork, like Mark Faigenbaum's "Raymond Chandler" - a noirish tableau created from salvaged bullets and a 1930's circuit panel spattered with what appeared to be vintage blood - underscores the city's status as the nation's capital of recycling. Currently, 63 percent of its garbage is recycled.

Of course, stinky, organic waste, rotting food and other degradeables end up on the compost heap. Solid, unbiodegrabable garbage lives on through eternity as Art:

In the unbiodegradable, art endures. At the opening, Flash Hopkins, a local artist, surveyed Mr. Mendoza's "Artificial Nature," an assemblage of packing peanuts configured to resemble coral. Mr. Hopkins worked with Dana Albany, a previous artist in residence, on a sailboat made of books, its sails ripped-out pages from "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey."

"It's amazing what people throw away," Mr. Hopkins said of the objects rescued from the recycling building, a cathedral of garbage where the strains of "Moonlight Sonata," piped in by stereo, could be heard over the drone of Caterpillars. "It's very powerful."

The artists in residence, some 50 since the program began, are financed through 2 cents of the $18.90 a month San Francisco residents pay for garbage collection. Each artist receives a $1,800 stipend, though it has been temporarily suspended because of the downturn in the city's economy.

People's hearts can be touched by trash? The hearts of which "people", people in general, or the indoctrinated audience for avant trash art? Don't most people express their "emotions about waste" by flushing the toilet?

"What you see in a street full of trash," Ms. Hanson said, "is that most of what's thrown away need never have existed."

She was convinced that art made from trash would appeal to people's emotions about waste. "People change their ways only when their hearts are touched," Ms. Hanson said.

While New York may be "the only other city with an artist officially designated to work with garbage", in truth every MFA graduate from every art program in the entire world is fully trained and qualified in the waste disposal problems of their own work. San Francisco is innovative for making its "best" artists compete for who gets the top slots where grad school Dadaists belong, at the garbage dump. They even enviously compete for this state-sanctioned honor:

New York is the only other city with an artist officially designated to work with garbage. Since 1977, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 65, has been the sole artist in residence for the city's sanitation department, working on a conceptual piece on the former Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, from a studio in Lower Manhattan.

In contrast to New York, Ms. Ukeles said, San Francisco's rotating artists are selected by a jury, own their own work and are physically based at the dump. "I was always jealous, honestly," she said.

Of course, no discourse on trash college art is complete without the usual riffs on the evils of greed, capitalism and consumerism, and some typical poetic waxing about "the temporality of human existence,":

The opportunity to explore the detritus of consumer culture can be profound, the artists say.

"It makes you think about the temporality of human existence," said Dee Hibbert Jones, a juror and an assistant professor of sculpture and public art at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "You see how whole sections of lives end up in the dump."

Oh well, there's one good side to how much trash the evil United States produces-- the avant garde never runs out raw materials.

"In Mexico, people reuse and reuse and reuse," said Mr. Tovar, a native of that country. "I feel relieved when these artists reuse this stuff. Here in the U.S., we can always create more."

On your next tour of Italy, don't waste your time on outdated bastions of so-called art like the Uffizi or the Vatican-- ask for directions to the city trash dump and see the real deal. In Paris, ignore the Louvre and Notre Dame, they are not nearly as "challenging" as what's in the sewers. In India, ignore the Taj Mahal and other antique treasures, instead admire the artistic intent of crap floating in the Ganges. When in San Francisco, you know where to find the best refuse.

Quotes: From Art to Anti-art

"As for me, I certainly consider a great appreciation of painting to be the best indication of a most perfect mind, even though it happens that this art is pleasing to the uneducated as well as to the educated. It occurs rarely in any other art that what delights the experienced also moves the inexperienced."
"The first great care of one who seeks to obtain eminence in painting is to acquire the fame and renown of the ancients. It is useful to remember that avarice is always the enemy of virtue. Rarely can anyone given to acquisition of wealth acquire renown. I have seen many in the first flower of learning suddenly sink to money-making. As a result they acquire neither riches nor praise. However, if they had increased their talent with study, they would have easily soared into great renown."
-- Alberti, from On Painting

"The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection."
"Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish."
-- Michelangelo

"Drawing is the probity of art."
"To draw does not mean to simply reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modeling. See what remains after that. Drawing includes three and a half quarters of the content of painting. If I were asked to put up a sign over my door I should inscribe it: School for Drawing, and I am sure that I should bring forth painters."
"Drawing contains everything, except the hue."
"Expression in painting demands a very great science of drawing; for expression cannot be good if it has not been formulated with absolute exactitude. To seize it only approximately is to miss it and to represent only those false people whose study it is to counterfeit sentiments which they do not experience. The extreme precision we need is to be arrived at only through the surest talent for drawing. Thus the painters of expression, among the moderns, turn out to be the greatest draftsmen. Look at Raphael!"
"One must keep right on drawing; draw with your eyes when you cannot draw with a pencil. As long as you do not hold a balance between your seeing of things and your execution, you will do nothing that is really good."
-- J.A.D. Ingres

"In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature."
-- Henri de Toulouse Lautrec

"Millions of artists create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity."
"In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius: he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Artist History."
"Painting's washed up. Who'll do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?"
-- Marcel Duchamp

"Take an object.
Do something to it.
Do something else to it.
Do something else to it, again."
-- Jasper Johns

"This telegram is a work of art if I say it is."
-- Robert Rauschenberg

"They've [the neo-Dadaists] looted Duchamp's store, but all they've done is change the wrapping paper."
-- Pablo Picasso

Garbage Put in Trash

Apparently, this is not satire:

Back to school for binmen who thought modern art was a load of old rubbish
Ben Aris in Berlin
Thursday January 13, 2005
The Guardian

The sculpture by German artist Michael Beutler that was mistaken for rubbish and incinerated by Frankfurt binmen

To the dustmen of Frankfurt, they were a mess that needed to be cleared from the streets of their spotless city. The yellow plastic sheets were swiftly scooped up, crushed and burned. But the diligence of the rubbish collectors was little consolation to the city's prestigious art academy, which is now ruing the loss of an important work.

To the dustmen of Frankfurt, they were a mess that needed to be cleared from the streets of their spotless city. The yellow plastic sheets were swiftly scooped up, crushed and burned. But the diligence of the rubbish collectors was little consolation to the city's prestigious art academy, which is now ruing the loss of an important work.

Unknown to the binmen, the sheets were part of a city-wide exhibition of modern sculpture by Michael Beutler, a graduate of Frankfurt's Stadel art school.

Thirty of the dustmen are now being sent to modern art classes to try to ensure that the same mistake never happens again.

The head of Frankfurt's sanitation department, Peter Postleb, took responsibility for the destruction of the sculpture, saying that confusing the plastic sheets with rubbish was an easy mistake to make. He thought they were abandoned building materials.

Mr Postleb said he noticed the pile as he was driving through the city. It was raining, which didn't make things any easier, he said.

"As the weather was bad I thought it was construction workers who had dumped their materials on the street and called my people to come and take it away," he said.

"I didn't recognise it as art and there was no sign or anything to show it was art."

He only realised his mistake a few days later when he read about the exhibition in a local paper. "I instantly called the depot, but they told me that it had already been thrown into the incinerator," he said.

Embarrassed, Mr Postleb contacted Beutler, who, he said, took the news well.

The exhibition is due to finish at the end of the week and Mr Postleb has offered to clear away the other nine sculptures at his own expense.

The monthly "Check Your Art Sense" lessons, which start on Sunday, will involve the dustmen being shown two pictures: one from the museum's permanent exhibition and another lesser-known work from the archive. Then they will be asked to discuss the differences between them.

Question: instead of indoctrinating the garbage men to tell the difference between non-art and art, a process akin to the final torture scenes in Orwell's 1984 which would leave them happily able to believe that 2 + 5 = 5, or rather non-art = Art, why not re-educate the entire faculty and student body of this school to be real artists? Or strongly encourage them to quit?

These Frankfurt bin men are going to live in fear of doing their jobs every day for the rest of their lives, as everything they encounter on their rounds lacks only a white gallery cube or concrete plaza to designate it as Art

What Became of Brit Non-Art?

Apparently, this is not a parody. As news breaks that "Charles Saatchi is selling Damien Hirst's shark to an American collector for £7m", the Independent examines "the fate of the works that defined the aesthetic of a movement".

That's right, the "aesthetic" of a "movement". What's strange about this "movement" is that while on the surface it appears to have happened in Britain since 1989, in reality its practitioners, promoters and patrons somehow have time traveled back to a world before their grandparents were in diapers. This "aesthetic" was known 90 years ago as Dada, and this "movement" as Surrealism.

For instance, Rachel Whiteread's "idea" of casting the interior space of a house comes straight out of one of the biographies or autobiographies of Salvador Dali. This idea that made the Surrealist crowd around Dali Andre Breton go "ahhhh..." when it was proposed most of a century ago. Dali fully understood that his own idea was inspired by the volcanic tragedy of ancient Pompei. For some reason, no Surrealist in the 1920s actually tried this idea.

Emin's masterpiece Everyone That I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, really can be replaced by spending less than $100 for a tent and magic marker at WalMart without any shame. One found object is as good as another, as is the (yawn...) sexual laundry list of any infantile, philistine, exhibitionist non-artist:

RACHEL WHITEREAD: House: When made: 1993

When destroyed: 1993

In 1993, Rachel Whiteread won the £20,000 Turner Prize for House, a concrete cast of the interior of a terraced home in the East End of London. She was also awarded £40,000 by the art/music collective K Foundation on the same night for being the worst artist of the year. Whiteread took eight weeks to produce the sculpture using 70 tons of concrete to fill the property. Production costs were estimated at £50,000. On the night Whiteread won the Turner Prize, she was told that Bow Council intended to knock down her artwork and build a children's playground. The council's leader, Eric Flounder, called the sculpture "utter rubbish".

TRACEY EMIN: Everyone That I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995: Created: 1995

Current owner: Burned in Momart fire

The work was destroyed in last year's Momart warehouse fire, after which a specialist valued it at over £1m. The tent, embroidered with the names of everyone Emin had slept with, prompted derision from many quarters when first shown in 1995. Emin was criticised for philistinism and exhibitionism. After the fire, a newspaper claimed to have recreated the tent for £39.99. Emin condemned them for philistinism.

Apparently, the "artists" themselves, and some collectors, are the only ones too clueless to realize that they are the product of an official, state-sanctioned system designed to suppress and put down actually talented people while holding aloft the biggest losers on two legs as examples of the pure genius of anti-art. Turner Prize committees enforce this ruthlessly with serious financial reward.

Damien Hirst's pickled shark is its own parody. It's just too funny that somewhere out there in TV Land lurks a collector stupid enough and clueless enough to pay £7million for something that's more like $10 per pound as the corner fish market.

Erotics of Babble

Roger Kimball on the death of Susan Sontag and the complete predictability of a huge, hagiographical, front-page obituary tomorrow in The New York Times...

Not that Sontag's efforts were unanimously praised. The critic John Simon, to take just one example, wondered in a sharp letter to Partisan Review whether Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'" was itself "only a piece of 'camp.'" No, the important things were the attentiveness, speed, and intensity of the response. Pro or con, Sontag's essays galvanized debate: indeed, they contributed mightily to changing the very climate of intellectual debate. Her demand, at the end of "Against Interpretation," that "in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art"; her praise of camp, the "whole point" of which "is to dethrone the serious"; her encomium to the "new sensibility" of the Sixties, whose acolytes, she observed, "have broken, whether they know it or not, with the Matthew Arnold notion of culture, finding it historically and humanly obsolescent": in these and other such pronouncements Sontag offered not arguments but a mood, a tone, an atmosphere.

Never mind that a lot of it was literally nonsense: it was nevertheless irresistible nonsense. It somehow didn't matter, for example, that the whole notion of "an erotics of art" was ridiculous. Everyone likes sex, and talking about "erotics" seems so much sexier than talking about "sex"; and of course everyone likes art: How was it that no one had thought of putting them together in this clever way before? Who would bother with something so boring as mere "interpretation"--which, Sontag had suggested, was these days "reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling," "the revenge of the intellect upon art"--when we could have (or pretend to have) an erotics instead?

...and Salman Rushdie speaking for the hive mind of the art lemmings, for those with strong stomachs:

"Susan Sontag was a great literary artist, a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles. She set a standard of intellectual rigor to which I and her many other admirers continue to aspire, insisting that with literary talent came an obligation to speak out on the great issues of the day, and above all to defend the sovereignty of the creative mind and imagination against every kind of tyranny."

'Good for Nothing' New York Art

Umm, shouldn't Christo be saying that anti-art and dadaism are good for nothing or serve no purpose? Or that anti-art is not meant to last? One good thing about bad art is that while a Van Eyck still looks as fresh as the day it was painted, it is all going to fall apart well within the lifetimes of the stupid collectors who got snookered into buying so much of it:

Love it or hate it, you won't be able to miss the 7,500 saffron-colored "gates" being installed in New York's Central Park by the artist Christo in one of the biggest art projects ever attempted in the city.

And if you want meaning, the artist's wife says there is none to the "good for nothing" art.

Why decorate Central Park's walkways for two weeks?

"We create works of joy and beauty. We do not create messages. We do not create symbols. We create works of art," the artist's wife said. "All works of art are good for nothing, except to be a work of art."

Christo has said elsewhere that the temporary quality of the projects imbues them with a sense of urgency to be seen and their value comes from the fact that they will not last.

A pointless, weeks long "art project" that any fifth rate decorator--er, uh, artist, could construct out of junk, that adds nothing to Central Park, somehow costs no more than $21 million. Now, a quick trip to the lumber yard reveals that this sum could purchase quite a lot of materials... Judging from the Maybach that Christo drives, perhaps there is a point to this anti-art, as well as a reason for its "joy" and "beauty", from someone too anti-materialist to make an actual work of actual art that actually lasts. Redefining art itself as anti-art is one major coup by the camp followers of Duchamp and their legions of academic ideologues. When their works fall apart, soon, they can only hope the wall labels explaining their purported intentions continue to exist.

"Nobody needs The Gates ... [It's] totally irrational, irresponsible, useless, with no justification, with no reason to exist except we like [it]."

Perhaps centuries hence, while the pyramids still stand, the Parthenon looks the same, and most of the works in the Louvre still look as fresh as a proverbial daisy, historians could class the entire output of the international army of rote followers of the Marcel Duchamp Anti-art Dadaist school as executed by a single, hive-minded super non-artist. They could call him G.F. Nothing. Next to G.F. Nothing's picture in the encyclopedia entry under "Lost Civilizations: Dadaism 1912-2012" they could pencil a pointy mustache onto some photo of any anonymous, pretentious idiot wearing the beret of an artíste.

Citizen Lame

In the January New York Observer, the sharp-witted and "controversial" pundit Ann Coulter makes an observation about Marxists--whoops, I mean, "liberals", that strangely intersects with the international school of bad, bad art. While in the context of topical political subjects like Hillary Clinton that are outside the scope of this blog, the analogy to the bad opera singer in Citizen Kane strikes home:

Do you have a perverse admiration for her?

"Ewwww, no. As with John Kerry, I generally don't admire people who get ahead on somebody else's coattails. She's like the anti-feminist. No, except she isn't—because all feminists behave that way and pretend to be, 'Oh, I'm a strong woman.' They're all weak and pathetic. Have you ever seen Citizen Kane? You know, he marries the nightclub singer and then wants to make her a great opera singer, because he controls all news in America; even though the audience is booing and throwing paper airplanes, all the headlines on every newspaper is 'Susan Alexander Sweeps Chicago!' That is what it's like to be a liberal in America, whether you're Susan Sontag or Hillary Clinton. No matter how pathetic and useless and everyone can be booing you, throwing paper airplanes—you can be incomprehensible like Susan Sontag, a 'genius,' a 'public intellectual'! Did you try reading anything she's ever written? What was the point of it? And Hillary, constantly voted the most admired woman."

Of course, both the fictitious opera audience and the actual movie audience of Citizen Kane (1941) got the joke. Susan Alexander Kane could at least sing, a little, just not up to standards expected by the ignorant bourgeoisie opera lovers, who all knew that her career and rave reviews were solely propped up by the wealth and bad taste of her husband. In the real world, since the 1960s, a performance or work of art far, far worse than that of Mrs. Kane would be rewarded not with boos and objects thrown, but with a Turner Prize and a New York gallery contract.

Coulter's reference to Susan Sontag is more directly related to the fine arts and its Viet Nam-like quagmire of criticism and critical thinking, but no one blog could possibly begin to cover the range of Sontag's jaw-dropping stupidity-- I mean, 'genius'.

Hacks Praise Hacks

Some "critics" defend their fellow ideologues with the warmest of enthusiasm. From Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent at the Guardian UK, we learn from this year's winning entry of the Turner Prize that

...Laura Bush likes a deep fried jalapeno chilli with her burger.

What is most inadvertently hilarious about the antiquitated avant-garde is that they still sincerely believe themselves to be the wilder shores of conceptual art, when in fact their substitution of other found objects such as unmade beds, elephant dung and copulating sex dolls for Duchamp's urinal, Duchamp's bicycle wheel, or the metal slabs, American flags, twisted metal and other objects by Duchamp's camp followers, keeps them perpetually on some cutting edge of revolutionary contemporary art. They are somehow still the "cutting edge", too-hip-for-the-Norman-Rockwell-bourgeoisie, even 95 years after Duchamp's original "challenge" in the year 1912.

It's too bad the original Dadaists didn't have the "cutting edge" medium of video (invented after 1920, first video broadcast around 1936) so they could make videos about then-President William Howard Taft, which no doubt would still be topically relevant indictments of American [INSERT MARXIST CLICHES AND TRITE ANTI-AMERICANISM HERE]. If they did, the Turner Prize would be awarding its honors to even more precisely re-rehashed exact duplicates of Duchamp's original anti-achievements of an entire century ago.