July 2010

David Brooks on books [annotated]

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A person enters the literary world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.

[It was such immersion that led me to conclude that the US needed to invade Iraq.]

A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.

[Such as led many "bloggers" to decide invading Iraq was wrong.]

Outsider Definition

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After the previous post on Henry Darger a friend wondered if "outsiders" can exist anymore, with the Net leveling and connecting. Sure, "outsider" now equals "someone not on the Net." But seriously, the term outsider sounds cruel and judgmental and snobby but all it means is "one who makes art heedless of a context larger than one's own computer (or studio, or computer/studio)." We can like an outsider's work as much as an insider's but it's always fair to ask "where is this coming from?"

Using that "metric" it's actually harder to identify an insider than an outsider. The same friend thought the two net art camps discussed in an earlier post possibly ignored some of the other subdivisions. Well, yes, and to heck with all of them. A type of artist exists, let's call him Patrick, who cannot describe any new artwork or art movement without giving a long summation beginning with Manet, working through Cubism, minimalism, Pop, several shades of conceptualism, and then increasingly fine gradations of "net art" to the present example and where it fits in that continuum. This is perhaps taking insider-dom to extremes.

To be an outsider you just make your work and let the historians take care of it. To be an insider all you really need to understand is what you're doing (Camp Two) and how it differs from stuff you hate (Camp One), plus some vague background knowledge of how it all fits in the history of art, which you don't need to recite every time. I had a discussion with a Camp One/Camp Two analyzer about how much depth you even need to go into explaining the camp you dislike. You don't want to dignify it with too much scholarly exegesis. As they say in politics, "if your opponent is drowning, throw him an anvil." But if you acknowledge another camp at all, and care about it, you are an insider.

Darger Biopic Excoriated

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Ted Goranson writes scathingly about In the Realms of the Unreal, a film about the outsider artist Henry Darger. Didn't see the film; sounds like yet another botched attempt to explain visual art and artists.

But gosh this filmmaker makes so many bad choices. Although the story has no explicit sexual flavor, it is quite close to perverse. My own view is that the world and the girls as [Darger] imagined them were tokens of otherworldliness so abstract and pure that they need to be admired for the clean purity. Having Dakota Fanning narrate as one of the Vivian Girls, and with practiced childishness, tips the balance from abstract to absolutely dangerous. A big mistake. The fellow that narrates Darger's inner voice is profoundly wrong too. A narrator could work. Animating the drawings could work. But gosh, either you need to fully buy into the world and enter it as Darger would, or you have to set a platform in between him and us that has some solidity. We have to know who and where we are. This filmmaker does not do that, skipping from place to place with no anchor, no coherence. If the man is about anything, it is coherence.

Goranson also questions the documentary's lack of objectivity:

It would have been good to know that some of the "witnesses" here basically stole the man's legacy and became wealthy as a result. Their recall is colored by some pretty crass motives.

Don't know about "stole" and "wealthy" (a little research is needed here) but this is a fair question to raise. Posthumous spin is part of an artist's story and you can't get any distance on that if you handle your sources with kid gloves, no pun intended.