Two Classy Guys

Not particularly recommended: Ben Davis' 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. Humorless warmed-over Marxism written for some artists who were mad about Jeff Koons' "Skin Fruit" exhibition at the New Museum. Just don't go to the damned show!

But the Davis is worth skimming to appreciate Greg Afinogenov's Materialism and Art-criticism: A Response to Ben Davis’ “9.5 Theses on Art and Class”. It's witty and world weary.

“Art” itself, in Davis’s argument, becomes such a mystified idea. On the one hand, it is presented as a “basic and general” impulse which permeates all social structures and creative activities. Its nature, however, soon subtly changes: it acquires a kind of quantitative aspect which it then becomes the goal of political action to increase. The operation is done without argument, which conceals all the attendant problems: surely art is not realized better or worse in different societies? Where would one get the yardstick through which to measure it? How is the goal of the “maximum flourishing of human artistic potential” to be weighed against other possible goals, such as peace or economic equality, without facile utopianism? A vision of the artistic world that fails to offer any more concrete definitions of its central term is equivalent in every way to the flabby “ideals” ridiculed by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century. Its supposed political aspect, realized through the connection to the “working class” and to various “radical impulses,” is defined entirely a priori and, apparently, largely unconsciously; thus, Davis writes that the contradiction between the two middle-class definitions of art occurs “at every moment where what an artist wants to express comes into contradiction with the demands of making a living; in a situation where a minority dominates most of society’s resources, this is often.” The latent (and patently false assumption) that true art must always be politicized in a leftist direction is neither defended nor discussed.

Only in Davis’s concrete proposals, which are largely consigned to thesis 8, do we see the real impact of these essentialized concepts. For despite all the loud talk of the ruling class, of ideology and critique, of politics and revolt, Davis’s “Theses” finally have nothing more to offer than a few half-hearted tugs at the teat of the State. Government funding for the arts, art education, money for research projects: all this would—and did—warm the heart of any nineteenth-century European liberal, sweating into his starched cravat about the threat of the socialist masses. What could be better for institutionalization, cooptation, and control than barrels of cash dispensed in the name of abstract ideals? When at last Davis’s abstractions fail him, and he is unable after all to find in the “working class” a viable countervailing force against “ruling-class ideology,” the government is always there as a potential source of solutions. The gesture, of course, makes nonsense of the “critical” standpoint—and it would be difficult even for Hegel to see government art funding as a stop on the road to “changing the material basis of society.” His politics were a bit more direct.

This is right on the money, no pun intended, and in response Davis mostly hyperventilates.

The problem with both essayists: they don't argue from art but rather drag their political brawls into the art arena, where, as usual, artists watch the punching and counterpunching and exclaim "those guys are some kinda smart!" Davis invokes the "Skin Fruit" protestors as the raison d'etre of his theses, but at least one of those two artists makes "art about the art world," which is a lesser-to-the-point-of-nugatory, snake-eating-its-tail kind of pursuit. Would love to read some analysis of contemporary artwork that teases out political assumptions while respecting how it works as art, and a comprehensive theory based on such analyses. So tired of Marxist and post-Marxist intellectuals treating art as a tabula rasa for their sociological and historiographical debates. Even Boris Groys, who does a much better job than Davis of thinking outside the "small contingent producing baubles for the rich" box (by even-handedly considering kitsch--web art, Howard!--and art made by totalitarian societies), prefers the view from 30,000 feet.

NancarrowTube

If you don't know Conlon Nancarrow's music for player piano this is as good an introduction as any:

YouTube (Study for Player Piano No. 36 - video by Jürgen Hocker)

A post-human Sun Ra plays Charles Ives with the aid of neurotransmitter accelerators and nine extra arms.

hat tip disquiet

externalities

oil_spill_illalli

GIF pair by Illalli

From Naked Capitalism:

But this is a vastly bigger leak, and most important, the Gulf is not Alaska. The visibility is vastly higher, more people are affected, as are more governors, senators, and representatives. And Obama appears to be laying the groundwork to demand that BP pay not just cleanup costs, but the full cost of the damage wrought. From an economic standpoint, this is sound: the problem with “externalities” or costs of a product that are foisted on innocent bystanders is that the people who suffer seldom can recover their losses. So the parties to the product sale get an artificial subsidy (the product is provided for a cost lower than its true, fully loaded cost to society) which they somehow divide up between them.

[...]

I wouldn’t be optimistic; Team Obama has yet to rough up anyone. But this particular set of circumstances – a monstrous disaster that is not going to be resolved anytime soon and a rich, unpopular, and relatively isolated target – will show whether Obama’s survival instincts will overcome his deep seated deference to corporate chieftans.

Abramović and Politics

Recently artist Marina Abramović did a performance piece at the Museum of Modern Art where museumgoers lined up to sit in a chair and stare at her for an undetermined length of time (as long as they wanted or, from what friends say who followed it closely, until they upstaged the artist with aberrant behavior and were hustled away by museum guards).

A writer for the Antiwar.com blog has a slightly different take on Marina Abramović than that of the typical jaded art person in New York. While the latter might see her as the owner of two handsome dwellings feted in the New York Times home-and-garden section, thrower of fab Soho parties and orchestrator of new media three-ring entertainments, the former takes at face value that she is a shamanic martyr figure, and roots the pain-and-endurance aspect of her work in her earlier life experience as a Serb and refugee from Communism:

The artist’s influences are chiefly the air of Yugoslav nationalism in the postwar years — both parents were popular WWII figures; her great uncle was the patriarch of the Serbian Church — and the stark and dreary oppression of Tito’s communist regime. Abramović came of age under this anti-individualist orthodoxy; might this lead one to experiment further with self-denial, self-imposed stress positions — a popular tool in the torturer’s repertoire — and self-inflicted pain?

This rhetorical question presented in the interests of fairness and balance.

Tourist Guy Still With Us

tourist_guy

Added this photo to a post from 8 years ago called "Creepy Clown and New Media."
That mini-essay covered the "stalker collage" and other artistic crowdsourcing phenomena (although the word crowdsourcing didn't exist then). Many of the links are dead but the argument still flies, I think:

Like Creepy Clown, the Tourist Guy is usually a silent, passive witness to some activity, and the chemistry between his cigar store Indian placidity and rambunctious scenes of murder and violence is often hilarious. And once again, anyone with Photoshop could make a "Tourist Guy" masterpiece. This is [the] real New Media art...

Meaning the "street" had already trumped the "top down" concepts of the new media panels of the day such as:

Database Cultures in Collaboration: Panelists discuss the challenges of using databases as the generative engines behind their art work, creating alternative systems that reveal the poetic, metaphoric, critical, and community-building possibilities of manipulating and reconstituting data.