eye of the storm

speaking of art: it's amazing what's hapnin on general hospital these days. i mean it's very typical for sweeps month to get the whole cast at a party and start a gunfight, a fire, a blizzard, and a series of explosions; it might take weeks before you realize that only a minor character they introduced two months ago is actually dead, after the miracle surgeries etc. but now claudia - a paradigmatic super-bitch only much much worse only actually just terribly terribly misunderstood only multiply continuously homicidal and deeply crazy although really just sad and so lonely only sexually obsessed with her brother etc, played by the very-fine and notably buff sarah brown - is heading to the bold and the beautiful or something. so she's being written out in an elaborate way that embroils the whole cast in total disaster. it's a mafia/physician/pregnantwomen conflagration: gh apocalypse. every member of the ensemble has multiple motives to kill claudia, while she has multiple motives to kill everybody, that lovely psychotic bitch! can't get that shit at the met.

 

i've been watching gh since the late seventies. here's a piece on gh aesthetics from maybe a decade ago.

in the new york review of books dated november 19, peter brooks, a lit crit with a line in henry james, reviews some books about the louvre and the founding of the modern mega-museum, a development which i would say reflects and also drives an entirely new conception of art in the west that develops in the late eighteenth century. in the familiar narrative, napoleon loots europe and sticks the loot in a gigantic more-or-less abandoned palace. then the british follow suit and the americans etc and pretty soon you've got a mega-museum in every capital etc. now despite all the problems in the assembling of these collections, brooks gives a merry little tribute to the monster museum at the end of his piece. "a consensus has emerged that it is the fate of great art to end up in the museum - it's neither safe nor viewable elsewhere.... We might never have had the museum without cultural looting, but who would give it up today?"

well, i might. but right now i won't. i only want to point out that, for example, the metropolitan museum says that it possesses 5 million objects. now how many of these are on display? 20,000? so in what sense is the work "viewable"? it's like - correction: it is - a massive bunker of art, a miser with a stashed hoard of useless gold. the point isn't to display the art; it's to segregate it or insulate it, to assert its priceless uniqueness by, um, burying it forever etc.

but the good part about this is that by taking all the masterpieces and the whimsical astonishments of the avant-garde and sticking them all in big stone bunkers, these institutions demonstrate that the art they house is dead. these institutions are tombs. so that frees us from the endless weight of tens of millions of masterpieces and lets us breathe in a world of actual art that's alive: you know, good cooking, well-made clothing, our rose bushes, excellent pop music, your quilt, and stuff. in yanking the dead art with its infinite weight, its more-than-human status (which, admittedly, is a status that is manufactured by the institution and its accompanying practices in art history etc), out of our lives, the mega-museum frees us to live.

[one side note: the worst possible argument for the proposition p is "a consensus has emerged that p." if a consensus has emerged that p, p  is certainly false.]

this is just one man's opinion, but i could do without many aspects of the contemporary art world, or rather, the avant-garde artworld for decades. the figure of the young baudelaire, a la dash snow, is just not a good thing: anyway, you better figure out whether you're a happy party-boy or a tortured genius. but either persona is insufferable. we're far too far from the real romance of making things, the actual work, which has to be the point. i was sort of hoping that jeff koons would collapse, but he's always back. stop the super-astonishing exception to all rules crap and fucking do your work. remember when pomo killed "the genius"? but the genius is unkillable even though he's always od-ing. if i might, let me just say that i am inexorably opposed to art. we need a couple of centuries of craft.

some times the onion is just hilarious:

Rockburne is preparing a 41-foot-tall mural of the night sky -- as it looked at the time of Colin Powell's birth -- to be mounted at the U.S. Embassy in Jamaica, where Powell's family is from. Her "Homage to Colin Powell" was commissioned by the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies, a nonprofit organization dedicated to installing works by American artists in U.S. embassies around the world.

oops wait. that's the washington post.

a friend of my mom's asked me the other day what to read on the relation of evolutionary biology to art. i didn't really have a good answer except perhaps "ben-ami scharfstein," but let me make a few remarks on this matter. i think that this sort of question is not actually scientific because it proceeds from an a priori assumption. take any given thing we do, in any way we conceive it, and it must have an explanation in terms of natural selection. putting it mildly, that is false. now this case is particularly acute. we are thinking of 'art' in terms of more-or-less-by-definition useless objects: art defined precisely as what is not practically useful, what you just stare rapt at; art really defined in its distinction from craft. this is a conception that dates from the 18th century, or at earliest the renaissance: obviously that's miniscule on an evolutionary scale. personally i would proceed precisely in terms of craft: skill in making things is obviously of the utmost practical value for the kind of organisms we are. thus the idea that skill in itself is admirable would be a sensible evolutionary-type development: more or less why we have these relatively elaborate central nervous systems. but it could be fantastically elaborated into an admiration of skill for its own sake, detached from practical applications. this, it seems to me, accounts for at least some of the value we place on art works that have no practical applications, or to extreme skill in sport or performance (say, sleight-of-hand magic or circus-type skills). if you conceive of art in terms of impracticality, it is an evolutionary puzzle. but if you conceive it as one of many sort of fantastical or arbitrary implications or side-effects of actual adaptations, it at least makes a certain sort of sense. on the other hand, such side-effects could end up being utterly counter-adaptive, as we fiddle while the world burns. then again, even if it were counter-adaptive or even universally fatal, it wouldn't follow that art isn't the meaning of life.

i think people's tendency to promote other people to the status of little gods is always problematic. this controls, for example, the way we experience the history of the arts and the intellect in an inordinate way. the masterpiece gets promoted to a status beyond the human, and once you've soaked in the trans-human reputation of plato, or a milton, or a michelangelo, or an einstein, there can be no context in which they emerged, no atmosphere of thought or making in which they operated: they become, among other things, inexplicable, incomprehensible. the right response to reading plato or seeing michelangelos, it seems to me, is disappointment: despite all the ecstatic mystical gobbledygook that surrounds them like an odoriferous gas, they turn out to be human after all. the stuff is, as the babygod nietzsche would say, all-too-human. the music of the beatles, experienced in the context of the insane bloat of their reception, is absurd in its mediocrity. now all this becomes actually physically dangerous when the tendency to worship is turned on political authorities, people who operate the machinery of war and repression and welfare. john kennedy as god is hilarious, but he's also starting up wars etc. oy the charisma, bathing us all in its mystical sexy god-juice. the american left, as it's demonstating in its obama ecstasy, is as much an authoritarian cult as that constructed around mussolini, though with a different aesthetic. so i would, er, be careful. at any rate, we can guarantee that there will be a larger and more intrusive state at the end of his administration than there was before, hedged around with cultic apparatus..

speaking of political aesthetics: behold the pc colossus and despair!

watcha been lookin at, crispy?
well when we were up in massachusetts, ma and i visited the norman rockwell museum. i came away convinced again that rockwell was america's genius of visual communication: profound, amusing, clear, smart, and always fundamentally kind. and as a handler of paint and a draughtsman, he has no superiors. he is comparable to figures such as twain and whitman, and connected to them directly. or: he was twentieth-century eakins. the fact that he's dismissed as a hack, or used to be, just goes to show you how aberrant was the art world circa 1860-1990 or something. fortunately, picasso and pollock never sold a painting, thus maintaining their aesthetic purity. consider the work of comparable figures such as william hogarth or jan steen: well within the realm of fine art.

triple self-portrait:

the connoisseur:

girl at the mirror:

my daughter emma went to the creative alliance in baltimore the other day and saw a synchronized swimming interpretation of tolstoy's war and peace.

yo check out emma's site!

this stuff is so great. hand a toddler a tootsie pop. then take it away and shoot a picture. i think the people who object cannot be parents, who of necessity see this kind of thing every few minutes for years. anyway it's very existential: tells you something fundamental about the human condition.

still free

check it out: writing "still free" on airforce 1!

threadless

y'all seen this? emma turned me on to it.

britney pops it out for life

yo y'all checked this out?

reminds me a bit of this, by the utterly empty jeff koons, but it's about sixty times more interesting in a variety of dimensions.

theory of depiction

is it just me, or do you see a problem with the idea that a cartoon from 2006 is a "picture of" the prophet. get me? long ago in a doctoral dissertation far away i argued that certain relevant visual resemblances between picture and motif was required for the relation of pictorial representation to obtain. after all this history of iconoclasm and pictures of pictures of pictures,on what theory is the picture an image of mohammad?

anthology of me

an obviously right-headed person named stephen gordon has published a little volume of quotations from captain capitulation. thanks, man. also my creators column, a modified manifesto, is up. i wish someone would publish this thing cause even though it's kind of funny, it's kind of true, and kind of important.

people really are chumps , knowhati'msayin?