wsj: the opposite flaws of trump and mueller
splicetoday: art and capitalism in bentonville
times literary supplement: an authoritative but anti-authoritarian account of 'the dawn of civilization' (review of the great james c. scott's against the grain) [drive]
times higher eduction: teaching beauty and existentialism to the students of now {drive}
larb philosophical salon: western philosophy as white supremacism
wsj: hatred enhances your self-esteem
Rolling pretty good these days!
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splicetoday: Fukuyama described the fictional end of a fictional history. This one is real. (also a quick precis of my political orientation)
wsj: Who do you want controlling your internet, Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? (or here)
splice: copyright is obviously incompatible with the basic values of scholarship
splice: the scandals at lincoln center and the nature of art
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Man. Woman. Nature. History. Art. Birth. Death. Infinity. Three chords and Truth.
https://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/10/09/dispatches-from-wolf-country-old-age-should-rage/
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One of the projects Crispin and I have been putting off until he's in the witness protection program here in California is our own musical-poetical-satirical-philosophical unified field theory. Fuck Einstein, our's will work. Here's my latest stab at it from over at Veterans News Now or where ever they're putting my stuff...
http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2016/09/28/more-mid-week-blues/
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i do think that my best book (well, until entanglements) is political aesthetics. here are a couple of reviews:
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The news this morning that Guy Clark has passed away in Nashville, while not at all unexpected, is still quietly defiant and sad. I've listened to Guy's music since I picked up a copy of Jerry Jeff Walker's "A Man Must Carry On" in Germany in 1977. First heard him sitting in a hotel room in Dublin in 1978, on the English Channel of Radio Eire, doing "LA.Freeway..." First record I ordered when I got back to the states was "Old Number 1" and the second "The Fool on the Hill."
He admitted that he lived in Nashville because that was where the work was for him, but he as Texan as you can be, and all in a good way. Work hard, drink some whiskey, sit around with friends and talk shit while passing the IW Dance and a guitar. Be tolerant, kind, and take no shit. He was a frequent visitor to the "Guitar Pulls" at Johnny Cash's home. People would show up, play their stuff, and pick and grin and bullshit. Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, Rodney Crowell, John Anderson, Rosanne Cash, Emmylou Harris,Bobby Bare and whomever else was around would show up. Showcase their new stuff casually -- somewhere between "I've been working on this one" and "networking." Get ideas, add and steal licks, sing some harmony and learn from each other how their music could sound.
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i am going to show you some images of an unbelievable stone i just glanced at and pried out of the creek bank in my nearest woods while i was looking for tray material. no number of images can do justice to this thing. all color variations are intrinsic to the stone, not dirt or algae, etc. 9" wide x 7" tall in the first view.
principles of latimore suiseki, all intended to maximize a wabi-sabi aesthetic effect and a zen/taoist spiritual practice. i love the ways the classic japanese stones are treated, and the trays of incomparable craft in which they are displayed. but i think they are incompatible with wabi-sabi aesthetics, or in tension, anyway.
(1) local stone
(2) no treatment of any sort except washing
(3) local, found supports/trays
(4) no stone is permanently installed in any display. many of these stones rest as mountains on several different faces; all must be available.
(5) typically displayed in multi-stone arrangements intended to encapsulate ranges or landscapes.
(6) arrangements should be done quickly and improvisationally, but are revisable at will by anyone who may be around.
(7) to fully appreciate the display, the stones must be handled.
(8) should be displayed outdoors and allowed to continue weathering.
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let me summarize the problems/coincidences with me and nehamas. we both wrote books titles the art of living. mine was from suny press, 1995; his from california, 2000. In 2004, in my book six names of beauty (routledge), i gave the first thorough and systematic revival of what might be termed an erotic conception of beauty since shaftesbury or perhaps burke in the 18th century. (i am an expert on that.) in 2010 nehamas, in only a promise of happiness (princeton) also revived that view, in a somewhat different form, without acknowledging my work in any way, and was ecstatically received as an innovator, winning the award for best professional/scholarly book in philosophy from the association of american publishers. these books have, as epigraphs, the very same four lines of sappho (in different translations, though). those are the big items. i have not at all scoured for other similarities.
it would be natural to think that we both got the view from arthur danto. danto suggested the epigraph to me, and i credited him for it. indeed, danto himself published the abuse of beauty with open court in 2003. i was corresponding with danto, seeing him at conferences, and so on; we both knew of the other's work and had been in dialogue on the subject of beauty for many years. his approach is completely different and opposed to that taken by me, and by nehamas. danto influenced me in many ways, but not in that one (it sure is a great book, though).
when his book appeared i emailed alexander nehamas at his princeton address along these lines: 'we really seem to be working along similar lines! we have books with the same title. we're both working along the same lines on beauty. our books have the same epigraph! we should connect more,' etc. no reply. sometimes it's hard to never have heard of someone or read his work; you've really got to delete a lot of stuff everywhere, especially in your brain.
i guess nehamas has replied in daily nous. i'll have a look eventually. here's why it's impossible that he hadn't seen my book, though it is indeed not in his index. so, the first thing i did when i started writing 6 names was go on amazon and search 'beauty philosophy.' i definitely wanted to know what books had appeared recently, assess whether anyone was working in a similar vein, and so on. there was remarkably little; almost the first thing that popped up was mothersill's thing from i think the early 90s, which i'd already read. so, as he set out, or at any point in the process, nehamas certainly was also trying to see what was out there. (if he did not do that, he's an excruciatingly incompetent scholar, and nehamas is not that, whatever the drawbacks). and if he had hit mine he would have immediately seen affinities, if this was already his approach to beauty. so the notion that he never saw it at all - especially, for example, if danto was providing the sappho epigraph - just strikes me as extremely unlikely.
one thing that is very difficult not to notice: that someone has written a book with the very title you are going to use, or that there are two books out there by academic philosophers with the same title. indeed, your publisher is quite likely to make you aware of that fact if, impossibly, you missed it. (titles can't be copyrighted, though.) if nothing else, my book would have brough my aesthetics to nehamas's attention.
all i saw was the quote that said: i had never seen his book; which has that element of sneering so familiar to anyone who has ever run into alexander nehamas; he was so unknown that i didn't notice his book. but anyone who was talking to danto about beauty, or doing a rudimentary search on the topic he was writing a scholarly book about, could not have failed to notice my book.
indeed, if nehamas was talking to danto about beauty, i think 'sartwell' would have been one of the first things out his mouth. we had corresponded as my book was in progress, and he blurbed both books. my book would have shown up in the first few search results on amazon or elsewhere, with a blurb by danto, and a sketch of the basic approach. the idea that you'd decide not to look at it seems to me vanishingly small. so, i do not see any realistic scenario where i am not in the index. if i had been doing 6 names a few years after only a promise of happiness, you would have heard early about the similarities; indeed, i might have been very enthusiastic about the similarities, ready to take account of nehamas's work, and band together as a movement for a new-ancient approach to beauty.
indeed, i can more or less prove that would have been my approach. so unknown was my work on beauty that shortly after nehamas's book appeared, the stanford encyclopedia approached me to do their entry on beauty. despite my misgivings, i associated his work and mine as signs of a renaissance of beauty as a theme in philosophy, and of this approach to it particularly. i didn't pretend not to have read his book. i didn't nitpick or try to show why my book was better, and so on. it's good they didn't get nehamas to do it; his insistence on repressing all signs and memories of my book would have led to a skewed and decidedly self-congratulatory view of the terrain.
i guess nehamas has replied in daily nous. i'll have a look eventually. here's why i think it's impossible that he hadn't seen my book, though it is indeed not in his index. so, the first thing i did when i started writing 6 names was go on amazon and search 'beauty philosophy.' i definitely wanted to know what books had appeared recently, assess whether anyone was working in a similar vein, and so on. there was remarkably little; almost the first thing that popped up was mothersill's thing from i think the early 90s, which i'd already read. so, as he set out, or at any point in the process, nehamas certainly was also trying to see what was out there. (if he did not do that, he's an excruciatingly incompetent scholar, and nehamas is not that, whatever the drawbacks). and if he had hit mine he would have immediately seen affinities, if this was already his approach to beauty. so the notion that he never saw it at all - especially, for example, if danto was providing the sappho epigraph - just strikes me as extremely unlikely.
all i saw was the quote that said: i had never seen his book; which has that element of sneering so familiar to anyone who has ever run into alexander nehamas; he was so unknown that i didn't notice his book. but anyone who was talking to danto about beauty, or doing a rudimentary search on the topic he was writing a scholarly book about, could not have failed to notice my book.
indeed, if nehamas was talking to danto about beauty, i think 'sartwell' would have been one of the first things out his mouth. we had corresponded as my book was in progress, and he blurbed both books. my book would have shown up in the first few search results on amazon or elsewhere, with a blurb by danto, and a sketch of the basic approach. the idea that you'd decide not to look at it seems to me vanishingly small. so, i do not see any realistic scenario where i am not in the index. if i had been doing 6 names a few years after only a promise of happiness, you would have heard early about the similarities; indeed, i might have been very enthusiastic about the similarities, ready to take account of nehamas's work, and band together as a movement for a new-ancient approach to beauty.
indeed, i can more or less prove that would have been my approach. so unknown was my work on beauty that shortly after nehamas's book appeared, the stanford encyclopedia approached me to do their entry on beauty. despite my misgivings, i associated his work and mine as signs of a renaissance of beauty as a theme in philosophy, and of this approach to it particularly. i didn't pretend not to have read his book. i didn't nitpick or try to show why my book was better, and so on. it's good they didn't get nehamas to do it; his insistence on repressing all signs and memories of my book would have led to a skewed and decidedly self-congratulatory view of the terrain.
i figured that the defense would be both sneering and peremptory. but here he just hanged himself. in other words, the defense is so obviously disingenuous that it is tantamount to a self-immolation. the outer shell of elitist arrogance combined with the inner knowledge of mediocrity creates expressions which just cannot be true: true to the facts, or true to the self. alexander nehamas was lost to himself decades ago when he entered into a performance, a simulation that would get him to the highest level of academia. 'i had never seen his book' is the point where the emptiness inside became explicitly external, where there wasn't anything inside anymore, just an automaton playing the Edmund N. Carpenter, II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.
note to princeton faculty and admin: you are asking yourself whether that last paragraph is libelous. before you do that, why don't you try asking yourself whether it's true.
on the other hand, it is worth saying that the locus classicus of this sort of view is plato's symposium, which is certainly central to both books. and of course, nehamas has worked on that material throughout his career. also our theories are certainly not identical; i'd describe them as being in the same family: again, one fundamentally unrepresented in the literature on beauty since burke. we are interested in very different artworks, and so on. the texts do not overlap.
the biggest difference to my mind is precisely nehamas's centralization of the concept of happiness. i regard happiness as one of the worst things that ever happened to philosophy: not even a concept, but a variable or blank or packing crate where each person or philosopher just tosses everything he thinks he wants. thinks he wants, because for example if there really were any person who only wanted maximum pleasure and minimum pain he would be a non-human monstrosity. anyway, then we call the crate happiness. i actually do not think the concept has ever done anything for anyone, but it has made many philosophies into useless circling around a hole into which have been lobbed a random collection of whatever that person thinks they want. the very worst case is aristotle, who keeps throwing all sorts of dimensions of life and values and so on into the empty pit of eudaimonia. anyone can talk for hours about what aristotle means by eudaimonia. ask them what he means by it, like a fairly compact definition rather than a three-hour lecture, and i'm telling you, no one has any idea what he means. neither did he. he could do all of the nicomachean ethics better if he just forgot that empy-ass shit. so i went with 'longing'; it's a certain sort of very fundamental human experience, unlike 'happiness', which is just a blank song from a charlie brown special. actually, i would attack nehamas's book on many grounds, but that would be the first.
oops let me summarize the problems/coincidences with me and nehamas. we both wrote books titles the art of living. mine was years earlier. within five years or whatever, we gave the first thorough and systematic revival of what might be termed an erotic conception of beauty. (i am an expert on that. and notice that i was myself generous to nehamas in that stanford encyclopedia article.) these books have, as epigraphs, the very same four lines of sappho (in different translations, though). those are the big items.
a couple of times over the years i have emailed alexander nehamas along these lines: 'we really seem to be working along similar lines! we have books with the same title. we're both working along the same lines on beauty. our books have the same epigraph! we should connect more,' etc. no reply. sometimes it's hard to never have heard of someone or read his work; you've really got to delete a lot of stuff everywhere, especially in your brain.
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i was in pittsburgh over the weekend and went to the warhol museum. i might state my view of warhol as follows: really it's impossible to do the history of art of the last half century without him; he's foundational. now, on the other hand, i would say that i have experienced the images as sometimes amusing, but not interesting as images; just kind of a trick to very quickly change photos into paintings. it's very repetitive and the swathes of color thrown over the image never struck me aesthetically. (also of course the style of his images is utterly ubiquitous; has been for decades. i don't need to ever actually see one again.)
at any rate, i've heard several people say that they were converted finally to warhol by the museum, which is pretty darn cool, in an old dept store etc. and to a limited extent, that would be true of my experience. i would say, for example, that like a lot of people i was favorably impressed with the pre-pop materials, and they have paintings and drawings going back to the 40s, a fair amount of his fine commercial design, book jackets, and so on. he's very fresh and amusing and he can really draw.
now the weakest floor, by far, is dominated by the celebrity portraits of the 1970s. these are mechanically self-imitative; they lose all the sharpness and freshness and conceptual interest of the early pop images. i'd say that in this period, warhol was continuously fawning on celebrity (for example, that was the tone of interview magazine). the man's values are revealed in all their glittering emptiness, his mediocrity as a draughtsman etc is obvious. just speculating now, but the word 'cocaine' comes unbidden to my brain. it's like the most banal disco music, but you can't really dance to it.
but i will also say this: moving back from the 70s/80s to the 60s makes you realize how sharp those early marilyns and elvises and jackies and maos were. it shows how well he was doing the style of warhol in the 60s, and actually i was more impressed with both the visual and conceptual quality of the earlier work than i would have thought i'd be.
[further notes: the 80s collaborations with basquiat are incoherent. the room of floating silver clouds is wonderful. my favorite work is probably the three-d packaging things: the brillo boxes etc. arthur danto wrote about them obsessively for decades, and i could see how one might (he also held that they killed art forever.)]
me on andy warhol and the persistence of postmodernism
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Did you catch the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame induction the other night with Willie Nelson, Double Trouble, and others? Willie's voice is more or less a whisper now, but still interesting and compelling...and, of course the reason for the title is to aggravate Crispin after the last anti-Dylan rant. No Dylan, and it would all still be "moon...spoon...goon...macaroon...love..dove..above..shove" in music. I get it that he doesn't like Dylan...there's a lot of Dylan that I, as a certified Dylan nut, don't really care for. I really don't care for the Beatles. Seriously. But, I'd be a fool to deny their impact and influence. It would be as silly as ignoring Bob Wills or Memphis Minnie in Country or in Blues. Crispy knows this well, and acknowledges it....He just doesn't like the guy. He's Crispin's "picked sturgeon."
Well, I don't like pickled sturgeon either, but my approach is to ignore it. Pretend it doesn't exist in my universe. Smile politely when offered it someplace -- I go to some odd places -- as if offered something by an Alien Space Hostess. Crispin likes to pick at it, sniffing, snorting and making faces. Like an unhappy version of Browning's Duke in My Last Duchess, he occasionally rants about it and then goes off to mutter in the corner.
Meanwhile, over at Vets Today...
And, just for the record, Beyonce is one of the best cover artists for blues and soul music that has ever picked up a microphone.
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Interesting day, and I'm ignoring my wife to post this. I happened on a Dangerous Minds Article this morning that was focused on a recently discovered live performance of John Lee Hooker. There were other things I could have done, but I decided to just look at that. Damn...I realized that I had a lot of work to do.
We tend to forget often that Hooker was not a part of the Chicago Blues scene...He was a motor city blues man -- a rougher, grittier sound and a bit closer to the Delta than the Loop. While eventually the Motor City Blues led to Motown, that route was pretty convoluted. But, if you want to hear the influence of John Lee Hooker and others check out some early Bob Seeger, or Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels or MC5's legendary Lick Out the Jams, Motherfucker from 1967.
Now the Link takes you over to my piece at The Defeatists which has a helluva lot of music embedded in it. And, as is normal with me, some politics, circa 1958 and 1947. Anyway, God does love a Boogie-Man, and John Lee Hooker was a notoriously nice gentleman, shy and nothing like the surly precursor to RunDMC that he appeared. And the music, damn...I really need to practice more.
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Sad news -- Kim Fowley passed away. Now he was old, and had been fighting cancer for about three years but he was still doing his show on the Underground Garage and making appearances and such as well as running a producers workshop down in LA until the end. The guy who brought us "They're Coming to Take US Away" and managed the Runaways and supposedly invented the holding up lighters at concerts crap while working with the Plastic Ono Band was an interesting guy. I don't think he really meant any harm, and he did produce some very interesting stuff.
Of course, at his drug addled worst, he was a raging, self-centered asshole, I suppose. He also appears to have been a nice guy who when sober admitted to having been a less than stellar human being. He made peace with people he'd hurt -- and in fairness, had hurt him back -- got married a couple of months ago to his much beloved girlfriend, and was funny as hell as well as a perceptive commentator on Steven Van Zandt's station on Sirrius XM. He didn't take himself too seriously, and didn't take rock and roll too seriously, while at the same time taking the position that it did change lives and culture in ways that no one expected.
It changed mine. And, he made me laugh...and think. Laughing and wincing and shaking my head simultaneously.
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Besides being a frustrated card counter hanging out in Atlantic city on weekends -- he counts the cards ok, but the cheating makes him break out in hives -- Mr. Sartwell put himself through various levels of education by alternately stealing hubcaps and vandalizing heavy construction equipment or writing rock and roll criticism.
Having an actual philosopher who actually knows something about the subject teaching American popular music to a college class is pretty amazing; usually this is done by musicologists who are tired of not getting the difference between a rondo and a fugue across to a composition class; or, someone who majored in "American Studies" and is just scavenging around the edge. So it's cool...good for him, and good for his students.
Of course, all is not well. Crispy responds to a comment below indicating that the students seem alienated and bored. Well shit, man, they expected that you'd just have them listen to the Clash for a semester. Anarchist philosophy prof who lives in an old schoolhouse -- what the hell else would they expect?
Here's another example:
The original by some teenagers from Detroit in prom dresses:
And then about 15 years later, there was this, recorded in Cobo Hall, Detroit:
Compare, contrast and evaluate listing influences and examples...
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if you happen to be in chicago next week, i'll be speaking as part of a fine lineup of people (including lewis hyde) at the 'lived practice symposium' at the school of art institute. i go off at 10 am saturday, november 8 at the fullerton auditorium. here's the paper. yes, i will show taylor swift videos, but you will also get a dose of merle haggard. thinking about it, i might be working toward a book on the aesthetic dimensions of identity categories such as race and gender, or an aesthetic account of race and gender and sexuality and so on that would also be a broadening of aesthetics and all its central concepts ('beauty', 'form', 'expression' 'aesthetic experience', e.g.). i guess it would kind of pick up where my (er) best book, political aesthetics, left off.
it's a familiar idea that these things are 'social constructions' but that's just the sketchiest of starting points. how are they constructed? where are they constructed? by whom? (even if they are not entirely or exhaustively social constructions, they surely have very many siocially-constructed aspects or inflections at a given place and time.) if we wanted to know how they are being made right now, where would we look? well we should look in my opinion at the arts very broadly construed: styles of movement and slangs, musics and scents, body adornments and modifications, designs of devices and device interfaces, arrangements of environments: what ranciere calls 'the distribution of the sensible'.
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"I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal."--Rust Cohle, True Detective
I have no idea why True Detective didn't take every possible or conceivable award at the Emmys...except that the Emmys are pretty irrelevant to everything. But the persona of Rust Cohle will probably follow Matthew McConaghey to his grace and he'll be fine with that. Not unlike the Duke and the Ringo Kid; Eastwood and Dirty Harry. And, he can have some fun with it as well...possible he's the new Eastwood for our times, burned out on bad X and imitation Don Perrignon, trying to maintain a certain level of gravitas despite knowing it's all a stupid game. Or the post-modern John Wayne, doing the "man's gotta do what a man's gotta do" for the world to wonder at.
So, the guy has some standards. Lots of people in entertainment and sports don't. When A-Rod first was a seeming hero for the 21st Century, i.e., before Texas and the contract, the only ad he got in the Seattle market was a series of spots for Yammi Yougurt, which he jumped at. Sets the bar kind of low for class and establishing a brand. McConaghey has probably done others, but he just made a few for Lincoln SUVs and while I'm not sure they'd sell me a Lincoln if I was thinking about a SUV, I'd definitely pay to have him drive me around and talk about stuff...important stuff, like God and Sin and Beauty and smoked brisket and stuff.
Some of the dialogue in the top one ranks with the best cowboy poets and Shakespeare..."I speak bull...1800 pounds and can do whatever he wants...I can respect that...Take the long way...Thanks."On the other hand, it makes me realize something -- we're in a bold new world here that McLuhan saw coming. Soon, all meaning and art will be in the commercials, and the content will be static and Zipadeedodah. But, not just yet, at all times and in all places...but soon.
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Rod Serling was a TV writer and producer in the 50s and 60s. He got fed up and since he was rich, he kind of left it all and spent a lot of time on his yacht going up and down the Erie Canal and the Finger Lakes as well as other places. Used to berth at a Senaca River Restaurant outside of Baldwinsville and drink beer and talk Syracuse Football with my Dad in the 60s and 70s after the Twilight Zone went off the air.
The Twilight Zone was his major TV product as well as a ton of independent TV productions. He gave the censors fits, unintentionally at first, by trying to write stuff that was intelligent, current and culturally challenging. I found an excerpt of this interview online and decided that the whole thing was worth providing. Public intellectuals used to speak this way -- imagine Ed Schultz and Sean Hannity having to use this level of logic, clarity and vocabulary. We are all fellow travelers in the great conspiracy of mediocrity. The story of the time that Lassie had puppies and the show got hate mail over showing puppies and the miracle of birth is worth the cost of admission alone, especially since it's free.
(I pulled the interview from The Internet Archive. I generally use it to look for and listen to concert footage, but it's an incredible asset -- kind of like browsing a really good library or book store with a lot of everything. It's one of my leading bookmarks, and I recommend it to anyone who might suddenly want to watch an Eisenstein film with the Greatful Dead playing in the background. https://archive.org/)
Speaking of public intellectuals, one that very few people think of that way is Ray Davies co-founder of the Kinks and cultural provocateur. Davies and his brother Dave made the Gallagher Brothers and the Everly Brothers look like the Brothers Four with their fights, feuds and general hair-pulling. However, they well deserve their place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Ray has just been elected to the Songwriter's Hall of Fame. This was a 2006 commentary on "Yob culture" and fits with Serling in an odd way...
"Jack the lad has become Oscar Wilde
And the followers of style say, "It's the latest thing"
And William Shakespeare is the schmooze of the week
And anyone who says different is a fuckin' antique
And Noel Coward has become very hard and the comic says
"Bullocks" and everybody laughs and that's that
"Style, I mean, never was much, never has been
But the little bit that was was all that we had
And the clown does a belch and we all belch back
And that's that.."
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i was surprised to find out that there's a new spanish translation of six names of beauty. it's a super-cute little object, too. i look back with mortification on some moments of my writing history, but i'm happy and proud that i wrote that book.
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I really don't like that bloody thing. Upworthy -- what the hell does it even mean? It's kind like RL Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse which some people find poetic but I always found it to be saccharine, maudlin "why the hell did they give me this instead of the book about Vikings I wanted" even when I was a kid. But, in the words of the old Russian proverb, Даже слепая свинья находит желудь иногда, or as we say in Dusquesne, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH THIS SCREWY INTERFACE?
Ok, it's ok now. Actually, it translates like this...
Charlie: You're getting on. You're pushing 30. You know, it's time to think about getting some ambition.
Terry: I always figured I'd live a bit longer without it. --
And if you're taking a course in Aesthetics and Politics with Herr Professor Doktor Sartwell, compare and contrast values based on this contrasting versions of the Clash piece by Mr. Yoakum and Ms. McColl with extra credit if you can describe the similarity in the personal sitations of Ms. McColl and Mr. Strummer in 2012. Guaranteed C-, I tell you. Trust me. I used to be in govenment...
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yes, i'm up at nytimes.com on arthur danto today. ole danto, quine, and rorty - yeah i can feel them right here with me, on this silver eagle rolling through the night.
that is a perfect performance.
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In which Crusader AXE insults Vanderbilt Divinity School, the Academy of Country Music, and people who don't get country music while insulting the current gang of people supposedly singing it...and confesses dreaming of a Nudie suit and talking about them without showing a picture or mentioning Porter Waggoner, due probably to penis envy. (Long before Randy Johnson, Porter was known around Nashville as the"Big Unit" and it had nothing to do with his slider/fastball combination.)
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Ok, I admit that I can be a sucker for a lot of things. But, water and spray and rivers and such aren't usually a big thing with me. Well, hell -- if the world's oceans actually just rolled off the edge of the world in the pre-Columbus cosmology, this view of Niagara Falls is what it might look like. This amateur use of technology and art is the sort of thing that I suspect gets Ms. Wolfe and our other colleagues over at the SASM Institute all flustered, as it should. As it should. Absolutely spellbinding, although the music could be a bit less blah...Clannad must have something that would be a better fit.
Called this piece "Perhaps a reason to forgive if she exists which she doesn't but still..." at the Defeatists. Enough said...
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in the june 20 new york review of books, there is a devastating portrayal of the activities of the andy warhol foundation and the 'andy warhol art authentication board'. the basic accusation is that members of these interlocked organizations were in a position to profit from authenticating and discrediting works, and that this has very much affected their various decisions. [the piece isn't up yet on their site and will likely be behind a paywall when it is.]
whether it's corrupt or not, this whole situation is a remarkable emblem of a central fact about art in this period. postmodern artists, of whom warhol is perhaps the best and central example, attacked many of the basic teachings (or, dogmas) of modernism: the great individual genius, for example, and the concept of originality. warhol's entire set of techniques and the nature of his images were completely incompatible with modernism: he was the opposite of a picasso or a pollock. but half a century into post-modernism, the art market and the museum system have hardly changed at all, and indeed most ordinary viewers of art still believe all the teachings of modernism.
with regard to these institutions, the post-modern era never happened at all. so, the authentication board stamps warhols as originals or not. this makes hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of difference in their value. the stuff they're working through is tens of thousands of images. for the most part, these items were never touched by warhol except to add a signature, if that. both prints and 'original paintings' were instead more or less designed by him and executed in various shops around town, which warhol didn't even bother to visit. then various prints and paintings were executed that he didn't sign, or where it's not clear who authorized what when.
what is and is not an original warhol, in the art authentication board's definition, depends on what warhol was 'aware' of as they were being made: mere awareness is what is analogous, in warhol, to the hand of pollock. now, in my view, the hand of pollock is harder to distinguish from the hand of, say, a copyist, than such institutions like to pretend. but discerning the direction of warhol's momentary awareness in 1973 from here is really a job for an expert, a true connoisseur, or possibly an omniscient deity. and of course, many of warhol's works appropriated images from elsewhere: warhol swiped them from popular culture in the first place. the whole thing could be interpreted as a pointed demonstration that 'originality' is over or pointless in the era of mass media.
and yet the entire discourse and institutional context that would be appropriate to, or at was least developed in relation to, a van gogh or a matisse or a picasso, are just reproduced by the warhol foundation, authentication board, museum, etc. it's frigging absurd, like you were trying to account for the latest results in physics using the intellectual equipment of medieval theology. or it's even worse than that because warhol was actually attacking the system of thought he is now completely absorbed into. if your goal is to preserve warhol's legacy, forget this whole idea entirely. if your mission is monetize warhol to the maximum possible degree, just keep right on.
there are, i am going to say, two reasons why, even if modernism died in actual art, it just kept going in the art market and museum system as though nothing had ever happened. first of all, modernism is extremely, extremely commercially excellent. get rid of the idea of originality and genius; ok, now try to sell that sucker for tens of millions of dollars. don't be silly. honestly, a reproduction of a warhol or an image of it on a screen is basically just as a good as an 'orginal,' and for that matter is just as original. in virtue of what, precisely, would you distinguish them? is it that the original was brushed at a distance of some miles by andy warhol's coked-up awareness? warhols were extremely, pointedly 'works of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.' so the aura has to be imposed or invented, or is just a matter of let's pretend. and really, the difference is negligible even to its extreme proponents, having to do merely with warhol's awareness of the object, which means he was aware generally, say, that a hundred prints were made somewhere in brooklyn, e.g. this would be silly except for the $$$$.
and also, whole generations of art appreciators were trained in modernist dogma, and the claim of arts institutions to various forms of state or foundation support depend on it completely. you go to the museum to gasp at the stunning works of incomparable or super-human geniuses: incomprehensibly great figures that are infinitely more exalted and more important than the mere humans staring at their paintings. that's why an ordinary person staring at a picasso can experience transcendence of their pitiful lives. they need something higher, something seraphic. also they need us experts to tell them what is the product of genius, because admittedly it's not detectible on a visual inspection without a gigantic machinery of hooha, or expertise. you are really really going to need the hooha when the appreciators are staring at a warhol elvis, a lichtenstein comic strip, or a jenny holzer text. you've got some splainin to do, but all you've got is the van gogh schtick. hope people don't notice the difference, i guess, or that no one has enough self-confidence actually to say aloud what everyone is thinking. you might want to make sure they feel disqualified, to start with. shut up and gape, bitch; we'll tell you what to think and what to feel.
so the whole institutional economics of art - public or private - depends on what rosalind krauss called 'the originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths.' it doesn't matter what you do: if you are an important artist, these institutions will portray you and market you as an original genius. the canvas on which you have someone in bangladesh stencil 'this is not a work of original genius' will be authenticated as a work of original genius and held to be more valuable than the economy of bangladesh as a whole.
it's odd, but the ideology of modernism seemed to be anti-capitalist, and the genius floats above commerce like a seraph. likewise one reason people loathed post-modernism was because it seemed to make its peace with commodification, advertising, and so on. this is a laugh. i think you'd be better off reading modernism as a symptom of capitalism and post-modernism as a critique of it. this is obvious, and can't be more clearly demonstrated than in this case.
so maybe actual artists and people who were trying to understand what they were doing came to think that modernism was just a bunch of bizarre and destructive fictions. and then maybe they even came back to it, or left the critique itself behind as boring, after decades. but the art market and the museum system never budged one iota. and though people might criticize the particular decisions and the venality of the andy warhol industry, it is amazingly effective in making an extreme anti-picasso into a picasso and stacking cash to the moon.
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also i'm working up the sexuality and gender as aesthetic categories thing, which i'll be delivering at slippery rock u late in april. and here's the video playlist.
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