This Is Why You Should Curb Your Dog

The Media Lies, Your Ability to Make Informed Voting Decisions Dies

Being in the tank for a candidate is bad, actively spreading false propaganda is another thing entirely.


The Main Stream Media has completely lost sight its professional standards, and has possibly lost its soul.

The Humanities

The Summer 2008 issue of The Wilson Quarterly has an excellent article by Wilfred M. McClay, "the Burden of the Humanities"

Mr. McClay brings some excellent and piercing perspective on the Humanities as they are currently being taught in our universities, and how they are perceived by the general public, and why.

Strange, that an era so pleased with its superficially freewheeling and antinomian qualities is actually so distrustful of the literary imagination, so intent upon making its productions conform to predetermined criteria. Meanwhile, the genuine, unfeigned love of literature is most faithfully represented not in the universities but among the intelligent readers and devoted secondary-school teachers scattered across the land.

Mr. McClay points out how identity politics has eviscerated the meaning of the Arts and Humanities and he goes on to show why we should care about this at all. He shows that the Humanities can and should remind us "that the ancients knew things about humankind that modernity has failed to repeal," a reminder more important today, as some aim to move us into a post-human world.

Go have a good read.


(image "Landscape" 1994, by Mark Tansey, used as the title illustration in the original article)

Art, or the Colosseum?


UPDATE, thanks to Assistant Village Idiot and Eugene Volokh for the links. If you are here for the first time, please also check out my Art Studio website, Jerub-Baal Studio



Neatoramma posts about German artist Gregor Schneider, who plans to display a person's death as a piece of performance art. A doctor has agreed to help find a volunteer.

Actually, to be fair, Neatorama’s description is not really accurate. The piece would be considered installation art. If I have followed the article trail properly through Google, this interview in the Art Newspaper is where it all started, with a response by the artist to the comments thread here and a further defense by the artist published in the Guardian Further interesting reading on the subject, from a legal angle (US only) can be found at the Volokh Conspiracy (who I might ad, posted an interesting essay on the Aliza Shvarts art-thesis-cum-hoax at Yale, and the legal and ethical issues surrounding Yale’s ending of her project. Read through the comments…. )

I think all of these are good reads before coming to a conclusion about the project.

First or all, Mr. Schneider is taken aback at some of the insults and threats that he has received in response to the publishing of his idea. I can’t say that I blame him. The examples he gives, if they are true (and given the often vituperative nature of on-line commentary, I believe him. He could probably have gone on for several pages… ) Such things are not arguments or discussion, and they do nothing but take away from any rational criticism that could be given to the artist. I sincerely hope for his safety and peace of mind.

That said there are a number of things in the artist’s arguments that appear to me to be flawed. Foremost is his comparison of his art concept with several modern social realities and some art history, as a way of justifying the morality and compassion of his concept.

One of these arguments is that modern entertainment, especially television, regularly portrays death in a degrading way. Well, he will get no argument from me that television is often debasing of its subject matter. However, using this as an argument to validate his motivations or methods as moral and compassionate is highly suspect. This is moral relativism. The unethical, immoral, or distasteful actions of others does not make my actions moral (or immoral, as matter of fact), anymore than Mr. Schneider’s being German makes me an American.

Mr. Schneider’s argument from art history is that, “Michelangelo used to cut up dead people to study their anatomy. Is that not much more shocking than what I am proposing to do?” * Well, obviously, Michelangelo’s subjects were already dead, and were not subject to public scrutiny while he made his studies (that being due more to his fear of the Catholic Church’s authorities than of any moral rectitude on his part). But even in later years, where such dissections were done as a matter of public viewing, it still remains that the subject’s actual passing was not the part on display. The artist's argument would have made more sense had he compared it to public hangings, seen as entertainment by the masses in days gone by. However, I don’t think that comparison would have the effect he hopes.

Mr. Schneider states that, “…I am not proposing that I would bring about someone’s death, or stage it.” ** Or that he would encourage suicide. I believe him. This does leave a scheduling problem. If the point of the exhibit is to show death as a positive experience, then the natural death would have to occur during the operating hours of the museum or gallery, hardly something you could plan out. Would this then mean that the exhibition was a failure, or that the patrons and visitors should get their ticket money back? My understanding of most municipal health code regulations is that leaving a freshly dead and untreated human body lying about in your home or place of business is out of the question. (Heck, I’m not even allowed to bury my cat in the backyard.) This would seem to be a major operational flaw.

Another argument for the moral standing of Md. Schneider’s proposal is that many people die in bleak environments, separated from loved ones and any support. “These days, many die in hospitals, locked away from the public,” and, “Shouldn’t this last journey be the most intimate and personal journey in a person’s life?” *** He is arguing two opposing points here. In one, the public is not allowed to see death (suggesting that the artist believes it should be so allowed), in the other, death should be personal. His proposed art installation would certainly be public. The very act of displaying someone’s death in a gallery environment would remove any vestige of the intimate or personal for the subject. He also complains of the regulations and rules surrounding burial, saying, “In my view, the dying should be able to define the rituals and sites of their funeral themselves.” † But where would this lead? Is the artist then suggesting the possible return of Suttee?

A further justification provided is the support Mr. Schneider has received from a priest. Unfortunately, history shows that the approval of a religious leader is no guarantee of moral strength or purity. (Meaning no disrespect to the gentleman mentioned, who I do not know.)

Finally, I will quote Mr. Schneider one last time. “My feeling is that the church used to provide us with rituals and ceremonies appropriate for death, but in a secular age, don’t we need to create our own?” In a way, this is the whole of the resistance that Mr. Schneider has found himself facing. The lack of a moral framework leaves no standard for decency or any idea of what actually constitutes respect.

This art concept (as a public display) and the arguments underlying it, exemplifies the muddy, self-justifying and often self-centered thinking behind much of the Arts today. In my opinion, such is the result of the amoral atmosphere that exists in the modern Humanities.


Notes

* ”There is nothing perverse about a dying person in an art gallery” Gregor Schneider, The Guardian, Saturday April 26, 2008

** ibid,

*** ibid,

† ibid,

(Editing note, corrected paragraph eight, where I mistyped "we" for "he." The pronoun has been corrected)

Another New Sketch



the Burden of the Prophets, Modern Theology Series
Watercolor on Paper, 8x10 inches © 2008 MJAndrade

Modern Theology, its critique and its results are turning out to be a fertile ground for painting concepts.

More on this as it comes...

'NETFEED/ART: Artistic Suicide Challenge
(visual: Bigger X at Toronto arraignment)
VO: A guerrilla artist known only as No-1 has challenged the better-known forced involvement artist Bigger X to a suicide competition. No-1’s broadside against Bigger X, which calls him a “poseur” because “he only works with other people’s deaths,” suggests a suicide competition between the two artists, to be broadcast live by “artOWNartWONartNOW.” The one with the most artistically interesting suicide would be judged the winner, even though he or she would not be around to collect the prize. Bigger X, who is wanted by the police for questioning in a Philadelphia bombing, has not been available for comment, but ZZZCrax of “artOWNartWONartNOW” called it “an intriguing story.” '

[Fictional news blurb from the beginning of chapter 21 of “Mountain of Black Glass” copyright 1999, by Tad Williams (Volume Three of “Otherland”, a four volume SciFi novel).]

There has been a lot of commentary about the Aliza Shvarts/Yale Shock Art Thesis incident. Roger Kimball has an essay well worth reading, Yale, Abortion, and the Limits of Art. There is another piece at The American Digest. The Volokh Conspiracy has an excellent post on Yale's attempt to close the barn door after the horse left.

One thing in the comments section on that last really struck me. "Dre", responding to an earlier commenter, posted the following;

"I think this Yale thing is terrific. The artist's work has provoked wild-ass reactions all over the place, just as much of our art must do. "

It is only a short distance to this:

Karlheinz Stockhausen on the 9/11 attacks: “What happened there is—they all have to rearrange their brains now—is the greatest work of art ever. . . That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that people practice madly for 10 years, completely, fanatically, for a concert and then died. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos. . . I could not do that. Against that, we composers are nothing.”
http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~jast/Number14/Minor.htm "

The passage at the top of this post is from a science fiction book written in 1999, but is a follow-up on a passage in an earlier volume of the series (I think volume one, [I'm not sure, I lent it out] City of Golden Shadow released in hardback in 1996) where Bigger X causes a car wreck with fatalities as a type of "forced involvement" performance art. This fiction predates the Stockhausen quote by at least five years.

The nihilistic direction of modern performance art (and the avant guard in general) has been easy to predict for a long time. That knowledge has in fact been a part of the popular culture.

Too bad that the artists haven't noticed it. It tends to put the lie to their "groundbreaking" and "transgressiveness" if everyone can see it coming.

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

Charles Johnson put up a quote of Euripides last night, Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.

That quote put me in mind of two verses from the Book of Proverbs.

Proverbs 26:4-5

4 Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
or you will be like him yourself.

5 Answer a fool according to his folly,
or he will be wise in his own eyes.

This is as close as the Bible comes to saying that, in dealing with the folly of men, there are indeed "No-Win" situations.

I am tempted to make snarky remarks about politics, but I will refrain.... (No you didn't! ed.)

Predictable

Just watched the second episode of "Simon Shama's Power of Art" on PBS. This episode was about Picasso. In talking about the painting "Guernica", Mr. Shama couldn't resist sniping against the Iraq war.



He related how a copy of Guernica, arguably Picasso's greatest masterpiece, was covered up during the press conference after the US made its case before the UN that force should be used to overthrow Saddam. The reason being that the painting would have been "too disturbing." (It actually sounded to both my wife and I that Mr. Sharma blamed the press corps for this request.)
Mr. Sharma finished up with something to the tune of, you may be the greatest power in the world, capable of toppling dictators, but don't mess with great art. (paraphrased, ed.)



I don't know, but maybe somebody from the US delegation should have asked that it stay uncovered...





...I think the Kurds of Halabja would have thought it an entirely appropriate backdrop to an announcement of the plans to topple the fascist who had killed them.

Two Interesting Thoughts

Not related on the surface, but deeply related at the core. Remembering the purveyors of the intellectual cult of death in the West and an essay about relativism and evil.

Both good reads, and worth dwelling on.

The Underlying Cowardice of the Arts

For as long as I can remember artists (in fact, the Arts as a whole) have styled themselves as "the Brave Little Tailor" to the big bad giant "Censorship." There is a pantheon of demi-gods in the art world, Arthur Miller (for 'the Crucible'), Andres Serrano (for 'Piss Christ', which I blogged about here), chocolate covered Karen Finley, Chris Ofili (for what is often called the 'Dung Madonna') and many others. Most of these demi-gods, with Arthur Miller being the exception, are so puerile that simply ignoring them would have been sufficient. They will be at most footnotes in Jansen's History of Art in another twenty-five years. And sadly for Mr. Miller, "the Crucible" has been so overplayed as to become trite.

Artists have shown their 'bravery' for years by tackling religious sensibilities. The target has often been Catholicism, because I suppose, the thrill of challenging the Inquisition. However, unlike Francisco Goya who actually lived and worked in Spain during the Inquisition, they have acted in a vacuum when it comes to persecution.

Now, as Roger Kimball points out in today’s Opinion Journal, artists are censoring themselves (with no sense of irony) at the mere suggestion that Islamic Fascists might be offended by their artwork.

Yoo-hoo! Big brave Artists! Where are you?

These artists show real bravery, but they are mostly forgotten in the Salons of the West.

Mr. Kimball asks
Poor transgressive rebel artists! How are they to shock the middle class anymore?

and The Glenn answers
They may have to go back to actually doing work that's, you know, good.

More comments by Ann Althouse.

Thoughts on being an Iconoclast

A lot of the old family photos have ended up in my hands, so I began scanning them at the highest resolution I could and loaded them onto a Flickr page (see side bar) so that family could see them as well. I also began loading some stuff I had shot, and old resources and research that I had always meant to digitize but had never gotten around to doing. Needless to say, it's become a bit of a monster, with almost 1300 images uploaded in the last two months.

However, it is not without its value.

Flickr has numerous groups focusing on everything from A to Z, including artists. So I began to load low-res versions of some of my paintings, sketches, and step-by-step photos of the painting process, and then posting these to some of the appropriate groups. The response has been very encouraging.

One particular response from a very kind gentleman was this, "Anybody who is an iconoclast can't be all bad."

Looking at the rest of his comments and the time-stamps, I'm not sure if he had time to follow the links to my website and see "Iconoclastic Realism" in the title, or if he chose that word because of the image he was commenting on. Either way, it got me wondering what people think when I say I am an iconoclast?

From a cultural standpoint, the last fifty years have been fraught with change. Virtually every norm, moral, scruple, and standard have been questioned, and a vast number have simply been jettisoned. There is no doubt that my children are growing up in a very different culture than that which my parents knew as children. The slogan "challenge authority" has become the new authority. Speech codes, diversity by enforced quota (not by providing equal opportunity for merit) "fake but accurate," PC religion and the cult of the victim are the moral landscape of today. Common sense, common decency, truthfulness instead of agenda, and personal responsibility are out the window.

Yet when I look at culture, what passes as 'edgy' art is still focused on the same topics as it was in the Sixties. Of course, with the wide changes in our culture the subjects are all now moot, and so artists are left only to try to be more shocking than last year's art. So instead of trying to promise sexual freedom, art now offers sexual degradation and objectification. Instead of trying to promise a new enlightenment by experimenting with religions foreign to our uptight parents, art now assails faith itself. Up rooting the Old was the foundation of the ideals of the Boomer generation. However, up rooting and foundation laying are diametrically opposed. And so the undermining of 'the Establishment' has led to a new Establishment that has no idea what to do next.

Yes, I am an iconoclast. But that may not mean what you think it means, for the icons have changed.

UPDATE, for a look at this subject in action, see Sissy Willis' take on the Whitney Biennial

Gnosis and the Image

The Assistant Village Idiot had an excellent link to a piece on the cultural differences of thought and perception between East (especially Chinese) and West. This is of course the piece referenced below that I so botched in terms of commenting. By way of intellectual apology, (and a way to distract you all from my blushing) here is a link to another aspect of cultural perception from the New Atlantis by Christine Rosen titled The Image Culture.

This piece was originally published last fall, but I just came across it today. It covers a lot of ground I’ve been thinking about over the last few years. Ms. Rosen talks about how the ubiquity and shear mass of images in modern culture, both static pictures and video/movies, have begun to erode the primacy of the written word as the our chief means of communication.

She writes:

“Historians and anthropologists have explored the story of mankind’s movement from an oral-based culture to a written culture, and later to a printed one. But it is only in the past several decades that we have begun to assimilate the effects of the move from a culture based on the printed word to one based largely on images. In making images rather than texts our guide, are we opening up new vistas for understanding and expression, creating a form of communication that is “better than print,” as New York University communications professor Mitchell Stephens has argued? Or are we merely making a peculiar and unwelcome return to forms of communication once ascendant in preliterate societies—perhaps creating a world of hieroglyphics and ideograms (albeit technologically sophisticated ones)—and in the process becoming, as the late Daniel Boorstin argued, slavishly devoted to the enchanting and superficial image at the expense of the deeper truths that the written word alone can convey?”

I’ve previously written about Postmodernist Gnosis here and Ms. Rosen brings new insight to the issues involved with the degeneration of quality in discourse in our culture.

We have a historically rare intellectual climate in the modern West, and the blogosphere is an excellent example of this. For most of history, a very few had the keys to information, and controlled it as a method of controlling their societies. Gnosis, or special elite knowledge reserved for the highest rank has always been a hallmark and a tool of repressive societies. A free society depends on the ability to freely exchange, explain and understand information. A two tier society, where the masses only understand visual images and are taught by pictures, and where only ivory tower people have command of the written word is the type of dystopia illustrated by Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s 1984. Ms. Rosen writes of how digital image technology undermines our trust in the veracity of images. In the early 80s, no less than the National Geographic got flak for having a digitally manipulated image on one of its covers. One of the big three weekly news magazines suffered backlash in manipulating a photo of OJ Simpson to make him darker and strengthen the contrast between his skin and stubble (accusers claiming this showed racial stereotyping). The technologies for this type of image handling are now in the hands of many ‘regular’ people, and numerous magazines provide tips and techniques monthly. Very, very few instances of photo manipulation are meant for anything other than purely innocent purposes, but it’s easy to project a time when every court case using photographic evidence will need an “Image Scientist” to explain why the evidence is trustworthy for a jury who know how to press a button on their home computers to remove “red-eye” from Christmas photos.

As an artist, I know how images are subject to personal interpretation, and are incapable of pure clarity. A replacement of literacy for the instantaneous gratification of an info-image would be a great blow to our society. As Christine Rosen asks, “Does every cultural trend make a culture genuinely better?”

Postmodernist Gnosis

Dr. Sanity linked to this article where Roger Kimball takes on Postmodernist Art History, as personified by Michael Fried. The type of thinking Mr. Kimball describes is an extention of the pretentiousness I saw when in college in the late 70s and early 80s. Even back then, so much of the discussion I saw in the humanities was couched in obtuseness and obsfucation. It seemed that the idea was to make you think that the speaker was smart, because he or she used so many big words strung together that it was impossible to understand them.

It's the same strategy used by the print industry when printing science journals. Wow, tiny sans serif print, in three narrow columns, it's so hard to read, I must be really smart to be able to understand it! (This is a real tactic, I remember taking a weekend seminar on print and layout where it was discussed) The difference is, the science journal is trying to stroke your ego, by making you work harder to read an article so that you feel smarter when you've finished all the hard work of reading it. The arts-humanities professors were trying to make themselves feel smarter by making it harder for us as students or their readers who loved art to understand, and then when the Gnosis, the hidden meaning was finally revealed we would be 'elevated into the elite priesthood' of those who understood the truth and the secret words of knowledge.

Thankfully, in the Theatre Department we didn't actually get much of this, as too much time and effort had to be put into the practical craft of making a show work. Even in the acting classes, which by nature had to focus on the emotional touchy-feely side of life, it was a practical matter of knowing your body and your emotions so that you could control them and use them as tools within your performance.

Having talked with so many artists who struggled through art school feeling like outcasts because their politics, or religion, or brand of art didn't fit the mold of the 'artiste' I am thankful that I studied in such a craft-oriented enviroment. (I think that, at least on the university level Art was a lot less diverse then than it is now)

The result of this posturing is this, in an economy where so many more people are rising up past the financial (and educational) levels of their parents generations, many people who would otherwise be excited to own or view art feel inadequate to participate in the art world, even as viewers. Think about it, how often do you talk with someone who, when they find out you're an artist, preface their next sentence with, "Well, I don't really know much about art..." before trying to find out what you do or talk about your work? My response invariably is "What do you like? It's enough to know that you like it."

Art should be participatory. When the Arts exclude people by making them feel inadequate or uneducated, it diminishes the role that art plays in our society, and it reduces the number of potential patrons that might make our art a livelyhood.

UPDATE: Sigmund, Carl & Alfred provide related insight.