While I can never speak for anyone else, I very much enjoyed Camille Paglia’s recent observations about art:
The art world, like humanities faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy—an upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1960s. (I am speaking as a libertarian Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 2008.)
Today’s blasé liberal secularism also departs from the respectful exploration of world religions that characterized the 1960s. Artists can now win attention by imitating once-risky shock gestures of sexual exhibitionism or sacrilege. This trend began over two decades ago with Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a jar of the artist’s urine, and was typified more recently by Cosimo Cavallaro’s “My Sweet Lord,” a life-size nude statue of the crucified Christ sculpted from chocolate, intended for a street-level gallery window in Manhattan during Holy Week. However, museums and galleries would never tolerate equally satirical treatment of Judaism or Islam.
It’s high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell’s soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.
The vulnerability of students and faculty alike to factitious theory about the arts is in large part due to the bourgeois drift of the last half century. Our woefully shrunken industrial base means that today’s college-bound young people rarely have direct contact any longer with the manual trades, which share skills, methods and materials with artistic workmanship.
There’s a lot more, and I suggest reading it all.
I’m a libertarian Republican who didn’t vote for Obama, but I love Warhol, I love Dalí, and I also love workmanship. Artists traditionally work with natural elements, like stone, metal, fire, water. Many of today’s artists couldn’t even change a tire. Unlike the artists who really knew how to be defiant and avant garde, they lack the balls to speak truth to power. Instead, they kowtow to power (Obama cult artist Shepherd Fairey being a perfect example). Such subservient sycophants and their followers not only would never put a picture of Mohammad in urine, they wouldn’t put a picture of Obama in urine, lest they offend the powerful. Much easier to pick on the powerless and call it brave.
Art is still being created, mind you. It just doesn’t get past the gatekeepers who are opposed to it in the name of it.
Watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wz2bAByWyI
And if you want an appropriate music moment, here’s R. Crumb and the Cheap Suit Serenaders singing “Fine Artiste Blues”:
Comments
6 responses to “Controlled art = destroyed art”
Paglia, like most liberals has never had an industrial (or trade) job and has a highly romanticized view of life as a worker. She also is totally ignorant about our economy.
Actual industrial production has not declined as a percentage of GDP for decades. There has been a redistribution of what we make, but we still make cars, trains, computers, steel, gasoline, etc.
The big change across the board has been automation, which has eliminated a significant fraction of jobs in all industries. It has also eliminated many jobs in the so-called “knowledge” industry, like engineering and finance.
This trend will continue, so future generations will have even less real work experience.
As to Warhol, I think the rot began with Picasso and his ilk. The entire mass of 20th Century art is junk. We need a Savonarola to burn it.
Heh – thanks for the crumb…I was hungry. Unlike Bob, I do agree with Paglia on this one.
She’s another like Dylan – she doesn’t toe the line.
You missed the Rockford Art Scene this last weekend. I saw some of the most amazing stuff. A guy who works with computer graphics to produce some of the most non-computer looking art I have ever seen.
All kinds of beautiful art. If you are in the neighborhood for the next Art Scene don’t miss it.
You can keep track of events here:
http://artsforeveryone.com/FallArtScene.cfm
Kathy,
Bob is correct. Manufacturing output has not declined as a % of the economy. Just the jobs.
As Bob said, automation is a major issue. Dealing with the impact of over a century of 2-3%/year productivity improvements is something for which neither the liberal nor the conservative ideology is well equipped.
This is untrod territory we are in, and something new will be needed to deal with the “surplus population” in a healthy manner.
Oh, and art is as it ever was, there have always been official arbiters of taste, and most of the artistic community ignores them and carries on with whatever they were going to do anyway.