(no subject)
In Woody Allen's Sleeper, Diane Keaton, playing a nauseatingly pretentious attse maven from 200 years time, waxes rhapsodic about such literary and art-historical giants as John Laws-ian pulp poet Rod McKuen and famed big-eye painter Walter Keane. In Woody's world, the high-cultural canon has degenerated into kitschy sentimentality. To a certain extent, the future is now: Jeff Koons' and Takashi Murakami's non-ironic embrace of cuddly pop iconography - to cite the most obvious examples - shifts seamlessly between museum, mass media, commercial gallery and town square, becoming super iconic at every level. These are the guys you're average art snob will be talking about in the year 2205. Maybe Scott Redford was right - though I hope not - when he said "there's not such a big difference between art and popular culture". Koons' and Murakami's output and reception would certainly seem to support that claim. Scott Redford also said that for him "it is always more fun reading the Face or visiting a porn site than looking at Art Monthly. Talk about your rhetorical comparisons! OK. So here's my beef: Listen Scott, love yer work, and I'm totally down with the surfing thing, but if it's dumb fun or a hard-on you're after, don't take your love to Art-town. Pop will win that contest every time, which is not to say art does not afford pleasure, libidinal or otherwise, but that art and pop culture - no matter how porous the boundaries - generally work very different means to very different ends. Don't get me wrong, I like the cutting wit and subversive absurdism of The Simpsons as much as the next guy, but when it comes to art, I want meta-critical reflexivity, aura, discernment, profundity, perversity, obsession, insanity, intensity, immanence, ambiguity, beguilement, subtlety, sophistication, historical depth and/or stone-cold material presence, most of which are pretty well unavailbale in the predominantly narrative and time-based popular arts. Koons, Murakami and their crossover ilk notwithstanding,a rt and pop are for the msot aprt incommensurate. They engage separate and dissimilar histories, visual codes, discourses and cultural contexts. And as for porn, perhaps the purest form of popular entertainment, it may be captivating for its fantastic absence of repression and thereby provide rich source material for artisitic co-option, but art in and of itself it ain't. And besides, aren't the feints and veils, sublimations and symptoms of the clothed world more interesting and revealing with regard to our selves and the way we organise pur domains than the spurting, butt-naked nothingness of unbridled desire? But Scott, I do agree with you that art has no greater claim on the high moral ground than pop or that its bullshit quotient is any lower. Both are rotten with commercialism, greed, egomania and opportunism. And you're absolutely right about art being bourgeois - though I prefer elitist - to which I say: don;t hate the player, homie, hate the game. Which brings me to my next complaint: teh currently bloated state of the first-world contemporary art market and concomitant populism erdoing art's productivity confounding or recondite potential. Swelling in tandem wiht the proliferation of art fairs, biennials, and star-architect-designed museums, the currently bullish scene is testimony to the rise fo art as a middle-class entertainment medium and civic status symbol. Not surprisingly, in the midst of this sea change we have witnessed the ascent of shonky curation - somebody ahs to fill these spaces - as a powerfully determining force and, more worringly, the declinign influence of criticism. This feeding frenzy has also brought forth a new type of dilettante-collector, who, without botehring to bone up on the historyand theory of art, seems to be setting conceptual and aesthetic agendas with their chequebook. And tehre are plenty of artsits out there prepared to do whatever it takes to turn a trick, hence the explosion of cute, shiny, goofy, well-mannered (or innocuously risque), easily decoded and asimilated images and objects. At present, if it sells or pulls in the punters, it's good and, for art, that's bad.
Phew, that and finding my old sketchbook today (I might post some soon, see how I've grown :P) have made me think twice about only putting one fine arts course in my preferences. And even then, it was for Sydney which are my last options. My plan Z. Hmmm, I guess I'll try and keep my art as a hobby until it pays the bills or makes me whole, whichever comes first. Seeing as art rarely makes a living I doubt I'll ever reach either of these goals. But whatever. I'm bored.