"My work is an invitation to look elsewhere."-Robert Rauchenberg, drunk on top of a ladder, in the film Painters Painting.
An art critic for the Times of London has penned a piece declaring Pop art intolerably passé.
Short diatribe follows: I'm all for immersive experience and personal signifigance, who isn't? The fallacy here is that he's using Pop art as a strawman for the moneyed art world, caused by what he sees as corrupt, ignorant, and unworthy collectors. (The philistines!) Taking the inclination of critics to pigeon-hole in the name of analysis in stride; I think this is a prime example of our gallery-museum apparatus's inability to be honest about the boundaries between the studio, the gallery and society's art consumers. The idea that the capital-A of the art is diminished once money changes hands, or once someone without an MFA professes to liking it, is laughable. Sure, Warhol and his ilk will always be stuck in the sixties, and are currently being swapped between aging trophy wives like baseball cards, but the real message of Pop art is that everyone should be an artist.
6 comments:
"The World is dead. Long live The World"
I'm of the opinion that they're are two Societies of Art (tm): The society in which artists talk about their work with one another, and the society in which art is discussed and sold by non-artists. The second conversation gets most of the press, because that's where the cold cash is trading in hot hands, and thus tends to dominate and bleed quite a bit into the first (and I generally perceive this bleed off as invented conceptual frameworks artists have cobbled together to dress up there work for the marketplace [see Marketing. Also, see Lies]). I'm of the opinion that many artists can't tell the difference between these two conversations (or just aren't interested in the first because it doesn't make them any money) and their work suffers as a result (please see ANY SAIC Graduate Program Theseus show). Perhaps this is a failure in contemporary training? I know the upset this guy in the article is expressing has to do with braking our "Artist" stereotype. Where am I going with this? Fuck if I know. I'm going to bed...
It's all Pop Art's Fault
Being in a relationship with someone who frequently watches home remodeling/design shows helps me understand exactly why Pop Art is so big among the upper class folk. The shows have saturated the market because they're relatively cheap to make and get rediculous ratings.
That being said, if you think pop art is a big problem with the art world, you've never experienced a girl taking 100 Tylenol in a feeble attempt to commit suicide so she could use it as a performance piece.
Lets face it, art is what you make of it. I can't say I'm really big into pop art, but i am largely influenced by pop culture. Who isn't though, right? Video Games, Movies, the friggin internet! Just because you don't own a a television doesn't mean you're immune to the talk of Survivor amongst co-workers/friends.
You'll never be able define good art and bad art (but I'll have no problem telling you my opinion on the matter). Generalizing "pop art" as an unnecessary evil seems like a bit of a stretch.
"Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant, but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgement of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show."
Ralph Waldo Emerson "THE POET" 1844
Perhaps it would be best to break down the social mechanics surrounding art into leveraged and un-leveraged interactions.
And I think that groups that are made up of un-leveraged interactions, such as peer groups, villages, etc., are much more creative than groups based on leveraged interactions, such as the Hollywood studios, and Grad Schools. (Unleveraged groups are not nessecarily more productive, but more innovative and dynamic.)
i definitely agree about the villages (maybe tribes) or substrata of various groups of artists and establishments that support/milk the talent of the artists at each level.
i'm having a heck of a time finding the particular type of exhibition venue that I would like to see my work represented in. There are many little cafe, restruaration, or naive-'gallery's but not one that is really frequented by people that would give any critical reaction to the work. (maybe's its naive to think that there would be. more likely, i guess)
that's also another big can of worms, though. there are no more art critics and there are no magazines reviewing art that is now currently being shown with any kind of critical rigor by the writer. it seems to be nothing but reporting. this was something that i hadn't really noticed until a prof of mine at northwestern pointed it out. but this prof, who still maintains that he is an art critic, lane relyea (jason, you met this guy at the autonomy dinner a couple of years ago and heard him speak about this exact same thing). but his position, the role of critical art writer in the art world has all but become anochronistic somehow.
just open any art magazine these days even the 'good ones', you don't really see a bad review. what does that mean? is only the really qualified or valid artwork given a review and we are to assume that if its not written about that it is irrelevant.
my point i guess is that if art criticism becomes irrelvant, the quality of work that artists make may suffer from lack of validity or even relevance if there are no standards anymore.
just look at the recent book of contemporary painters, 'Vitamin P', it's like a fuckin' rolodex!
all artists arranged alphabetically...
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i think the pop art argument is a bit complicated too. because art by the populace or low or street art is influenced by pop culture, but i wouldn't necessary categorize as pop art. there i think it branches again, because you might call a lot of street art that appropriates and subverts pop icons like andre the giant or ronald mc donald as more of an art of rebellion or a reaction to pop art. the old fight fire with fire, works best maybe because those icons are so easily recognizable and readable.
so i almost think that consistent active and attacking street art has an effect. as long as as it doesn't get boxed up and sold in a gallery as graffiti-art-street- culture-weird-funky-cool, which was sort of my impression of the work INSIDE the kunstlerhaus bethanien (see pictures that jason posted last week, thank you don jason.) , but that kind of work does this weird switch whenever it put on display in a gallery, it loses its punch or its hooliganistic defiance to the establishment. i dunno, i think it becomes LESS relevant. which is interesting to think of a gallery having the exact opposite effect than what it was intending to do.
I think that the aformentioned profesor has a good point in that the rigour of critical writing has diminished somewhat and turned into something of a pony show laying out hype for each new crop of Columbia University graduate students showing in Chelsea. On the other hand this same character appeared to me to be consistently pointing this out to agrandize his own role as the only art critic that does not like ANYTHING, especially works not presented with a seminar and a 500 page thesis on the cultural impact, weight, and art history movement references.
A relatively new art magazine here in Madrid called NO EXIT is quite merciless in its local and international criticisms, so much that many advertisers have pulled out because they find it offensive someone would dare to talk bad about their shows. A friend of mine does the page layout and apparantly the staff writers spend their time questioning each other "You are not actually going to print that are you . . ." Too bad its circulation is about 14 people.
Regardless of all this we are still left with the two distinct dialogues about ART(tm), and as practitioners something of loathing and suspicion for the second "Leveraged -- this is about cash -- did I mention I am not an ignorant prole?" version. It will be interesting to see if in the coming years someone can do a show and say "I was really interested in drawing processes here" and not immediately be sent to the lion pit to be ripped to shreds.
I have been collecting anecdotes of people in THE ART WORLD(tm) who are itching to slap around the hegonomy and insulation that academics and "high concept" have on contemporary art. But that is best looked into in another post . . .
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