Thanks, Cheerskep for your comment. From you it's an honor. I write this stuff off the cuff and on the fly and only notice the mistakes later. I do love words and language as much as I love colors and shapes. They're all so wonderfully chewable. Maybe I'll start that long delayed project: A collection of my essays and troubled thoughts on art and history. Of course I care a lot about 'what is said' yet I do relish the 'how' when the 'what' is not very new to us wily old cats. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: Tom McCormack <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, November 17, 2012 3:22:21 PM Subject: Re: aesthetics Rant A rant, William, but a good rant, an excellent rant. I mean the tone, the timber, the rhythms, the style -- not the "text", where by 'text' I mean the specific assertions, indictments, "what is said", rather than "how it is said". I claimed it before, I now claim it again: If you weren't a painter you could have made it as a writer. Like many artists in many genres, you're best when you're angry -- up to a level. On Nov 17, 2012, at 11:42 AM, William Conger wrote: > MOMA is putting on a garage sale. Artist Martha Rosler has made a career of > putting on garage sales as if they were art events. Her very tired idea that > material culture is art, if it's put on in the right venue -- and what beats > MOMA? -- has a lot of space on today's NYT. > > Here's where I willingly join with those philistines who lament the decay of > discrimination when it comes to exercising aesthetic taste. Grandmas' old dress > is hanging on the wall at MOMA and can be yours for maybe $5, after you pay the > $25 museum admission. Yesterday, Grandmas' dress was picked from the local > garage sale, a real garage sale, for $1, we might suppose. There it was a > worthless piece of cloth. Together with other junk it provided some > entertainment for bored neighbors who like to poke around in someone else's > refuse. But with Ms. Rosler, in concert with some very delightful curator with > a prestigious job and a big budget and still dizzy from her ivy grad school > seminar where she learned -- aha! -- that everyday stuff is really art if you > just have that special turn of mind, thanks to Duchamp and a bunch of delirious > literature theorists, and an art temple to display it. Never mind that the idea > is now so tired, so very tired, so dog-eared tired that it just flops down > wherever it can like any poor, flea-bitten Fido. > > Meanwhile the 1 percenters are crowding each other a few blocks uptown to spend > dozens of millions of dollars for other scraps of cloth stained by the likes of > Rothko, Kline, and their cohorts one and many. (While children starve > everywhere). > > Both the bottom and the top of the artworld -- rotting ideas at the bottom, > rotting canvases at the top, are what real artists wake up to every day. > Somehow, they go to their work and try to keep alive an ancient impulse to do > something worthwhile that others might find encouraging, even beautiful. > Whoever the artists are today, they ain't the ones junking up MOMA and they > ain't the ones being propped up at the auction houses and serving as piggy banks > for the creepy few who park their money in 'art' while awaiting the next big > social exploitation opportunity. > > I can tell you it's damned depressing to have lived through the collapse of art > and the concept of the beautiful. My whole career has been lived in the midst > of this miserable situation. The people who make the calls, the pretty little > curators from Williams or Harvard or Yale or Princeton, or the huckstering > auctioneers in $10,000 suits and their clients with god-knows what evil-begotten > fortunes, or the pinch-nosed ex-Marxist theorists who never touched a tool of > any kind, and who lounge in bliss among the tenured few, are -- all of them -- > the enemies of art and artists, even when, especially when, they pretend > otherwise. I know what I'm saying. I was there; I am there. > > Does this mean I'm flipping over to Berg's side? No! It means artists live > with a great paradox. They do what they do even though it makes no sense > whatsoever in today's world. They keep a flame burning. I'll say this: If > someone says that thing is art, can be art, can be experienced as if it was art, > can become art in the right location, doubt it. Real artists doubt everything, > including their own work. > > As far as I'm concerned MOMA has opened the gates of Hell and might as well sell > off their whole collection at garage sale prices.
