art review

[redsage]

A few weeks ago, I was reading SFGate and came across an art review. It was bitchy and catty and scathing, so even though I was unfamiliar with the artist or exhibition in question, I read it. It was funny, and made interesting points about what makes something "art" in the first place. I read it aloud to metaphorge.

A couple of weeks later, I saw a response. Apparently the author had managed to seriously upset a number of readers with his negative review, and he got a lot of angry responses. He wrote a column in reply.

Below the cut you can read the response column. I think it's brave and insightful, and I'm still thinking about it even now a week later. You don't need to read the review to get context, or to know anything about the works of the artist in question. It talks a lot about the nature of art criticism, and what distinguishes art from the merely pretty.


Unfavorable 'Chihuly' review sparks emotions
Kenneth Baker
Sunday, July 27, 2008

My recent review of the exhibition "Chihuly at the de Young" polarized reader response as nothing else I have written for The Chronicle ever has. A torrent of angry e-mails followed, along with a trickle of approving ones.
Because so many of them have points in common and touch on basic critical issues, it seems appropriate - and practical - to reply to them en bloc. So here goes.
Many respondents insisted that they do not need a critic to tell them what art is or how good it is. Most complained that I denied Dale Chihuly's glass works the status of art and have no business doing so.
One sensible reader found a middle path: He agreed with me that Chihuly's baubles do not merit a major museum show, but found it useful to figure out for himself why, through firsthand experience. Yet another, though she deplored my effort to discourage people from seeing the show, described how she came to see the emptiness of Chihuly's work on her own - after three visits.
Critics dream of finding readers as honest and as committed to looking as these.
The detractors are half-right about not needing a critic, but not for the reasons they imagine.
In today's culture, people need not merely critics to tell them what art is, but also artists, curators, art historians, art dealers, collectors - and the viewers' own education and sensibility.
In the consensus as to the art status of a piece or a body of work, each such participant has something to contribute, and each type of contribution has to be valued differently.
The critic owes his readers not reassurance or even judgment, but a point of view, and thus, an example of how a point of view forms.
Hence, my practice of comparing one artist's works with those made by others. Art is made of connections - connections available to any informed observer - not just of materials and good intentions.
The several readers who faulted me for comparing Chihuly's work with his more serious contemporaries' uses of glass misunderstood my purpose: I was looking for redeeming linkages between his work and art - sculpture - of canonical stature, and could find none. No one who wrote to me in his defense mentioned any either.
Some visitors to "Chihuly at the de Young" seem to take the cheery insularity of his work as its strong point. But its disconnection from the main lines of thought around the visual art of the past century places it on the same footing as the luxury items in department stores' home-furnishings sections.
A few readers denigrated Chihuly as "the Thomas Kinkade of sculpture," which even I consider too severe, though I also wish I'd thought of it first.
Most of us would prefer to believe that "art" is a quality inherent in or infused in certain things, but the history of modern art, and of its enveloping social reality, has left us in a much more complex and ambiguous position. Those who refuse to acknowledge this are the very dupes that the culture industry banks on.
Quite a few people found the tone of my review ugly. I agree, which is why I reserve that tone for occasions, such as this one, when I see fraudulence or some other real public disservice afoot. As a practical matter, nothing I or any other critic can say will slow the juggernaut of Chihuly's success. In all likelihood, as experience suggests, such a damning review will bring more people, not fewer, to the exhibition.
I took a caustic tone because I believe, more or less as the poet John Ciardi put it, that we are what we do with our attention.
Every newspaper critic argues that readers ought to spend their attention in some ways and not others. A critic, no matter what his field, must be an expert in the uses of attention and their rewards - in terms of pleasure, expanded insight, challenges to habit and prejudice and much more.
Today art critics also find themselves having to push back against the tendency of many museums to market their programming as entertainment, which inevitably tends toward escapist uses of attention. "Chihuly at the de Young" is a prime example of this sorry cultural drift.
A nice guy

For the information of those who read what I wrote as a personal attack on Chihuly, let me acknowledge that I have met him once, thoroughly prepared to dislike him by the contemptuous attitude of others known to us in common. I was pleasantly surprised to find him down to earth and full of wry humor, even about his own well-piloted good fortune in the market.
One reader seemed to speak unawares for many others when she asked: "If Duchamp's urinal can be art, how can you discount Chihuly?"
Political philosopher Hannah Arendt defined artworks as "thought things," that is, things that materialize thought, things to be thought about and, in rare cases, things to help us think.
Making a statement

Marcel Duchamp's notorious "Fountain" (1917), a mass-produced plumbing fixture turned on its back, signed with a pseudonym and presented as sculpture, proclaimed a fissure between the concept of art and its unambiguous embodiment in objects.
If Duchamp's gesture had found no resonance in the wider situation of culture, his prank would have been forgotten long ago. But the peculiar cultural condition that he diagnosed persists: We still seldom see thought and thing brought together seamlessly outside the realm of mechanical engineering. Artists' struggles with this problem continue to produce bizarre and fantastically various results, some provocative, illuminating and pleasing, most not.
Does the art public need critics, specialists, to help it sort these struggles out? Yes. It truly is a full-time job. Bloggers cannot - at any rate, do not - get it done.
Chihuly does not participate in the struggle I have just described. If he is aware of it, he appears not to care, and so he excuses admirers of his work from knowing or caring. That is his prerogative, but the same cannot be said for the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, which continues to muddy the distinction between education and showmanship.

Comments

[merovingian.livejournal.com]

>Though I would disagree with the idea that it is on some level ok for the artist to be ignorant of, or ignore these issues.

I would love to hear more! What's wrong with this?

[sammhain.livejournal.com]

Because actively discouraging people from thinking critically about themselves, the world, and the relationship between those two things is a bad idea for a wide variety of reasons, especially considering the wide array of economic, enviornmental, and social justice issues confronting the world and people living in it whether those people would like to think about those things or not.


There's plenty of time for chilling out, or goofing off too, I'm not suggesting all art be deadly serious or overtly political, or that you have to be hardcore with it 100% of the time, but I am saying as an artist you have responsibility toward your art and toward what art is/can be whether you want that responsibility or not.

Also you may find this interesting:

http://www.openmagazine.co.uk/performance/exclusive-john-harrigan.htm

Since it adresses many of these same issues.

[tyrsalvia.livejournal.com]

At the same time, a lot of abstract art addresses many of these issues in an indirect way. It's fairly easy to come up with a cultural critique of representational or narrative art, but a lot harder with abstract art. Where do we classify Mondrian or Pollack in all of this?

[sammhain.livejournal.com]

Most abstract art requires an education to appreciate it I agree. I hated it until I went to art school. In many ways I think this is more at the heart of an art for experts (or at least dedicated amateurs) versus art for the people.

One way we can classify it is by the context the artist put it in. Now if the case wants to be made that it's the same with Chihuly (I don't know enough about him to say one way or the other), that's another issue, but I do think that as an artist if you make the choice to be abstract or obscure your motivations and context there is a penalty that may have to be paid for that and this kind of a debate is sometimes that penalty.

Considering the art vs craftsman angle of this debate I found this article sort of amusing:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/visualart/266884_dalelawsuit17.html

This is also an issue that in some ways is more about artistic process than art, for example my mother does not (as I do) struggle to reconcile her enjoyment of some avante gaurd art with a belief that it's also fairly self indulgent and often so isolating and cliquish that it risks not serving the function I feel good art must which is to communicate something about the world and our place in it..the roles of truth and beauty even if that truth or beauty is hard to witness, or is painful.

And the reason for that is I think that as an artist I have a reverance for the artistic process as well as art, but at the end of the day it is my own belief that art is more important than the people who create it.

[merovingian.livejournal.com]

Interesting!

So I think you're saying that artists in general have a responsibility to make their work with an awareness of what's happening in the field as a whole, and that if something is made without that responsibility, it may be entertainment but doesn't really qualify as art.

Would you say this responsibility apply only to non-performing fine arts, or do other media bear the responsibility as well?

(I'm wondering about, for instance: music, theatre, literature, and perhaps some fields that are less agreed-upon as art like cuisine, fashion, and architecture.)

[sammhain.livejournal.com]

"So I think you're saying that artists in general have a responsibility to make their work with an awareness of what's happening in the field as a whole, and that if something is made without that responsibility, it may be entertainment but doesn't really qualify as art."

I don't think they need to be an expert, but they should be somewhat familiar with it. Great writer's are typically voracious readers and I don't think that's a coincidence. For me I wonder too how do you become a writer or a painter, or a muscician unless you love and therefore are familiar to some extent with them. When I took sculpture classes in art school part of that was a broad stroke introduction to sculpture, because as my teacher said even at an introductory level you need to be baically familiar to understand how sculpture works.

And I will admit in theory it is possible to produce art despite being ignorant of your field, especially if you are producing works that relate to the human experience, but if your works are devoid of both a connection to your field and to the world at large the case in my mind is pretty hard to make that it's something more than entertainment.

I also have to say in some ways I agree with something Graham Greene said about the books you read as an adult not influencing you. I think it's a weird middleground. As a writer it's not my job to write something that is a response to say Lolita, but it is my exposure to literaure especially as a child and teenager that gave me the tools I needed to start to serve art in the first place. I'm more influenced by Madeleine L'Engle than I am by books I read now. So in that sense what I write may not be tracable to Nabokov in any way, even though I'm familiar with his work. I suspect that would hold true despite the medium.

"Would you say this responsibility apply only to non-performing fine arts, or do other media bear the responsibility as well?"

I think it applies across the board, but also as I said above I think there is wiggle room so long as you are creating something that is demonstrably something other than entertainment or something pretty to look at.

"cuisine, fashion, and architecture"

Here I don't have anywhere near enough of a familiarity to feel comfortable isuing an opinion on how it might or might not apply.

[sammhain.livejournal.com]

Also, since it's interesting to me, I find that I am at times influenced by what some writers say about writing, even if not by their novels.