"How the Art World Lost Its Mind"
There is an extremely interesting article on the state of "the art world" in The New Republic for February 5, 2007. Author Jed Perl replaces "post-modern" with "laissez-faire aesthetics" but otherwise sounds a lot like Ken Myers in All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes--and Myers wrote his critique in 1989!
A couple of quotes:
"Something very strange has emerged, something more pertinent to art than to money--a new attitude, now pervasive in teh upper echelons of the art world, about the meaning and experience and value of art itself. A great shift has occurred...We have entered the age of laissez-faire aesthetics. The people who are buying and selling the most highly priced contemporary art right now--think of them as the laissez-faire aesthetes--believe that any experience that anyone can have with a work of art is equal to any other. They imagine that the most desirable work of art is the one that inspires a range of absolutely divergent meanings and impressions almost simultaneously....My problem, I now realize, is not only that I am looking for consistency, it is that I persist in imagining that there is such a thing as inconsistency....A painting is simply what everybody or anybody says it is, what everybody or anybody wishes it to be." (page 21 in hard copy)
"What laissez-faire aesthetics has left us with...is a weakening of all conviction, an unwillingness to take stands, a reluctance to champion, or surrender to, any first principle." (p 26)
"Laissez-faire aesthetics is the aesthetics that violates the very principle of art, because it insists that anything goes, when in fact the only thing that is truly unacceptable in the visual arts is the idea that anything goes....At times...it could seem that what had died was the modernist century, with its vehement advocacy of certain aesthetic principles. Perhaps we have to accept that it has gone. But what is really in danger now is something much bigger than modernity. It is nothing less than the precious exclusivity of the high-art experience." (p 27)
For for some of us, "what is really in danger" is absolute truth.
You can find the article at
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070205&s=perl020507
A couple of quotes:
"Something very strange has emerged, something more pertinent to art than to money--a new attitude, now pervasive in teh upper echelons of the art world, about the meaning and experience and value of art itself. A great shift has occurred...We have entered the age of laissez-faire aesthetics. The people who are buying and selling the most highly priced contemporary art right now--think of them as the laissez-faire aesthetes--believe that any experience that anyone can have with a work of art is equal to any other. They imagine that the most desirable work of art is the one that inspires a range of absolutely divergent meanings and impressions almost simultaneously....My problem, I now realize, is not only that I am looking for consistency, it is that I persist in imagining that there is such a thing as inconsistency....A painting is simply what everybody or anybody says it is, what everybody or anybody wishes it to be." (page 21 in hard copy)
"What laissez-faire aesthetics has left us with...is a weakening of all conviction, an unwillingness to take stands, a reluctance to champion, or surrender to, any first principle." (p 26)
"Laissez-faire aesthetics is the aesthetics that violates the very principle of art, because it insists that anything goes, when in fact the only thing that is truly unacceptable in the visual arts is the idea that anything goes....At times...it could seem that what had died was the modernist century, with its vehement advocacy of certain aesthetic principles. Perhaps we have to accept that it has gone. But what is really in danger now is something much bigger than modernity. It is nothing less than the precious exclusivity of the high-art experience." (p 27)
For for some of us, "what is really in danger" is absolute truth.
You can find the article at
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070205&s=perl020507
posted by hl at
6:26 PM
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