The Left Argument Against State Patronage of the Arts
If state sponsorship becomes the normal state of affairs, art per se is thrown into question. On the other hand, if art’s essential quality — its autonomy — is upheld as an ideal for and by artists, sponsorship cannot exist but as a scandal.
Yet, state sponsorship is not, at present, scandalous.
American Painting
In a moment when the Right claims that America is a cultural identity, a tradition, a way of life, “American Painting” raises the question of America not as a particular cultural identity, but as the embodiment of a perpetual critique of cultural tradition as a force of domination. On the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the need for that perpetual critique seems as relevant as ever.
Greg Parma Smith at Hoffman Donahue
The question of images, I think, is an appearance (an image) of a deeper, more intractable question of history. At issue today is less what we are in space than where we are in time, how we receive the inheritance of classicism after so many iterations. How the painted picture has any authority — even the authority to merely exist.
Obsolescent Experience
“Woe to ye anthropologists who make camp here! Some knowledge truly is lost for all time.”
The Whitney Biennial Will See Contemporary Art To Its End
The whole Biennial, in fact, feels like the work of a future civilization that has discovered the wreckage of 21st Century “contemporary art,” and did their best, based on extensive archeological and archival research, to stage a faithful reproduction. Like Colonial Williamsburg.
End of the End of Painting?
The present moment is marked by the return of painting. The postmodern theorist Douglas Crimp made his indictment of painting in a historical moment that was actually marked by the return of painting after its demise at the hands of the avant-garde in the 60’s and 70’s. Crimp wrote “The End of Painting” in 1981. But rather than confirming Crimp’s speculation of an end of painting, we seem to be living in a moment that would suggest the end of the avant-garde.
"To Be Clear at All Costs” ~ On Morton Feldman
“Kierkegaard wrote a marvelous thing in Either/Or. He said he feels that when he dies, they are going to ask him only one question, when he gets up there. And the question is, ‘Did you make things clear?’”
Nixon Thirty Years Later
Do we know what film is about today? The ersatz cinema which fills theaters seems to tell us definitively: No. Stone’s film is much more than a cultural product of its time. It’s one of the best films of the 1990s and still has a great deal to teach us about how film works, and what it means to make a political film.
“Human Music”
Imagine driving in your car listening to MJ on the radio, grooving and enjoying the song until … wait … you stop to ask yourself … was this bassline played manually by a human, because if MIDI sequencing was involved, I don't like it anymore. Said no one ever!
Where Are The Music Houses?
Although there's a reaction against utopian thinking, art itself has a utopian edge
Against trademark hollowness: The difference that “Theory” makes
Now seems as good as any moment, as history breaks around us, to reconsider our attachments to modernism and formalism — along with the implications of such attachments — for the purpose of developing an art criticism that aspires to be adequate to the present.
Voluptuous Music
What is really feared in loud music is not the loudness, but the ugliness
Against Art Education
Our art education does not produce artists or critics, but little art historians – worse, librarians! We are what Nietzsche described as “idlers in the garden of knowledge,” individuals with an Alexandrian relationship with art, art as an infinite archive of “works” to be perused, art as mere culture. Our spirit transforms art into artifacts.
“Et in Arcadia ego”
Art occupies a precarious position in society. The artist even more so. One the hand, art is officially sanctioned. It is generally taught, and ‘creativity’ and ‘self-expression’ are almost universally encouraged . . . But the true artist, as Octave declaims in his eulogy on the rock, knows that he “is a misfit, a stranger, a prophet none believe, and to whom none relate.”
paintings and Paintings
There are paintings, and then there are paintings — I’ll capitalize the latter. Anyone who has Seen a Painting will feel the Truth in this distinction, and anyone who has felt the dissatisfaction of merely seeing a mere painting — and who hasn’t? — will either suspect that such a distinction exists or turn away from the work in front of them in search of meaning elsewhere.
