Critical Fragments

Where are my irreverent Archilochus’s, the anti-Odysseans, deserting the wars? The anti-epics, the solitary wisdom of Silenus? The bawdy-funny Iambe with their vulgar truthful tongues?

~

Non-academics often write/think academically, and academics are often less intellectual than they realize. Truth is, we’re steeped in antiquarianism. Consequence of postmodernism naturalized. Where are the critical historians?

~

To wax sentimental and virtue signal that you care so much about all the downtrodden people who don't have the material comforts to create art is as wrong as it is simple annoying. People create in poverty, in war, in all kinds of adverse conditions. You can even argue that art is only vital amongst the suffering. Adorno et al thought Art in general was conditionally & categorically bound up in the suffering of the species. Do such artists get rich & famous? Not always. But is that what constitutes “success”? Is being an exhibited or published artist in a barbaric society the main determination of success? Is being an artist just about having a career now? This idea that one has to be materially comfortable to be a creator is a pernicious post-occupy millennial excuse factory, an apologia for mediocrity. The Millennial culture industry for the past two decades has made a spectacle of scraping the global ground for the overlooked and downtrodden, and all they’ve come up with is mediocrity, at best. If the downtrodden are not making art, it's not because they're poor. Hasn't anyone ever heard of the poet?

“You can go 3 days without bread, but 3 days without poetry, never. And anyone who says the contrary is a liar.” -Baudelaire

~

Artists are those who’ve made peace with their narcissism. Narcissus wasn’t all bad, not at all, we forget that he was indeed beautiful in the most profound sense of the term. Let's not throw the baby narcissus out with the bath water which drowned him.

~

Rather the philistine who recoils in horror at the power of art than the sophisticated aesthete who strangles the life out of art & calls it ‘love’, the way some choke a hard cock until the blood vessels are damaged.

~

Elkins has had no choice but to grapple with Chris Cutrone’s compelling & influential philosophy of modernity (also situated at SAIC), which after Adorno much preceded Tatol's aversion to premodern fantasy ~ the good ole days were never good & are behind us anyways, so get with the reality of the “bad new days” already (Benjamin). Strangely, Tatol vehemently dislikes Cutrone. Elkins isn’t merely wrong or reactionary, there is a “remodernism” or neo-modernism afoot since the early discontents with Postmodernism c.~2010 that might actually be “crypto-conservative”, see all the new abstract paintings that are ready to be hung in cheap motel rooms. I think the more interesting question though is why modernism appeals to so many now at the end/naturalization of Postmodernism ~ Is it really just stylistic repetition, or is modernity an “incomplete project”? If the latter, isn’t the aversion to modernity the true crypto-conservatism? Elkins is right, there are other literary forms beyond the Enlightenment that compel people to read ~ but why then do so many gravitate to the moderns nonetheless (including Elkins’ complicated modern novels concerns), while all the premodern stuff seems so unconvincing. Eg. no one really likes Hildegaard as much as contemporary music.

~

Aye, as I’ve said, most artists rage against AI because it’s closer to their existing practice than they’d care to acknowledge, a hard look in the mirror. (politics and environmentalism aside.) Wake up! We’ve been living in an industrialized culture for over a century, and are products of culture industry. Products that produce and reproduce and copy and recycle … not unlike AI. Products that obsess to reproduce, perhaps only our neurosis and opportunism differentiates us, when most art now lacks the emotional depth that demagogues say ‘make us human’. Our art has a calculated, machined quality to it, like it or not. Our words are rigid and rationalized, not sinuous and free. We study, we’re overly sophisticated in the worst of ways, our culture is rationalized, rationed out, and we’re so socially preoccupied that any notion of the individual is like a holographic projection from out the tiny pinhole of collective cultural pathos. Art does not come naturally to us, love it as we do. And do we love art so much because we’re so bad at it? Love it as a simp loves his desired object? We’d like to be free ‘n easy romantics, but it doesn’t come natural to us. We have to contrive and construct to create the semblance of lyrical freedom. We persist in pursuing a romantic art because our barbaric culture has preserved that romantic image which still appeals to us alienated, “democratized & syphilized” individuals in mass culture. We still hope to redeem the individual, often expressed via forms like the novel, even though contemporary values skew even the autonomous literary ‘I’ today towards social subordination (and why it’s so disappointing when authors feed into it). We live in a synthetic, not an organic culture, and that may be more interesting, ultimately! But one has to lean into that barbarism. “Progressive barbarism”, as Adorno/Benjamin suggested.

~

It’s a shame that “dialectical” has become an empty buzzword, because it actually was a sincere attempt to grasp the phenomena of our world in flux. When things are in transition, as they are in our modern world, they occupy two states simultaneously, an old and a new one, put simply. When critics appear to “lambaste” their object, they are really acknowledging a conservative tendency in the object, but also asking, But what yearning for freedom does it point to? At least this is how critics should proceed. Perhaps critics in “little magazines” really are just cranks now?

~

The Literal State of the Art: All these artist culture officers bedecked in their tawdry awards proudly pinned on their ugly cultural military uniforms.

~

More stupid anti-recording, music-must-be-live-and-communal platitudes floating about. Is reading a novel in private reducible to being "anti-social"? Do we need to project novels on theater screens and read them "communally" to appreciate them? Live music has its place, but listening to recordings in private, on one's commute, in their home, etc. can be just as much if not more profound. This pernicious idea that music is in all instances primarily a "communal" activity is rampant nonsense, conservative reactionary ideology.

~

Writers who have nothing to say often appear responsible. Actually daring a thought and arguing it will offend status-quo readers who conflate idle speculation with philosophical sophistication.

~

Jon Baskin has a nice read of the AA scenes in Infinite Jest. Nevertheless I am one who argues that Wallace is not a sincere writer, failing his own theory. He always struck me as theatrical, setting the stage for writers like Lerner or Castro who likewise try to be abjectly funny but abjectly fail, and specifically because it seems insincere. Imo sincerity is really about trying to understand one’s object of inquiry, if contemporary fiction is just going to continue on as critique in a different mode. Fiction and criticism have indeed converged, and not sure it makes sense to propose it should be otherwise, so much as understand why this has come to pass. For the new sincerity to occur, writers will need to find a worthy object of critique (not the cliche social media issues everyone’s exhausted with), and then really absorb into it instead of evading it through bombastic theatricality and a kind of ersatz hipsterism that is too cool for everything and yet not cool at all.

~

Nothing bad to say about contemporary novelists, but rather the expectations and values around the novel itself: Novels are expected to be quasi-philosophical and pseudo-psychological chin-stroking (chafing!) tomes. Why is that valuable and attractive? Why don't we value joyful novels? Where are the gay scientists? Why do people assume grey depression is 'deep'? It seems very adolescent.

~

Conceptual Art (rip) was an enlightenment art project:— it tried to disenchant the artistic process & reveal its essential gestures & character. But they were actually, deep down, calculating pragmatists who didn’t read their Nietzsche ~ Art is just as much about concealing as revealing.

~

In today’s neo-luddite idealization of nature ~ an idealization that is more abstract than the modern second nature it recoils from ~ Melville’s questioning about the order of Nature is important, most relevantly as an artist with a broad perspective drawing on various literary forms and knowledge. The death of Wendell Berry has me wondering if 21c writers will redeem an American literature of sincere questioning, or just become ideologues for their elected movement.

~

On the revealing that Lerner was a great debater: And yet eg Baudelaire and Melville were notoriously terrible public speakers. Says a lot about the rationalized millennial author — What’s less poetic than debate?! A rationalized form demented by barbaric society, where self-righteous positioning predominates and yet sways no one. Whither the broad perspectives of eg Woolf? But it’s about truth you say? Debate today is no more about truth than Scrabble is about poetry. The “decorated” preachers and their little demented choirs.

~

I worked on organic farms as a wee lad and encountered Wendell Berry’s work early on. I was excited to read a farmer that was also a poet, as the farmers I worked with were often anti-art eco pragmatists. The artist in me appreciated the rare Whole Human, the Whitmanian mind and body, even though I found the writing simplistic and cliche — ideology with line breaks. As I drifted away from farming and chose Art, I saw him more as an ideologue for a movement I personally experienced as problematic ~ the petit-bourgeois back-to-the-land fantasies of the Boomers after their failed revolution, which Millennials idealized in turn, was no paradise in reality, and symptom of revolutionary retreat despite its heroic self-image. Quixotic is the word. I’m skeptical of those who advocate submission to Nature as the answer to all of our ills, as if Nature’s not as hard and alienating as it can be transcendent. Humans have spent thousands of years trying to make peace with nature, to find our way within its order that works for us, and it’s not at all resolved, let alone understood or even framed in way where it could potentially be. More to the point, idealizing nature today is as abstract as the mediated modern life it recoils from, which is, paradoxically, more immediate and present to us as our second nature now. The love of an externalized Nature is actually more abstract than human activity, which is an expression of nature. Nature has produced in humans a complex spirit that actually goes against nature by regarding it as an aesthetic object of contemplation ~ no other species does this, they have a will to survival and to spread their seed as prolifically as possible in a way that humans question. It’s also easy to fall in love with a Nature that has been thoroughly domesticated, and which is the fruit of our violent domination over the ages. A true reconciliation with Nature would take into account the second nature that we’ve created within the first, and which no one really wants to deny, despite the romantic lipservice. Still, the Jefferson and Whitman in me values the agrarian American mystic, which I think Berry was more of a placeholder for, rather than the real thing. For me Berry raised more questions about our complicated relationship with Nature than he did resolve them. It seems Berry will continue to have purchase on a culture that leans neo-luddite, for now, and which makes a lot of sense, for now, as the domination of Nature and actually our nature is ongoing by the technocracy. But I’m sorry to say I mostly find those sentiments conservative and reactionary, one-dimensional, as understandable as they may be in part. I don’t think agriaranism vs technocracy is a sufficient framework to understand social life, not taking a position on either side, nor some synthesis of those reified categories.

~

“Autofiction as interested in the immanent fictionality of the self” (e-phemera) ~ Isn't this exactly the cliche pseudo-philosophical pomo-academic bs that’s so exhausted, and spans other mediums in crisis too (cont. art)? Dead horse on artificial life support. We not finna keep culture moving anymore or what?

~

Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People and the Tiger Hunt and a bunch of other disparate phenomena. Why can’t artists/writers today represent the vastness of life, from politics to whatever, instead of myopically aestheticizing their chosen ideology? Make political art or make anti-political art are the only options? When did artists and writers become so closed to the vastness of life?

~

I will not talk ill of the dead, but the living are fair game. Wendell Berryheads are tasteless neo-luddites who confuse adolescent nature sentiments for deep thought, and boomer back-to-the-land retreat for revolutionary consciousness. Berry was a great figurehead for neoliberal ideology, from the grassroots fantasies to the sentimental poetry that is ideology with line breaks.

~

Often when I think I don’t like an artist’s work, it’s actually their audience that’s the problem. There’s nothing to really dislike in mediocrity, it inspires no intense feelings either way, and it’s good for people to create regardless. What’s truly insufferable though is the viral hyperinflation of mediocre sentimentality and the performed demonstration of bad taste passed off as sophistication.

~

Never bought the boomers’ back-to-the-land sentimental idealization of nature. Anyone who’s ever spent time in nature or worked on a farm knows that it’s alienating and toilsome work. Nature is antagonistic to humans & only via thousands of years of fucked up activities have we come to a place where nature can be regarded as an aesthetic object, because it has been thoroughly denatured.

~

Just as for Adorno Beethoven is Tonality, Kali Malone is Millennial Gray.

~

Academic millennials that live miserable city lives love the romance of the back-to-the-land boomer who writes corny sentimental poetry & tends his petit-bourgeois garden.

~

Maybe Joyce’s greatest achievement was the integration of the epic and iambic lyrical poetry, classically separate and mutually antagonistic. In Joyce there’s the grandiose and historically sweeping, but also the individual, discontented 'I' usually excluded for its vulgar particularity.

~

Autofiction itself isn’t the problem, an attempt to grasp particulars of life is what lit is about, and eg Auerbach thought natural particularity like this was what literature was progressing towards all these centuries. Rather its that the life of this natural representation has been drained by pomo→millennial pens bent towards abstractions, generalizations, and recycled academic cliches. So the autofiction discontent might not even be about autofiction per se, but something about millennial consciousness and the deepening crisis of particular experience.

~

Can you imagine clapping at a painting? Strange behavior this music thing.

~

Artists who were also critics: Baudelaire, Poe, Nietzsche, Judd, Motherwell, Pound, ...

~

I thought art people liked I Love Dick as an ironic sendup of the artworld, the kind that everyone loves to love to hate, and then started to hate to love to hate, breeding faux-sincere sentimental culture that pretends to love to love but really hates to love. I didn’t know people liked it for literary reasons. I liked it for the opportunity to see Kevin Bacon play Donald Judd. Like much autofiction, it seems destined for TV or minor indie movies.

~

Beckett laid out on his sickbed while all the French student protesters marched below his home is the proper place for a poet.

~

Maybe the only true measure of artistic success is the character of one’s readers/listeners. I am grateful to have some of the best readers and listeners around. As in life, where a few good friends are better than all the superficial acquaintances of the popular. And like Kanye said, followers mean nothing, Hitler had millions, Jesus had 12. I am grateful for my proverbial 12, and don't need the fake love of millions or a fickle public that turns on people for the dumbest of reasons.

~

Why does the millennial mind gravitate towards secondary literature, criticism, hot takes, “discourse” … and move away from the art itself?

~

My hot take is that Verlaine was the better poet than Rimbaud. Not a bad poem of his. Perhaps the best poet for me, though I love the American spirit far more. To be an American Verlaine. Or perhaps there was something American in Verlaine already?

~

Good form: Zukovsky’s “A” printed at 9×6”, which is a 3:2 ratio, which is a perfect fifth, which is the musical interval most formalized by Bach, whose music is a central motivation for “A”.

~

Humanitarian aesthete sentimentality will never understand that the poet hates words as much as loves words.

~

There were no sirens and they sang no song, what happened was a guy from Boston acted like he was screaming.

~

Art died a long time ago and we’re basically just artist-larpers. Playing choose-your-own-adventure, but the adventures are very boring.

~

"You can't create in survival mode" Pretty much all the good artists disagree. Whiny ass bitch ass dead millennial left ass culture.

~

If music were described like perfume:— Top notes: E, G#, B Middle notes: E, G, Bb Base Notes, D, F, A

~

"In an age of musical imbecility we find the aspiring poet in his garret, he never goes to a concert either from lack of curiosity, or because he can't afford to buy concert tickets, that being the fault of a precarious and wholly filthy system of economics, but in any case the level of general culture is so low that the poet's impecunious friends are not musicians, or are accustomed only to an agglutinous or banal substitute for good melody." - Pound

~

Hating AI is very petit-bourgeois — the poor, aspiring business owners love using AI to generate imagery. To be fair though, they’re also petit-bourgeois I guess.

~

Literary analysis is bureaucrat behavior.

~

Ever since God was killed, Art is the opiate of the masses.

~

Art appreciation is a poor substitute for comprehending the life of art. Rather the raw pliable material of the philistine who feels the primitive edge of art than the rigid pedantry of the barbaric aesthete with their rosè-colored glasses and kulture.

~

Novels and online recipes today suffer from the same pathos :— they go on incessantly before they ever get to the essence of the thing. 99% florid pseudo-musings, filler, advertisements, and distractions, 1% substance.

~

Bosch and post-Boschian depictions of Hell indicate that Hell is made of pseudo-activity. Just a bunch of damned people doing silly little things. Sounds familiar.

~

Literature is more than an opportunity to flex one’s brain muscle.

~

“Fuck history”? Don’t mind if I do!

~

As long as we love hope, we love virtual reality.

~

Those whose work is writing corny sentences and entering line breaks do not have a right to complain about the lack of “skilled labor” in AI art.

~

"Watch my bag for me? Please? I’m just going to the bathroom. Please bro, watch my bag for me? Why won’t you watch my bag for me?"

If I wanted to watch bags I’d carry my own.

~

Everyone looking for their niche with their calculating hunter-gatherer eyes.

~

The meaning of the Narcissus myth was that Narcissus did not know how to handle his beauty, and was indeed beautiful in the highest sense of the term. Narcissists today often aren’t beautiful at all and should really be better students of their master. Make narcissists beautiful again.

~

Daughter: How many albums do you have, Dad?
Me: A lot, too many
Daughter: You should have submitted them to the Grammys
Me: You think I could have have won a Grammy?
Daughter: Yep
Me: Aw, thanks
Daughter: Do you want to win a Grammy?
Me: Maybe, creating is its own reward though, you know what I mean?
Daughter: Olivia Rodrigo has a new boyfriend

~

Going hungry is fine. Have some tenacity. Nothing wrong with a little resonant emptiness.

~

All this craft slop makes me want conceptual art. And I don’t love conceptual art.

~

We find more pleasure in the abstract playing with representations of things more than the thing itself. Only unimaginative brutes prefer the “real”. Virtuality forever! Art, baby!

~

“In Minor Keys” — Simplistic frame. Real composers switch between minor & major many times throughout a composition.

~

“Community” is a word made up in museum boardrooms.
When I hear the word “community” I think, “snake pit.”

~

If art is reducible to “labor”, then artists would then be owners of their business, and there is no guarantee that a business succeeds. Businesses fail all the time. It would be the sole responsibility of the artist to win clients and sustain them through the quality of the work at a reasonable price. It’s not that artists are bad at managing their business, it’s that most don’t even have one to begin with. Few have done their preliminary market research to determine if there’s even a market for their art … (hint: there’s probably not). Since contemporary art has lost credibility with the public ~ and often for reasons that indicate many artists are too incompetent to run a business ~ winning clients is now a bigger obstacle than in other enterprises. If artists are their own business owners, then who exactly are they demanding livable wages from? Themselves? Or perhaps the artists that talk about “labor” are really just demanding to be paid by the state, a truly pathetic orientation that would make any true artist shudder in disgust. Or maybe art isn’t reducible to “labor” at all. 🤔

~

The origin of “slop” is inessential stuff. Superfluous. Unnecessary. “Pseudo-activity” (Adorno). In other words, 99.9% of everything out there that doesn’t actively argue for its right to exist in a world that has no clear need for art, but foolishly assumes its importance. One can protest that society is wrong for this ~ and be completely right ~ while such protests will amount to nothing. In such a situation there is a “tragic need for art” (Nietzsche), but a need which artists must actively clarify. Important artworks bear the mark of their necessity. Are artists interested in doing this ambitious work today?

~

One lens for the patronage problem and how it affects art — Sound artists, “new” music composers, and (allegedly) experimental musicians have failed to build on the ambitious works of La Monte Young and Maryanne Amacher, analogously to how few visual artists have yet comprehended what James Turrell is really doing. These radically American artists who aim to expand the conditions ofaesthetic possibility are still subjected to antiquated European metaphysics or absurd contemporary theory ~ often both, funny how they converge ~ the inadequacy of which has led to foolish misinterpretations and bad practice. But the artists and theorists are not solely to blame, the patronage for such ambitious works has also disappeared since the ‘80s. The support is gone. Instead of patrons committed to the expansion of aesthetic experience ~ e.g. Heiner Friedrich, who would spend countless hours with Young’s music and made ‘land art’ possible ~ we have patrons who merely want to prove they’re not racist or classist, who “altruistically” distribute their funds to a myriad of comparatively status-quo artists (the origin of “slop”), and who then disappear into the dark night of the state on their moral high-horse, thinking they’ve done good. They haven’t done anything at all, actually. Do they even like the work? Is their taste to be trusted at all? What we have today is an art-welfare state shrewdly operated by state-patrons and their art administrators who don’t understand art and are too self-righteous for reflection. Artists fighting like animals elbowing for a place at the polluted community center trough. Wake up, artists, seek the clear mountain spring instead, and lead new patrons there if they can be found. They probably have to be made. One of the lessons of art history is that important art patrons are often not inherently “cultured” art-lovers the way our patrons today pretend to be. Today, the “cultured” are more likely to be an obstacle to new art than a support.

~

Millennial artists will do anything to avoid accountability, self-reflection, and work. I recall my first day of art school in the early 00s, meeting my classmates’ eyes when the teacher informed us that only 1% of us would make it, and each of us silently knowing we were that 1%. They were clear, but ambitious Millennial artists were too delusional to listen, perhaps as we ought to have been. But things change and most Millennials have proven too rigid and petulant to adapt, too entitled to accept a marginal position, too fearful of not being "accepted" by the dominant culture.

~

They say I’m tone-deaf, but they said the same thing about Beethoven and Schoenberg, and they changed music forever.

~