Category: Art Theory

Wilfully Naive

Deer Me

On the September twenty fifth, twenty twenty five broadcast of Morning Edition on NPR listeners were once more reminded that the art world is full of those who are at best wilfully naive and at worst dealers in child sexual abuse material or out right pedophiles. I’m talking of course about the interview with Sally Mann. You’re forgiven if you had someone else in mind, there’s certainly enough of them.

To be clear, NPR should absolutely know that a professional photographer publishing and displaying nude (genital inclusive) photographic prints of their own children is detestable.

The argument is the old saw that it’s “art” and anyone offended is ignorant. They even trot out their favorite horse that even Jesus is depicted nude in centuries worth of religious art. Well, let me know when you have a photo of a pre-pubescent Jesus, full frontal nude. Until then keep your sophistry to yourself.

There’s a great many who will defend nearly anything in the name of art. Those who object are ignorant and pedestrian, perverting artistic achievements with their own skewed view. How many times can someone say that anyone seeing something sexual in this or that photo is demented and still believe it? Water drawn up from a bottomless well. Backed into a corner some will eventually admit “it’s complicated”.

It’s not though. We don’t need to talk about intentions, consent, exploitation, the artistic worth of this or that. None of that needs any consideration at all. This is the test. If you have a photo on your gallery wall, that would send a random creep to jail were it to be found on his hard drive, it’s child sexual abuse material. Simple.

The only people who can say it’s not, and mean it, are either clinging to that to avoid recognizing what they are, or those eternally sheltered souls with no experience in the horrors of the real world. Maybe the images are in no way inherently sexual. Maybe there’s consent now that the child has reached the age of majority. Maybe no one’s been arrested, and maybe no one, even I, claim the artist intended to produce child sexual abuse material.

Who though, is seeking out this “art”? Only the critically minded appreciators of fine art? Or will it be admitted that regardless of intent a “product” has been produced that criminal abusers will seek out? Fuck Sally Mann, and fuck NPR for giving her a few minutes behind the microphone.

Is This Why People Doom-Scroll? I’m Here For It!

Deer Me

The popular rise of artificial intelligence, which I feel we should all just admit is not “AI”, has given rise to something awesome: widespread, boarder-line irrational anger. I can appreciate this because I both do not care, and find it hugely entertaining. I guess there’s AI out there where you tell it something like “creepy Victorian child who is frail but also a Dyson vacuum cleaner in the style of Harry Clarke” and it goes out to whatever image collection and language interpretation database it has been trained on and a machine learning language engine algorithm spits out a drawing for you. Let it be known I do not know any of the proper terms, I skip those paragraphs, they’re boring.

Some people do the prompt crafting and enter the result in art competitions, and win. A that causes internet fights.

The argument is usually between a side that says “you didn’t produce this art, it’s not your work, you should not have been allowed into our competition” and the other which says “I had to come up with an idea, and then I had to carefully craft my instructions to the AI to get this image, I made it, it’s art.” Maybe they say they tweaked it some in photoshop. This opposition is great ‘cause someone, eventually, always mentions assistants.

Is this really a Rembrandt or did van Rijn just sign the work of one of his apprentices? Is this really a Koons or did he and the gallerist just get to cash the check? And it gets to be so wild because the fine art market and it’s participants made their choice centuries before Warhol’s factory made it acceptable to talk about, and now all the paint-spattered, charcoal-smeared, my-hand-feels-like-numb-claw, lower-caste artists are solidly rejecting that position. And it’s like, it’s not your fault, but you’re the reason big names in the fine art community even exist. Withhold your artistic labor, your technical skill, and the big names will collapse.

The proletariat doesn’t just own the means of production, they are the means of production.

And people know, but it doesn’t matter because even if 99.99% of the anonymous working artists out there went on strike, a couple hundred people are sure to be willing to bet that this is their chance to transition from nameless assistant to name on the shingle. That could be true to, if they’ve been careful about swiping phone numbers. Seriously, like having the right number is a fine art fundamental. But none of that’s knew.

And not all the threads last long enough to make it to the obvious. When they do though it’s amazing cause you can practically witness both sides just silently mouthing “well… fuck.” See, my position is just make it. Produce. That’s the opposite of consumer culture, producer culture. Like the good stuff that the world is better as a result of, the secret stuff that is created under compulsion because you have to, the terrible stuff that you gotta get out of the way before you get to the real stuff.

Contemporary Art Sucks

Deer Me

If you’ve gone to MoMa or the Tate Modern, hell, if you’ve picked up a recent copy of Art Digest or gotten by clicking about art in Wikipedia you’ve seen some modern art. Chances are you’ve seen it and, even if you didn’t say it you thought, damn that’s terrible. Oh, so and so spent 2 million on it? guess I’ll look again and try and rationalize. Or, maybe you swallowed it whole and just beleive that the capacity to generate a “cost” or end up in a museum or find a space in a gallery is what dictates the worth of an artwork.

So, I just ready Julian Spalding’s Con Art and in a effort to hear a cojent argument against that position I read Susie Hodge’s Why Your Five-Year-Old Could Not Have Done That. I was rather disapointed in both. Spalding just seems to accept that his position is correct and doesn’t need any sort of a defense. Hodge on the other hand give you her position in the title, just as Spalding does, and then proceeds to defend her stance in a way that totally disregards it. A more apt title for her work would have been, “Why The Art World Wont Defend Anything by Your Five-Year-Old.”

Spalding’s argument is something along the lines of, and I’ll paraphrase here, “What the hell is wrong with your morons? None of this is any good!”. Hodge’s is “We can bring all kinds of context to the analysis of this Unmade Bed or Uncarved Block so it’s deffinately worth a bunch of recognition and museum space.” I think their both wrong. I think they’re both looking at the wrong thing. I think this because terrible movies get made all the time and no one has any problem speaking up and saying they’re terrible.

Take Gigli. This is a movie that ends up on all kinds of worst movie ever lists. It had stars who people liked, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, and a budget of $75.6 million dollars. It made $7.3 million. If you invested $11.00 in making it, you got a dollar back on that investment and lost ten. The public at large and professional critics have no trouble at all panning the film. Why desparage Gigli but not the most expensive photo ever sold, a useless, photoshopped travesty called Rhein II?

Well, to sell Rhein II for $4.3 million one only had to briefly convince a few dozen high net worth idiots in an auction house that it was any good. In order to make a profit on Gigli you’d have to convince the public at large. Look at it this way, the fact Gigli got made is proof you can convice a few wealthy people that shit (even if it isn’t canned) is art that’s valuable. That it made no money to speak of is proof you can’t convince the world.

Oddly enough, everyone in the art world probably knows this. Everyone. It’d be hillarious, if it wasn’t so sad.