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Show Mode Mega-Roundup
Journal entry for 18 Oct 2010 | Link
I'm in show mode. Works are piling up. The to-do list is growing to frightful lengths. Today's journal entry shall be a great dumping of links, articles that have caused thoughts to percolate somewhere in the back of my consciousness as more pressing needs dominate the foreground. I shall also clear a backlog of reader mail. At the end there will be cat pictures.
Clive Head at the National Gallery
Michael Paraskos has sent word about Clive Head: Modern Perspectives, newly opened at the National Gallery, London.
In his paintings Head attempts to create an alternative universe that looks uncannily like our own world, but is spatially very different from it. His starting point is always to stand in a specific location, such as the entrance to a London Underground station or an unassuming coffee shop, where he will gather information by sketching, photographing and simply experiencing the scene. But the end point is never to recreate an image of that location, it is to invent an artificial world that convinces the viewer of its reality. This sets up a complex relationship in Head's paintings, between their resemblance to somewhere we might know, like a London street, and Head's insistence that we are in fact looking through a framed 'window' at another reality.
The primary difference between Head's painted realities and the reality of every day life lies in the way they define space. Head does not present a vista or view like a camera, he shows an entire environment, and if we were to try to replicate seeing one of his environments in real life we could not do it by visiting the location and simply looking straight ahead. Instead we would have to look ahead and simultaneously to our extreme left and extreme right, up and down as far as our heads could go, and even behind us. At the same time we would have to walk around the location, peering round corners, and experiencing the passage of time. Head's paintings are in effect more like the record of a living human body wandering around a location, rather than a static snapshot of a part of it. Consequently his work most closely resembles a movie camera panning around a scene, but the closest painting equivalent is in the multiple viewpoints, shifts of scale and games played with time seen in a Cubist painting by Picasso or Braque. Unlike a shattered Cubist image, however, Head uses a realist language of painting to render his experience into something coherent and whole. This places Head at the forefront of contemporary aesthetic theory and practice, as he seeks to reinvent painting for the twenty-first century.
Paraskos wrote the accompanying monograph. I am likewise coveting his treatment of Herbert Read. He tells me that Read enjoys a prestige among British modernists akin to Clement Greenberg, and his work informed the establishment of what he and Head are calling The New Aesthetics.
Inbound #5
The #5 issue of Inbound, the anthology of the Boston Comics Roundtable, is now available via the BCR website. As previously mentioned, this issue includes my story "Django and Pesto" as well as a great lot of excellent comics work.
Leaf and Signal and Ever More Victory
Laura Parsons writes; yours truly gets a mention.
This month, Craghead brings together an international group of like-minded artists for the exhibition, “Leaf and Signal,” at The Bridge. Consisting of original works and pages printed from computer files, the show’s artwork comes from books self-published by three individual artists and three collectives, who practice what Craighead calls “lo-fi” publishing. A few of the pieces are framed, but most— and there are hundreds— are plastered to the walls using wheat paste to create the feeling of street art.
Money and Academia
Jacob Weisberg doesn't care for Peter Thiel's plan to pay entrepreneurial college students to drop out.
It should be noted that Thiel has also supported some genuinely good and useful causes, like the Committee to Protect Journalists. But Thiel's latest crusade is his worst yet, and more troubling than the possibility of an unfrozen caveman venture capitalist awaking in the 22nd century and demanding his space capsule. The Thiel Fellowship will pay would-be entrepreneurs under 20 $100,000 in cash to drop out of school. In announcing the program, Thiel made clear his contempt for American universities which, like governments, he believes, cost more than they're worth and hinder what really matters in life, namely starting tech companies. His scholarships are meant as an escape hatch from these insufficiently capitalist institutions of higher learning.
(Thiel is a fascinating guy, a gay billionaire at the far fringes of libertarianism with an interest in seasteading. One looks back and forth in bewilderment between his immense fortune and his hemorrhaging mutual fund.)
Meanwhile, at the other end of the economic spectrum, adjunct professor Jeremy Dehn punches a hole in the for-profit schools.
Teachers at for-profits are paid less, and work more. Full-time instructors teach up to four times as many classes as their state school counterparts. And although nobody teaches only for the money — I gross just over $30,000 a year, summers on, no benefits — I earn 50 percent to 65 percent more at nonprofits. I try to treat both jobs with the same seriousness, but I’d be lying if I said this was always the case.
The business model of for-profit schools may pay off for shareholders — just ask Goldman Sachs, which controls a third of the parent company of my for-profit employer, the Art Institute of Colorado — but it clearly isn’t as effective at educating students.
Maria Bustillos follows up in an article that manages to aggregate some interesting data despite the cloying prose.
The General Accounting Office reported on August 4th on an undercover investigation that revealed the widespread fleecing of students in order to grab a staggering amount of Federal money: $24 billion in loans and grants provided by the Department of Education in 2009 alone.
The success of the for-profit schools hinges on the availability of federal student loans, and it's lost on Bustillos that this is a prototypical example of corporatism.
Dan Edelstein, professor of French at Stanford, suggests a heresy in the form of basic economics.
It has by now become received wisdom: college students today are less interested in traditional subjects, and have become more professionally oriented. They’ve voted with their feet, choosing business, pre-med, and engineering majors over German, art history, or comparative literature. Clearly, it’s in the zeitgeist. Unfortunately for humanities professors, however, lower enrollment can translate into the elimination of entire departments: just ask German professors at the University of Southern California. But what’s to be done? The client is king, and students are our clients in higher education. The only problem with this logic is that universities in fact bear a considerable responsibility for the brain drain away from the humanities. By raising the cost of education to stratospheric levels, we oblige students to seek a higher return on their investment. It is this sort of economic calculation, I suggest, and not some alleged generational change, that is driving students in droves towards preprofessional degrees.
Garde Duty
Alan Pocaro checks in.
Notions of the avant-garde or the cutting edge in visual art in 2010 are problematic to say the least. Despite the fact that there has been no true avant-garde in art for decades or more, artists, galleries, and centers of contemporary art are still obsessed with conceptions of the "new" and seem incapable of appreciating anything that extends past the latest transgressive 23 year old. As far back as 1917 Duchamp demonstrated that literally anything can be viewed in an aesthetic context. (Game, set, match, can we move on now?) Continuing to suggest or title an exhibition based on a "leading edge" mentality in an artistic ecosystem as delicate as Cincinnati's is a dangerous business.
In Defense of Naïve Reading
Clearly, poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no a priori reason to think that they could be suitable objects of “research.” By and large they were produced for the pleasure and enlightenment of those who enjoyed them. But just as clearly, the teaching of literature in universities ─ especially after the 19th-century research model of Humboldt University of Berlin was widely copied ─ needed a justification consistent with the aims of that academic setting: that fact alone has always shaped the way vernacular literature has been taught.
CSI Rural Ontario
There has been a new development in the mystery surrounding the death of Tom Thompson in 1917.
Jimmy Stringer had lived most of his 72 years at Canoe Lake and claimed to have once painted with Thomson when he had been staying with relatives in the park and Thomson, then serving as a fire ranger, had visited.
The elfin Jimmy – tiny, but with large hair the colour of the snowbanks melting below in this early thaw – had come to town to pick up supplies and go on a bit of a late-winter bender. He was into a second bottle of Brights President sherry – then $2.20 a bottle – and well into his reserve of Tom Thomson tales when he mentioned the shinbone.
Reader Mail
More material has arrived concerning the neurological activity of art.
There's a great line in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition which has me thinking about the level at which art works:
You 'know' in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things.
This may not be literally true. Wikipedia says, "Some scientists have suggested that the concept of the limbic system should be abandoned as obsolete, as it is grounded more in transient tradition than in facts." The nucleus accumbens may be responsible instead. But it is intriguing.
Another reader on Thom Collins.
Mr. Collins's resume is hardly that of a heavy-hitter. It's not that MAM deserves better, but he's not exactly up to its pretensions, or its supposedly on-track "world class" new museum building, which has been its principal preoccupation for quite some time.
In an interview I read of him, he says all manner of correct things, as indeed he must, and he both flatters and propositions the local "major" collectors to get on board with the new and ostensibly improved MAM. It's all excruciatingly predictable. But maybe I'm being too pessimistic. Maybe the new place will turn out to have a really great cafe to hang out in and discuss the latest trendy trends. Oh, and discuss the art, too, such as it may be. Lots of discussion. Ad nauseam. Looking, not so much. Besides, it's unlikely there will be much actually worth seeing.
Another reader:
I recently made friends with a guy who works as a painter for Jeff Koons. I found out that Koons hires an enormous staff in order to do his paintings. From what my new friend told me, Koons gets an idea for combining various images from pop culture, he hires some graphic artists to design the collage, and then he hires a team of painters to paint the design, blown up to enormous proportions. A team of ten may work on the painting at full-time hours for an entire year before it's done. Koons then signs it at the bottom, and sells it for several million dollars.
Yesterday I got into a debate about this whole practice with another friend of mine, who is an art curator. This seems to me to be an entirely new phenomenon in the history of fine art: that one could merely have the idea, then outsource all the work to other people, and yet still take all the credit and make tons of money from it. (Koons has a staff of around 100, thus he can produce about 12 of these paintings a year. He also does sculpture, of course.) My art curator friend said that this is how things have always been, and I would know it if I "really knew my art history." He gave the example of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, and having assistants help him. I conceded that that would be possible given the enormous size of the task. But later I did a little research, and found that in reality Michelangelo's assistants just helped with things like ladders and mixing paint. Only rarely would he allow one of them to paint a small section, like a cloud or something.
I asked my friend for other specific examples from history. He didn't give any, but just said, "Oh no, the idea of artistic 'branding' is very familiar, this is nothing new with Koons. You just don't know your art history." That may be, I would just like some evidence.
I replied:
You're right, and your curator friend is wrong.
If you look at the traditional painting workshops, they were all headed by artists who could masterfully execute any part of their pictures. Contracts with the shop of Rubens, for instance, specified that a certain portion of the painting would be executed by the master and the rest by assistants. The ratio of the former to the latter determined the price. Remember too that before digital media, "coming up with an idea" meant drawing it. Some artistically helpless noble might have wanted Raphael to paint him a St. George, but that's as far as conceptual input ever went. It was up to Raphael to envision the knight and the dragon and the scene of their battle.
Those workshops barely survived into the 1800s. By then it had become clear to the early modernists that the workshops were prone to producing impersonal, stilted canvases. They abandoned the practice and went back to painting everything themselves.
Branding, before 1900, was something you did to a cow using a hot iron. Producing a stylistically consistent painting from a workshop of assistants required enormous levels of skill and taste throughout the process, and it's not an accident that Bellini's workshop produced Titian, or that Perugino's produced Raphael. Koons more closely resembles Raphael's patrons than Raphael. Your curator friend doesn't know his art history, and you may tell him I said so if you like.
Cat Pictures
As promised. We pulled a tree down, and the cats are taking full advantage of new sun in the yard even as opportunities to do so wane with the advancing fall.
