Modern Kicks

all there is?

Dave Hickey's been receiving some discussion due to the talk he gave last month at the Frieze Art Fair entitled "Schoolyard Art: Playing Fair Without the Referee" (text of it here, podcast here, Callen Bair wrote on it just after it happened, while Ed was on it  last week.)  I don't have much to say about it, and haven't ever had much to say about Hickey, as I must confess that until last, week, I had never knowingly read anything by him.  I had heard a great deal, of course, enough so that when I found myself in late October out in Williamstown to see the Clark's new Fragonard exhibition (about which more to come), I took the opportunity to pick up his well-known and, I gather, highly regarded collection of essays, Air Guitar from the museum's excellent bookstore.  I haven't finished it, so no final discussion from me, and I won't deny I've found some things of interest.  Hickey certainly writes well, if in a style that's a bit dated.  He has a taste for the audacious that, while not as charming as he seems to think it is, does lead him to some fresh takes, as in his essay on Liberace and his museum.  But man . . . the endless namedropping, the straw men, the conflation of culture and society, the tiresome populist posturing--are people impressed by all this, or just willing to overlook it?  Because while I'm not going to say the book's totally worthless, it's not really grabbing me.  I know the essays are a decade or more old now, but c'mon: embracing Las Vegas as a way to kid on the squares was tired even then.  I do give him some credit for acknowledging in the book's title essay that it's all basically wanking, but still: please try to be less of a wanker.

I admit that I might feel differently if I picked up something else by Hickey (I'd like to see his essays on beauty in The Invisible Dragon, for instance.)  And maybe I'll change my mind by the time I finish the book.  We shall see.  I should note that anyone who has a chance to get to the Clark in the coming week should do so, as they seem to have extended the run of the exhibition of their large recent gift of British art to November 11.  I was a little tired by the time I got to it--I've decided for the future that Williamstown is definitely not a day trip--but there's a number of wonderful things, including several Constable cloud studies and other sketches, plus some excellent watercolors by lesser known (at least by me) artists from the same time.  I have to say, however, that viewing the exhibition only edged me along further in the view that the only Turner I like to look at is early Turner.  All those lurid marshmallow smears of later years move me less and less.  Anyway, I should probably listen to the Hickey podcast; hearing his tone might give me a better sense of him . . . or not.

The Big RED and Shiny Annual est arrivé!

Or it will arrivé soon, at least.  The details:

Packed with essays by Jane Hudson, James Nadeau, Marrikka Trotter, Meg Rotzel, Heidi Aishman, Matthew Gamber, Steve Aishman and Matthew Nash, our new book brings all of the great writing about art and culture you have come to expect from our website to your coffee table. And, it's a steal at only $12.

There are two ways you can get your hands on your very own copy:

The most enjoyable is to join us on September 7th, from 6-9, at Axiom Gallery in Jamaica Plain for our release party. Books will be on sale, and you can meet the writers, talk about the great art you've seen over the summer, and check out the Collision Collective exhibition.

-or-

You can order yours online by going to our books page. We're taking pre-orders now, and books will be available after our release party on the 7th.

12 bucks is cheap.  Even I can afford that.  And it should be good reading, with lots of stuff of interest to readers in Boston and beyond.  So go on and order a copy; I just did.  And then you can go check out the new issue.

cultural workers of the world, unite!

"Ours is the first cultural epoch in which many men aspire to high achievement in the arts and, in their frustration, form a dispossessed class which cuts across the conventional class lines, making a proletariat of the spirit."

--Lionel Trilling

noted

- A. O. Scott writes that the new biography of Kingsley Amis offers "tasteful catnip for high-minded voyeurs."

- Porter Wagoner is back, baby.

- Because I didn't link to it the other day, part 4 of Christoph Büchel's statement to the Globe.

- Ken Johnson on what the soaring art market means for public collections.

- Louise Bourgeois interviewed in the LA Times.

Given that Dolly's career had moved on to a very different place by the time I was listening to music (i.e., halfway toward being a joke), I never realized how much Emmylou Harris sounded like the young Parton.

wish i'd thought of that

Like I've always said, you can't be too careful:

"It would be pleasant to follow in greater detail than is possible here the steps of the Greek History toward popularity and authority.  There is for instance a letter by Auguste Comte promising to read it in order to find confirmation of his own theories, though in obedience to mental hygiene he was no longer reading books."

--Arnaldo Momigliano

Madame Bovary, c'est moi

"As more and more people find themselves working at jobs that are in fact beneath their abilities, as leisure and sociability themselves take on the qualities of work, the posture of cynical detachment becomes the dominant style of everyday intercourse.  Many forms of popular art appeal to this sense of knowingness and thereby reinforce it.  They parody familiar roles and themes, inviting the audience to consider itself superior to its surroundings.  Popular forms begin to parody themselves: Westerns take off on Westerns; soap operas like Fernwood, Soap, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman assure the viewer of his own sophistication by mocking the conventions of soap opera.  Yet much popular art remains romantic and escapist, eschews this theater of the absurd, and promises escape from routine instead of ironic detachment.  Advertising and popular romance dazzle their audiences with visions of rich experience and adventure.  They promise not cynical detachment but a piece of the action, a part in the drama instead of cynical spectatorship.  Emma Bovary, prototypical consumer of mass culture, still dreams; and her dreams, shared by millions, intensify dissatisfaction with jobs and social routine.

Unreflective accommodation to routine becomes progressively more difficult to achieve.  While modern industry condemns people to jobs that insult their intelligence, the mass culture of romantic escape fills their heads with visions of experience beyond their means--beyond their emotional and imaginative capacity as well--and thus contributes to a further devaluation of routine.  The disparity between romance and reality, the world of the beautiful people and the workaday world, gives rise to an ironic detachment that dulls pain but also cripples the will to change social conditions, to make even modest improvement in work and play, and to restore meaning and dignity to everyday life."

--Christopher Lasch

more Courbet

In the post below regarding The Most Arrogant Man in France I mentioned it owed something to visual studies and discussions of print culture, and linked to a couple of examples of the social history of art covering the same period to which the book could be considered in some loose sense kin or successor (though not necessarily the same in outlook.)  Given that, it almost goes without saying (but won't) that the recent interpretation Chu takes issue with the most seems to be Michael Fried's.  I don't want to overstate the case; there are readings of particular works that Chu agrees with Fried on, and the book neither offers polemic or extensive methodological debate.  Chu prefers to tell her own story, but she does point out on several occasions where she disagrees with Fried.  More importantly, she notes that her emphasis on Courbet's use of the press as a model and borrowings from literary modes can't help but stand in opposition to any sort of phenomenological (or otherwise) emphasis on Courbet as a painter predominantly concerned with vision and the body.

Balzac on criticism

"'But what about your review articles?' asked Lucien as they drove away to the Palais-Royal.

'Pooh! you've no idea how they're dashed off.  Take Travels in Egypt: I opened the book and read a bit here and there without cutting the pages, and I discovered eleven mistakes in the French.  I shall write a column to the effect that even if the author can interpret the duck-lingo carved on the Egyptian pebbles they call obelisks, he doesn't know his own language--and I shall prove it to him.  I shall say that instead of talking about natural history and antiquities he ought only to have concerned himself with the future of Egypt, the progress of civilization, the means of winning Egypt over to France which, after conquering it and then losing it again, could still establish a moral ascendancy over it.  The a few pages of patriotic twaddle, the whole interlarded with tirades on Marseilles, the Levant and our trading interests.'

'But supposing he had done all that?  What would you say then?'

'Well, I'd say that instead of boring us with politics he should have given his attention to Art and described the country in its picturesque and territorial aspects.  Thereupon, as a critic, I fall to lamentation.  We're snowed under with politics, I should say; it's boring, and we can't get away from it.  Then I should yearn for those charming travel books which explain all the difficulties of navigation, the thrill of winding through narrow straits, the delight of crossing the line, in short everything those who will never travel need to know.  But, while commending them, one mocks at travelers who rhapsodize over a passing bird, a flying-fish, a haul of tunny, geographical points they have spotted and shallows they have recognized.  One puts in a new claim for perfectly unintelligible scientific facts, which are so fascinating like everything which is profound, mysterious and incomprehensible.  The reader laughs--he gets his money's worth.  As regards novels, Florine is the greatest novel-reader in the world.  She analyzes them for me, and I knock off an article based on her opinion.  When she's been bored by what she calls 'literary verbiage' I take the book into serious consideration and ask the publisher for another copy.  He sends it along, delighted at the prospect of a favorable review.'

'Great Heavens!  But what about criticism, the sacred task of criticism?' said Lucien, still imbued with the doctrines of the Cénacle.

'My dear chap,' said Lousteau.  'Criticism's a scrubbing brush which you mustn't use on flimsy materials--it would tear them to shreds.'"

--Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions

Courbet, painting, and the press

Is the field of visual studies growing, or has it failed to live up to its promise?  The signs apparently are contradictory, but I can say that a visual studies approach can be found fruitfully deployed in Petra ten-Doesschate Chu's recently published study, The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture.  Chu, a noted Courbet scholar, editor of his letters and of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, places the artist in the context of the developing nineteenth century French press, the milieu of Balzac's ambitious journalists and backdrop to Flaubert's ironic realist treatments of striving provincials.  Courbet reveled in the world of newspapers, Chu argues: not only was he an avid media consumer and friend and drinking partner to journalists, Baudelaire and Champfleury not least among them, Courbet also looked to manipulate the press to further his career and even drew upon literary and journalistic modes in his paintings.  It's a story of the early days of modern art that has a good deal of contemporary resonance.

literature: it ruins lives

"'It's always the same story, every year the same enthusiastic inrush of beardless ambition from the provinces to Paris: an equal, indeed an increasing number of young men who leap forward, with high head and lofty heart, to their wooing of Fashion, the Princess Turandot of the Thousand and One Days to whom everyone would play Prince Calaf!  But not one guesses the riddle and wins her.  They all fall into the pit of misery, the mire of journalism, the morass of the book-trade.  These mendicants go round like gleaners, picking up biographical articles, 'tartines', news-in-brief columns on the newspapers or else write books bespoken by the shrewd-minded pedlars of scrawl who prefer a piece of nonsense they can sell in a fortnight to a masterpiece which stays long on their hands.  These caterpillars, squashed before they can turn into butterflies, live on shame and infamy: they're ready to bite or boost budding talent at the bidding of some pasha from the Constitutionnel, the Quotidienne or the Journal des Débats, on a hint from the publishers, at the request of a jealous colleague or often in return for a dinner.  Those who get over the obstacles forget the squalor of their beginnings.  I myself spent six months putting the best of my wit into some articles for a scoundrel who passed them off as his own and, on the strength of these samples, was put in charge of a feuilleton; he didn't take me on as a collaborator; he didn't even pay me five francs; and yet, when I meet him I'm obliged to shake hands with him.'

'But why?' Lucien asked with proud resentment.

'Because I may need to get a dozen lines into his feuilleton,' Lousteau coldly replied."

--Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions