The Old Baudleroo’s The Conspiracy of Art is not on my recommended list. It’s a collection of essays and interviews and sweepings from the postmodern barbershop floor in aid of the thesis that contemporary art is a crock.
I wonder how much time he spent figuring that one out.
“Caveman” fans and the VCA in general know my opinion of piles of dirt on the museum floor. And I’ve even delved into intellectual analyses of piles of dirt on the museum floor. Aside from the fact that he obfuscates virtually every thought with vague language or neologisms when there’s a perfectly acceptable word already, or maybe simply aside from the fact that he happens to be French, a disease that has challenged modern civilization since at least as far back as Mark Twain, the Old B and I don’t necessarily disagree. We like the classical stuff. We see the arrival of Impressionism and the subsequent abstractionists as an evaluation of art as much as (and occasionally more than) the creation of art. The OB writes that Duchamp’s claim that a urinal was a piece of art because Duchamp, an artist, claimed it was a piece of art, has multiple meanings. First of all, it raises the question of if, in fact, art is simply what artists say it is, or is art what someone else (critics? the general public?) say it is. I certainly agree with that as a conundrum of modernity. Secondly, it makes the statement that, at least according to the OB, anything can be art, and that the boundary between art and reality no longer exists. Well, we all know how the OB feels about reality, but in fact, this thinking makes it a little more clear what his general theses are (e.g., Disneyland and reality). In any case, if art is supposed to be something special, connected to some aesthetic sense, transcendent, whatever, at the point where art becomes a toilet, or a toilet becomes art, that transcendence ain’t what it used to be. The real world has impinged/coopted the interior world.
The other great step in modern art, according to the OB, and again, this is standard enough thinking or at least a perfectly reasonable thesis, comes with Andy Warhol. Whereas Duchamp claimed real items were art, Warhol claimed that non artistic items were legitimate subjects of art. Specifically, a room filled with his perfect blown-up copies of Brillo boxes. Throw in Warhol’s mass production of art, and whereas with Duchamp any commodity in the world can become a piece of art, with Warhol any piece of art can become a commodity. Duchamp begins the process of reevaluating what art is on an intellectual level (as compared to the abstractionists reevaluating it on an artistic level) and Warhol completes that process.
The conspiracy of art, meanwhile, is the OB's analysis of what happens after this process is completed. Artists no longer need to have skill or talent, they only have to claim that they're artists, and we as consumers of art, or critics, or whoever, in accepting or validating this claim, are in cahoots with these yabbos. Art is dead, or at least it sucks, because we don't know what it is anymore (in the Kantian aesthetic sense, say, although the OB doesn't cite the Kantster). Art is what whoever is saying what art is is. (Is that a real sentence? Maybe I've become OBish!)
Anyhow, this book probably costs about twenty bucks. I have now summed it up for free, and saved you a lot of agony. Thank you notes are not necessary. I live to please.
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