Participatory 'Art' -- Or Legal Entrapment?
Monday, April 05, 2021
"'Something made by an artist' is not a definition of art. A beard and a vacant stare are not the defining characteristics of an artist." -- Ayn Rand
***
The above quote immediately came to my mind when I encountered the following headline from the New York Post: "Couple Accidentally Paints Over $500,000 Artwork."
Obviously, the couple couldn't tell whatever the hell they'd painted over was "art" or the couple had good reason to believe that there was an open invitation to join the fun.
Indeed, one look at the exhibit (at beginning of clip below) indicates that either explanation or both could apply: And, yes, the paint cans and brushes were there and are "considered part of the piece."
Given the widespread belief that art is whatever the hell the artist claims it is, and the near-insistence on "participation" by "the people" in "art" -- regardless of any individual's ability, knowledge, or training -- there are only two remarkable things about this story.
One of these things is that this sort of thing isn't a near-daily occurrence.
The other is that the paper -- a conservative one -- joined the cultural left in making fun of the couple's "cringeworthy" actions.
In better days, such an outlet would have justifiably ridiculed the "artist" and called the museum out for setting its patrons up.
Since these aren't better days, we have to reach back to 1966, when Ayn Rand delivered a lecture on "Our Cultural Value-Deprivation" at Boston's Ford Hall Forum, to hear anything like intelligent commentary pertaining to this episode. She states in relevant part:
There is also the nonrepresentational -- or Rorschach -- school of art, consisting of blobs, swirls, and smears which are and aren't, which are anything you might want them to be provided you stare at them long enough, keeping your eyes and mind out of focus. Provided also you forget that the Rorschach test was devised to detect mental illness.This couple did nothing that self-described promoters of "art" wouldn't have encouraged them to do, and yet they were arrested for "vandalism" and then made fun of by the news media!
If one were to look for the purpose of that sort of stuff, the kindest thing to say would be that the purpose is to take in the suckers and provide a field day for pretentious mediocrities. But if one looked deeper, one would find something much worse: the attempt to make you doubt the evidence of your senses and the sanity of your mind. [bold added]
Consider the frequent howls of protest from the conservative media there are about the "politically correct" word games leftists famously play. How many times has someone been crucified before the media for innocently using a word, after said word was recently deemed unacceptable or redefined or both -- and/or taken completely out of context? This is even worse, because the couple in question did exactly what our cultural leaders have been encouraging them to do.
It is bad enough that the cultural left is in such a position of dominance that something so simultaneously Orwellian and high-schoolish can occur at all. It is worse to see quarters that might once have pushed back joining in.
-- CAV
6 comments:
This reminds me of two artworks I've encountered.
The first supports your point. I remember being in an art museum and seeing three steel plates on the floor. Growing up in a construction family, my first thought was that there was a hole being covered--this is a fairly common way to deal with the fall hazards associated with holes on construction sites. Then I saw the sign saying "Please do not walk on sculpture." Nothing else could have possibly let one know that the piece was art. If you have to put a sign up saying it's art, it's not art!
The second is counter to your point, at least somewhat. In college I was in a friend's room listening to music. A mutual friend came in and put on a CD. They both loved it, but I thought it was horrible. The mutual friend explained that the CD was of music intended specifically for musicians, and consisted of pieces that showcased technical abilities of the musician in question. The two of them--both of whom had music backgrounds, one of whom went on to be a professional musician--were in awe over the music, because being able to do this represented a technical ability far beyond what most ever hope to achieve.
That second story taught me that audience is key to understanding art. Art is, after all, communication, and one's target audience dictates one's communication methods. If your target audience is experts in a particular field--and "art" is a legitimate field to address, like any other--it makes sense that the artwork doesn't appeal to the general public, or in some cases is even incomprehensible to that general public. The artist simply didn't care about making it comprehensible to the general public. In fact, it would be wrong for them to do so, as it would undermine their intent. It's like a talk at a scientific convention--the presenter assumes, rightly, that their audience has a certain level of understanding of the field, and the ignorance of those outside the target audience simply isn't the speaker's problem.
I'm not entirely immune to this myself. I once made a ring that had a void where the stone would normally be. Historically gems were used, not for aesthetic value, but as signs of wealth. By removing the stone from the design and replacing it with a void (filled by the person's finger once the piece is worn), I was saying that a person is worth as much as a gem. I CAN set stones in rings--while I prefer metal working I have done stone-setting--so not doing so was a conscious choice, one that other jewelers saw but which the general public didn't notice.
Obviously not all "modern art" is like this. Much of it (likely most, at this point) is simply lazy. The proper way to go about this is to master the skills, then communicate with fellow experts once one has demonstrated one's expertise. But imitating these people without that deep knowledge is a cheap way to steal some of their glory. Because it's true that experts communicating with each other are often incomprehensible to the uninitiated, third-raters can pretend that incomprehensibility is a sign of depth when in fact it's a sign of incompetence. To return to the science conference analogy, what many artists do is akin to a YouTube conspiracy theorist--making incomprehensible nonsense in the hopes that no one will see that the incomprehensibility is merely a smoke screen. But I think it's worth remembering that not all non-representational art is third-raters trying to appear better than they are. Sometimes the reason it's not comprehensible or appealing is because we weren't the target audience anyway.
Dinwar,
These are both interesting examples, although I don't think your second detracts from my point: A piece that non-artists would not even realize was art, regardless of its merit, should be marked as such if it's being exhibited to people so likely to misconstrue it as to step on it or attempt to participate in it. (That said, I don't think the piece in question qualifies as art.)
Gus
Hi Gus, Dinwar,
I think my favorite example(s) of this phenomenon was when janitors doing their jobs made the esthetically correct decision and threw the 'art' in the dumpster.
There are a couple of examples here.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/8qkvab/a-janitor-threw-away-a-boozy-art-exhibit-thinking-it-was-trash
. . . One of Italy's most prominent art critics, Vittorio Sgarbi, said the janitor "was right" in her assertion that the instillation belonged in the trash. "If she thought it was rubbish, it means it was. Art should be understood by everyone—including cleaners," Sgarbi explained to NBC News. He went on to say, "The fact that the museum could simply pick the pieces from the trash bin and put them back together shows you that wasn't art in the first place."
c andrew
That is hilarious and I like what the art critic said.
I'm not sure I agree that art should be understood by everyone. Again, art is communication, and communication implies an audience. If your audience is "humanity in general", sure, it should be comprehensible to everyone. But if your target audience is a specific group you don't need to worry about whether folks outside that group can comprehend it. The uninitiated shouldn't consider it to be trash, obviously--but I don't think it's fair to say that being universally understood is a diagnostic trait of art.
I agree that everyone should understand that a thing is art, to be clear. If someone genuinely thinks it's trash, the artist has failed. But knowing that something is art, and knowing what the artist was trying to say, are two different things.
Dinwar writes, "I'm not sure I agree that art should be understood by everyone. Again, art is communication, and communication implies an audience."
Along those lines, I remember back in grad school when I was friends with some undergrad music majors. They were arguing one evening along those lines in the usual way about whether popularity has much to do with artistic worth--an artist has something to say, right? so the audience needs to listen to him. But then the more people who like it, the less worth it is likely to have. They had pretty much reached the conclusion unpalatable to themselves as musicians who loved applause that the artist is all and the audience is irrelevant, so they need to take it whether they like it or not. I said something like, "That's very monist of you, but both sides of the coin are necessary, by the nature of the beast. [Sadly, I don't think anyone smiled at the mixed metaphor. --After this I'm less sure how I phrased it:] A message needs both a sender and a recipient. Not all recipients are suited to every message, and it's the sender's decision which recipients to suit her message to." (They were all young women, so the pronoun seemed appropriate to the audience--sender's decision, doncha know.) Dunno if any of them were convinced by it, but I liked it. (I was tempted to add something about how musicians were like telephones in that metaphor and then drive it into the ground, but I decided to be less mischievous than usual.)
The part that made me chuckle about that the most is that I probably had broader tastes than any of them, liking and introducing them to both very modern and very old music that they hadn't heard of. (The first movement of that first work was intended by the composer as a protest against the brutality of WWII and the devastation left in its wake.) I even went through a period of about 6 months many decades ago in which I listened obsessively to serial music; though I'm not a great fan, some of it I still like. (An acquaintance once played the beginnings of two pieces for me and asked me which was tonal. You can look it up if you don't know.) I pretty much agree with this essay, especially this part:
What I propose is that we take 12-tone out of the “Great Monuments of Western Music” bag, and put it in the “Curious Dead-ends of Music History” bag....That way we can talk about 12-tone music as an interesting kind of fixation that composers got themselves into, the way we talk about the rhythmically complex music that happened at the court of Avignon from 1400 to 1418.
Of course, it's often simply dismissed as noise, which it isn't. (There's any number of works I could point you to that are.) It uses all and only the notes of the scale, which are not noise; it just eschews time-tested ways of organizing those notes. At its best it can make for a subtler, more kaleidoscopic feel, but on the whole it just expresses anomie, perhaps ennui.
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