The comments were pretty pejorative and you said bad things about art critics and the “nouveau riche.” What do you mean you didn’t make a judgment?
I’m uninterested in asking you. I’m sure it does occur. You seem unaware that you have a habit of speaking in big generalities. THAT was the problem I had.
Think it’s bad now? Wait a few years for neopostmodernism.
Oh, wait…
Well, I’d amend that to “being silly,” but your description is entirely accurate; I was aiming at pithy, not exhaustive accuracy.
In 1961 a capacity crowd filled London’s Wigmore Hall to hear a piano concert publicized as “An Evening of Surrealism in Music.” The pianist, a mysterous Hungarian named Thomas Blod, sat at the keyboard for an hour pounding furiously on a piano in which the keys had been disconnected from the strings. A polite but puzzled audience applauded the bold innovator at the end of the performance. One couple me the musician backstage afterwards to tell him they had enjoyed the performance so much because it was so quiet.
Thomas Blod was a fraud. The pianist was actually an antique dealer with a Hungarian accent, an odd sense of humor, and a seething contempt for modern music.
In 1944, Australia’s leading avant garde poetry magazine, * Angry Penguins, * devoted thirty pages to a celebration of the poet Ern Malley. Over the following year, poetry circles in the United States buzzed about Ern Malley and a serious study of his verse by poet Harry Roskolenko appeared in the magazine * Voices. * Because of Malley’s explicit descriptions of sex, Australian authorities declared the 1944 issue of * Angry Penguins * obscene and confiscated it. The poems were defended on the floor of the Australian parliament by none other than T.S. Eliot.
Ern Malley had never existed. The whole affair was a hoax concocted by poets Harold Stewart and James McAuley who had written their bogus poetry with the help of * The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations * and a United States government report on sewage disposal techniques.
In 1964 a reputable art gallery in Goteburg, Sweden, displayed a number of paintings by artist Pierre Brassau whose works were hailed by several of Goteburg’s top art critics. One critic wrote, " Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer."
Pierre Brassau was a chimpanzee in a zoo. A journalist who wanted to make a statement about modern art had bribed the chimp’s keeper to put a brush, some oil paints and a few canvases in the animal’s cage. It isn’t known what the newsman did with the ninety dollars someone paid for one of the paintings.
In Atlanta an artist commissioned to do artwork for the Richard Russell Federal Building was outraged when workmen mistook one of his works for trash and threw it out. The work was entitled * Artist’s Dropcloth * and consisted of a dropcloth smeared with paint. In New York a painting hung upside down for years before anyone noticed. In California a woman stapled her baby daughter’s dirty diapers to a canvas and called it painting. It got rave reviews.
How can such things happen?
Why do so many of our best educated and supposedly most intelligent people fall for obvious nonsense and transparent hoaxes?
In art galleries and museums, in concert halls and recording studios, in publishers’ offices and bookstores, the story of the emperor’s new clothes is repeated every day. Intellectual vanity and the reckless pursuit of novelty are among the greatest curses of our age. Intellectuals are no more immune to the herd instinct than any other group of people, and when the flock starts bleating, most of the intelligentsia will bleat right along. Is there an art lover who doesn’t want to get in on the ground floor of the latest new wave in painting or sculpture? Is there a music lover who doesn’t want to be the first in his circle to praise the latest innovator who’s wowing them in London and New York? And isn’t there always a pitying sigh or an amused snicker for the poor fellow who “just doesn’t get” a minimalist painting or a concerto for harmonica and whoopee cushion?
Much of this strange obsession with transparent nonsense has to do with class snobbery. In earlier times, social climbing was a much more straightforward business. If you had managed to pile up some cash, you simply imitated the aristocracy as best as you could. You polished up your table manners, cultivated a taste for fine food and wine, sent your sons to the university and your daughters to the finishing school. If you were lucky, you married off one of your kids to some poverty stricken nobleman who desperately needed cash and got yourself a title in the family.
And of course, you got into art. What’s the point of having all that cash if you don’t have the leisure to appreciate the finer things in life?
But the industrial revolution changed all that.
Wealth was suddenly so abundant that not even the greediest gaggle of aristocrats and bourgeois social climbers could hog it all for themselves. Wealth no longer conferred social distinction. Who cared that you could own a fancy car and vacation in Paris if plumbers and real estate salesmen could do the same? What did it matter that you sent your kids to college if the farmers and factory workers could send them as well?
It was a social snob’s nightmare–the peasants had got hold of money.
Nobody ever came up with a perfect solution to the problem, but modern art came pretty close.
Tribes need totems, and if you don’t want to be taken for a hardhat or a redneck, you’d be better be damned careful not to share their tastes. After all, the whole point of esthetics is to show that you’re a person of elevated tastes and interests.
So what good is art that just anybody can understand?
Make it strange. Make it incomprehensible. Show you’ve got superior insight.
Get rid of that still life and replace with something that looks like a squid had a miscarriage on a canvas. When the plumbers and real estate salesmen scratch their heads and grimace, smile condescendingly. After all, not just anybody can understand this stuff, right?
And if you’re an artist with good connections, you’ve got it made. If there were clearly understood standards for judging your work, people might find out you’re a hack, and then it’s back to the greeting card company for you. Of course, you’re going to have to do some pretty stomach-churning things–that old bat who runs the art gallery has some pretty revolting erotic tastes, after all–but just think of how good it’s going to feel when you sell your * Teacup with Lavender Ferret * to that loaded bank director. Thirty grand buys an awful lot of champagne and cocaine, you know.
Best of all, you’re an artist (or at least an art lover) and that means you’re not mixed up in all those sordid goings-on at the bank or the law office. You’re above all that. You’re an enlightened soul, and you can sneer at the world’s corruption. You’re above all that. You’ve got it all.
We laugh at trailer park yahoos who send their badly needed money to television preachers. Why do we not laugh at Park Avenue yahoos who spend huge amounts of cash on patent nonsense?
We can argue about modernism and post-modernism and post-post-modernism until the cocaine wears off, but the bottom line is that an awful lot of patent nonsense gets passed off as “art.”
It doesn’t matter if you’ve got money or not. A yahoo is a yahoo. And yahoos with money living in penthouses are yahoos every bit as much as yahoos in trailer parks without money.
That’s a friggin’ outstanding post, with one omission:
add “and philosophy,” and it’s perfect.
Oh, and a reference to Sokal.
One thing that bugs me about post-modernism, besides the stupid name, is how it thinks it’s invented things that are in fact decades, if not centuries old.
Art that’s aware of it’s own frame? Try Don Quixote, where Sancho and the Don spend a lot of the second book discussing and complaining about how they were portrayed in the first book. Art that raises social consciousness? Dickens did a better job describing the lot of the poor than any number of post-modern writers.
To me post modernism is a lot of conceptual smoke and mirrors to justify a lot of mediocre to awful art and lit. While good criticism can deepen one’s appreciation of a work of art, good art apppeals to the naive as well as the learned. While every piece of art has a concept behind it, if it’s nothing but concept it is at best no more than a more or less clever joke.
My favorite comment on post-modernism was in the movie Ghost World when Thora Birch’s art teacher denounces Thora’s charming drawings in favor of a student whose work consists of nothing but a bunch of randomly twisted wire hangars meant to symbolize the oppression of women or something. ( I’m not doing the scene justice. It’s really funny.)
It’s like the old Gary Larson cartoon where one of the cows looks up and goes “Hey! Wait a minute! This is grass!! We’ve been eating grass!!” Only for “eating” say “reading” or “looking at” and for “grass” say “crap.”
“Postmodernism is not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category…a way of operating. We could say that every period has its own postmodernism, just as every period would have its own mannerism,” Umberto Eco, “Postmodernism, Irony, and the Enjoyable.”
*It goes back farther than that. I don’t think you can fully appreciate Euripides unless you realize that his work involved a postmodern-type reaction to the conventions of Greek drama. I assume that the audiences of his own time “got it”, but readers in later centuries often wondered why this guy had such a great reputation. Those deus ex machina endings! At least when the other guys did it they tried to make it seem plausible, and not just some ridiculously contrived happy ending tacked on to an otherwise tragic work…
From Camille Paglia’s recent interview in Salon…
In her own, somewhat cranky way, Paglia is expressing my own feelings about where postmodernism needs to go from here. The difference is, she was never down with it at all. I feel it served a useful purpose, but is inadequate without some blood, sweat, and tears, some grit, some engagement and purpose and meaning.
Paglia says her artistic and intellectual basis is Roman paganism. I share much of that with her, as a Witch of the goddess Cybele. I’m Italian-American too, and the ancient Mediterranean heritage of my grandmothers still has plenty to offer America and the world.
OK – for the present and/or impending period of art/esthetics/philosophy/culture in general, I nominate “cyberzoic”! The Cyberzoic Period! It evokes paleontological terminology, it’s ambiguous, it sounds vaguely ominous, and it’s got “cyber” in it! 
Excellent! I knew I could count on someone from the subgenius to come up with a cool name. Any other contenders?
LonesomePolecat, a lot of postmodern art is crap. A lot of everything is crap–that’s how it’s always been. Most greek tragedy was crap. Led Zepplin were great, but they inspired lots of crappy hair metal. Jackson Pollack was great, but he inspired a whole lot of untalented hacks who just splattered paint on canvas. Duchamp was a super-genuis, but he inspired a whole lot of people to call their good day at the junk sale “art.” But just as Poison and Whitesnake don’t make Zepplin bad, uncreative hacks who glom onto modernism and postmodernism don’t invalidate the entire school of thought.
I’ve got as much problem with postmodern theory as the next guy, but to me the grain of truth and real insight in theory is that the author’s intentions don’t matter nearly as much as we (as artists) hope they do, and if someone sees something in a work of art, then it’s there whether the artist wanted it to be there or not. To me, that does not cheapen art, but is rather an admonition to the artist that if he or she’s got something to say, they should damn well say it clearly. And when you’re creating something, you have to try and get out of yourself and see the other possible interpretations of the piece. You can even purposefully make some or all of your peice ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations, and some of the beauty of the piece is in the way the different meanings play off of each other. Of course, you have to be careful about that or it can lead into the wilderness. Good example: What is Mona Lisa smiling about? Bad example: Look at this shiny thing I found at the junk shop. It’s art!
That also means that some works of art are accidental. The movie Showgirls, for example, has a big following of people who think it’s brilliant parody. I think it’s unabashed hackwork and that the parody is the eye of the beholder. But if they see it there and can defend it intellectually, which they have to great extremes in right here in Cafe Society, then sure, it’s in there. In my opinion, then, it’s an accidental great work of art, but I hate it. But hey, that’s just my opinon, right?
Interestingly, your examples of hoaxes and mocking frauds are actually pretty interesting works of post-modern art. One of the things I like about post-modernism is that it elevated jokes and pranks to high art.