The Friday martini posts continue this week with a photo from Ken Johnson’s photographic series “Ode to the Martini.” Concerning this one, “Friday After Work,” Ken rightly notes:
It is important for the drink to be cold. Not cool, cold.
Sounds right to me. If this doesn’t inspire you to knock off early, then you are way too diligent.
Photo © Ken Johnson. Used by permission.
June 13th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Leisure, Visual Arts |
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This photograph by Arthur S. Mole and John D. Thomas was taken in July 1918 at Fort Dodge, Iowa. 18,000 officers and men posed for the photo, spreading over a quarter mile on the parade grounds. Snopes.com has information on this photo and links to similar photos by Mole and Thomas.
The Iowa National Guard site has more:
According to a July 3, 1986, story in the Fort Dodge Messenger, many men fainted-they were dressed in woolen uniforms-as the temperature neared 105 degrees Farenheit. The photo, taken from the top of a specially constructed tower by a Chicago photography studio, Mole & Thomas, was intended to help promote the sale of war bonds but was never used.
June 9th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Visual Arts |
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The San Francisco Art Institute has canceled its exhibition by Adel Abdessemed called “Don’t Trust Me,” which includes video clips of animals being bludgeoned to death.
“We’ve gotten dozens of threatening phone calls that targeted specific staff people with death threats, threats of violence and threats of sexual assaults,” said Art Institute President Chris Bratton. “We remain committed to freedom of speech as fundamental to this institution, but we have to take people’s safety very seriously.”
The institution’s freedom of speech is not at issue. People still don’t seem to understand that the First Amendment protects them from action by the State; it does not guarantee funding or insulate them from criticism. There are other laws designed to protect people from physical violence and threats.
We can all give thanks that our Founders had a more robust understanding of freedom and the courage to defend it with their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. The institute’s tepid commitment is about as inspiring as its art.
But the Founders probably would not have pledged their lives for the sake of bad art, and we can’t expect the San Francisco Art Institute to risk the safety of its staff on so flimsy a cause. We can, however, expect the institute not to blame its predicament on censorship. The real question is why it scheduled the exhibit in the first place. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Art Institute officials said Saturday that Abdessemed had shot the videos at a farm in rural Mexico that routinely slaughters animals in the way he depicted. They said the videos were part of a social critique. “One of the things this exhibition was pointing to was the difference in production of food resources between industrialized production in the U.S. and in poorer countries,” said Bratton.
But . . .
The show did not mention that the videos were shot in Mexico or provide any historical context.
Perhaps the Art Institute shared this view (the source is unclear):
At once intimate and spectacular, Abdessemed’s work aims to convert the banal into the dramatic. Transforming everyday materials and images into unexpected and sometimes shocking expressions, his inventive gestures, as if by alchemy, work to undo dominant modes of perception and entrenched sociocultural norms—they work, in short, to generate new relevance for radical ideas and actions. Actively defying social, cultural, moral, and religious taboos, Abdessemed contrives to subvert common sense and knowledge, received wisdom, and established biopolitical systems.
“Contrive” is an apt verb. Common sense, knowledge, and received wisdom are indeed subverted here. This shock art was intended to incite, and the San Francisco Art Institute should hardly be surprised when confronted by “radical actions” from people who are not constrained by “entrenched sociocultural norms.” With a little common sense and received wisdom, the institute might have taken a pass on exhibiting an animal snuff film.
I’m all in favor of defending art and freedom of expression, but defending the San Francisco Art Institute would accomplish neither.
April 1st, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Law, Visual Arts |
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That’s the title of the upcoming program at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, exploring “the complex and controversial subject of the relationship between homosexuality, queer theory and queer studies, and the discipline of art history.” Roger Kimball responds:
I hope someone will propound the equally challenging question, namely “How Long Will the Public Put Up With Such Rubbish Masquerading as Serious Inquiry?” That is a conversation I would dearly like to hear.
March 15th, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Visual Arts |
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After being embroiled in the culture wars, the National Endowment for the Arts has lowered its sights and now strives to avoid political controversy. So writes Michael J. Lewis in “After the Art Wars,” Commentary Magazine (Jan. 2008).
The NEA famously sponsored controversial works of visual art in the late 1980s that nearly caused the agency’s demise. When Clinton was elected president in 1992, many in the arts world expected him to defend the NEA from conservatives, but instead the agency steered away from radical projects.
It seems, then, that both Republicans and Democrats had learned the same lesson from the art wars: entanglement with the visual arts could do them no political good, and quite possibly much harm. Whichever party claims the presidency a year from now, this political calculus is unlikely to change.
Lewis reviews the history of the agency, and the artistic climate in which it was created, in order to shed light on its possible future. He contrasts the American and French versions of patronage. The French established academies for the cultivation and rigorous control of state-sponsored art, resulting in high standards and conservative art. “In the meantime, many of what we regard as the fundamental achievements of French art took place outside this elaborate edifice and in deliberate opposition to it.” In America, patronage was concentrated in private hands – Rockefeller, Getty, Vanderbilt – until the Great Depression discredited this plutocratic control of art. Calls to involve the federal government in funding the arts began during the depression.
Lewis also describes how the efforts to create the NEA coincided with an unusual period of formalism in art. “The only period when the utilitarian view of art was consciously suppressed was from the late 1930’s to the mid-1960’s.” Except for this formalist period, the impulse has been “to think of art as justified by the lesson it imparts rather than the pleasure it gives.”
And so the NEA was incubated in this formalist period and hatched at its end in 1965. Its formalist beginning quickly succumbed to the new utilitarianism.
Within a few years of the founding of the NEA, the doctrine of formalism, which had insulated art from any sort of didactic program and instituted a kind of cordon sanitaire between art and politics, collapsed utterly. The Vietnam war, the international upheavals of 1968, the rise of the New Left and the counterculture – all these suggested to many artists that a detached apolitical stance was no longer tenable, and was in fact immoral.
The NEA, lacking a guiding aesthetic principle or coherent national policy, began supporting cutting-edge art, basing its decisions not on artistic merit but on extra-artistic, social content. A pursuit of such policies in distributing tax dollars seems sure to lead to the political disputes that ensued. Many NEA panelists perceived their mission not as supporting the arts, but as supporting putatively disadvantaged artists.
Tellingly, neither the arts community itself nor its liberal constituency has ever defended the NEA on grounds of aesthetic merit. The arguments made on its behalf invariably boil down to a simple proposition: what is good for the arts community – that is, those who make art, exhibit it, and write about it – is perforce good for art.
The NEA has now set the mundane goal of delivering a direct grant to every congressional district. That safe stance may help to insulate the agency from renewed controversy, but it still suggests an absence of any serious policy or guiding aesthetic.
Lewis asks relevant questions about the future of the agency and what role the government should play in promoting the arts. His comments deserve consideration. Any discussion of the NEA’s future needs to examine the role of private patronage and whether government support provides a needed boost. It also needs to consider the aesthetic questions, like whether government dollars encourage serious art in a way that private money cannot or instead skew the arts toward mediocrity.
Government dollars come with government oversight, and the arts community cannot reasonably hope for an arts utopia in which a panel of experts has carte blanche to spend tax dollars on art that has no broad constituency. Whether the NEA can articulate a vision that appeals to a large segment of the public while at the same time setting high artistic standards remains to be seen.
March 10th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics, Visual Arts |
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An exhibition has been closed in Berlin because of threats received over photos deemed offensive to Muslims. “Islamic Threats Shut Art Exhibit.”
The show by Danish collective Surrend is aimed at depicting what they say is the absurdity of extremism in all religions.
One of the 21 photos is of the Kaaba - the cube-shaped building inside the Grande Mosque in Mecca - with the inscription describing the stone as “stupid”.
Apparently the Muslims don’t agree that their holy site is stupid, and the exhibitors fear some Muslims may get carried away expressing their disagreement. Probably most Christians and Jews don’t believe that their holy sites are stupid either. Who knew?
This comes in the wake of Mozart’s opera Idomeneo being canceled in Berlin because it depicted Mohammed’s decapitated head. It also depicted Jesus, Buddha, and Poseidon similarly discombobulated. You needn’t be an adherent of any religion to be offended by such hogwash. Somebody should have cancelled this production merely in defense of Mozart.
But the exhibitors have caved to Muslim threats, and we are left to ponder the lessons. Some Muslims will learn the lesson that the art world is easily intimidated while reminding us that they do not follow Western conventions of civil discourse. What lessons will the artists take? Based on descriptions of the photos in the news, the exhibition presented aesthetically immature art perhaps more suitable to bumper stickers. The artists will surely feel vindicated concerning the absurdity of religious extremism, and then they will probably continue to lampoon Christianity and Judaism while steering clear of Islam. We can be reasonably sure that the lessons they take from this event will not include anything about the extreme absurdity of their own art.
Who ultimately escapes with their reputation unscathed? Not the Muslims, not the artists participating in this exhibit, but the religions with the confidence to rest their case on the testimony of far better artists over centuries of time.
February 29th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Religion, Visual Arts |
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