1. The artist Piero Manzoni sold cans of "Artist's Shit" as
Today Manzoni's canned shit enjoys a place of honor in the prestigious Tate Art Museum in London. I've been unable to locate a single work by the eleven realists at the Tate, but I'm displaying their work today on the equally prestigious IllustrationArt blog.
In an exhibition of paintings called “A Realist View” at the National Arts Club, the eleven questioned whether the new so-called freedom of modern art was an improvement. They wrote, “This freedom from obligation has resulted, very largely, in an impoverishment of the artist’s imagination, not an enrichment of it.” New York Times art critic Emily Genauer described the eleven as "the new rebels."
For a century modern artists had prided themselves on being rebels against the establishment. Post-impressionists, cubists, fauvists, futurists, surrealists, modernists, dadaists, orphists, expressionists, abstract expressionists, conceptual artists, and pop artists (quickly followed by op artists, postmodernists, neo-expressionists, minimalists, color-field artists, graffiiti artists, installationists, performance artists, earthworks artists and assorted other types) have all enjoyed their time in the headlines. By 1961, "rebellion" was commonplace. But Genauer asserted that the eleven were "the most rebellious of all the new rebel art groups around today."
The eleven artists were committed to realism, but they wanted to show how reality, when perceived through different eyes, could be original, diverse and fertile.
Artist Burt Silverman painted psychologically insightful pictures. He didn't speak in symbols or concepts. As Auden wrote, "God must be a hidden deity, veiled by His creation."
Contrast Silverman's brand of realism with Harvey Dinnerstein's allegorical mural representing the parade of the 1960s:
Dinnerstein painted it in a sharply realistic but fantastical style, very different from the work of the others.
Daniel Schwartz explored bold colors and patterns in his work:
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| "Epiphany" by Schwartz |
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David Levine worked very differently, with a powerful graphic style
67 comments:
On the last thread, anonymous argued;
”You might not like destabilization of metanarratives, skepticism towards traditional structures and institutions, complicated levels of irony, alternative facts, cultural fragmentation, fake news, strange loops, reality television etc etc but that does not nullify their existence.“
What postmodernists have failed to do is demonstrate anything particularly unique about our time in relation to those matters. We need not “nullify” that which is historically unremarkable.
If anything, we live in a period of considerable epistemic consolidation. Unlike the great debates of Rome (Quot homines, tot sententiae: traditional pagan religions, the endless number of absorbed foreign cults, Judaism, Aristotle’s unmoved mover, Platonism, ad infinitum), our own debates about reality are comparatively minor. Today, disputes of that kind are almost entirely relegated to Gods of the gaps where science does not yet reach, regardless of the faith of the parties. That is a comparatively small matter. This is because we agree about the truth more, not less. That is progress.
Compared with the political debates of any other era, our biggest questions are almost comically small (though mentally ill extremists are just as volatile as ever). Should people pay for medicine directly out of their own pockets or through taxes? I suspect the fervor with which we argue that point would garner an amused chuckle from de Maistre and Rousseau, who contended with far more fundamental disagreements.
Our news is more trustworthy than at any prior time in history. Compared with the complete media blackout of FDR’s disability, our press’s own failures (e.g., in covering the Biden laptop) are far less total. And compared with the “fake news” of the Middle Ages (“No really, our victory was heralded by angels”), such failures are trivialities.
And again, those trends in no way change or diminish the sincerity with which we tell our children “I love you,” so it is still completely unclear why they should affect the sincerity of our art.
If anything, we live in a period of considerable epistemic consolidation.
Agreed, especially as far as the hard sciences are concerned.
(Fukuyama was undeniably mistaken in his estimation of history, but some principle of cultural evolution must be at work - and we might as well call this process progress, even though it is directionless.)
Still, consider this in contrast to the number of people who do not trust the science of climate or vaccines. Consider the fragmented hyperreality of mediation, the sheer surplus information overload available through an overwhelming amount of channels. On a communal level, people are no longer experiencing a shared reality - at least less so than 60 years ago
But this can (and hopefully will) change, even though also this moment in time will be forever.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
If anything, we live in a period of considerable epistemic consolidation. Agreed, especially as far as the hard sciences are concerned.
If by epistemic consolidation in the hard sciences one means that many eminent physicists now acknowledge (publicly or otherwise) that science, in order to function as such, does not concern itself with meaning and it has therefore been a long held delusion to conclude that there is no meaning behind what it it is dealing with, then yes, I would agree that epistemic boundaries are being recognised.
The excitement of the new is difficult to resist. Art that surprises us with unexpected valuations of things can always be titillating for a while. "The cult of the new" has seduced many artists to race for the new and different, as if novelty itself is a virtue. But the point here is that there can be more vitality in realisms than in many of the most far flung experiments of postmodernism.
The question to ask yourself David, is, could there be an ontological reason behind why that is?
On a communal level, people are no longer experiencing a shared reality - at least less so than 60 years ago
I disagree. People today have less diversity of mind than ever before.
It was once very common that if you brought together five random adults, each would be hyper-fixated on and knowledgeable about entirely different subjects. One might be a yachting aficionado of 20th-century military biographies, another a theosophist Egyptologist from Queens, another an asthete and student of fine cooking in the French Quarter, another a Dust Bowl survivor fascinated by dime-store romances, and another a fox-hunting Pennsylvanian deeply interested in the Brandywine painters.
Because they would have consumed entirely different books, steeped in extremely localized culture and lore, they would have absorbed very different ways of thinking. Their worldviews would diverge in the deepest ways imaginable. The reader of 20th-century military history would see the world in a way utterly unlike the French-cooking enthusiast, who in turn would see it differently from the Egyptologist. For them to interact meaningfully, they would need to expend real effort to build bridges between their distinct worlds.
Now, the diversity of realities has collapsed. If you bring together five random adults today, they are very likely consumed by the same popular topics and have probably just consumed the same media. As I walk around my office, nearly everyone is focused on yesterday’s minor events, the same memes, and the same viral conversations. In the lunchroom, I hear a replay of the same conversation I read in the comments on Instagram that morning, which then becomes the editorial on The View the following week, which then turns into slogans and T-shirts the following month.
From where I stand, our reality has never been more shared. Believing that our minor disagreements about vaccines or global warming are somehow exceptional is mere recency bias.
A survey of the history of science shows that considerably greater disagreement about fundamental scientific questions was once the norm. The fact that science today is sufficiently settled that our primary disputes are whether vaccines have an acceptable risk–reward balance, or whether anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the primary driver of the 0.42% Kelvin change in global average temperatures, reveals just how narrow those disagreements actually are when compared to those of the past.
And again, I will repeat my core argument a third time, "Those trends in no way change or diminish the sincerity with which we tell our children “'I love you,' so it is still completely unclear why they should affect the sincerity of our art."
The portrait of the painter in the scarf is my favorite Silverman piece. In my view it would stand side by side with anything by any of the greats: Velazquez, Orpen, Sargent, Repin, Rembrandt, or Fechin. The curly head of hair alone would repay hours of scrutiny by any artist.
Many years ago I purchased an instructional VHS of him painting a portrait. And there was a lot to learn in it, but what you couldn't learn was his special brush touch and his taste. Which is all his own.
Painting is touching.
Overall I can appreciate how skepticism towards art inspired by the analysis initiated by the French nerds follows logically from skepticism towards the analysis. If you don’t believe, for instance, that a substantial cultural loss of metanarrative has occurred in the West, then why would art that seeks to reflect this interest you?
But I, perhaps not so unsurprisingly, disagree with this reading of history. It reminds me of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature which runs along similar lines as Francis Fukuyama. I think they were both wrong.
It is analogically equally as reasonable to claim that neither the aesthetics of Kant nor the ethics of Nietzsche did anything to diminish the sincerity with which we tell our children “'I love you' or somehow followingly have a substantial impact on culture and art.
Your argument makes sense - I just do not accept the validity of the premises.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Richard wrote: "Compared with the political debates of any other era, our biggest questions are almost comically small."
To the contrary, we are living in an era when, for the first time, we have the ability to extinguish all life on earth. As Arthur Koestler wrote, beginning in 1945 we were no longer living in the era "A.D." or "C.E." but "P.H." (post Hiroshima). The ability to trigger the end of life on earth is spreading into more and more unreliable hands. Short of that, we can trigger the greatest massacres in all of history with bio-toxins or poison gas, or just using new technologies improved since the era of concentration camps. Then there's the question of the repressive governments that will be necessary to forestall those disasters, or the budgetary choices necessary to colonize other planets before life on earth is destroyed. Or the question of how we use CRISPR and similar inventions to rewrite what human beings are. Rome, Athens and Jerusalem never had to confront such issues.
David, the use of the term 'ARC' (Art Renewal Center) has often been used on your blog in the past (and recently, in the last 2 posts) in a disparaging way, with a kind of built-in-assumption that anyone reading knows what is wrong with ARC type work.
Yet, with the exception of the Levines, these could all fit comfortably on the ARC's 'living artists' page, if they were young or mid-career today:
https://www.artrenewal.org/LivingArtist/Search
Indeed, Jeremy Lipking, who you and Kev both chose as an exemplar of modern excellence two posts ago, is on that very page (above).
(my post above)
Postmodern Anonymouse wrote: "Agreed, especially as far as the hard sciences are concerned."
The hard sciences became considerably less hard when the intuitive Newtonian universe was replaced by the quantum universe. Today we wrestle with fundamental issues such as multiverses, perfect entropy and the heat death of the universe.
It's true that we've had technological consolidation, but even that seems to be capped, at least in the US, as superstition, anti-empirical and anti-science sentiments ascend, and health science is put under the control of a witch doctor.
chris bennett wrote: "The question to ask yourself David, is, could there be an ontological reason behind why that is?"
First of all, my apologies for revising that paragraph before I realized you had commented on it. I wrote this post on my cell phone from a mountain in Utah, and pretty much mangled its formatting. When I got home to my laptop, I refined the post, especially the end.
As for your point, I'm not sure there's a singular ontological reason for this. We have predispositions in both directions; there are reasons we are drawn toward exciting new changes but we also need to guard against the safety and security of traditions. I like the way Beryl Markham, a pioneering woman pilot, put it in her 1942 book, West with the Night: "Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.”
I think the bottom line is that there is abundant junk within traditional realism and avant garde explorations, so there is no abiding stay for us at either extreme. We're never relieved of our obligation to try to view art with fresh and discerning eyes.
Dunno what ol' Bob's been up to since he took over, but american 'health science' - as practiced by your addictive prescription-happy doctors - is rightly abhorred by health professionals across europe (though there are a few malpractising miscreants here who endeavour to ape what they see across the atlantic. And the evil of 'transing' non-sterotypical kids - who have had an adult fetish projected on them so adult fetishists can pretend it's not a fetish - is a concurrant evil, though one which is thankfully being dismantled across jurisdictions).
Mass opiation of communitues....little kids put on psych meds....no f'cking thanks. America was an outlier on covid vaccines, too, btw; if that's you're gripe with Kennedy. Whatever about his former/current? stance on vaccines generally, kids were at no risk from covid without comorbidities. The US reported 500 child deaths, yet even the most draconian countries elsewhere in the world had none. The UK government put the chance of a healthy child either dying or suffering serious health consequences from covid at 1 in 2 million. Everyone - professionals, not rabble like myself - has called bullshit on the US figures. If you'd like, though, I can provide you with limb-losses, thousands of heart conditions, the deaths of several healthy teens and twenty-yr-olds, plus, for good measure, a healthy ten year old who took a heart attack, all caused by the various vaccines (several of which were banned for using on the young when these effects were confirmed, while still being doled out state-side). But this isn't a political blog, apparently. Or a scientific one...
Nice pictures.
Bill
Painting is touching
Ha! I've been thinking a great deal about that very thing for many months now. William Coldstream, founder of the Euston Road School whose influence continues through generations of artists, was asked what aspect of painting he considered to be the most important. He replied with one word; "Touch".
It seems to me Kev that touch is the active manifestation of what the artist believes the paint to be standing for. The interface between imagination and its physical realisation. And I'm cautiously coming to believe it has something to do with the very foundation of composition itself.
I think that's how most people feel about your own declamations and the weird, embedded a-priori assumptions they rely on but no-one shares.
[Errata - 1 'you're' < 'your'.....2 'simultaneously, ie - without currants' /B]
(And not the 'makes sense' bit, obv. Bill)
Chris,
I guess I think it is first the aspect of love. The love of what you are making and what you are depicting, the great privilege of having the ability and time to craft something beautiful, into which you may pour your heart and soul.
I see it as similar to the caress of a loved one, or a beloved pet sleeping on your lap. You appreciate the contours and the texture as the outer manifestation of something deeper.
Since the touch of a brush is also, of course, producing illusory effects - like motion, form, atmosphere, and texture, and relations, I agree it is also compositional, expressive, and method of identify subject and objects.
Those aren’t “political questions” in the postmodernist meaning collapse sense that Anonymous and I were discussing.
There is no collapsing consensus about whether we should blow up the entire earth with nukes. If anything, the existence of nuclear weapons has rapidly created consensus on a host of issues that were previously open to vigorous debate. Across the political spectrum, there is now broad agreement that conflict carries extremely high risks and that unnecessary wars must be avoided at all costs.
CRISPR (and gain of function research) has also driven rapid consensus building. Where there was once considerable debate about whether we should be cautious in the types of science we pursue, there is now stronger agreement than ever that certain kinds of research, when conducted without safeguards, pose a genuine threat to the survival of our species.
Obviously "ARC" is being used as a shorthand for the modern cosplaying of 19th century atelier life, and the concomitant belief that great work will somehow arise through dedication to prolonged exercises in life drawing and model sessions. The result of the belief in myths garnered piecemeal from old texts. And some fears about the reality of inherent talent.
"ARC" very much appreciates and wants more Burt Silvermans and Jeremy Lipkings. But (the implication is) they may not be quite on track as to how those fellows actually happened. None of the greats were obedient wallflowers, they weren't schooly or hive-minded. They were playful and yet weren't playing around; the opposite of the atelier cosplayer.
The hard sciences became considerably less hard when the intuitive Newtonian universe was replaced by the quantum universe. Today we wrestle with fundamental issues such as multiverses, perfect entropy and the heat death of the universe.
It's true that we've had technological consolidation, but even that seems to be capped, at least in the US, as superstition, anti-empirical and anti-science sentiments ascend, and health science is put under the control of a witch doctor.
Having a hard time seeing what art point you’re making here. Is this to mean that you agree with Anon that a shared reality is collapsing, and so, artists must discount all authenticity in their work?
Laurence John and Kev Ferrara-- regarding the Art Renewal Center and Jeremy Lipking: an artist is not responsible for the kind of people who like his work.
My personal view of ARC is that any organization that is incapable of distinguishing between the talent of a Lipking and that of a robot like Nelson Shanks has no business getting as angry and militant as ARC has been. Its chairman, the overheated Fred Ross, used to rail against the "conspiracy... to malign and degrade the reputations" of realistic artists using "pathetic lies and distortions." Whoa. Time to unload and spend a little more time with your eyes open.
David,
Jeremy Lipking is on the ‘living artists’ list. I’m assuming he’s given his approval since an 'affiliated artist' requires an application procedure to be listed on that page.
https://www.artrenewal.org/LivingArtist/Search
"During this same period, astrophysicists discovered that the increasing speed of the expansion of the universe will eventually rob the universe of all life, heat and meaning. Unless its trajectory changes, The future universe will be one in which even subatomic particles will no longer cohere, and matter will dissipate into a formless sea of entropy."
Nobody has any idea what the "fate" of the universe will be.
Mainly because, as Leonard Susskind and his friends have said on occasion, nobody actually understands quantum mechanics or its connection to general relativity. Or the origin of the universe. Susskind recently revealed that Richard Feynman had remarked to him that he'd found Quantum Mechanics so confusing that he has no idea if any of the math is correct or not.
Nobody understands the connection between time and space, between quantum and general relativity, nobody understands dark matter, nobody understands black holes - or even gravity really - nobody knows what is beyond our ability to see, nobody understands the microwave background radiation, nobody understands how or if or why our universe began, nobody knows if string theory is right or wrong, or if Bohm had it right, or if the anthropic principle or human consciousness or perception limitations throws off everything. Or if it's all just computation. Or a simulation. And so on.
A little epistemic humility and some healthy skepticism of scientific absolutism in the face of massive uncertainty and ignorance will relieve you of the burden of worrying about extinction some 33 billions years hence.
"The reports of our imminent heat death have been greatly exaggerated" ~ Quark Twain
Today we wrestle with fundamental issues such as multiverses, perfect entropy and the heat death of the universe.
Such matters are, in a sense, practically indistinguishable from concepts found in religious eschatology. Like notions of heaven and hell, they comfort and frighten children and the child-like at bedtime, and primarily function as metaphors in the day-to-day of most thinking adults. But the science behind it, like the science of microcircuitry, microwave ovens, GNSS and clothing made of oil seems (I’m no scientist) to be grounded in physical reality in some sense that the social sciences are not.
One of the complications revealed by the analysis of the French nerds, is the dissolution of barrier between the hard and soft sciences. The result? Everybody’s a scientist now. Comment sections are full of people who have their own «theories», and seemingly demand to be taken seriously on the grounds of their addiction YouTube-videos.
Contemporary tendencies towards anti-intellectualism and witch doctorism are not reactions against postmodernity, they are symptoms of postmodernity.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"Contemporary tendencies towards anti-intellectualism and witch doctorism are not reactions against postmodernity, they are symptoms of postmodernity."
Nothing nearly so arcane.
1.Science or portions thereof are used for political of financial ends.
2.Ideologies or ambitions develop their own systems of meaning/anti-meaning that demand others see through the same lens if their validity is to hold.
Both try to occlude the any part of the world they can't be fit with their own stage-scenery and canvas sky. Often making them indistinguishable from the worst kinds of programmatic politico-religious movements.
People, either through knowing things verifiably at odds with what they're being told - or recognising the pseuds in the intellectual pretenses - see the stars through the canvas that's been rolled over them.
Or they believe they know, or they have their own competing system or stage-sets.
And they react against it.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, new or 'postmodern' about it.
The 'validity of your premises' is just another iteration nobody's signed up to outside of dodgy academic and political cults.
Bill
Plus, the prediliction of many of these people would suggest french-nerds < french-paedophiles, as it seems the more statistically notable characteristic. And there are, I'm sure, many french nerds studying occitan troubador verse, or collecting stamps, innocent of it all.
If a noted german physicist had been also a national socialist, his work presumably should be unscathed and stand on its merit. If he were not a physicist, though, but, say, an ethnologist, it will suggest some caution in approach.
So, when numerous senior figures in the rogues gallery of 'postmodernists' with convoluted systems announcing the loss of meaning and resultant moral relativism sign their names to petitions demanding doing away with age-of-consent laws, or spend their leisure hours molesting kids in Tunisian graveyards (and lecturing their students on the permissability of same), it should at the very least raise an alarmed eyebrow with regard to the foundations of their 'premises'...
Bill
We were shown a VHS of Silverman painting a portrait of a man in glasses when I was in art school, might have been the same one. The thing that struck me the most was how utterly fearless he is with a brush. Not a moment's hesitation in drawing and painting over something he'd done, using or dispensing with any of the rules that we were being taught at the time.
Had a look to see if there were any parts of the video online, instead found this of Burt Silverman talking about the group of artists and the time referred to in David's post, above-
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FtNjYYcsknY&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD
Bill
Something of a shaggy dog story or two.
First, as a welp, I loved Levine's drawings in New York and the New York Review of Books. (In the latter case, I started getting bored when the reliance on photos became too obvious in the work. But before then, his caricatures of Johnson and Nixon, oy, a bunch of classics.)
Based on that, I went to a gallery show of what I learned of only shortly before: His watercolor paintings.
Reader, they were fantastic and beautiful, revelations.
As for Silverman, while I liked his paintings, it were the drawings for the New Yorker that I really liked.
I should add that the photo in the post resonated because of the careers these artists had. Back in 1961, the future had yet to be created.
Still, a bunch of these are life long faves.
That said, IMO shit in a can especially resonates with these times and I'll leave it at that.
The talent on that roof is really awesome. Thanks for reminding us about those great artists. Which ones are still with us? My favorites were Silverman who was a genius and Schwartz who I learned about from this blog.
We were shown a VHS of Silverman painting a portrait of a man in glasses when I was in art school, might have been the same one.
Mine was Portrait of a Young Girl: Jenny.
"The thing that struck me the most was how utterly fearless he is with a brush. Not a moment's hesitation in drawing and painting over something he'd done, using or dispensing with any of the rules that we were being taught at the time."
One of the joys of painting alongside Garin Baker for me was that he was a real painter. He had studied under two painter friends of Burt Silverman's; Max Ginsburg and Irwin "Greeny" Greenberg. There was a basic outlines in wet paint of the figural envelope, but no "painting to the drawn outlines"- no hugging the shore. The paint strokes flowed out from the figure across the silhouette boundary, and then "subtractive" strokes were used to craft the silhouette back, which allowed for all manner of different edge treatments, or none at all (lost edges). There was no scaffolding of underdrawing that could be relied on when things went astray. You were always drawing and painting at the same time.
You can see in Sargent the same method. Especially when he was freewheeling. Giant crosswise brushstrokes merging the figure with the background, just slightly modified by perpendicular strokes to find the silhouette edge here and there.
Slverman is, I think, still with us and about 97
I think the bottom line is that there is abundant junk within traditional realism and avant garde explorations, so there is no abiding stay for us at either extreme. We're never relieved of our obligation to try to view art with fresh and discerning eyes.
I don't disagree with that David.
But our effort to do this does not, or should not, involve declining to interpret consistent patterns in nature and aesthetic practice as evidencing the existence of immutable fundamental principles.
For example: ‘realism’ is nearer to the source (nature) of that from which it abstracts than second and third order abstractions derived from it. Such later order abstractions become, by definition, increasingly watered down echoes of their original source, ultimately cannibalising themselves in spiralling cycles of the ironic, nihilistic and cynical self-referencing, otherwise known as modernism and post-modernism.
And this, I suggest, is the reason you found the nine realist illustrators more fruitful and surprising than the shit-canning, cliff wrapping, formaldehyde dunking efforts of the fellows championed by MOMA.
Manqueman-- I agree that Silverman's drawings were something special in a different category from his paintings.
And yes, I too took note of the fact that 65 years have passed since that rooftop gathering. The talented young artists had studied art together at New York’s High School of Music and Art following World War II. They fell in love with the work of the great painters of realistic art, although not the type of realism that had become popular in the 1920s. Instead, they preferred the earlier brand of realism: 19th century English landscapes, and the work of painters such as Thomas Eakins and John Sloan. Each of those artists worked hard and was successful in his own way (proving their point about the diversity of realism).
there is abundant junk within traditional realism
After the invention of the camera maybe. Before then, I’m not sure what junk you’d be referencing.
I was on a walking tour of "Shakespeare's London" maybe 15-20 years ago. I can still see and hear our guide--an actor "between roles"--gesturing at the Tate and exclaiming that "the poor and downtrodden of London had been crying out for another museum of modern art!"
But perhaps in this case, the Tate's choice of exhibit is the right one, embodying the spirit of modern patrons of the arts.
Laurence John-- I didn't mean that Jeremy Lipking had some obligation to withdraw from the ARC "living artists" hit list. There were other talented artists connected with ARC. I thought Adrian Gottlieb was very good, and ARC's creator wanted Silverman in their masters program. They commingle wheat and chaff but I'm sure ARC is a very effective marketing device for all kinds of realistic painters.
I confess I haven't revisited ARC in many years, but I agree with Kev Ferrara's characterization above. ARC seemed more concerned with technical accuracy than the art of it all. In his public statements the head of ARC seemed to think he could promote realism with insults and money, rather than talent and ideas employed by the eleven painters on the roof.
(The following is a sidebar on scientific issues which can be skipped)
Anonymous/Bill-- Sorry for describing RFK Jr. as a witch doctor; I was misled by his last appearance before Congress in which he was wearing a bone through his nose, a loin cloth and feathers in his hair. As for those statistics, fact checkers have been laughing at his assertions for a long time. (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZpD8BZmGuiUiGagmQI22ZzmkI0Zuk3TN/view ). For those of you still itching for a political debate, let me rush to add there are witch doctors on both ends of the political spectrum. I consider this to be a question of science, not politics.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "Nobody has any idea what the 'fate' of the universe will be."
Of course lots of people-- including a consensus of the experts-- have a strong idea what the fate of the universe will be. Nobody will claim 100% certainty, and they shouldn't. Leonard Susskind properly has "epistemic humility" about his string theory, but on the other hand he is confident about the accelerating expansion of the universe and the dissipation it leads to. Same with Sean Carroll, Brian Greene and other top experts who've written extensively on the subject. I attended a lecture by Carroll where he was interrogated about how we could possibly speak with confidence about what happened in Planck time immediately following the big bang when no one was there to see it. He made a very convincing response about the difference between acquiring empirical knowledge through our physical senses and acquiring knowledge through math and logic, the latter holding true in any possible world under any possible circumstance.
Richard wrote: "Having a hard time seeing what art point you’re making here. Is this to mean that you agree with Anon that a shared reality is collapsing, and so, artists must discount all authenticity in their work?"
Definitely not. As discussed in earlier posts I think it's pretty clear that science has given us plenty of reasons to be humbler about our place and purpose in the universe (starting with Galileo informing us that the earth is not the center of all things) and humbler about the truths given to us by our sense. I salute Cromwell's impassioned plea, “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken.” But that doesn't undermine the importance of our search for a shared reality, and it underscores, I think, the importance of authenticity in art. In the words of Bob Dylan, "Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.'
there is abundant junk within traditional realism
After the invention of the camera maybe. Before then, I’m not sure what junk you’d be referencing.
99% of all art is crap. Before or after the camera. Instead of looking at museums, look at auction sales. Especially from the smaller houses. Or minor dealers' inventories. Or hit the antique shops.
Many decades ago I built a website for a modern art dealer, where his entire back stock was catalogued. 900 pieces... all puerile, and hundreds of slovenly works of surrealism, were digitized for the site or online archives. Not one good design. It was shocking. It made me beg for Malevich. Kupka seemed like a distant dream.
Equal time: I knew a gal who clerked a two-story warehouse for a major realist art dealer in Connecticut. She finagled me in and I was allowed to run amuck in the vast fields of realism circa 1750 to 1950 or thereabouts. It was like the warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones, except with better lighting. Realist paintings, leaning upright stacks upon stacks of them, rows upon rows, all musty and dusty. Must have been 40,000 paintings (I have no idea how many, actually). I flicked through row after row after row, some in frames so heavy I had to heave them into view: Cow, barn, dim portrait, landscape, bad illustration of ladies at tea, weak faded figure drawing, plain air slop, bad copy of Gilbert Stuart's Washington Portrait, maritime sailboat picture made entirely with trick brushstrokes, bad horse painting, Cowboy and a rodeo clown playing cards on a hay bail in the muddiest colors you'd ever seen, a painting of a seashell that looked like an art school study, A painting of the sea that looked like every wave was made of rubber, and so on.
I thought somehow, somewhere in there would be something good, one single great find. The night before I had had a dream of finding a Walter Everett painting I had only ever seen in black and white tearsheets. I woke that morning with a ludicrous amount of pep.
Nope. One goddamn bad painting after another. I couldn't believe the total lack of talent, energy, originality, or quality in that storage facility. No Mucha, No Fechin, No Sargent, No Cornwell, No Pyle, No Brangwyn, nor anything even approaching anything like them. After about two and a half hours, having seen at least seven thousand paintings, in abject misery, I recalled Brotman's Law, named after the movie distributer. And cut my losses.
"including a consensus of the experts"
A lovely dream. There are no experts in the origin, history, and fate of the universe, David. We're little people on a little world with little machines and calculators. The science is all interpretation. The math is uncheckable. We have no idea what we don't know. We are in the equivalent of the Hunt Lennox globe period - 1508 - where we look with our telescopes into infinity and wonder after dragons.
"He made a very convincing response about the difference between acquiring empirical knowledge through our physical senses and acquiring knowledge through math and logic, the latter holding true in any possible world under any possible circumstance."
Hmm. Suddenly all your vehement arguments against unverifiable absolutist claims have vanished. I think we've found your faith.
Kev Ferrara-- Brother, I feel your pain on this. Wading through the sea of laborious, sincere, mediocre art is a good way to remind ourselves just how good the artists at the top really are. Also a good reminder that the difference between good art and bad is not an illusion.
The 11 artists in the photo are wearing suits and ties. They were a classy group in a more serious time.
JSL
David, I trust/hope you were jesting with that 'factcheck' sketch
(a shit late-night tv show that confuses humour with the Automatic Snigger), but I wasn't defending RFK. Nor backing any figures he's given, but referring to the incongruities between lies told during the 2020-22 period in America and findings in the rest of the world (and things were far from above board over here, too, for that matter - we can certainly match you head-for-head with assholes in politics - just somewhat more honest).
If my ire was raised, it was at the reappearance of a political smugness which takes the piss out of RFK while appealing to political totem 'science' while ignoring that said science is considered by the rest of the western world - accurately and with a level head - to have at least as much bullshit in it as anything yer man Kennedy has said, 'witch-doctors at both ends of the political spectrum' as you say. To those I alluded to can be added that the levels of additives in many food products in the US are banned in the EU for the known harms to human health caused. Something, I believe to his credit that RFK has said, among a few other things he's right about. But that juju is from the medicine-bags of a least a few of those shamen at Congress who were grilling the witchdoctor, so seems to get a pass when the other brand of superstition is in the spotlight.
Bill
' 'witch-doctors at both ends of the political spectrum' as you say. ', belatedly.
Bill
''As for those statistics, fact checkers have been laughing at his assertions for a long time (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZpD8BZmGuiUiGagmQI22Zzmk......''
Which I never referred to, whatever they are. (Who did you think you were parrying ?....)
Bill
(I talked about UK govt figures, so I presume you were smokebombing for the gallery here / B.)
“Cow, barn, dim portrait, landscape, bad illustration of ladies at tea, weak faded figure drawing, plain air slop”
“Wading through the sea of laborious, sincere, mediocre art is a good way to remind ourselves just how good the artists at the top really are. Also a good reminder that the difference between good art and bad is not an illusion.”
That is the attitude that got us into this mess in the first place.
Art must be regular and common, communication by image. If you make it the exclusive, lofty climb of genius alone, you will end up with neither common art nor genius.
When you complain that the authentic, common visual expression of every man is “junk” or “slop,” you kill art by making it alien to life.
I do not meet a laborer at the bar and stomp away in disgust because he is not a great orator. I listen to the words he says, and find what good there is in them. Where I know better, I try to model in my own expression, knowing full well that neither of us is a master. This is a foundational attitude to civilization.
The society that produces great writers is the one in which little poems punctuate letters to friends. The society that produces great musicians is the one in which fiddlers and mandolinists improvise in the pub. The society that produces great painters is the one in which the tailor sketches her daughter and hangs it in the hall.
If you are an enemy to that, you are more an enemy to art than all the cans of artist’s shit in the world.
I made a similar comment to a friend about a sloppy oil of a cottage hanging, coincidentally, in a pub; when trying to point out that no matter how far it develops, a.i. produce could never reach the painting. It struggled with the plasticity of the paint, and with that early step into applying perspective (from the 'naive' way of drawing of kids centred on the elements in their picture) and not quite hitting the mark; but it resounded with the human response and feel for the - trite, to a cynic - rural scene.
A bit like 'folk art', you don't need overestimations that stretch their case (and can ruin and miss what they are) to see that a lot of it is very beautiful. And leaving out faux-primitive.
Bill
Distinguishing between great art and mediocre art isn't walling common people off from it. Any more than recognizing that one can be a great orator means boring people aren't allowed to speak. You can encourage someone's sincere effort at painting, while being clear that it shouldn't hanging next to Rembrandt at the Legion of Honor.
You can encourage someone's sincere effort at painting, while being clear that it shouldn't hanging next to Rembrandt
And that is the fear that drives such overcorrection. Although I made no such claim, we imagine it everywhere. (For clarity: I only disagreed with the notion that there was “abundant junk” among pre-20th century art. That something is not trash does not, ipso facto, make it treasure.)
Too many critics have lavished the most extreme praise on works that deserved no such recognition. As a result, we now feel compelled to sneer at something as simple as a pretty little painting of a cow, fearing that a dishonest art journalist might persuade a public eager to display their class distinction that it is a masterpiece.
"That is the attitude that got us into this mess in the first place."
You are confusing the situation where snobs attempt to take high status by shunning narrative works that manifest at an insufficiently austere level of abstraction... with a basic understanding and appreciation of artistic quality.
In other words, the problem is/was that high-strung status-obsessed intellectuals who flooded their dumb takes and salty preferences about art into the cultural bloodstream via printed media and politicking and tainted the ability of the normie to see artwork straight and with their own two eyes. They were helped in this endeavor by sellers and investors and the CIA, who promoted and used the caché of upper crustiness to accomplish ulterior goals.
The corrective to this is teaching about quality, beauty, truth, composition, poetics, etc... and to laugh at the so-called intellectuals - culture vultures - and sneer at their attempts to control artistic discourse via arrogance. And to mock elites who try to tout garbage art that they know nothing about except that it bestows unearned status on them by proxy.
"Art must be regular and common, communication by image.
There is some tension between promoting a common culture and promoting quality and encouraging greatness. But, again, I've said I think art to flourish must have opportunity, a local scene, and good teaching.
If you make it the exclusive, lofty climb of genius alone, you will end up with neither common art nor genius.
Nobody is doing that. When I go to life drawing sessions - just as an example - I'm always praising and encouraging the amateurs. No matter how egregious their retarded scrawls. While giving the serious talents the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
As I've said before, the best reason to encourage everybody to try to do art is to develop the base of the cultural pyramid that will support and somewhat understand those at the top. (Also as a farm team for the majors, of course, as you have also said.)
"Too many critics have lavished the most extreme praise on works that deserved no such recognition. As a result, we now feel compelled to sneer at something as simple as a pretty little painting of a cow, fearing that a dishonest art journalist might persuade a public eager to display their class distinction that it is a masterpiece."
Do you think I give a damn about the opinion of art journalists? Come on now. And I detest class-obsessed people and all their tiresome self-regarding status plays. Awful unexamined minds.
Any time you're tempted to begin a sentence, "Art must be..." I suggest you put down your computer and take a walk around the block before proceeding.
A COMMENT FROM BURT SILVERMAN
A number of the artists that I write about read these posts but resist the temptation to enter the discussions, sometimes wisely.
Burt Silverman wrote me on the side and compared these comments to
"a makeup course in my Philosophy classes at Columbia." He offered some interesting reminiscences ( " BTW. Harvey's "Parade" was a conscious attempt to mimic the classic victory parade paintings that were the propaganda tools of past emperors. His art was very much about his Brooklyn world") and he shared some thoughts about the "new realism." When I asked if he wanted to put them in a comment to the group, he gave me permission to share a few things from his email.
In his typical self-effacing manner, Mr. Silverman wrote, "Realism is what us ill-informed, near-illiterate fools do to speak about ordinary events and ordinary lives.... If I were to comment on the article I would write something that stresses once again... the need to put the aesthetic Humpy Dumpty back together again. It was the separation of form and content, and the capture of picture making by philosophizing aesthetics like at the beginning, with Clement Greenberg. It was validating paintings without people, with pseudo-science.
There's so much to take apart here. Still, ...our desire in the exhibition was to keep alive the validity of an art that was really just our experience, our discomfort, our affections-- for the lives we actually live."
Rather than talk about his own work, and his differences with the new realism, Silverman offered me an analysis by Robert McGrath which he thought addressed the issue: "[Silverman's] art may be seen as a kind of radical realism by virtue of its continuing devotion to a humanist vision that has survived modernist dogma of the fifties as well as the austere, impersonal canons of judgment imbedded in the current 'new realism'. For Silverman, form remains inextricably linked to meaning. Asserting itself throughout his painting is the fluid brushwork and natural coloration that informs the eye while eliciting, alchemically, a compassionate understanding of the human condition. In the final analysis, it is Silverman’s unflinching vision together with his creative rethinking of tradition, that constitutes his most defiant and enduring artistic contribution."
"If I were to comment on the article I would write something that stresses once again... the need to put the aesthetic Humpy Dumpty back together again. It was the separation of form and content, and the capture of picture making by philosophizing aesthetics like at the beginning, with Clement Greenberg. It was validating paintings without people, with pseudo-science."
QFT
I enjoyed the interview with Burt Silverman (I linked it above), in the first part of it he's talking more about this subject and these artists. Phenomenal painter.
"Make-up course in philosophy"...hmph! ; )
Bill
Of all that might follow "Art must be...", I thought Richard's a pretty innocuous statement. And broad enough to cover everything, 'regular and common' doesn't leave out the lofty and sublime, just the unnecessarily esoteric/cryptic.
Bill
I'm always praising and encouraging the amateurs. No matter how egregious their retarded scrawls.
One is either an “amateur” or a “professional.” That is horrible, that is alien to life.
When a friend tells me about his childhood, I don’t ever think, “This is amateur autobiography.” The question of whether he earns a living by telling people about his childhood is the furthest thing from my mind.
The content of his communication is what matters. If what he has to say is immoral, I may feel disgust. If what he says is something we share, I may feel camaraderie. If what he says is lofty, it may move my heart, I may feel inspired.
Whether he speaks finely or poorly matters only insofar as it affects what he is able to tell me. But the job of the listener is to try, generously, to understand what is being told to him.
The “high-strung, status-obsessed intellectuals” were only able to capture art because it became this horrible, alien thing. If you want to take it back from the houses of intellectual fashion, art must be made regular. When it is regular, people will have something in mind they wish to communicate, and they will seek the skills to express it. The Brandywine tradition of mental projection will arise again through expediency alone, because to know what you wish to communicate is the first step in communicating.
But I don’t think it will ever return so long as we continue to believe that painting is a special lofty job for special lofty people, instead of merely one of the behaviors of communication of which the human animal is capable.
As far as I can tell, painting is the most difficult artform there is. It is completely plastic down to the atom, and you have to build everything yourself with a combination of engineering, semi-eidetic memory, massive libraries of visual knowledge, poetry, and athleticism. Most people don't even have one of those things. Let alone the dedication to find out if you have any of those things.
Talk-n-text has taken over the world because it's the easiest medium. No prep needed, everything you're using is already ready-made including the structures. You can be articulate off the shelf. And to impress dummies simply know some ready-mades that other people don't normally use. You just say what happened in your day and you're already a storyteller.
Given the supreme difficulty of painting, the gap between the casual dabbler and the serious student - and every professional painter is a forever student - is massive. And obvious.
I've known many thousands of people who have told me stories. None of whom studied storytelling. None of whom paid attention in English class. None of whom could tell a past participle from a dangling one.
I've known "artists" who have been in life drawing classes their whole adult lives and still can't draw the f'ing figure. Still can't make a beautiful mark with their pencil. Still don't understand form or light or weight or gesture.
Hey, it turns out that we don't just draw what we see, because we don't really see what we don't know. Because we draw our understandings. Art demands of us then that we know the hidden anatomies of things, the quiet secrets of everyday physics, the 'deeper meanings' behind things in every sense of that phrase. The mood of a room. The subtle tone of the ambient light. The vanishing point on an invisible horizon.
Which is to say, one must actually be a philosopher to be a painter. And one is either a philosopher, constantly penetrating through the superficial with the mind, or one is not. It is not a question of common vs elite. It is a question of basic proclivities and abilities.
I once read Greg Manchess - in the de rigeur pandering-populist mode of our day - say that there was no such thing as talent. That it was all hard work, and good information and study. A few week later I heard him talking about his process, where he mentioned how the night before painting something he would lie in bed and imagine the entire painting process; previsualizing the creation of the work from start to finish. Can you do that? Can anybody?
Which is to say, one must actually be a philosopher to be a painter.
How is that different from saying writing is one of the most difficult art forms because William Shakespeare required philosophical depth and a slew of very specific talents and proclivities to write what he did?
My 12-year-old son doesn’t need to know about the mood of a room, subtle ambient light, or the qualities of a figure, because those aren’t things he is in any position to communicate with me about.
He draws in a way perfectly suited to his visual ideas: the scale of one character compared to another, the silhouette of a monster, the shape of a jet blast from the back of a spacecraft.
Conversely, I met a very unusual young man from Iraq this week who had all sorts of things to say about mood in landscape. Although he has only been painting for a short time (he started with Bob Ross VHS tapes of all things just a few years ago), his works are some of the best landscapes I’ve seen in ages from a contemporary painter. They were great because of the depth of what he had to communicate regarding mood and landscape, not because of his time spent painting or studying. He made all sorts of textbook mistakes, which turned out to matter very little.
There are many artists who want to draw figures because they believe the figure is a lofty subject within a lofty art. But if they have nothing meaningful to express through the figure, they will never truly be able to draw it. Because painting has been turned into this alien thing, too many painters convince themselves they should have something to say about the figure when they do not. As a result, they spend years struggling to invent insights they do not have instead of communicating visually about the things they already do know and have something real to say about.
Richard, I am talking about basic competency and the differences in the languages.
Your son can tell you that the cat is sitting in the hallway, and you will understand that as both a true and factual statement. You will not question it as a description of the real.
If instead of telling you he tries to draw the situation, you will get a cartoon. And you will know it is a cartoon; a simple, silly, fictional account. Extreme in its lossiness.
In words, you need only articulate the consonants and vowels and people presume you are articulate. To be articulate in paint to a similar degree takes half a lifetime.
Obviously I agree that one needs something to say as well. That's the meaning of poetic in the context of purely visual narrative. How you can argue to me something you've read me arguing here for years thinking that it would be a new concept to me, I have no idea.
Nor am I saying people shouldn't be encouraged to cartoon their thoughts. Especially now that ubiquitous emojis are making them lazy even at that.
The complex mimesis of contemporary realist (you know what I mean) painting is comparable to the complexity of contemporary literature. Standards change as culture does. Virginia Woolf isn’t better than Shapespeare, nor vice versa. Increasing complexity isn’t a very reliable measure of quality.
- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
“In words, you need only articulate the consonants and vowels and people presume you are articulate.”
That distinction, I would say, is a perfect illustration of the problem as I see it with the current state of affairs.
The spoken sentence “the cat is in the halfway” is far more of a “simple, silly, fictional account” than the drawing. It is more lossy. At least in the cartoon we have a count of the cat’s eyes and ears. We can likely tell if it is alive or dead. We have a rough idea of whether it was sitting or lying, and so on. And that is despite how vanishingly little practice the average child has in drawing compared with speaking.
The codified and articulate nature of a text lexicon and grammar, and its proper usage symbolizes the self-control of the animal - the elimination of emotion and need, personal mastery, and thus takes on a veneer of civilization, and then status. Regardless of the inanity of what is said, the conformity to the rigor of the code use alone confers ego inflation.
Outside of that, I understand words and cartoons to be at the exact same level of abstraction with respect to the language being used. The only difference is, again, the status symbolism of articulating the code adeptly.
This is why I say that intellectuals like cartoons because most intellectualism, most word use, is cartooning. I include graphics and diagramming in this understanding as well; all equivalent. Most cartoons are jaunty graphic diagrams, same with most spoken sentences.
Fyi, Lipking studied with Glen Orbik, who had studied with Fred Fixler, who had studied with Frank Reilly, who had studied with Frank Vincent DuMond and Dean Cornwell. Although Reilly was a stiff artist himself obsessed with systematizing, the figure drawing legacy he started is not. tldr: Lipking did not arise from the Renaissance-LARPing atelier trend.
I agree with many of the comments here about the work of Silverman, and I enjoyed receiving his own comments about our discussion. While the vocabulary of these comments may be a little arcane I'd refer you back to the simpler language in my quote from Auden in this post: "God must be a hidden deity, veiled by His creation." If you want to paint God (or paint a pure idea or a concept) don't try to paint it directly as a diagram or in words or as a divine vowel because you will inevitably fall short. God (or an idea or concept) can best be perceived when veiled by his creations-- that girl sitting in front of the Victoria Secret window or the young man sitting in the art studio.
If you ever climbed high enough to look directly into the face of the abstract, without the veil of God's work, it would burn out your corneas.
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