Behold two art revolutions on a staircase:
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| Marcel Duchamp (1912) Walt Disney Studios (1936) |
Marcel Duchamp painted his revolutionary Nude Descending a Staircase to convey motion in a still picture. 24 years later, Disney transformed still pictures of Snow White ascending a staircase into images that moved.
Duchamp explained the era: "The whole idea of movement, of speed, was in the air" and the old static pictures seemed inadequate.
In previous years, a picture stood still while the viewer's mind moved. For example, James Avati's figures on the stairs (below) didn't move, yet viewers mentally moved up the stairs and envisioned what was about to take place in the room above the bar:
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| James Avati (1959) |
Duchamp, like Muybridge before him and the Futurists after him, was an early, stuttering response to the way the world was changing. Disney was equally revolutionary but more commercially successful.
Neither Duchamp nor Disney could fully appreciate how their world was unraveling. The old Newtonian universe was coming apart like wet tissue paper in the wake of relativity and quantum physics; longstanding political empires were imploding and geopolitical alliances were fraying; the first World War developed horrific new weapons which were only a stepping stone to worse weapons. The sun was setting on the Age of Reason, and the arts stepped up to try to make sense of the new order.
In times of disintegration, artists have to decide which paths offer new promise and which paths have become obsolete. An era of experimentation and confusion was perfectly suited for Dada artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The Baroness performed for audiences by rubbing a photograph of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase over her naked body while reciting a love poem to Duchamp: “Marcel, Marcel, I love you like hell, Marcel.”
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The baroness was born Elsa Plotz in Germany in 1874. Before coming to America she studied art in Dachau, future home of the infamous Nazi death camp. She became an artist, poet, actress and model. Elsa and her husband had many colorful adventures before they faked her husband's suicide to escape creditors and fled to the United States in 1909.
Throwing off the chains of the old world, Elsa aggressively pushed sexual and artistic boundaries, rejecting traditional male and female gender norms. Several affairs and marriages later, after an unsuccessful effort at becoming a farmer in Kentucky, she married Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven in New York where she worked making sculptures out of discarded objects and writing poetry.
She became the star of a Dada film, "Elsa, Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven Shaving Her Pubic Hair." She invented new words such as "phalluspistol" to replace the old world vocabulary. Critics agree that one of her greatest contributions to the arts was her use of the em dash (a punctuation mark longer than either the "en dash" or the minus sign) in her poetry.
The example of the Baroness raises an important question for artists working in times, like now, of great social change: How do we remain meaningful by embracing the new, while at the same time not looking like a nitwit?
The example of the Baroness raises an important question for artists working in times, like now, of great social change: How do we remain meaningful by embracing the new, while at the same time not looking like a nitwit?
Today we find ourselves in another period of disintegration, this time driven by world-ending AI cognitive power. Centuries ago we sharpened our focus on objective reality by the invention of the magnetic compass and the mechanical clock, which gave us a more concrete sense of space and time. Photographs and videos became arbiters of objective, verifiable reality. They encouraged the rise of science and rationality. But now our grip is loosening once again as "objective truth" has become the plaything of algorithms, deepfakes and bots.
Some of art's greatest moments, the ones that delivered the reward of enhanced perceptions, arose when society seemed to be spinning out of control. Art helped to work out an era's conflicts and grapple for values. But can it still serve that role? For millennia art has been a source of excitement but today it can barely compete with algorithms that have been fine tuned to keep viewers in a constant state of excitement and agitation.
Wherever the eye looks in the desert of fine art, one sees little more than puerile responses to this emerging world-- certainly nothing to rival the great artistic responses of the past. Can illustration, because of its more direct nexus to the engines of change and its economic restraints on silliness, possibly do any better?
143 comments:
I admit to feeling despondent. The changes that are happening rapidly and without any meaningful public debate are essentially dehumanizing. If this is progress, I prefer to go back.
How curious! It just so happens that in the last few pages I drew for the comic I'm working on, there's a sequence of three panels with the protagonists descending stairs into the hell that awaits them. Perhaps my subconscious was following the line of thought in your post, although I think that, unfortunately, my work is part of that childish response you mention. Nevertheless, I do believe that illustration, and good illustrators, can play a fundamental role in stirring consciences. I'm sure there's a good number of graffiti artists in the world, whether people like it or not, who are still capable of blowing a few minds.
AI has infected everything and its speed is increasing. Soon there will be nothing left for traditional art.
Art helped to work out an era's conflicts and grapple for values.
After the fact, though — as the unfathomable multitude of events and tendencies of any moment in time is reduced down to history.
This too, shall pass.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Postmodern Anonymouse-- actually, I meant a bigger role for art than merely helping to digest and live with changes "after the fact."
When the whole Modern Age was just getting started, society seemed like it was spinning out of control. It was a time of extreme polarization, of bitter religious conflicts, of great violence, social division and (to complete the analogy) plagues. The world seemed to be wracked with the birthing pains of modernity.
But look at the role that art played:
in the transition from the medieval focus on the afterlife (with its thin, stiff allegorical art) to the Renaissance focus on the here and now, it was the artists who lovingly painted pink and billowy flesh on nekkid women, lush fabrics, ripe fruit, beautiful metalwork, and kindled widespread appreciation for the secular world. What better bait for physical sciences and empiricism?
Martin Luther's great Reformation wouldn't have taken off and transformed Europe if Lucas Cranach hadn't illustrated graphic novels of Martin Luther's work for the illiterate peasants of Europe. The plays of Shakespeare became the ethical and social laboratories for Europe trying to find its way after the old gods had died. The development of perspective and technical drawing, the new focus on accuracy in and precision of the graphic arts were values that provided a platform for the Age of Discovery.
When people were done killing each other in religious wars, the values of capitalism and individualism that grew with modernity were exported from Europe through globalization and colonization.
I think art was at the heart of what emerged from the chaos during the pre-Modern era, but as the modern era winds to a close I'm afraid I see very little in the arts that could perform the same role.
That Baroness is hilarious. I never heard of her. Where can we see that film you described?
"We" ? She sounds mentally disturbed. So do you.
The invention of the Gutenberg press and the «re-invention» of oil painting (including the broadening spectrum of available pigments available) played a more vital role than the singular products that these technological developements enabled.
The creation of art never moves things forward, it is at its best an act of confronting chaos by creating acceptable ways of experiencing it - alongside contemporal functions created by science and concepts created by philosophy. These efforts are reactive, Otherwise unordered and unguided in the present - history is always written after the fact, and it can always be re-written after the fact of its writing.
It is impossible to know what history the internet and AI will lead to. The science, philosophy and art is in developement. The Shakespeares and da Vincis of our time might currently be locally visible (or even already famous) …and they might not be.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Avati was a solid talent and a pro, but that stairs climbing painting is the opposite of a great example of illusory rhythmic animation in painting. Avati’s poetic abstractions were mood-oriented, mostly. He used rhythm mostly to theme and track the eye through the picture (as you mentioned) rather than to provide an illusion of movement. So yes his work will seem static in comparison to the blatant graphic-cartooning of the action in Duchamp’s piece. (I don’t think you meant to imply that Duchamp invented animation in art. Again, he, in the Modernist Mode, just made it blatant, aka “Graphic”. )
As a better comparison - and there are thousands of highly rhythmic action-evoking pictures which precede Duchamp - one may cite: Evariste Lumenais (Flight of King Gradlon) or Remington (The Infantry Square, Downing the Nigh Leader) Pyle (Nation Makers, Battle of Bunker Hill, Battle of Nashville). Paolo Uccello (Battle of San Romano). Rubens, (Death of Decius Mus). And so on.
In my estimation, as an expression of movement by a Futurist-Cartoonist 'Nude Descending' is considerably inferior to Giacoma Balla’s 'Dog On A Leash' in terms of actually getting the movement illusion effect to come across graphically. Duschamp’s work seems to be responding more to Muybridge, Picasso and Braque, rather than how reality is experienced.
The creation of art never moves things forward […] These efforts are reactive
It doesn’t make you sound smart when anyone can think of counter proofs to your thesis in literally seconds. Try harder.
Anonymous-- sometimes it's difficult to distinguish between "mentally disturbed" and "avant-garde." Dada was a good example of that. Its central theme was that people needed to be shocked out of the social norms that had let the world astray in World War I. That was a legitimate argument worth testing in a time of extreme change.
Personally, I agree that the Baroness worked on the "wacky" side of the ledger. Furthermore, much of her "fame" seems to have stemmed from her sexual generosity with better known male artists. But even today many feminists continue to embrace her as a hero and originator. They write revisionist criticism praising her work, claim she deserves credit for the idea of exhibiting a urinal as a sculpture and they republish her poems.
Kev Ferrara-- I think that both Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase and Giacoma Balla’s 'Dog On A Leash' were cinematic responses, testing the possibilities of a static art form when it bumped up against movies. I don't view one as stronger than the other, I just chose Duchamp's because the common theme of a staircase created a common basis for comparison. (And you're correct, I wasn't suggesting that Duchamp deserved any credit for animation, or that Avati was trying to convey the illusion of movement. In a quiet scene, almost as still as Edward Hopper, Avati launched our brain to move, which is what art has done for thousands of years.).
Put aside my point that these works, such as the Disney drawings, were completely flat and static because they weren't trying to be "action-evoking" in the traditional sense; the Snow White drawings would later move in a theater. I was a little surprised by some of your suggested examples of action-evoking pictures. The handcuffs on Evariste Lumenais's Flight of King Gradlon would be enough to cause me to give up painting to become a filmmaker instead. But What about Frazetta's Flashman On The Charge or N.C. Wyeth's thundering horses in "Skiffington's Pony"? In those examples, the artists took more expressive liberties with the anatomy of a horse, and the feeling of motion benefited from it.
I think that Wyeth outdid his master when it came to "action-evoking" in Nation Makers or Battle of Bunker Hill, because he was free to stretch and bend his horses in a way that Pyle never did. I agree the Battle of Nashville was great when it came to dynamic painting, and Attack Upon The Chew House even more.
Post modern anonymouse wrote: "The creation of art never moves things forward, it is at its best an act of confronting chaos by creating acceptable ways of experiencing it."
Wow, that's a mighty bold statement. I surely must've quoted Bernard Wolfe here before: "Art makes order out of chaos, do they still teach that hogwash in the schools? It's liars who give order to chaos , then go around calling themselves artists and in this way give art a bad name.... When do you see Dostoevsky laying out his reality with a T-square?"
You might guess that I find fault with both extremes. I'm one of those "art contains multitudes" guys.
I love her poem “Marcel, Marcel, I love you like hell, Marcel.” It even rhymes.
>>>>The handcuffs on Evariste Lumenais's Flight of King Gradlon would be enough to cause me to give up painting to become a filmmaker instead.
What handcuffs? Are you guys talking about the same picture?
~ FV
>>>>>But What about Frazetta's Flashman On The Charge or N.C. Wyeth's thundering horses in "Skiffington's Pony"?
I thought Kev was deliberately choosing examples that preceded Duchamp. (Kev can correct me if I'm wrong.)
Sorry, I was referring to metaphorical handcuffs. The Lumenais painting seemed like such a captive of its medium-- not much fluidity to the water, not much motion to the figures. I could never forget that I was looking at ground mineral pigments applied with a stick on a flat surface. With the passage of time, better conventions and greater artistic freedom led to more "action-evoking" paintings. Monet shed the "handcuffs" for his impressionistic painting of rippling water in "La Grenouillere," and that strikes me as a better artistic observation.
Anonymous wrote: "I thought Kev was deliberately choosing examples that preceded Duchamp."
Yes, I missed that (despite the fact that Kev wrote, "pictures which precede Duchamp.") OK, but the Wyeth picture I mentioned was painted in 1904, 8 years before Duchamp's nude. and there were other earlier "motion" paintings such as the Monet I mentioned which captured the flickering of light on the surface of rippling water. I can't say if there's a causal connection but the invention of photography and later movies seem to have coincided with the changed ambitions of artists. Impressionism followed by expressionism arose after the mechanical reproduction of images began to eat into the classical domain of Bouguereau types. I think Duchamp, Disney and others broke further than Kev's traditional "action-evoking" paintings. Not necessarily better, but certainly a different approach.
The intention of the singular artists is irrelevant in the context of a history of art. Shakespeare was a popular poet in his time, not a playwright. Would we know of him today if not his activity in a most fortuitous moment in time vis a vis the invention of the printing press?
The social function of art as it will be represented after the fact, when the actual chaos of multifarious idiosyncracies and tendencies of any present is collapsed into written history, is just that - a history.
War is the prime mover, the father of all things. Art is, at best, the soothing mother. And there’s no «forward» in evolution - this notion is in itself an expression of the artistic impulse. But everything must be made sense of, everything must be given meaning - which is entirely produced after the fact.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I'm astounded the feminists don't celebrate her true achievement, which would appear to be the Original of a niche porn category. Must be an oversight.
They'll be bristling over that.
Was the Duchamp considered a successful depiction of the illusion of movement when unveiled? What was the consensus, and were the opinions valid or just confused? The first reactions are often the most interesting, but soon forgotten.
I think that both Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase and Giacoma Balla’s 'Dog On A Leash' were cinematic responses
Well, the phenakistiscope preceded the movies by a long way. So did stroboscopic photos. The Balla looks very stroboscopic to me. Which links us back to Muybridge. Even the Sunday Funnies had shown keyframe animation type sequences by 1912. Plus it was already known in the art world that intense density of iterative rhythm created a sense of frenzied action.
In my view, the stylized plate-like quality of the build elements of the Duchamp recalls Cubist works like Picasso's Girl With A Mandolin more than anything zipping fast as per the Futurists.
I'd be interested to see if anybody else failed to find the Lumenais painting in violent action in terms of its illusionistic effect. I agree that it is a bit stiff in drawing. That it moves regardless educates us to look beyond drawing for the origin of effects.
Monet's broken color is a different sort of effect from action/animation.
Animation/Motion illusions rarely stem from exaggerated anatomy, except in cartooning. Composition is always more powerful than any individual element; all things in relation. N.C. Wyeth's use of contorted anatomy is a trick; it expresses muscular stress; the strain of effort. Not movement. There are other Pyle principles he was using which are more germain to this discussion.
I didn't mean my list of action pictures to be comprehensive, in any sense. ("And so on," he wrote.)
So painful. You are a true writer-sadist. The Torquemada of vain Postmodern Bafflegab.
Wikipedia awaits.
I get a lot of action from the Lumenais. The horse's leg lifts, the friar's extended arm juts upward, the cape flips up in the wind, etc. Wild. Like Frazetta 100 years before Frazetta.
~ FV
David, your post is a neat accounting of events, but (correct me if I'm wrong) you seem to view them as separate and not belonging to a larger pattern. My understanding of this larger pattern is one of an ongoing breakdown of unity into multiplicity starting with the Enlightenment belief that phenomenal reality is causally dependent on emerging structures out of ever smaller components. With this comes the idea that identities are nominal or arbitrary and that progressively breaking things down to smaller units is the only sensible choice we have. Welcome to the ideology of the modern world.
Which started to get its boots on in the twenties, symptomized by elite types such as Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven lacking purpose or belief in anything else indulging themselves in twerking the culture by whatever opportunities came their way. The technologies of the 1960s allowed this mindset to spread more broadly and led directly to the situation we now find ourselves in, the upside-down world of the carnival, in other words the classic behaviour at the end of a cycle. The dissolving of unity into multiplicity is the process of death.
And I'd say that this is what's been happening to the culture. To stay with the visual arts; Impressionism (dissolving of optical identities), Cubism (breaking of structural identities), 'Abstraction' (liquification of identities themselves) led to nihilism across all domains in the form of Post Modernism. These movements are not 'discoveries' or 'progress' or new ways of reflecting reality but a sequence of symptoms as a consequence of an ontological belief.
This general breakdown, it seems obvious to me at least, is pointing to the realisation that the belief we've been increasingly adhering to must be fundamentally at odds with that of reality. And, to keep things relative to your topic, anything done in the graphic sphere which does not acknowledge this risks being just another symptom of decomposition.
Chris: "With this comes the idea that identities are nominal or arbitrary and that progressively breaking things down to smaller units is the only sensible choice we have. Welcome to the ideology of the modern world"
What would you propose as an alternate 'unifying' ideology ?
Well Laurence, now you’re asking!
What I’m about to say is not anything like ‘a unifying ideology’, for I believe it to be an account of how the world lays itself out. Meaning in the world is inevitable in that it is the calling that draws things into being, draws matter into identity. It is not something imposed after the fact. I haven't the time to properly substantiate this claim, but I hope the following illustration of the principle will give a little hint of what I mean.
Imagine that you don’t know what a car is for. And imagine that in order to try to understand this you take it apart, steering wheel, engine, gearbox, seats etc, and then you take those things apart so that the engine is broken down into pistons, carburettor, fuel pipes, and then you examine each of those, and then the metal they were made from, and then the carbon within that and so on to the molecules, their atoms right on down to the wave function itself. At no point during this process would it tell you what a car is for. A car, like anything else, comes into being to answer a purpose, which is not embodied in the fact of the car itself. Let's say one of those purposes is to carry groceries from the shop. That purpose will inevitably serve a higher purpose like feeding your family, which in turn will be serving a still higher purpose on and on up a hierarchy of ‘a good’ to which each purpose is aimed. And if we follow them up, from whatever point we start, each good in the hierarchy will be found to be pointing ultimately to the highest good. The alignment of all things towards the highest meaning that gives rise to them in the first place.
I hope that goes just a little way to answer what is the most important of questions.
For a more constrained counter-theory to “identities are nominal or arbitrary and that progressively breaking things down to smaller units is the only sensible choice we have” than what Chris has provided —
- The fact that an entity or system is composed of smaller parts does not necessarily mean it can be fully explained solely as the sum of those parts.
- Studying an entity or system exclusively by reducing it to its parts will, by definition, omit any qualities, behaviors, or phenomena that are not fully explained as a sum of those parts alone.
- The fact that the parts of a system have a given property does not necessarily mean that the system as a whole must have that same property.
Chris, what you're describing above is the 'meaningful relation' that things (e.g. tools, machines, food etc.) have for us due to their 'purpose' in our lives. But 'purpose' isn't the same thing as capital-M 'Meaning'. A parent's entire 'purpose' might be to raise their child to the very best of their abilities. But that doesn't mean that human life itself within the universe has a 'meaning' or reason for coming into being in the first place.
Similarly, when you say "each good in the hierarchy will be found to be pointing ultimately to the highest good" ... surely the chain of upward pointing 'goods' will max out if (like me) you're a non-believer in a god. If you ARE a believer in a god then your 'highest good' will probably be the worshipping of your god. The non-believer however, is stuck with the problem that even if they strive to achieve the 'highest good' in their life, it's all happening within the perishable material realm, and we're back to the modern "what's the point of it all ?" position.
Richard, I agree with all three points you've made. I've never seen any problem with the fact that things in the universe are composed of tiny particles the more you zoom in. Nor do I think that the discovery of atoms or theories about the quantum state are really the underlying cause of the postmodern malaise. I took Chris's point to be more about the failures of a 'materialist' mindset generally.
The process of rational analysis and abstract individuation obviously didn’t start with the Enlightement. Was Aristotle a nihilistic postmodernist? Jesus?
The very notion of identity is a product of the process you are railing against. It, like romantic love and the concept of good and evil, are fairly recent inventions.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Laurence: "what you're describing above is the 'meaningful relation' that things (e.g. tools, machines, food etc.) have for us due to their 'purpose' in our lives."
I chose the car example because the purpose of its inorganic parts towards its identity crosses into the purpose of the organic driver and on up from there through the hierarchy of purposes calling the human upwards at ever greater scales towards the ultimate purpose. I was not describing just 'a man and his tools' scenario.
A parent's entire 'purpose' might be to raise their child to the very best of their abilities. But that doesn't mean that human life itself within the universe has a 'meaning' or reason for coming into being in the first place.
It's far more reasonable to believe that it does. The parent is a part of nature, so what they do will necessarily be a link in chain of purposes that scale to the highest purpose. Why do you assume that the fundamental purpose that calls into existence human behaviour is in essence different from that of nature? It's far more reasonable to say it is an expression of the many being drawn into the one. Atoms are drawn up into cells, which are drawn up into organs, drawn up into the body, drawn up into its needs, drawn up into its purpose, drawn up into the world, drawn up into the cosmos, drawn up by, well... the causeless cause.
A question for you Laurence that may help matters here: what is your distinction between purpose and meaning?
Chris: "what is your distinction between purpose and meaning?"
- The 'purpose' of the spanner is to tighten the nut.
- Discuss the 'meaning' of the painting 'Ophelia' by John Everett Millais.
Chris: "...through the hierarchy of purposes calling the human upwards at ever greater scales towards the ultimate purpose."
"...so what they do will necessarily be a link in chain of purposes that scale to the highest purpose"
... and the ultimate, highest purpose is ?
Song of Songs. Hundreds if not thousands of love lyrics from ancient China, Middle & Near East. Celtic love poetry preceding the troubadours by centuries.
Zoroastrianism.
You're speaking only to the ghosts up your ass with the first sentence.
Laurence - The 'purpose' of the spanner is to tighten the nut.
- Discuss the 'meaning' of the painting 'Ophelia' by John Everett Millais.
OK, this gives me a good hook on which to riff which may get a little closer to what I'm driving at:
Let's think about the meaning of good and bad.
The 'bad ' spanner would be something like a pair of pliers, and worse than that would be, say, a screw driver. So it can be said that the goodness of a spanner is its fittedness to its purpose. A spanner would be bad for turning screws.
All to say: meaning can be thought of as a property of relationality.
So, applying this to Millais' Ophelia painting you mentioned.
The relation of the girl to the water is one of potential drowning, death, oblivion. The expression on her face being one of ecstasy or submission implies the relation between orgasm and death of self. The dark, deep flow of the river carrying the the young girl to her watery death in relation to those waters being the life blood to the blooming summer flowers and overarching foliage.
Etc etc.
All to say I believe that the meaning of life is a manifestation of its relation to the world. The relation of its purpose to the meta purpose within which it lives.
"Nor do I think that the discovery of atoms or theories about the quantum state are really the underlying cause of the postmodern malaise."
I'd say they both trace back to Descartes rejection of Aristotelian physics, qualia, and unity. That's where we got the go-to answer that the universe is a meaningless clock reducible to the sum of its parts.
Now, whether that is true from God’s point of view is, I think, really irrelevant.
From a human point of view, if you wish to understand a robin, you are better off looking at its diet, anatomy, and behaviors than declaring it an illusion and trying to model its atoms. Even if one could, by reducing it to its smallest parts, arrive at a more objective description, that description would tell you less about when it will arrive in the spring than would a poet in a 19th-century ladies’ magazine.
Postmodern nihilists have made the same mistake, but with man—trying to reduce love, beauty, balance, virtue, good, evil, and so on.
First they anthropologize them, then they behavioralize them, then they neurologicalize them (and if they were consistent, they would reduce those further to physics, then to quantum physics, and so on). By the end, they have lost all explanatory and predictive power, and can no more explain a beautiful picture than a physicist can explain the behavior of the bird.
Chris, I can't make your last two sentences cohere, sorry. No offence intended, but they read like Deepak Chopra style word salad. You've said "ultimate purpose, highest purpose" and now "meta purpose" with no attempt to define what those might be.
...
Richard: "I'd say they both trace back to Descartes rejection of Aristotelian physics, qualia, and unity. That's where we got the go-to answer that the universe is a meaningless clock reducible to the sum of its parts."
I don't recognise the brand of atom-obsessed-modern-disillusionment you're talking about. It's an academic take. Most young people seem disillusioned for much more prosaic reasons; not being able to find a nice partner, not being able to find work or being able to afford a house as their parents did. Feeling isolated due to social media and diminished real-life community. The deranging and anxiety-inducing effect of various ideologies on their world-view. The uglification of everything. There's a whole new genre of youtube video now with titles like "why did everything become so ugly ?" or (to bring it back around to the point of David's post) "Why is modern art so ugly ?". Which is encouraging in a way (while also being depressing); at least the younger generation can see that something has gone badly wrong with western culture.
"I don't recognise the brand of atom-obsessed-modern-disillusionment you're talking about. It's an academic take. Most young people seem disillusioned for much more prosaic reasons;"
Yes, but that shift and related ones had an effect, eg drip-downs that led to mechanistic ideas about society and the human being. Leading to situations where "diminished real-life community. The deranging and anxiety-inducing effect of various ideologies on their world-view. The uglification of everything"... could mushroom.
Brutalism....the mechanical twins corporatism/marxism....utilitarian ideas about the body and brain are behind the ousting of the psyche and spirit that cleared the ground for current quite clearly mad ideas to develop.
Laurence: "Chris, I can't make your last two sentences cohere... You've said "ultimate purpose, highest purpose" and now "meta purpose" with no attempt to define what those might be."
Ha, they all refer to the same thing, that's to say; the point at which the many purposes become the one. This happens when the purpose of atoms form the purpose of a molecule, and this pattern of being continues with organs forming a body, football players becoming a team, planets coming together to form a solar system, stars becoming a galaxy. The 'ultimate/highest/meta' purpose would therefore be where, at the highest scale, the many purposes come into the one, overarching purpose of the universe itself.
Chris: "The 'ultimate/highest/meta' purpose would therefore be where, at the highest scale, the many purposes come into the one, overarching purpose of the universe itself"
Ok... it sounds if you're going for the 'everything is one single unified whole' kind of philosophy (Monism ?) or something similar to Rupert Spira's ideas on 'non-duality'.
If we're going with the idea of 'purpose' as in - "the 'purpose' of the spanner is to tighten the nut" - then what is "overarching purpose of the universe itself" ?
So predictable.
I again apologize for the sloppy post-post proof reading. Posting anonymously means post can’t be edited once posted. Or deleted in post-affect shame, as is your particular wont.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"So predictable."
Why are you surprised that you get predictable responses to your predictable responses? (Not just from me, but from everybody). After all, you speak on behalf of radical chic fraudsters, behind a shield of cowardly anonymity, peddling their inane provocations; workshopped on the public dime. Such is regularly found offensive and worth rebuke. (You might try some shame yourself and dare to be critical of the tenets of your indoctrination.)
Fyi, most of what I have deleted over the years were posts containing proprietary technical discussions, language, and research that I didn't want online. Sometimes I delete responses out of empathy or comity. Sometimes because I no longer care to be part of a conversational sinkhole with bad faith respondents.
Stop posting anonymously.
Well Laurence, it relates to what I was saying about the meaning of good and bad. The good of the spanner is when it is properly aligned with the purpose of its being; tightening a nut. We can say that this is the 'highest good' of the spanner. But the spanner can become worn or be slightly too big for the nut and it will consequently become less truly aligned with its purpose. If we bend or distort or break the spanner it will be further misaligned with its purpose. In other words: well on its way to being a bad spanner.
For an identity to fulfill itself it therefore has to be maximally aligned with the highest good of its purpose. This also goes for a bomb, in which its highest good would be to explode at full capacity. But the good of any identity is nested within other identities' goods. The man may use the spanner to tighten the nut of a thumb screw or he may use it to mend the brakes of his daughter's bicycle - an act that is nested in a larger purpose which in turn is nested in a higher purpose still, and all the while co-existing with adjacent purposes of other stuff going on. And all of this is being swept up in the largening scale of the hierarchy of goods.
All to say, misaligning oneself in relation to this hierarchy of goods is to bring trouble on ourselves sooner or later. If a cop serves himself instead of his duty he becomes corrupted and in so doing corrupts the body of the police department in which he is a part.
This pattern of 'consequence of alignment and misalignment with good purpose' can be seen being played out at all scales from, say, a cancer in the body, right up to actions that affect whole societies, whole epochs. The world made us, we are therefore inevitably run through and through with its foundational patterns of being. So whatever is true for us and our alignment with our good can be seen as true for the universe as a whole.
The world made us, we are therefore inevitably run through and through with its foundational patterns of being. So whatever is true for us and our alignment with our good can be seen as true for the universe as a whole.
I like that argument. I suppose the corollary would be that, when we give voice to ideals and values that gesture to long term goods, we are merely putting more specific words to something that is already within us and the world; a kind of inherent teleology that comes along with the insistence of nature to be and blossom.
I think it is not coincidental that most of what is causing so much dismay in the world - imo anyway - is the result of implementing the opposite of the long view. The result of perspectival myopia, anxiety and impatience, and short-term thinking. Every aspect of western life (seemingly) has been degraded by dismissive arrogance, lossy shortcuts, and panicked emotionalist pleas, resulting in oversimple hasty kluged answers to every question and challenge, no matter how complex and far-reaching; and no matter the subject or field.
And the accumulated result of all this short-sightedness is our torturing by the resulting danger, incompetence, ineptitude, coercion, idiocy, madness, propaganda, bullshit, virtue signaling, narcissism, desperation, and paperwork.
The thing that people don’t understand about Tradition - about Family, Home, Community, Guilds, and Shared Beliefs holding steady through time - is that it offers a framework within which one has time and space to be integrated in being, and synthetic in creativity. Room to roam and enough isolation from the outer world to be wrong.
Orphans, on the other hand, are perfectly vulnerable and don't have headspace. People left on the doorstep of the worldly wolves invariably get hung up on Orwell’s Eternal Present; forever catching their hair on fire via manipulative media maelstroms, crushed daily under a siege mentality and ultimately signifying nothing.
That's beautiful Kev.
Thank you.
>>>>>"People left on the doorstep of the worldly wolves invariably get hung up on Orwell’s Eternal Present; forever catching their hair on fire via manipulative media maelstroms, crushed daily under a siege mentality and ultimately signifying nothing."
I agree with you generally. But there are people who become very street smart very early in life, don't pay attention to warped school or media political indoctrination at all, build their own businesses, and then get out of their respective ghettos.
Your argument reminds me of when you talk about "multipolar traps" that cause people to chase cheats and short cuts for unfair advantage in a closed market, leading to whole industries circling the drain because the cheats become S.O.P. And then the quality level of the whole industry drops. I guess cheat codes weren't invented just to beat video games.
~ FV
I’m sorry to have to be the one to explain this to you, but you are expressing yourself entirely from within the framework of a postmodern subjectivity. The examples you offer are presented as mere content, dislocated from actual time and positioned into this new, neverending present. The good and evil of zoroastrianism is teleported and merged with the current understanding of the concepts.
Again, the French nerds weren’t prescripting a cultutal shift, they were accurately describing the situation and a vector. It was a warning, and they were correct.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Don't be sorry - the 'teleportation' is only happening in your own head.
Thoughts, understanding, context have obviously changed about love, good and evil. But they were known at all times for which we have readable evidence. Not 'invented' at 'X'.
Nobody shares the expositary bubble you live in, from which you read & thus placed my comment. And from which you recast everything and everybody as if we shared your bizarre take/religion.
Examples of facts were given to show the absolutism of your assertions was widely off the mark. Sans interpretation, contemporary or personal. Nor 'positioning', 'teleporting' or 'merging'. Nothing.
All that is your own contextualising into your favourite theory.
Yet again, projecting rules that solely apply, invertedly, on your own personal kingdom - that particular world contained in its entirety in your own anus. Population = 1.
I’m sorry to have to be the one to explain this to you, Squanto, but you're an Israelite.
Says so right here on these tablets.
"there are people who become very street smart very early in life, don't pay attention to warped school or media political indoctrination"
Right. Those are rare feral folk, outside the situation I was describing.
"Your argument reminds me of when you talk about "multipolar traps" that cause people to chase cheats and short cuts for unfair advantage in a closed market."
It’s a very pervasive anti-ethic, the modern anxiety-fueled expedience mindset. A suffusing failing.
Lying, cheating, stealing, threatening, maiming and murder are the primary colors of immoral expedience. That’s old school. Everything else is weaker variations of the same. From the fakery and puffery of politicians, corporations and Hollywood, to the strategic elisions of propagandists and censors, to the Faustian deals of digital art programs, steroids, SSRIs and Ozempic, to the Munchausen and Transhausen by Proxy plots of deranged, attention-starved mothers.
Then to weaker versions of expedience still; the use of Heuristics instead of Judgment, Words/labels or sacralizing/demonizing standing in for arguments. “Clothes make the man.” Stuck on tribal symbols give you an identity. Zip codes gives you status. Sensation in place of artistry. Fame and notoriety instead of achievement. Credentials instead of expertise.
The list goes on and on. Quick dirty solutions, LARPing, cheat codes, virtual experience… all short-cuts of once kind or another. All over the place.
"Again, the French nerds weren’t prescripting a cultural shift, they were accurately describing the situation and a vector"
I know people who went to art school in the 1950s, including my mother. I have hundreds of pages of art school notes from the 1890 to 1940 period. Those students never heard anything that resembled sophistry or excuses for weak work from their teachers. The teaching methods were starting to get unconventional by the late 1950s, but they were still earnest and disciplined. Nobody was allowed to talk up their art, to try to get teacher, galleries, and clients to hallucinate what isn't present. The mantra was "a thing is only as good as it looks." There were no "artist’s statements" accompanying and justifying their work. Pyle admonished his students in 1904, “You simply cannot go to every newsstand in the country and explain your work.”
Postmodernism gave “academic” cover to fingerpainting and radical chic impostures. And lucrative tax loopholes made such "legit" because “anything goes” then got sanctioned by the elite and wealthy.
The excuses were taught in schools. Of course it was prescriptive. (Leaving aside that when an authority describes/explains something - and claims no standards by which to judge that phenomena - it is being shown to be allowed. And what one allows, as an authority on art, one sanctions.)
Anyway, every postmodern excuse for low quality art that I’ve ever heard, I've heard hundreds of times. If not thousands; the same facile evocations of relativism used time and again as passwords to get through difficulty and failure uncriticized. How? How do hundreds and hundreds of different college-“trained" artists - from ages 18 to 75 - all have the same exact mimetic nuggets coming out of their mouths to dismiss discipline and achievement? (I encounter at least 7 such self-excusing indoctrinates at my weekly life drawing sessions, wide age range, all speaking the same postmodern shibboleths. Identical to so many I’ve drawn with before, down through decades.)
That's just my aesthetic. That's just my perspective. I just let the process take me wherever it goes, I try not to pre-judge it. Truth and beauty are just dated metaphysics from the white-coded patriarchy. I'm not a camera, I paint what I feel. I just want to be free. Art is an attitude, art is what you can get away with. Art is all about defying convention. And so on. Ad infinitum.
I've heard these exact same arguments without end from countless people all of whom are clearly not drawing well. Exactly the same sentiments, always ready-to-hand, as these people waste year after year pretending to be artists in front of models that they’re not actually observing with the intensity level needed to achieve any worthwhile result.
How are these sophist excuses identical and everywhere if they were not, above all, prescriptive; taught as dogma; easily remembered, giving cover via a thin veneer of intellectualism… and thus happily passed around between struggling comrades?
The historically extreme fixation on individual choice predates the postmodernists by at least a quarter of a century. The Enlightenment ideal of progress by means of reason and science were, on a cultural level, shattered by the barbarism of WWI. The entirely non-scientific explanatory models of Freud came into vogue, positioning man as a feeling animal never entirely in charge of himself or his urges. The economy boomed, and technological advances fathered by the war enabled a staggering surge in industrial development, production - and consumption. For capital to flow, money must be spent - and people now had money to spend. But for capital to flow even better, surplus money must be spent. And so, PR-men and advertising agencies successfully merged the new field of psychology with an appropriated and perverted version of the ideal of individual liberty. Mass consumerism was founded on the creation of this new subject, the man who in effect only came into being by his choice of cigarettes and the woman by choice of detergent. Everything became a personal choice, something simply to buy into. What you bought, who you voted for, who you were - primarily available products. The people were made to believe that the personal power to choose between Pepsi and Coca Cola was an expression of individual liberty. That you can be whomever you want to be.
Then came the French nerds, and said Look at what is happening!
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"Then came the French nerds, and said Look at what is happening!"
Vs
"I’m sorry to have to be the one to explain this to you, but you are expressing yourself entirely from within the framework of a postmodern subjectivity. The examples you offer are presented as mere content, dislocated from actual time and positioned into this new, neverending present. The good and evil of zoroastrianism is teleported and merged with the current understanding of the concepts"
The first is neutral.
The second is a lens - yours and/or the french paedophile-academics.
The first claims to merely witness the loss of meaning.
The second sees its thesis of 'all is arbitrary meaning' everywhere, even where it is not.
And more to the point, the second is the 'philosophy' you've been expounding, alleging and waving like a flag since you first started commenting here.
The first is neutral.
The second is a lens[…]
There is no neutral and the two are the same.
Intermixing of Middle Eastern religions eventually begat a Jewish sect that successfully merged with Neo-Platonism to form a basis for contemporary models of good, evil, love and the self AND the Enlightenment introduced a new paradigm of analysis, atomization and individuation AND the postmodern subject is something new.
The french nerds accurately described the postmodern condition AND neo-liberalism won AND Fukuyama was wrong AND Damien Hirst is shit AND racist post-colonial/post-marxist/pro-trans/anti-liberal professors exist AND Donald Trump is the President of the United States of America AND it is still easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, no matter what the tech bro McCarthyist would want you to believe.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I should apologise if anyone else is reading for repeating the head-up-arse stuff in describing you, but you continued deafness suggests you must've yogically done it for real.
1. You: "romantic love and the concept of good and evil, are fairly recent inventions."
2. Me: Gives examples, showing 'No they're not, as far as can be read these were always known and experienced.'
3. You: Mistake this for retro-fitting later/contemporary ideas of these onto the examples given. Spout your postmodern diarrhea. Try to pronounce that was what I really meant. Because you are fucking inapable of stepping outside of you own thesis to realise most people don't share it and fuck-all actually fits it, especially - what you have the hardest time realising - anything that shows up the fact that it's mostly a great steaming stew of bollocks.
4. I point out that I gave some naked facts, on their own and totally without any theoretical frame - NOT a contemporary re-reading of them.
Add "ideas and concepts of them of course have changed" to distinguish the two separate things.
"The examples you offer are presented as mere content, dislocated from actual time and positioned into this new, neverending present. The good and evil of zoroastrianism is teleported and merged with the current understanding of the concepts"
•The examples are fucking examples. I'm not responsible for where they ended up in your head; you are.
• The 'new neverending present' is your own deliberate misunderstading that the fact that nobody can fully realise an experience from radically different times and cultures is not the same as saying that is is impossible to recognise their phenomenon and experiences. The ghosts in cuniform aren't the ghosts in Poltergeist. They are still recognisable.
Then you give a potted history of the vague and flimsy kind that pseud twats use to try to appear knowledgable and win arguments, to show something of the fact that whatever the ancient Persians may have believed about these things, our own ideas - wait for it.... - have had THE BIBLE in-between then and now.
I'm not a historian. I'm not a linguist. Not anything. But I don't need to be to see and recognise that in their writings, the ancients had experiences of terror, hatred, destruction, malevolence...etc, expressed in places, entities and actions, distinguishable from their opposites. They could be co-existent in the same god, but they were distinguishable. Similarly with experiences of love that were separate from experiences of lust, social rules regulating marriage, property etc., that have enduring consistencies through - not since - courtly love, victorian valentines and Be My Baby
Anybody, from the level of a moderately intelligent ten or eleven year-old up, can.
Because it's fundamental, basic intelligibility, and recognisable, existing outside of and independent of the cavity you preach out of and seem stuck in.
And if the voices in your head you're winning arguments with are "tech-bro mccartyists", maybe go find some real ones to take your shit up with.
Hey folks, hey Dave, hey Kev. It's a great post, not that you need my compliments.
Kev, I've kept reading like you recommended me a while ago. Not enough to know best, but enough to know better. Of course, drawing, and seeing, are just as important. Trying to be the vehicle of appreciative expression...
P.M.A., when reading these comments I usually appreciate a counterpoint, which you readily provide (despite to the dismay of the folks responding to you here)... but I'll admit to feeling like here, the old battle-lines really show their fatigue. Just one thing:
I don't really think an artist can admit that "the intention of the singular artists is irrelevant in the context of a history of art." You, yourself, seem to readily admit history is made out of intentions... and we're all conversing.
I don't really think an artist can admit that "the intention of the singular artists is irrelevant in the context of a history of art." You, yourself, seem to readily admit history is made out of intentions... and we're all conversing.
Agreed, no artist can - or should - admit this. But after the fact, in the writing and rewriting of history, the intentions of individuals obviously aren’t as important as the intentions of the storyteller. In other words: History is told with intention, and that intention overwrites - or, at the very least, converses with - the intentions of those described. This process produces meaning.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"I don't really think an artist can admit that "the intention of the singular artists is irrelevant in the context of a history of art." You, yourself, seem to readily admit history is made out of intentions... and we're all conversing."
I don't know what you're reading.
What makes history is physical: actions, walls, inventions, creations, technology. To change the world with symbolic communication, one of the above physical effects needs to be triggered by that symbolic content. Which is politics. That's why we are now drowning in information wars.
Some Holy Text written by Middle Eastern premoderns, or Karl Marx, or "French Nerds" can spout any number of wonderful intended consequences of their ideas (or even lack of intention). But reality and the text's readers generally produce other physical manifestations of the essential arguments. Furthermore, the consistency with which certain books produce certain negative results that have little to do with the idealisms by which they are touted, makes it very difficult to believe that the true intentions, the deepest desires of the writers, were not also negatively (or selfishly) aligned.
Because Art is so revealing and built of plastic material that can permanently encode so much artistic intentionality, it is quite a bit more revealing of intention than most other acts. Which is why it is better outside the arts to rely on results rather than plans or PR in trying to determine intentions. Generally implementation - what actually happens - reveals the deepest intentions. Very few people are actually tuned in to their own true motivations. That's why, "Actions speak louder than words."
"But after the fact, in the writing and rewriting of history, the intentions of individuals obviously aren’t as important as the intentions of the storyteller."
You've just admitted that the Postmodern storytellers had intentions ulterior to mere academic descriptions of what they supposedly observed happening.
Something everybody else has already figured out.
Hey Kev,
> What makes history is physical: actions, walls, inventions, creations, technology. To change the world with symbolic communication, one of the above physical effects needs to be triggered by that symbolic content. Which is politics. That's why we are now drowning in information wars.
I don't disagree that a chain of cause-effect is what actually makes up the past. I was referring to history in the sense that P.M.A. seems to be referring to it, that being the practice of history, what historians do, in order to point out a hypocrisy in their own argument.
(Removed the last comment because it was really badly edited. Trying again:)
> the intentions of individuals obviously aren’t as important as the intentions of the storyteller.
> that intention overwrites or, at the very least, converses with
Yeah, I think converse. It isn't at all obvious which is more important! That's really what I was pointing out: we can paper over the past, retell it, and we can transmute written history that way... but the actions of past people, and the intentions they took those actions with, undeniably come out in the reality we face today (even if not in the way they had hoped).
If, then, a historian is shaped by that reality---if you're committed to a view of history where "no man stands alone," coming to grips with the fact that the words and actions we take effect each other---the historian's intentions cannot erase those intentions the historian responds to. Even if one was explicitly attempting to erase or ignore a fact of history, in that attempt, one can only end up making a kind of reply to it.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "I know people who went to art school in the 1950s...."
Wouldn't you agree that it's highly implausible to blame this dramatic shift in the focus of the arts on dogma "taught in schools" and "lucrative tax loopholes," and attitudes "sanctioned by the elite and wealthy"? In my experience, neither the world nor human nature work that way.
For most of the period you describe, artists who pursued avant-garde solutions faced an onslaught of popular hostility, but continued their explorations. And if the art students in the 1940s and 50s believed they could make a buck continuing to work like Howard Pyle, they would gladly have done so. They weren't lured away from what you regard as the "true path" by sloth or by post modernist polemics from college professors.
I think you're blinding yourself to the epic events surrounding those artists. Photography began nibbling away at the traditional role of the artists in the 19th century and by the 1960s was gobbling the majority of what once sustained artists. If you know any illustrators or portrait painters who were working mid-century, ask them how photography transformed their landscape. The collapse of illustrated magazines was far more persuasive than "sophist excuses" that you claim hypnotized hard working artists everywhere. On top of the tsunami of economic, material and practical changes affecting the art world, I think it is an equally big mistake to disregard the impact of the cultural changes. There was huge popular disillusionment caused by the crash of faith in progress. I agree the public was not yet aware of the ramifications of Einstein's general relativity but everybody on the planet was painfully aware that WWI, a low point in human history, was made possible by human misuse of the wonders of technology. Everybody was also aware of how the new speed changed everything. The loss of meaning, the absence of faith, the existentialism that surfaced with Dostoevsky and others in the late 19th century, the theories of Freud about our subconscious and lack of control, the realization that the noble ambitions of the encyclopedists was built on an illusion. It's a delusion to believe that crafty post-modern sophists, rather than the changing universe, altered the path of art.
There are precedents for all of this. At the beginning of the modern period, there were similar upheavals and cultural dislocations. The Renaissance shook up the art world just as much as post modernism has shaken up ours. Be grateful that, at the beginning of the modern world people were executed over artistic differences but now in the post-modern world people are just called "assholes" by intemperate commenters on the Illustrationart blog.
Postmodern Anonymouse wrote: "The people were made to believe that the personal power to choose between Pepsi and Coca Cola was an expression of individual liberty."
Arthur Koestler wrote that colonization ( a bloody and unsustainable invention of the modern era) has been replaced by coca-colonization which has proven far more effective. Give people what they want, from an abundance of choices, and they are yours. You and I (and Koestler) may feel that people should want something different than what they want.
I find it impossible to respond to the multiple unsigned "anonymouses" who leave no identifying initial or feature. If you put an aerial tramway emoji or some other identifier on your comment you're far more likely to get a reply.
The irritated spiel at post-whatsit was from me. Didn't need a reply, or think it needed signing. Same old.
Bill
"Wouldn't you agree that it's highly implausible to blame this dramatic shift in the focus of the arts on dogma "taught in schools" and "lucrative tax loopholes," and attitudes "sanctioned by the elite and wealthy"? In my experience, neither the world nor human nature work that way."
Well, “The Arts” is not a monolith. I hear many talk of how Modern Art was the great movement of the early 20th century, when the fact is that The Golden Age of Illustration was the actual top dog; the pervasive painting and drawing style of the time by a wide margin. When postmodernism came to the dying slicks, Frazetta’s art sold a million copies of a pulp novel reprinted from 1932. Nature finds a way.
I am not discounting perverse incentives. But ultimately artistic ethics are taught in a guild or mentoring situation, master to student. There is a reliance on elders and pros to hold the line, to keep the faith within the guild. Art is a kind of faith. Young artists do not fall into abstruse intellectual lacunae and booshwah unless they are led there by ideologically driven adults. Nobody drawing horses in their 3rd grade math notebook is looking to make a statement about the collapse of the post-enlightenment self in the wake of ubiquitous commercial media.
I grew up in the school system the late 1960s - your generation - produced, while you were finding your footing in the law profession. I had the cliched hippy art teachers, and the intellectual postmodern college professors. A college girlfriend even taught a survey class in postmodernism. I’ve been to the furtive late night art meetings, I’ve sat in the cafés with the theorists and guys who wrote for Art in America or who clerked at NYC galleries, I’ve heard the arguments over and over - the kind of sophistic excuses I began listing above that I now hear mostly from perennial art students. Don’t tell me this isn’t being taught.
Kev ferrara wrote: "I hear many talk of how Modern Art was the great movement of the early 20th century, when the fact is that The Golden Age of Illustration was the actual top dog; the pervasive painting and drawing style of the time by a wide margin."
In 1922 Norman Rockwell-- already a highly successful illustrator-- sailed to France to study abstraction. He enrolled in a “free academy“ in Paris and spent the next six months learning the latest in modernist painting, returning in 1923. He continued to dabble in abstract painting and even tried to persuade the Saturday Evening Post to run an abstract cover, but the Post turned him down. Rockwell returned to France in 1932 to take another crack at becoming a modernist painter. He announced he would no longer paint pictures for advertisements and stopped doing covers for the Post. But ultimately, he decided that his experiment was a failure, and that he was not naturally suited to be a modernist painter.
I agree that the steady paychecks were on the side of illustration during that period, but as you say, "the arts" is not a monolith and there are many ways to measure dominance.
PS-- I graduated from high school in the 1970s when-- as you say-- there were plenty of "cliched hippy art teachers" so I won't "tell [you] this isn’t being taught." But I worked part time as an apprentice in a commercial art studio throughout high school and later trained as a layout artist and illustrator, so I know it was quite possible to get an education in traditional skills for those who wanted one.
In 1922 Norman Rockwell-- already a highly successful illustrator-- sailed to France to study abstraction. He enrolled in a “free academy“ in Paris and spent the next six months learning the latest in modernist painting, returning in 1923.
In 1922, 1 in 4 U.S. households had a Maxfield Parrish print on the wall, just to set the cultural scene.
Many artists are full of doubt early on and struggle to catalyze an identity, especially when still in thrall to their heroes. Rockwell, who also was prone to depression, had not yet found his style in 1922. One can see in his work, especially his ads, that he is still trying like mad to ape J.C. Leyendecker. He comes asymptotically close in a few pieces just then. Which is a hell of an achievement of craft, knowledge, and diligence.
Who knows what he was studying in Paris just after - surely still trying to find himself, looking for good information as he always had, trying not to be depressed, wondering about life, 26 years old and having been at the art grind since puberty. He clearly was ambitious and dedicated, and a lot of status was suddenly being attached to Modernism. And status is a sure lure of the ambitious and impressionable and lost.
Too many super-talented artists become deeply disquieted and intimidated by intellectualism, and find themselves drawn toward and into it out of insecurity; wanting its acceptance like puppies want affectionate owners, to their artistic and psychological detriment. (As "intellectualism" in the arts was and is mostly a kind of high-end fanboy personality and mystification cult with catch-phrases of erudition and theory used as incantations to mesmerize and arrogate status, and various goods, services, opportunities, and paying stations. All while politicking.)
But suddenly in 1924 we have the Rockwell we now know. Indeed, he had to "find himself" and he did. Maybe he found himself in Paris - like others of the Lost Generation attempted to do - or maybe by getting so close to Leyendecker's style - a very rigorous and rigid design toolkit - he realized there was no other choice but to find and be himself. Which led him to be the very human, sympathetic, humorous, and generous delineator of the human condition that he was surely meant to be.
The depression (1932) was another time of great doubt among artists and illustrators. That's about the time that Walter Everett tried to switch to "fine art" and was told in no uncertain terms that he was a mere illustrator.
Once radicals take over any market (Whether a market for goods or services) they make sure that nobody ever gets past the gates again but their own kind. Which is just why they hated, for example, Andrew Wyeth with a blinding passion. And tried to crown his life - upon his death - with a clowning - several reputation-savaging obits in different prominent online publications - that were roundly rejected by the reading public, and were ultimately retracted.
There's one of the supposed Rockwell modernist paintings here, 2nd from bottom:
https://hyperallergic.com/cold-war-politics-sabotaged-norman-rockwells-art/
... which claims to be a "Study for The Connoisseur" (his painting of the smartly dressed man looking at a Pollock style painting), although the painting doesn't resemble the Pollock drip-style of that painting, so I'm a bit unsure how it's a 'study' unless he experimented with some different styles before deciding on the drip style.
https://jamesgurney.substack.com/p/rockwell-lecture-1949
From memory, I think Rockwell made a few (good humoured) jokes about modernism in this address
(It's a locked post, but new subscribers can listen for free with the app I think)
Great link, thanks Laurence.
Yes, Rockwell was reported to have spent some time playing around with various "modernist" paint application techniques and design types before deciding on the Pollockian splatter style for The Connoisseur (1962).
That Rockwell was able to learn how to create credible (even award-winning) Modernist designs in a few short weeks and under deadline as a 68-year-old tells us a lot. (And a lot more than some will admit.)
Kev Ferrara wrote: "Once radicals take over any market (Whether a market for goods or services) they make sure that nobody ever gets past the gates again but their own kind."
I think this is the heart of our difference. For me, art is too vast and centicipitous and slippery and fissiparous and dynamic ever to be "taken over" by a cabal of radicals. There have always been putative gatekeepers who would love to control some sub-market of art. During the period you mention the conservative Saturday Evening Post, by far the most popular magazine in the world, heavily influenced popular taste in illustration. Congressional committees hoped to dictate the content of comic book art or the level of nudity in men's magazines. They and many others ruled their section of the marketplace for a few moments before the immutable laws of erosion returned them to art's peneplain. But I don't believe that a collection of sour post-modernists was able to talk its way to the heights and then pull the ladder up after it so that honest hard working artists don't have a chance.
Again, that's not the way the world works in my experience.
Again, that's not the way the world works in my experience.
I guess ideological take-overs never happen in law firms.
That Rockwell was able to learn how to create credible (even award-winning) Modernist designs in a few short weeks and under deadline as a 68-year-old tells us a lot.
Does it? How does it follow that if one of the greats of the last century is able to quickly learn a new art style, that it is proof of the style’s total irrelevance?
Are the only worthwhile styles the ones that are difficult, even for masters, to learn?
The 'principles of design' are a denuded, limited version of aesthetic-narrative-poetic compositional principles, as I've pointed out previously. Modern art was a design/cartooning movement.
Someone of Rockwell's talent, experience, competence, and knowledge base of course had little trouble detecting the design ideas behind the Moderns' splashing and smearing of paint. He then figured out the technical side of things in short order. These are just the facts.
I don't think I implied that Modern Art-type Design was irrelevant in any way. It obviously wasn't. In fact, it was one of the most important design movements ever. It put cartooning on the map.
My beef is with the smug and impenetrable air of superior status that still accrues to it, despite being, in reality, a series of graphic and cartoon styles. A movement, as a whole, based on blatancy and lossy simplification with lots of truly risible theoretical talk to shore it up among the "intellectuals."
Why not elevate Jack Kirby to the same status as Picasso? Mondrian cribbed his design style from Frank Lloyd Wright's Coonley Playhouse stained glass. Where's that corrective? And so on.
I'm repeating myself. But I think it is important to chip away at the grand edifice of hype and smugness whenever possible, railing against the ignorance and arrogance of it all. Not to mention the ludicrous over-valuation of squares, triangles, and blank canvases. And worst of all, the way they boxed out anybody who could actually draw or paint; actively trying to destroy my culture - our culture - to their own narrow benefit. In short, fuck them.
Sorry if that's boring.
There are so many interesting ideas here. Why turn it into a boxing match?
JSL
It certainly happened in colleges. Sometimes student-led. The 68 protests in Paris (both 'post-modern' and strong marxist, and - eg Daniel Cohn Bendit - later pro-paedophile campaigners) was looked up to and aped across europe. There are a few examples of the students demanding the end of actual technical instruction in art colleges that were pretty much acquiesced to. https://www.rte.ie/archives/2015/0326/689871-ncad-student-protests/
One of the drones in this clip calls for the university staff to be forced "to go out and work in the fields and factories." The comedy here, though, eclipses any shock otherwise felt at the proposed reenactment of what was happening in Mao's China. Thankfully, back on the farm Seamus, Pat and Maureen refused to agree to denounce the dad, and told their daft brother, Barney-the-Red, "tae cop-yerself awn".
The work produced by this generation, as you might guess, was hilariously bad. The amateur pottery, miscast bronzes, splodge- canvasses, etc. amazingly failed to connect with the rural population and factory workers. Counterrevolutionaries, Reactionary ingrates....Sons of dogs.
There are certainly ideological takeovers in corporations, too, today. A few examples of what was happening in these played out publicly in publishers in the UK, senior managers more or less admitting that the politico-social stances had been implemented, from murky above/belows, irrelevant to the purpose of the businesses, and they were afraid to stir the hornets nests of activists in marketing, etc, departments. Successful authors ditched (not the really big ones of course) for wrongspeak. This sort of stuff was far worse in recent years than at the time of the clip. You wouldn't have found any of it in the commercial world back then, either.
Bill
"The work produced by this generation....failed to connect..", etc
It did, though, find a home in several of those same galleries - literally - they were criticising. And with that segment of their wealthy clientele that composed the same clique of patrons of the Arts.
Much in the same way as sanctimoniousness and tyranny can freely move from religiosity to an atheist persuasion, the motives of such people easily shift brand.
Bill
David: "Again, that's not the way the world works in my experience"
Culture is a complex system. A kind of slowly changing interference-pattern made up of many disparate, interwoven, interacting forces. No ONE reason for cultural change is ever sufficient. It's likely that ALL of the reasons cited so far for the shifts we talk about are relevant, plus others that haven't even been mentioned yet.
For instance; the fact that fashions change for pretty superficial reasons. The teenagers of the 1950s and 60s wanted to look youthful, rebellious and cool, in order to forge their own identity and independence and differentiate themselves from their parent's generation. If that meant wearing a striped Breton shirt and a pair of wrap-around sunglasses instead of a fedora and suit, then so be it. That becomes the new cool until it's displaced by the next new thing. This type of ongoing generational trend shift also applies to the visual arts, music, architecture, interior design etc.
(then of course, several generations later the kids go "damn, why can't we have paintings and architecture like they did in Europe in the 1800s ? Everything is so ugly now!")
Richard: "Are the only worthwhile styles the ones that are difficult, even for masters, to learn?"
It's for you (or the viewer) to decide whether something that is easy to achieve is worthwhile or not. The same question applies to AI generated imagery.
Pre-1870 there was a technical barrier to painting that meant that the average Joe would never have dreamt they could 'have a go'. It was more like a skilled profession that required an apprenticeship period to get through. This entry-level barrier was gradually lowered by impressionism, fauvism, cubism, expressionism, abstraction, and abstract expressionism. When the art world heaps praise on child-like scribbles with tacked-on literary 'meanings' the barrier to entry effectively no longer exists, the art college doors are flung open, and we end up in the situation we're now in.
Again, it's for you to decide whether you think the trajectory has been in a positive direction or not. I think Cy Twombly is crap. You and David don't.
all the fun of the fair...
Laurence,
We are all allowed to like what we like. But I don't see that as the issue.
It is not just opinion that those who have taken over various prominent or well-endowed art schools and art boards/commissions/endowments with ideological manichean fervor - first the Socialist Realists (in the 1930s), then The Abstract Expressionists (in the 50s and 60s), and finally (from the late 1960s up to the present day) The Postmodernists - have nothing to teach about art except their own ideology. It is not just opinion that they actively preach and encourage outright hatred for prior art and art information and politic to get any remaining old guard members ousted. When you sit in a postmodern classroom all you learn is argument. As if the poetic-narrative problems cleverly parsed and solved over hundreds of years never existed or didn’t matter. (”Not our art, not our problems, don’t care, good riddance. We are all that matter. We are ‘now’ forever; brilliant, holy and righteous into perpetuity. Amen.”)
It is also not just opinion that The Postmodernists have no intention of ever relinquishing their current institutional positions, where they perpetuate their personality cults and mind-bogglingly arrogant know-nothing-ism, while living the cozy life of successful demagogues.
These types are the very reason we had a revival of the classical atelier movement in the first place, along with the rise of online art schools and YouTube teachers. Young artists are starved for real information. And real opportunities to make the world more beautiful.
Meanwhile, one looks at major government or endowment Art projects, awards, and prizes and all the evidence is there of the current top-down postmodern monopoly. The big ones especially are obscene jokes; wasting taxpayer money on childish, meaningless work, outright fraud, and in-group nepotism all masked by sophistic pretension and virtue-signaling patter. (The last time I checked, the art piece that most set my hair on fire was the one with all the colorful balls rolled randomly down a hallway. For a million and half dollars.)
Radicals obviously target money sources. And influence sources. And stable academic positions. And the children of wealthy or well-connected people. Ideological takeover by arrogant authoritarian radicals is a real thing. That will never bring us anywhere good. These people need to be deposed. All the major schools need de-lousing of their various sorts of perched grifting apparatchiks.
p.s.
Kev: "Why not elevate Jack Kirby to the same status as Picasso? "
Oddly enough, Robert Crumb has been accepted into the modernist pantheon, represented now by David Zwirner Galleries (one of the biggies next to Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth), who represent modern-contemporary artists such as Chris Ofili, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. From their site: " R. Crumb .... has helped challenge and expand the boundaries of the graphic arts and redefined comics and cartoons as countercultural art forms".
I'm sure the 'countercultural' bit is the giveaway, but I still find it very odd how and why the contemporary-art-world selects the occasional person from the illustration / comic art / graphic novel world. I could easily have imagined Crumb living in obscurity in his latter years with zero gallery interest whatsoever.
"I'm sure the 'countercultural' bit is the giveaway, but I still find it very odd how and why the contemporary-art-world selects the occasional person from the illustration / comic art / graphic novel world. I could easily have imagined Crumb living in obscurity in his latter years with zero gallery interest whatsoever."
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I'd say the common "edgy" denominator is obsessive and deranged lasciviousness coupled to profound depression, nihilism and self-hatred, plus a shared energizing hatefulness toward healthy normality and "bourgeoise" commerciality.
Beyond that, Crumb has a particular characteristic unthreatening nebbish look, and can be taken in as a pet, as The Radical Chic set are inclined to do with peculiar characters of renown. As they did with, say, Truman Capote. (Or even white-suited Tom Wolfe who wrote Radical Chic from his experiences.)
Plus boomer nostalgia; easy money is to be made therein. And a lot of it. The product is already made and ready to upsell at substantial margins.
I should add that I have some appreciation for Crumb because he is now and again quite funny and even trenchant in his cultural commentary. (His take on Frazetta's art notwithstanding.)
A movement, as a whole, based on blatancy and lossy simplification with lots of truly risible theoretical talk to shore it up among the "intellectuals."
How are you so sure that institutions went bad, then art went bad, and then audiences got bad?
Doesn’t the “math” work just as well in the opposite direction: that people got dumb, so institutions and art got dumb?
Maybe the high quality of art in the mid-20th century was all actually just inertia from much better men from earlier eras. Perhaps by the 1950s, the audience was already too dumb, on the whole, to really appreciate the poetry in great pictures, perhaps the decline in art and art institutions was perfectly natural.
That seems to be the case today: what great art there still is now seems entirely inertial, inherited from better men, only repeated never invented. Our audiences certainly don’t seem up to consuming it, but I’m not even sure the artists seem up to the task of what they’re making (in a spiritual/intellectual/sentimental depth sense). Could that not have been the case in 1950, or 1900, or even 1850?
If we only saw a decline in art, that would be one thing. But when art, writing, architecture, craftsmanship, philosophy, politics and more all decline over the same 200 years, isn’t it more likely we’re inverting cause and effect?
Isn’t a people’s art only as good as the people themselves, plus whatever inertial advantage they inherit? Should we really have expected those institutions to maintain that cultural depth when the men were no longer equals to the art?
I think you're right, there was a decline caused by lack of belief, a disconnection from the felt-forces - the fusion in an individual or people with the non-abstract, concrete 'inner' of the things in the world that moved and motivated them before, be that nature qualities, myth/archetype, the points in the continuum between 'platonic'-sort-of experiences of ethics or ideas and their allegory avatars (they already a kind of decline from the kind of purer myth-experience you see in, say, Homer). A disconnection of some kind did occur, probably piecemeal over time, it has been written about and diagnosed in various different ways. Ideas and actions that couldn't have occurred in the forms they took became possible. Mechanisation broke much of the continuum between inner expereience and resulting deed, from war to art. And, piece by piece, built up an outer environment appropriate to the belief-emptiness, sole-commercial impulse, or mechanistic ideologies that they were spurred on by & housed.
There's a website that has etchings and engravings associated with the Prix de Rome, I think; the decline over the years first appears to be imaginative, then later in terms of technique and craft. The academic painting-craft of the 19th c remained very high, I'm not sure, though, how much of the 'poor' work in terms of their concepts/imaginative qualities is just representative of there always being a lot of work made in any era that is weak in various respects.
Institiutons seem doubtful when they doubt themselves. But there's a loop there, too, when this happens. If some ideology or other springs up, with a programmatic intention, it has to either take over or tear down the old relics.
That's why the clip of the college above seemed interesting. Ideas, bits of slogans dribble out from the students' mix of rural Irish and posh Dublin accents like stuff from a foreign phrasebook. It's almost quaint. That place would have been to the mania happening in Paris as the most distant village was to the Bolshevik revolution, but there they are - a circle of students repeating the mantras that spread from those epicentres, slowly through student magazines and political pamphlets, like dupes. An emblematic microcosm of things that were going on in a more organised and emphatic way in the bigger centres.
Bill
... it's never been a fully linear process, from a golden age to decay, though, of course. Always been falls and rises, but that's why I think the loss of what I tried to describe as access to the qualitative/virtue-ethic/spirit (all or any permutation, or level), etc, and what I think (?) you were describing with "in a spiritual/intellectual/sentimental depth sense", was & is the Dolorous Blow.
This is the first loss that was replaced not with a freeing-up, expansion or even just an alternative, but with a Nil.
Bill
what I think (?) you were describing with "in a spiritual/intellectual/sentimental depth sense", was & is the Dolorous Blow.
Yeah, I probably mean the Dolorous Blow/Strike a bit more literally than you do.
The King is castrated, and so the land or country goes to waste. That's what happened. I would wager that whatever institutional decline we saw over the 20th century was the direct result of cultural declines in the 19th century, brought about by the dissolution of the legitimate aristocracy.
Putting the political questions aside, just speaking sociologically: if you have a core clique within a population that is highly educated and deeply concerned with virtue, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, history, and so on, and you make a change in your society that dissolves that clique into a coarser, baser general population, you should expect to see significant cultural decline.
In short, I would suppose that the original Dolorous Strikes were the American and French Revolutions.
The fact that there were 100 years between Napoleon’s new “meritocratic” nobility and works like Les Grandes Baigneuses and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon tells us more about the strength (the inertia) of the aristocratic culture that preceded the revolution than it does about any particular cultural strengths of Napoleonic society.
That the new-money Rockefellers, with the help of the son of a Presbyterian minister, created a revolutionary museum (MoMA) that sought to undermine aristocratic art culture should have been the expected outcome, I would argue, of the revolution in 1776. We replaced a healthy legitimate aristocracy with a debased one, what more could we have expected? We should count ourselves lucky that it took so long.
I'm not sure about those things, mainly 'cos I know f.a. about them; but I don't think you need the influence of 'cliques', the conditions at that level, necessarily, to have 'spiritual/intellectual/sentimental depth' at the rural/worker/general level. In fact, it definitely isn't needed - look at folk culture. There's influence, two-way at that, happening of course.
Bill
"...more about the strength (the inertia) of the aristocratic culture that preceded the revolution than it does about any particular cultural strengths of Napoleonic society."
But yes to that. You can probably mark out a series of ripples of endurance and their lengths, each shorter than the last, that come from the wave-crests of diminishing cultural achievement and momentum.
Where you put the point the peaks had undoubtedly begun to drop, despite later achievements, though.... ?
Bill
("Should we really have expected those institutions to maintain that cultural depth", though could be asked of the monarchy. Not just George III, but later the Holy Roman Empire...the churches... Symptoms, too, of some other shifts ?
/B. )
How are you so sure that institutions went bad, then art went bad, and then audiences got bad?
I’m confused why you think that is my position.
I believe mostly in individuals in local scenes holding an art faith together, through shared values and ideals of community and character (to withstand anti-artistic temptations, cheats and tricks. And also loneliness.) I've said this.
I’ve also written many times about the problem of short cuts or cheats entering into a market, and the resulting spiral to the bottom; as everybody must adopt the cheat or be outflanked; which lowers the quality of everything including the ethics of the industry. And breaks the spirit of the faith. I think this is what happened to mainstream illustration.
”Doesn’t the “math” work just as well in the opposite direction: that people got dumb, so institutions and art got dumb?”
Since I believe most people become how they are treated and generally succumb to whatever philosophies are sublated into their technologies, both the fans of illustration and its practitioners continued to undergo negative changes over time as various tools came along and usurped the earlier more personally-invested and intensive practices. That includes the ubiquity of photography in the mid-century. Then TV. And so on.
All this is aside from what happened in the schools. Ultimately, because they are excepted from the market, the greater schools should be important bastions of the faith; of the age-old values and the character-building necessary to keeping the faith. Instead, radicals saw an opportunity to escape the market and establish sinecures for themselves and their friends, as well as personality cults to tickle their egos. And radicals are vicious pretentious punks. And here we are.
I don't think a "legitimate aristocracy" could have prevented the Sunday Funnies, Comic Books, or Graphic Posters from happening. Nor would any sane person want such a thing.
What makes history is physical: actions, walls, inventions, creations, technology. To change the world with symbolic communication, one of the above physical effects needs to be triggered by that symbolic content. Which is politics. That's why we are now drowning in information wars.
Once radicals take over any market (Whether a market for goods or services) they make sure that nobody ever gets past the gates again but their own kind.
the radicals actually responsible for overwriting ethics with laissez-faire market dynamics? Certainly not the neoliberals! Nope, ‘twas the objective force and historical inevitability of a handful of french nerds!
Well, that’s a history, I guess.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Well, roll up your sleeves & put up your dukes on neolibtechbro.blogspot.com
"the radicals actually responsible for overwriting ethics with laissez-faire market dynamics? Certainly not the neoliberals! Nope, ‘twas the objective force and historical inevitability of a handful of french nerds!
Well, that’s a history, I guess."
Ah. To feel as clever as you did as you tried to zing me with that convoluted mess of reading incomprehension and tendentiousness.
What the hell are you even talking about? What error do you think you've read me making that you think you're flagging up?
Reading comprehension matters. Having a perspective of the various historical moments and different institutions being discussed helps. Realizing that there are different arguments going on here, not one big dumb squish would be most efficacious.
Certainly better to cultivate consideration and circumspection about what I'm writing than go for broke with grand spurts of Nerd Retard Venom™. Which you seem to have stockpiled.
"But after the fact, in the writing and rewriting of history, the intentions of individuals obviously aren’t as important as the intentions of the storyteller."
You've just admitted that the Postmodern storytellers had intentions ulterior to mere academic descriptions of what they supposedly observed happening.
Something everybody else has already figured out.
Submitted on the Nature of Gotchas, Ideology, History and Reading comprehension.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"Submitted on the Nature of Gotchas, Ideology, History and Reading comprehension."
Yes, you had contradicted yourself. Quite obviously. I'm sorry you're still sore about that. But responding on tilt will not make anything better.
If your point is that you think you've found a contradiction I've made, I'd be glad to see it laid out as clearly as I laid out your error. As it stands, you are just spitting out sentences. I am unable to detect some coherent argument or counter-argument.
Alternately, I would be glad to clarify where you've made an error in reading comprehension in your assessment of what I was saying or implying.
Blood Meridian and Lonesome Dove, two novels about the Old West, were both published in 1985. The current year is 2026. The novels have not changed in the interim. Whatever intention the authors invested in their creation remains the same.
But the books’ cultural standing and significance then and now are not the same. Something changed. What happened? Did the postmodernists happen? Did radicals take over the market? Did the communists tamper not only with our precious bodily fluids, but with the very fabric of reality? Why is McCarthy’s book presently considered to be one of greatest American novels of all time when it wasn’t around the time of its publication?
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Yes, assessments of artistic worth can change. Critics are people too. Books can lose or gain in general appreciation or among select enclaves of readers.
Where are you going with this groundbreaking insight?
Everything changes, and this current moment in time isn’t special.
Bennet’s particular tracing of our current woes back to the Enlightenment isn’ the history. And your understanding and telling of the French Nerds’™ intervention into history and the arts is an invention. It is a history, not the. The Jordan Petersonesque take on postmodernism and postmodernity is just that - a story being told.
Obviously, the same applies to your understanding and exegesis of art.
The past is nearly as unpredictable as the future, and history is unstable - it is entirely a process of revision. Meaning isn’t inherent, it is - and must be - produced.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
'Meaning isn’t inherent, it is - and must be - produced'
Big Sigh....
What do you make it with ?
Bill
"Obviously, the same applies to your understanding and exegesis of art."
How would you know?
You know nothing. You’ve studied nothing of what I have studied or tested or taught. I’ve been at this for decades looking into what the greats of the past did and said. You haven’t done anything. You haven’t read anything sensible about what I discuss. And you’re not talented. How can you pronounce on this field, as a know-nothing? The arrogance is staggering. Insane. And awful to deal with.
I don’t know where you think your adamant know-nothing-ism takes us. I don’t see any helpful motive behind it. It seems utterly self-serving. What I see is that you don’t want the conversations that you don’t understand to have any legitimacy. Because then you’re out of the loop. You don’t want to be the low status, uninformed untalented guy in the art conversation. But it can’t be helped. You are. You have no art to show. No anecdotes from your experience in the arts. You have nothing to say about suggestion, composition and expression; theme and development and good drawing and poetics and artful technical practice. Nor all the rest of it; relation, and rhythm, and balance, etc. And no amount of narcissistic postmodern pleading that all of that is suddenly irrelevant will flip the table. Sorry.
What is timeless remains timeless no matter what you try to plead. Principles are principles. They aren’t opinions. Nor are they narratives. They are actionable modules of pragmatic understanding.
I know you can’t take that idea, because it kicks out the grand crutch your ego depends upon to stay upright. But that’s too bad. You need to give that crutch up; to have integrity, you must start over from scratch. In full acknowledgment of your ignorance, the greatness of past masters, and the reality of shared phenomenal experience; including aesthetic. Otherwise you will remain a useless, arrogant, bitter, postmodern belligerent fighting against reality to your dying day.
Marcel Duchamp’s «Nude Descending a Staircase» isn’t culturally significant because of Duchamp’s ability or intention. It is significant because of the way history has turned out. It remains significant bacause of its function in meaning-production. The same applies to the Mona Lisa. Duchamp’s neighbour, who was a far superior craftsman and intellect, a modern day da Vinci, remains unknown. His many works likewise. So it goes.
I may know nothing, but I won’t simply believe anything, either. And I recognize a priest when I see, hear or read him.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"I may know nothing, but... "
“Marcel Duchamp’s «Nude Descending a Staircase» isn’t … It is … It remains … The same applies… was far superior…”
You admit to knowing nothing. In between absolutist claims. As usual.
Incoherent. And completely un-self-aware in a way that only a profoundly lost narcissist can be.
Duchamp’s work became and remains well known for a lot of different reasons. Rhythmic animation, playful shapes, and decorative value are among those reasons. So is novelty. Mass media's interest in novelty and controversy. Culturistas' interest in being differentiated from the bourgeoise. Etc. To some people it isn’t culturally significant at all. To some others it’s everything. Art isn’t a monolith and neither is art appreciation.
I direct people to my prior post for a diagnosis of the problem. We'll let others decided who is the dogma spouting priest.
Back to my drawing table. Adieu.
The picture would have its existence and 'ecosystem' of qualities irrespective of fame or notoriety. Whether these have any existence outside of a mind that contemplates them is a metaphysical question, but nobody needs the title or explanation to feel at least something of the mimetic quality in it of movement and the human form. Because correspondences are part of nature. Not just in camouflage-mimesis, but in structure. Light-ray, plant-shoot. Delta, branches, nervous system. Mind and thought run along related shapes: thrust, dissipation (or alternatively diversification). Blah blah, etc. .... ; Loads of 'em.
Any series of human-centred events can be understood by any honest observer by a more specific set of correspondences, ie - normal human recognition of both general and specific cognates in things parallel, including things experienced. None of this is makesie-upsie.
'Culturally significant' is a recognisable fulcrum, novelty, alteration.... in a thread of some such human-centred events attended to - given attention. Circumscribing this or that particular thread might be subjective, based on either honesty or dishonesty, passive conformity to convention, or partiality due to incomplete knowledge.
Historians are alert to these things, as can anyone be, and the antidote is alertness, industrious scrutiny, willingness to undergo correction.....& honesty.
Where these are present, history may be partial but it is never invented.
(I'd certainly credit Kev's on art/illustration as a pretty damn good example.)
Bill
>>>>'Meaning isn’t inherent, it is - and must be - produced'
>>>>Big Sigh.... What do you make it with ?
I notice he didn't answer you Bill. I truly think we have a mental patient on our hands. He just repeats the same thing over and over with no proof. Offers no definition of meaning. Gets mad if anybody contradicts him, says everything else is nonsense. And then as his proof, he just repeats the same thing once again. Like just saying it proves it.
I think he's struggling with something. Some kind of mental issue. There's no other explanation.
~ FV
Big Sighin’ Brexit Bill,
your brain.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
There seeming to exist 1) an arrow of time through which a causal chain of events occur and 2) history, are two entirely different matters. It may be that not a sparrow falls to the ground apart from [insert object of religious belief], but plenty of bipedal sparrows have fallen apart from history.
History is a mental model, a contemporary recreation and invention of events no longer contemporary. On a personal level, my memory of having enjoyed a bar of chocolate yesterday, is unlukely to change for as long as that mental model of the event exists. On a cultural level, things gets more unstable, and history is subject to enormous change and revision.
The future of the past is unpredictable. And in light of this - and also examplifying it - I find the friction in discussions on postmodernity and radiCaL mARXIsT poSTmOdErnSM interesting, especially as the prevailing antagonism seems absolutely disconnected from the mental model of history it springs forth from.
Hope that made sense:)
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Like one of those carriage-pacing subway nuts; negative attention beats none at all.
Bill
Like a wall made of muscle? Thanks.
B.
My apologies, I was replying to your above question, «What do you make [meaning] with ?» I don’t know why the comment ended up disconnected from your question. Also, I don’t know what the «wall made of muscle» is referencing.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Finally, the forum’s Temu-versions of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern actually unite for some banter!
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Postmodern Anonymouse
That's ok. (Btw - best restock your nerd-venom it's losing zing)
Ok I believe you. Take the dollar and piss off.
B.
Do you guys think Billboard, Grammys, etc. deserve the same institutional critique as MoMA? Rolling Stone calls The Beatles the “#1 greatest musical artist of all time”, not Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi.
Do the first two have classical categories ? There's justification in looking at the things separately. The Beatles, I suppose, are a more novelty-inventive kind of 'popular singwriting' thing, so maybe parallel high achievement in non 'fine art'. But the Grammys, Rolling Stone, etc, largely look like they should be euthanised.
Bill
Look at P-on’s (Postmodern Anonymouse’s) pattern of attacks. He’s woke. Being part of that hate-fueled revolutionary cult gives ppl like him all the energy they don’t have for their own lives.
That’s why he goes to political attacks first. To the cult, being aligned with Brexit or finding value in Jordan Peterson or being against queer postmodernism “ally-ship” is a hard taint. The easiest heuristic possible. You’re either with our cult or against us. If you dare to defend J.K. Rowling, you’re evil. You’re indicted. The End. Simple-minded cult thinking by a dumb loser dying to feel worthwhile.
The other passwords are shorthand for “I’m smart, cultured, and one of the good people”. Not just Pomo crap, but he’s also referencing Blood Meridian, Dr. Strangelove, Shakespeare, laissez-faire, and so on. Because he’s dead set on portraying himself as smarter than you.
These are all passwords, tactics, politics. Not arguments. He is signaling like mad that he is the good and smart one. He can’t make a coherent argument. He doesn’t have one. All he can do is signal like hell that he should win the argument because he's the better person.
So this is not a debate about the actual subject; meaning, beauty, truth, etc. This is a venomous nerd who thinks these types of off-topic attacks and “intellectual” references make him unassailable in the battle front. And to other idiots of his cult, that might just be true. Postmodernists only believe in power. They can’t think for themselves. They only want to be seen as heroes by other feral children in their Lord of the Flies kingdom.
It is useless to argue with somebody who only thinks in terms of signaling his virtue to a bizarre collective to which he owes his entire identity. That’s why he seems like A.I. He’s hardly a person. He was raised an obedient statist-communist revolutionary. To be utterly delusional in mentality. A egotistical slave built to fail utterly as an individual. By sick, duplicitous people. Which made it absolutely necessary for him to be state-dependent or state-defined and a revolutionary. (In short his parents should be shot.)
That’s why everything he says about meaning is about community-determined meaning. Farming it all out to the collective. What we’re dealing with here is someone who has been taught to not have an identity. That’s why he’s anonymous, generic in thought and collectivist. Probably confused about his gender by now too. Yes an abject narcissist who probably doesn't even understand himself. Exactly the weird communist-postmodernist hybrid that Jordan Peterson identified.
Nerd Venom Antidote
>>>>>>>>>"That’s why everything he says about meaning is about community-determined meaning. Farming it all out to the collective. What we’re dealing with here is someone who has been taught to not have an identity. That’s why he’s anonymous, generic in thought and collectivist."
Not sure if this is all true, but this is at least very interesting as an overall psychological profile, the best thesis yet. And "P-on" is the best rename of Postmodern Anonymous. Using it from now on. It fits.
Not long ago P-on told us that he did some work in video games. Or something like that. He's very cagey. So I think we should assume he's lying about that. And everything else. I think he's just a sock puppet. A fraud from top to bottom. Very anxious to hide his identity.
~ FV
"That’s why everything he says about meaning is about community-determined meaning. Farming it all out to the collective. "
I was thinking along similar lines. He seems to have some kind of mental glitch where it never registers that what he's calling meaning is merely some kind of consensus arrived at by his tribe. A complete misunderstanding of the question of meaning at the fundamental level. And evidence of your idea of his having no functional identity that is able to feel and experience truth on its own. Which I don't know if that is a dissociation from clinical depression, hyper left-brain dominance, or Autism, or Asperger's. One wonders if all these dysfunctions have some relation to each other, as well as to the inability to experience aesthetic-poetic phenomena in the common way. Let alone life.
Weirdly, it all reminds me of David's claim about consensus truth from a little while back. Which many of us jumped on as being batty. And dangerous, as every tyranny or mass hysteria would be "true" as a consensus before being refuted by an opposing consensus, or counter-violence, or a collapse of faith in the mass formation narrative.
"Rolling Stone calls The Beatles the “#1 greatest musical artist of all time”, not Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi."
Rolling Stone is a magazine dedicated to click-baiting a certain cultural set. Its goal is not to set down music history - some academic enterprise - but merely to sell itself to that cultural set. (Also to guide them politically) Like most magazines, it always on the verge of collapse, and thus it must constantly flatter, pander intensely and attempt to radicalize its base demo to stay alive.
Beyond that, I do not understand any comparison of The Beatles to modern or postmodern art. The Beatles tell coherent stories - even if they're fantasy stories - with their narrative works. And their songs are full of beauty and excitement.
I believe very strongly that one can be a dedicated and fanatical fan of Frank Frazetta and still have no idea how good he is. I daresay, it is only when one tries like mad to actually create at Frazetta's level and in his artistic values that one learns just how great he is.
I'd say the same for the Beatles. Only by trying like the devil to write and perform something as tuneful, cool, fun, emotional, and seemingly effortless as a great Beatles song, will you ever realize just how great they are.
«Take Futurism. One might think it would have been considered an instance of entartete Kunst, along with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. But the early Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored Italian participation in the First World War for aesthetic reasons; they celebrated speed, violence, and risk, all of which somehow seemed to connect with the fascist cult of youth. While fascism identified itself with the Roman Empire and rediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (who proclaimed that a car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and wanted to kill even the moonlight) was nevertheless appointed as a member of the Italian Academy, which treated moonlight with great respect.»
There continues to be an obvious resonance with Umberto Eco’s essay on Ur-Fascism in certain strands of the comment section on this blog, all too easily amplified by even the slightest «NIhilisT pOstMOdeRn MarXIsT» approach to the topics of discussion, but in light of Apatoff’s casting of the Duchamp as an object of importance in the vector of history, I find the familiar pattern of reactionary response particularly fascinating in this iteration. I can’t put my finger on it, but there seems to be some weird horse shoe theory phenomenon manifesting here.
Thoughts?
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Postmodern Anonymouse
>>>>>"Look at P-on’s (Postmodern Anonymouse’s) pattern of attacks. He’s woke....These are all passwords, tactics, politics. Not arguments. ... Simple-minded cult thinking... The other passwords are shorthand for “I’m smart, cultured, and one of the good people”.
That’s why he goes to political attacks first. "
>>>> P-on: "Umberto Eco’s essay on Ur-Fascism ... I find the familiar pattern of reactionary response.. blah blah blah"
Nailed it.
It's all politics with P-on, recruiting with leftist "intellectualism" and constant political demonization-by-labeling. All activism, all day. Binary splits in the friend-enemy distinction in everything. You're either with the insane lying "intellectual" postmodern queer commies or you're a fascist nazi MAGA hillbilly knuckle-dragger.
Same 'ol same 'ol. Commie gonna commie. Boring af. Go away you divisive rote asshole.
~ FV
"I can’t put my finger on it, but there seems to be some weird horse shoe theory phenomenon manifesting here."
Postmodernists are fascists ? Too simplistic, despite the close relation between nihilist embrace & Wagnerian fatalist fantasy that leads only to the destruction of the usurped host......and the identical institutional takeovers.... and the possessed madness of followers in either cult...and the gulags and death camps.........
Oops. I've mixed up my loonie-cults. Apparently, the postmodernists aren't the communists. In my defence, so do quite a few of the activists I based my understanding on.
And, looking into it, it turns out that the commies aren't all bad, or at least haven't lost access to the rational faculty.
https://communistusa.org/marxism-versus-postmodernism/
'In the field of postmodern philosophy, the greatest minds in history are looked upon with disdain and unceremoniously discarded. Reason is denounced, while irrationality and unintelligibility are raised to the level of principle. Theoretical honesty and the pursuit for truth are drowned in endless caveats, ambiguities and incomprehensible language. The following is an excellent example of this genre:
"More important than political leftism, closer to a concurrence of the intensities: a vast subterraneous movement, wavering, more of a ruffle in fact, on account of which the law of value is disaffected. Holding up production, uncompensated seizures as modalities of consumption, refusal to “work,” (illusory?) communities, happenings, sexual liberation movements, occupations, squattings, abductions, productions of sounds, words, colors, with no artistic intention. Here are the “men of production,” the “masters of today”: marginals, experimental painters, pop, hippies and yippies, parasites, madmen, binned loonies. One hour of their lives offers more intensity and less intention than 300,000 words of a professional philosopher."
We do not know whether an hour in the life of marginals, experimental painters, pop, hippies and yippies, parasites, madmen, or binned loonies can offer more intensity than the words of an unspecified “professional philosopher.” But even from this brief extract it is certainly clear that just five minutes of anybody’s life is worth considerably more than 300,000 words of this particular philosopher.
Without so much as cracking a smile, the postmodernists put forward the most laughably absurd claims and propositions. Jean Baudrillard, for example, claimed that reality has now disappeared, and all meaning along with it. To illustrate his point, he paraphrases (and exaggerates) the words of Elias Canetti with apparent approval:
"Beyond a certain precise moment in time, history is no longer real. Without realizing it, the whole human race suddenly left reality behind. Nothing that has occurred since then has been true, but we are unable to realize it. Our task and our duty now is to discover this point or, so long as we fail to grasp it, we are condemned to continue on our present destructive course." '
Reading on, I realise I've been dissing a caricature of postmodernism based on the most tenuous brushes with its thought. These slivers I mistook for the pith.. the ambergris....the diamonds of its bowels.....
....and missed the full glories of its excresences;
' The reader might feel entitled to ask a question: What does this mean? But this question has been answered in advance. Since reality has now disappeared, and all meaning along with it, there is no point in asking for any meaning at all. This is a method that has the undoubted advantage of ruling out any awkward questions in advance. It silences all possible criticism and, in fact, liquidates the basis of rational thought in general. ...'
[ There follows some badmouthing Jesus by the Reds. BOO ! Hiss ! Then, back to the matter at hand...]
'....In fact, this penchant for the absurd takes us to the very heart of postmodernist thought, which rejects all rational thinking. Deleuze and Guattari, often portrayed as the “left wing” of postmodernism, take these absurdities to a whole new level:
"… the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man. Not man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life, and who ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into his body, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole: the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe. This is the second meaning of process as we use the term: man and nature are not like two opposite…"
Michel Foucault, a close friend of Deleuze and Guattari, fell over himself in his haste to shower praise on this nonsense: “… a lightning storm was produced which will bear the name of Deleuze: new thought is possible; thought is again possible.” 4 '
Thank you, Comrade.
Bill, FYI
The connection of postmodernism to communism is found on the last page of the communist manifesto. Marx wrote, "In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things."
That's where the slander and dismissal of truth, beauty, talent, logic, normal sexual relationships and genders, work ethic, age of consent, law, presumption of innocence, nationalism, grace, honor, and all the rest of the pomo nihilistic regime ties into marxism.
P-on has taken pains to lie about this connection and call everybody stupid for making. But that should surprise nobody.
They just want to smash and collapse everything. And anything that helps them do that is fine by them.
~ FV
'taken pains to lie '
That's presumptive of a coherence that just isn't there. / B.
Dear Bill and Ted,
Oops. I've mixed up my loonie-cults. Apparently, the postmodernists aren't the communists. In my defence, so do quite a few of the activists I based my understanding on.
And, looking into it, it turns out that the commies aren't all bad
my sweet brethren in Christ,
The connection of postmodernism to communism is found on the last page of the communist manifesto
the time is truly out of joint.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Are you having a mental breakdown ?
~ FV: "The connection of postmodernism to communism is found on the last page of the communist manifesto."
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Postmortem Dishonestmouse: "The time is truly out of joint."
Viruses mutate primarily to survive and adapt, resulting in changes that can improve their ability to infect, replicate faster, or evade immune responses. Evasiveness is a big factor in how viruses manage to replicate beneath scrutiny. These mutations can lead to new variants that impact vaccine effectiveness and treatment options, often causing better attachment to human cells.
Yellow Fever was identified over 130 years ago. Epidemics have come and gone. Vaccines have been developed, yet Yellow Fever still continues to mutate, infect susceptible people, and induce headaches and nausea.
In extreme outbreaks, widespread - sometimes draconian - "sanitation" efforts have often been warranted to cleanse a countryside of prolific viral shedders.
Heck, she's just unnerved at finding out the pearls of postmodern analysis, tenet and application she's been sharing here all this time are indistinguishable from a marxist taking the piss out of it.
Almost word for word in most cases.
All those wasted years.....the effort at getting to grips with Deleuze and Derrida..... page after page of it.... Going no-contact with rationality just to win the approval of her lecturer......Learning de Beauvoir groomed underage girls and Foucault was a straight-up kiddie-fiddler was hard, true, but it's the IDEAS that count, right ?
Just to finally realise that you've been speaking in imbecile while dressed as a clown, all along.
B.
Bill, give the Devil her due. They know exactly what they are after. Revolution.
'Evasiveness is a big factor in how viruses manage to replicate beneath scrutiny'
The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Eternal Tao, didn't you know....
Bill
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