Aesthetes Take Heed

If I say I’m really really shocked will they stop pissing about?

“how to make contact with something that has no function.”
I’d have thought anyone meeting the aptly named Dimchev has already achieved this.

I’m glad at least one person there was having a good time.
Quite. And it’s always a pleasure to see the European Union’s Culture Programme spending taxpayer’s money wisely. The EUCP is of course “enhancing our shared heritage” with “intercultural dialogue.”
It’s possibly worth noting just how often performance art is literally masturbatory. In the mid Nineties the Other Half and I were dragged to an ‘event’ in London. I can’t recall much about it other than that it involved a woman standing onstage, fully dressed, while pretending to masturbate and looking terribly bored. More bored than us, even. (I assume she was pretending. It was difficult to care either way.)

I didn’t watch the video,
Well, that’s hardly fair. I don’t see why you should get off so lightly.

I’m glad at least one person there was having a good time.
I want to see video of the audience watching this crap and pretending to like it.

I’ve always wanted to gather a group of friends, and dress the part of the sort of people who would attend these sorts of events, and actually go to one of these things. Then loudly proclaim that the artist clearly is stating their support for UKIP or the like. Then have your compatriots join in a lively disagreement and eventually all come around to your side that yes, the artist is obviously one of those racist conservatives. You’d have to work on your arts-bollocks speak to make it convincing.

While I appreciate the fact that you did warn me, I am now irreparably damaged.

In the mid Nineties … a woman standing onstage, fully dressed, while pretending to masturbate and looking terribly bored.
And yet, in the nearly 20 years since, our “daring” performance artists have not discovered anything new.

“traced letters on his back”
Sorry, I deleted too much out when I edited that. I wish there was some way to edit one’s comments after they’ve been posted.

“explores” the “provoking functionlessness” of various objects,
Really? How?

About that clown interacting with objects? Let’s just say Jonathan Winters he’s not.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-29/and-highest-paid-college-majors-are

AC1,
As noted at the time of the 2010 tuition fee protests and riots:

The average lifetime financial return on an arts degree is estimated at around £30,000. Set against the cost of courses, accommodation and lost earnings during the period of study, the net result is most likely a reduction in lifetime earnings. In short, there’s no longer a return for the taxpayer and little economic incentive for inter-generational subsidy. […] In the UK there are currently around 20,000 students of fine art, 10,000 philosophy students and 27,000 enthusiasts of media studies. But is there a corresponding economic need? If the investment of time, effort and (other people’s) money doesn’t pay off with a lucrative and fascinating career in the private sector and a return via taxation, then how is the process justified in its present form?

And yet the reaction of many art students seemed to be, “I refuse to pay for my own degree, which won’t get me a job and is worth bugger all outside of academia. Other people, who will benefit even less, should be the ones to pay for it.”

“And yet the reaction of many art students seemed to be, “I refuse to pay for my own degree, which won’t get me a job and is worth bugger all…”
Probably still worth a hell of a lot more than a degree in ‘Women’s Gender’ and ‘Sexuality Studies’…
http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=48887

“Every time you spot the word ‘explores’ or ‘interrogates’ you take a swig of tequila”
I suppose spotting ‘challenging preconceptions’ means you have to down the whole glass.

Wanking into a wig. For state-supplied cash. We really have lost it as a society.

…witnesses say the woman had shaved her pubic hair in the shape of a cross.
I suppose one has to appreciate the attention to detail.

We are heading to the era of ‘Meh’… Art therefore has increasingly no meaning, no relevance and eventually no observers.
Well, it’s often hard to distinguish between supposedly daring contemporary art and the kind of momentarily amusing tat I sometimes include in the ephemera posts. And while I’m happy to browse tat online, and laugh at it, I’m not so keen to waste an afternoon in a local gallery doing much the same thing, even though I’m forced to pay for it. But I’d imagine there’s always something worth seeing, somewhere. Whether that something ever finds its way into the local modish galleries may be another matter, and whether modish galleries will retain much of a connection with things worth seeing is another matter again. The things that please the eye may not even be recognised by artistic institutions.
Part of it, I think, is that the gatekeepers of such places often favour art that affects cleverness and political radicalism and thus flatters the gatekeepers’ own imagined cleverness. And so we get taxpayer-bankrolled tossers who tell us they’re “exploring” and “interrogating” something or other (in ways never made clear or discernible) and that they’re “trespassing upon patriarchal society” with “acts of resistance,” etc – all while presenting nothing you’d care to look at, except perhaps as farce or a joke at your expense.
Often, what’s funded and given space isn’t meant to be visually pleasing, or memorable, or even competent; it’s meant to be clever, at least in theory. As the critic Brian Ashbee wrote back in 1999, much of the art that’s in favour among our betters “isn’t art to be looked at; this is art to talk about and write about. It doesn’t reward visual attention; it generates text.” Which is to say, it exists for the benefit of a tiny minority of insecure incompetents who are part of the same subsidy-seeking hustle. And as they already have your money, extorted via taxation and dished out by the Arts Council, why should they care whether anyone turns up? Why should they care what you, the lowly punter, think?
[ Added: ]
Whether or not Barney The Pseudo-Artist gets that £20,000 grant has very little to do – probably nothing to do – with whether the public likes what he produces, or with whether anyone will even turn up to look at it once it’s been paid for. Which is why you can browse sites like Vimeo and find dozens of taxpayer-funded videos promoting these taxpayer-funded art events, the stats of which reveal that almost no-one was interested in watching them. Typically, we’re talking about less than fifty views, often less than ten, and sometimes none at all. Which doesn’t exactly suggest that these events were meeting some vast and hitherto neglected public appetite. But that’s the whole point of the Arts Council – to circumvent the preferences of the public and how they’d spend their own money voluntarily.
And the more fatuous and uninteresting such art events are, the more likely you are to hear a lot of ponderous bollocks. For instance, the creative titan behind the laughably bad Unrealised Potential ‘event’ describes himself like this:

My art practice is interdisciplinary and research led, framed by an exploration into revealing the ‘myth’ of the artist’s vision against the audience reading. I intend to expand and challenge an audiences experience whilst offering alternative bridges/means to interpret; this is usually through multi-part works that sit between ‘performance’ and ‘curation’. However it is the continual habit of cross-referencing seemingly opposing disciplines, narrative structures and interpretative motifs that invigorate my critical concerns/subtext to my work/projects as this paves the way to widen cultural gaps and make transparent ideological conditioning for a non-didactic ‘creative frequency’.

Readers are welcome to suggest how that statement might relate to or improve the actual crap on show.

Almost entirely crap – but Loren Fetterman does appear to be a real artist. His website has a gallery of fantasy subjects that are gorgeous representational art. He can actually draw.
Dunno how he got roped into this “performance art” shuck. And I shudder at the thought of Ms Elrick’s budy being even temporarily mutilated in a very painful way (and I don’t think it ever heals completely).
But it doesn’t look like just art bollocks.

We keep being told art is supposed to be “transgressive”, but then somebody comes along with a poster that transgresses against the wrong group.
OK, technically it’s probably not art in the sense most people (regular people, not art critics) would think, but it’s still funny to see the horror of quasi-artistic expression that’s not backed by the proper sentiment.

Stef,
It fascinates me how vitriolic some people can be, particularly those crouched behind a facade of intellect, blinkered and proud of the limitations of predefined knowledge. Is that why ‘exploration’ makes you uneasy? Frightened of losing your co-ordinates?
Heh. So gentle mockery is vitriol and the façade of intellect can only refer to those who aren’t sufficiently awed by what you do – those who, according to you, must be made uneasy, perhaps due to their fear…?
little hisses full of bitterness and self-importance.
Methinks you project, madam. I might be inclined to take you a little more seriously if you weren’t so keen to flatter yourself.
Thank you.
Likewise.

David,
Because you dared to criticize, even with “gentle mockery” (which makes it far worse, I gather), you must be made to wince in pain for your cheek.
I’ve always known publicly-funded artistes were a haughty and pretentious bunch, but now I guess we need to add “thin skinned”, “vindictive” and “sadistic” to the description.

Well you could at least allow the subject of your mockery to defend herself instead of blocking her!!!

This is the comment that Stef was apparently unable to post, emailed directly to me and reproduced in full as requested:

Yes it’s Stef. That’s reassuring, so presumably a glitch? I posted it up – re-read it and now it has gone and I can’t post it afresh on the site. Seemed odd and you can understand why I would assume it had been deleted.
My response was ::
We never expected awe nor did we seek it – we had no expectations whatsoever, something that this thread is saturated in, the core of all projected response.
The dialogue that’s been opened up is a perfect counterpoint to everything we asked people to consider and I welcome the conflict of thought. Our relationship is utterly symbiotic but your opinions might be better rooted if you were responding to an experience rather than an idea. It resides in a world of abstraction.
Naturally I’m going to respond to the ‘gentle mockery’ contained within, the phrase in itself a pretty euphemism for rhetoric drenched in misplaced superiority.
If you’re going to belittle the efforts of other people at least do it with honesty and conviction. Then this insipidly condescending tone might have some genuine worth beyond the transparent walls of a cyber stronghold.
If you want to repost it you can, I will happily leave it as a closing statement seen as though I am suddenly unable to respond.
Thanks
Stef

Stef,
Naturally I’m going to respond to the ‘gentle mockery’ contained within, the phrase in itself a pretty euphemism for rhetoric drenched in misplaced superiority. If you’re going to belittle the efforts of other people at least do it with honesty and conviction. Then this insipidly condescending tone might have some genuine worth beyond the transparent walls of a cyber stronghold.
I’m not often accused of being insufficiently honest or lacking conviction. I will, of course, try harder. It’s perhaps worth bearing in mind that, so far as I can make out, the more vigorous comments below the post weren’t actually aimed at you or your, um, performance. They were more general in nature, many based on direct experience of inadequate art, with links to illustrative examples involving other people. Your own contribution to human betterment was rather overshadowed by these more comical offerings.
But among many artists, curators and commentators there are recurring patterns of self-flattery, indeed comical conceit. If you follow the links above or browse the hundred or so posts tagged “art,” you’ll see dozens of examples, many of which are quite striking. Claims like your own – that unspecified “exploration” (the results of which remain mysterious) must make critics “uneasy” or fearful – do tend to flatter the speaker, generally by implying that a failure to be enticed or impressed, or to feel transgressed, is – can only be – the fault of the critic or audience. A typical example was quoted in a recent thread. Interviewed in the Guardian, on the subject of “new” art, the artist Michael Craig-Martin said,

For many this is the first time in their lives they have come across against something that does not find a comfortable place in their picture of things, something that resists their understanding. It is a very unnerving feeling, and they often dismiss the work as rubbish or the artist as fraudulent. Could it be the consequence of a failure in their education?

In terms of condescension and, as you put it, “misplaced superiority,” this is hard to beat. The thinking, which is almost a default, seems to be that if you, the lowly punter, aren’t impressed, it must be your own fault for being “uneducated,” uptight, terribly bourgeois, etc. Because the artist is never fraudulent, or incompetent, or comically unaware. And I’m sure you can see how closely your own comments to me fit with what is pretty much a standard conceit.

Stef,
This piece by our host is not a review, and as such he is not obliged to give it a first-person viewing. He is commenting upon its institutional representation and the institutional language being used to advocate for it, which is a valid topic of dialog despite your zeal to marginalize it in favor of your own preferred narrative.
It’s a shame that you can’t engage honestly with the remarks being made here. Instead you assume an insider position and attribute the author’s reaction to out-group philistinism, betraying your inability to participate in serious self-examination regarding your own work. Are there no truly shortcomings in it? Is it impossible that this work might be coming off as narcissistic masochism rather than a creative exploration? If you really had no expectations, why privilege other, more flattering readings over David’s? What does it say about this piece that its defenders are rudely advocating violence in its defense? What does it say about you that you don’t disavow such violence?
And that’s to say nothing about its derivativeness and triteness, which is not of concern to David, but is obvious to those of us in the topic-full time. Chris Burden, Maria Abramovic, and Vito Acconci were making similar statements, more emphatically, four decades ago, examining the same topics. For that matter, this is inferior to people committing their imagery and expression permanently to their flesh, in ink, and thus your piece has nothing in its relative favor except institutional context, as if semi-committal statements in the white cube trump fully committed statements in the vernacular.
This is the kind of retrogressive, academic, salon-style thinking that prevents art from moving forward.

We never expected awe nor did we seek it – we had no expectations whatsoever… I welcome the conflict of thought.
Sorry, I don’t believe this for one minute. Franklin’s covered it already but let’s recap: David laughed at the premise of your art and the way it was presented and you got all bent out of shape about it. People who ‘belittle’ your art are ‘blinkered’ and ‘frightened of losing their co-ordinates’, remember? Sounds like ‘conflict of thought’ is the last thing you want.

And too, how can the artists be sure that they’re not crediting themselves with unearned artistic accomplishment? The presumption here is that they’re going in with no expectations about what this art, or what any art is supposed to do – that’s our failing, you see, for harboring such bourgeois notions – and once it garners any reaction whatsoever, then that is what the work is about. Hence “you’ve reminded me exactly why we did this” and “the dialogue that’s been opened up is a perfect counterpoint to everything we asked people to consider.” Debating this, as I put it once, is like punching a hill of meringue. It’s also, in epochs measured in the contemporary art world, an ancient strategy.