I Get Mail from Sensitive Souls

I hereby apologize for any ‘violently senseless’ comments I made which hurt Devo’s feelings and ruined his/her life forever. It was my undeveloped soul that made me do it.

I hereby apologize for any ‘violently senseless’ comments I made which hurt Devo’s feelings and ruined his/her life forever.
I think you should report to the correction booth to think about what you’ve done. I’ll bring extra nails to hammer in.
It’s odd how these things so often follow a pattern. The weeping above reminds me of this rather sniffy exchange with the artist Stef Elrick, who took great exception to being ribbed, even briefly, and whose own subsequent comments revealed more than she intended. By daring to question the aesthetic and intellectual heft of her work, we were apparently indulging in unconscionable wickedness. You see, Ms Elrick’s radical “exploration” was making us “uneasy” and we were “frightened of losing [our] co-ordinates.” No other explanation was permitted in her mind. Such was her modesty.
And Ms Elrick’s indignation called to mind any number of similar manoeuvres, whereby scepticism or dissatisfaction with an artist’s work is dismissed as being the fault of an “unnerved” and “uneducated” public. Because if the lowly heathen punter isn’t impressed, or objects to the taxpayer funding of transparent flummery, this can only be due to their being uptight, unsophisticated or terribly bourgeois. Because, obviously, artists and curators are never fraudulent, incompetent or comically unaware. That simply cannot happen.
Again, the self-flattery, the teetering conceit, is quite hard to miss.

When they’re making me pay for this crap I feel entitled to make ‘violently senseless’ comments about it.

But our pitchforks and torches are just our way of causing the artist to ask “Have I taken the concept of shitting on the public too far?” The answer is always, “No, of course I haven’t; your can never take that concept too far”, but at least the question gets asked.

the reason you hate this art is because you refuse to ask yourself any meaningful questions…
Self-awareness, it’s not for everyone.

Hmmm. So anyone with the temerity to doubt the efficacy of funneling millions of pounds of taxpayers confiscated cash to the state approved Arts Establishment is a ‘Witch Hunter’? Oh well, you’d better start calling me Matthew Hopkins then.

The artist, Keeley Haftner, describes her work as “emerging through notions of tradition, satire, gender, archive, labour, and transience.”
Now she’s an “artist whose practice is developing in the context of investigating value-based hierarchies.”
https://twitter.com/KeeleyHaftner

It saddens all that I believe is truly good so deeply to see such ignorant and violently senseless comments made out of selfishness and an inability to think beyond an immediate and primitive reaction …
Let me just stop you there … if the reaction Haftner got was neither the one she expected or you (Devo) feels she deserves, then how do you feel the public should have in fact reacted?
A round of polite applause perhaps?
A momentary glance just long enough to take a photo on their phones as they go about their business, never to think about it ever again?
Or perhaps a post onto the work’s accompanying blog along the lines of ‘Wow, eh? I’ve never thought about what happens to trash after I’ve thrown it away – and now I do! In fact, I even now the names of all the dudes and dudesses that pick and compress my trash. Thank you, thank you Miss Haftner for remind me that rubbish doesn’t just disappear like magic!’?
I mean seriously, what? How precisely do you think people should have reacted – bearing in mind of course that unlike in a gallery where people can choose to go or not to go, basically all of the audience for this particular work were unwilling participants (and sponsors)?
And if the aim was to provoke thought how can you complain when the provocation is successful?

But how do you address a flood of ignorance, a torrent of hatred and insecurity? How do you speak to the angry voices with pitchforks and torches?
We mostly laugh and mock you, which is why you are so upset.

Come on David, you know “transgression” is only supposed to be used on the ignorant plebs, not on the wise arts establishment. Otherwise you might have some kind of nightmare scenario, where some of the ideas and values the common folk hold might appear to have some reason behind them, or some of the artsy types might be shown to be full of it. Then your poor artist might have to think for themselves! With only 6 years of college education and various government grants to help them! How could they manage?

“Self-awareness, it’s not for everyone.”
And isn’t it interesting that the least self-aware people are the ones going on about how “self-aware” and “conscious” they are? There are times when I wonder if fashionable leftism (well, all leftism) is merely an excuse for being psychologically deformed. And then at other times I don’t wonder. I suppose one should feel sorry for people like Devo, but it’s hard to feel sorry for those who are so aggressively stupid. It’s a lot easier to feel sorry for the retarded guy bagging groceries at the supermarket; he’s gamely doing the best he can, but I know how limited his chances in life are. It’s harder to feel sorry for someone who wastes their intellect on garbage and tries to shame or bully everyone into applauding them.

I thought Artist 101 taught that the authentic was valuable and the phoney not. She accuses you (or your commentators) of an “inability to think beyond an immediate and primitive reaction”. However the visceral reaction cannot be the phoney one unless one subscribes to the idea that only elites can be authentic.
It’s a curious accusation for someone who no doubt imagines themselves to be anti-establishment

If we distill that leading statement a little more we get:

It saddens all that I believe is truly good so deeply

Grammar aside, in the writer’s further context ‘all that I believe is truly good’ eventually alludes to a familiar, unassailable but subjective and irrational belief.
In this case that y’all are moral defectives.
In its external, popular context, such believers may also subscribe to the rather monolithic religion of progressivism. Proggs are nothing if not puritanical posturers, and to be so they must have a creed.
And of course, they must feel it ‘so deeply’. They are passionate. Converts.
To what they’re converted usually concerns the Progg not enough, I think, because distilling it then would reveal the rational conflict at the core. And that irony is the central trait of progressivism: It’s all motes and beams.
But felt motes and beams ‘so deeply’. And, as shabby religions often do, this one prefers to inflict moral casualties among the unwashed.
Oh, and about religion – this sloppy, pharisaical kind – consider three paragraphs from the wiki

Religion is a collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and worldviews that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature. According to some estimates, there are roughly 4,200 religions in the world.
Many religions may have organized behaviors, clergy, a definition of what constitutes adherence or membership, holy places, and scriptures. The practice of a religion may also include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration a god or gods, sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trance, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, public service or other aspects of human culture. Religions may also contain mythology.
The word religion is sometimes used interchangeably with faith or belief system; however, in the words of Émile Durkheim, religion differs from private belief in that it is “something eminently social”. A global 2012 poll reports that 59% of the world’s population is religious, 23% are not religious, and 13% are atheists.

Now, a nearly identical text substituting progressivism for each instance of religion:

Progressivism is a collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and a worldview that relate humanity to an ersatz spirituality and, frequently, to approved, collective moral values. Progressivism has narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred revised histories that are intended to give meaning to life and to explain the origin of life or the universe. It tends to derive morality, ethics, political laws and a preferred lifestyle from its ideas about the cosmos and human nature. According to its own efforts and definitions, there is one predominant school of Progressivism in the world. It has infiltrated both of the two major political classes in the West.
Progressivism has organized behaviors, an academic ‘clergy’, a definition of what constitutes adherence or membership, sacred values, and political scriptures. The practice of Progressivism may also include social rituals, political sermons, commemoration or veneration of Jesus figures, social sacrifice, race or gender studies and accreditation, central education, retirement and medical programs, festivals, parades and demonstrations, initiations, matrimonial services, environmental meditation or prayer, music, art, dance, public service or other aspects of human culture. Progressivism may also contain mythology.
The word Progressivism is sometimes used interchangeably with faith or belief system; however, in the view of many, Progressivism differs from private belief in that it is eminently socialistic, which is to say collective and statist. Polls report that roughly 20% of the nation’s population self-identifies as Progressive, 40% as moderate, and 40% as conservative.

Uncanny, isn’t it? It appears that just as religion is collective, Progressivism is religious.
There are plenty of ironies to the Progressive movement’s long slow march through institutions in order to assert that its own postmodern intellectual Nihilism is a legitimate article of faith. After all how reliable is a platform that absolutely insists that there are no absolutes, and that enforces that obvious blunder in an increasingly unavoidable, monolithic intellectual structure?

I think an issue many modern artists don’t understand from the non-artist crowd is their expectation that the artist do something they couldn’t do, e.g. draw something prettier with better detail than they would be able to draw. It seems modern artists find this a silly and stifling idea.
On our behalf, though, I write code. I expect that I can do this far better than your average person who doesn’t do it for a living. On the other hand, I expect a writer to write better than I do, and I know my dad’s farming skills are far superior to mine. He can do a hundred things that I wouldn’t know how to start, from driving a tractor accurately across a field to buying and selling products at market-appropriate times.
It’s really depressing to see someone get paid for “art” that I could do myself. You can argue that the thinking that goes into calling this particular thing “art” is what the artist really has to offer, but that seems pretty silly. I could call a refrigerator “code,” but even if others accepted my assertion for some reason, it isn’t code and it isn’t going to do anything useful.
I got to see a Leonardo da Vinci exhibit once, and it was fascinating the way he studied and put detail into his art. It appeared to me that he approached art the way a craftsman would approach building a really excellent table or chair, measuring things, determining exactly what would be needed, and finally building the final product at a high level of quality. There were various drawings and measurements of horses for his famous uncompleted horse sculpture. You could see his efforts to effectively capture the movement of the horse, the angle its leg would be at in mid-run. I’ve written notes sort of like that mapping out how I would write a complex program.
I can see the expertise and knowledge at work in his notes, in a way I could never do for a modern art piece. For one of those, it would be a note written on a cocktail napkin that said “eat apple with oil on it – deep? nature vs oil interests?”

“Yes, well that’s just the sort of blinkered, philistine, pig-ignorance I’ve come to expect from you non-creative garbage.” – Architect Sketch

Laughter and mockery are our only weapons against the thin-skinned, rent-seeking, pretentious pickpockets. It’s clearly very effective. Let’s keep laughing at them.

Let’s keep laughing at them.
Annoyingly I can’t recall where I read this or who wrote it, but some years ago I came across an article that was basically saying that this type of work was deliberately intended to be a way of undermining the Proletariat’s respect for the Bourgeoisie. Seriously.
The plan is supposedly simple – elites tend to buy and/or sponsor public art so by producing total and utter drek and having it accepted by Arts Councils and National Academies and the like is supposedly a way of exposing the upper echelons of society as morally and intellectually disabled clowns. And this, it is argued, is supposed to be the first signal to the oppressed Proletariat to rise up, take over society and burn unrepentant Capitalists in their homes.
Yeah, right. But I do like the idea that this generation of that type of contemporary artist thinks that the drek they produce is of some artistic value whereas if this theory is correct, they are in fact unwittingly carrying out some revolutionary strategy which wholly depends on them creating nothing but total drek.

The thing that strikes me about this type of contemporary artist is that nobody – including quite often the artists themselves – has any actual clue what they are there for or why anyone would need them to do what they do.
Right, something that strikes me about this sort of thing is the idea that you need someone to tell you whether it’s even art at all. You don’t need an expert to tell you my program is a program; it is digestible by a compiler, therefore it is code. Whether it’s good or bad code is typically determined by whether it achieves its goal or not.
Many of these modern artist types offer essentially nothing but pretense. They call something art, therefore it must be accepted as art. This works alright in the fashion world (this is fashionable because someone important says it is) because fashion is known to be ephemeral and essentially meaningless. Art ought to be immediately recognizable as art.
You wouldn’t need an expert to tell you a novel is art, nor a song (typically). A chair is recognizably a chair, if made correctly. So to some extent all they’re offering to do is call things art, rather than make something recognizable as such. And that’s a service that anyone could do. I can call this month’s bills art, or my computer mouse, or a bottle of aspirin. There’s no skill or meaning in it. Half the time they don’t even know what they want it to represent, they just want it to get some kind of reaction and then they’ll say that’s what it was about.
I don’t write code to get some kind of reaction, I have an intended goal in mind and I either succeed or fail in reaching it. Leonardo had a goal, to capture a horse’s motion in an artistic way, and he could succeed or fail in this goal. The modern artist seems to have no meaningful goal and claims success regardless of what happens.
Can performance art fail? Have any of those artists ever observed performance art that they thought was bad, or failed in its goals? It would be interesting to hear.

claims success regardless of what happens
It’s a common manoeuvre, practically a default. See, for instance, Ms Casey Jenkins, who tells us, repeatedly, just how “brave” and “downright seditious” she is, and whose stated intent varied wildly from day to day, and whose claim of artistic success is based on the fact almost everyone who saw her work found it risible. You see, by doing something that she imagines other people – sorry, “society” – will not find attractive, this is somehow a great achievement. Our not being impressed is, she argues, what makes it so impressive.
Apparently, whatever the public’s reaction, it can, and will, be construed as an affirmation. If people ignore you, it’s because they’re scared or disturbed by your daring and radicalism. If people mock your pretension and lack of discernible talent, they’re scared or disturbed by your daring and radicalism. However people respond, and even if they don’t, this is all because of how scary your work is and by extension how daring and radical you are. It is, if nothing else, a bold approach.
And likewise we have art students who tell us they have no idea what a piece of performance art is about, what it’s supposed purpose is, or what the artist may have intended, but they somehow know it’s “a work of ephemeral beauty” and is “complex, sophisticated… has layers of meaning.” It’s just that those alleged “layers of meaning” can’t be pinned down or explicated by the person saying it’s awesome. Apparently we have to take that on trust. To question the default assumption – of immense intellectual depth – is to risk gasps of indignation. And hilariously self-flattering emails.

There was an episode in the runup to the Cultural Olympiad of 2012. Artist Olafur Eliasson wanted £1 million from the Olympic Lottery Distributor for a website called “Take A Deep Breath”. Participants would be invited to take a deep breath and then post a message (or “breath bubble”) saying who they did it for and why. The website could also have featured an amazing video of people inhaling and exhaling.
Eliasson is quoted as saying: “The Olympics reflect the state of the world – the obsession with elite, the obsession with winners, rather than participatory ideas. I was asked by the Olympics to make a work of art that celebrates the Olympics. There’s not a lot to celebrate in the Olympics and I thought I would make a work of art that exposes some of the weaknesses of the Olympics.”
Well worth a million quid, I’m sure you’d agree? Video of people breathing and comments about whatever was in their head at the time. But no, alas the OLD turned the project down. According to board meeting minutes, it “struggled to justify the £1 million sought in relation to the outputs – it seemed very expensive”.
Philistines!

Steve 2 (:Steveageddon),
I think everyone, even the putative ‘knuckle-draggers’, can agree that the loss of that library is a genuine shame. It’s a shame in itself of course, but I’m already thinking ahead to the future possibility of some ghastly conceptual s***e that they’ll use to pave over the charred ruins.
So what’s the point of having a Glasgow School of Art, or any school of art, when we could achieve similar results by arming some homeless men with crafting supplies, a dictionary, and a bottle of Thunderbird?
Heh … The funny thing about so-called conceptual art is that it turns there is a surprisingly finite range of concepts available to the budding artist – there’s a more than even chance that somebody like, say, Gillian Wearing has already got homeless men stumbling around drinking and fighting and knocking paint onto a canvas on video somewhere.
I don’t think there’s anything in the conceptual camp that hasn’t already been done, often multiple times, over the last four or five decades. Unlike painting though, it does actually make a difference as to whether someone else has done the same pointless drek before.
Some people also say that the work of someone like Lesley Banks has also all been done before and it’s true that you can see echoes of Hockney, Magritte, Frampton and others in the paintings on her website, but those people would be wrong because those particular paintings are unique even if the genre and style aren’t. You can’t really say the same about two bales of compressed trash or human shit packed into tin cans etc. (the objects may be real and unique, but they are not the work – the concept is).
Anyway, it’s rather telling that on the list of aims given for the BA (Hons) in Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art, you have to wait until the third bullet point before there’s any mention of formal and practical skills, the first two points being:

Enable students to develop their intellectual, creative and imaginative abilities and attributes

Develop students critical understanding of the philosophical, historical, social and economic contexts of art and culture

There’s also a heavy emphasis throughout on what they call Critical Inquiry. When Oscar Wilde said this:

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.

I’m pretty sure he could never imagined just how intensely useless much of art was going to become in the years that came after.
D,
Can performance art fail?
Ha ha ha ha – that is seriously brilliant question! Genius! I must make a point of asking that whenever next I have an opportunity to meet a performance artist.
Alex Cull,
Eliasson is quoted as saying: “The Olympics reflect the state of the world – the obsession with elite, the obsession with winners, rather than participatory ideas …”
Oh what a flaming twat.
I mean really, that is an absolutely award-winning level of twattery from Eliasson there.

[Thanks, David!]

Basically a job well done then. Three cheers for David and the hearty band of commenters here

how do you feel the public should have in fact reacted?
The middle-class (and middle-brow) public is expected to clutch its pearls and head for the fainting couch, which provides the artiste with the opportunity to preen and scold.
It’s really depressing to see someone get paid for “art” that I could do myself.
The art is no longer in the execution or craftsmanship but in the concept. Rothko’s color-block paintings could be executed by anyone; instead, he’s exploring color qua color — not using color to create an image of something recognizable.
He also may have been exploring the question of “how simplistic can I make these canvasses and still get raves from empty-headed snobs,” but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the viewer.
Also, the advent of photography displaced the need for artists to reproduce a scene with exactness, so there’s that.

Shorter Devo: I am a proud, transgressive Art Warrior™, proudly transgressing against the bourgeoisie, and I will proudly and transgressively cry like a little bitch if anyone criticises me. It’s like the loony feminists who want women to become front-line combat troops but have a fit of the vapours if they spy a literary reference to anything beastly.

Umm, canon ^ (why I’m not an art critic)

Steve2: Steveageddon — I don’t have animation software, but I hope someone who does renders your script in glorious cartoon format.
See http://www.muvizu.com/
There is also access to the underlying software itself.
. . . . most historical modern art displayed in the major galleries of the world—no matter how ‘conceptual’—has made it into the cannon for good reason.
Yes, there is excellent modern art and it does get admired. I would argue that the reason to not bother with fitting the rest into a cannon, or bonfire, or drive something over it, is that I am lazy . . . and just happen to be bloody busy anyway.
It’s just Soooo much easier—and basically much more efficient anyay—to just ignore the ineptly done stuff . . .