Christian Fauer makes images with wax crayons.

Though not in the way you’d imagine.

Via Drawn!

Readers with an interest in visual culture should visit the blog of Eye magazine. While you’re there, you could even take a minute or two to read my post on the art world’s rhetorical flummery:

Take artist Aliza Shvarts, for example, who rose to fleeting prominence last year with a work that purported to involve “repeated, self-induced miscarriages”. She described her efforts thus: “This piece – in its textual and sculptural forms – is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a [sic] independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse… It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership.”

It isn’t clear how form or function can ‘converge’ on the body, not least because the human body is already a form with numerous functions. Can function, strictly speaking, ‘converge’ on anything at all? Can ambiguity be a ‘focus’ and ‘isolate’ something else – something that is terribly important but unclear and at no point explained? Despite such mysteries, one thing is unambiguous. Ms Shvarts believes that the extract above is itself a work of art: “The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above…”

The rest.

I’m not sure how long this will remain available online, but here’s Suzie Templeton’s 2006 stop-motion retelling of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. The detail, sets and character design are pretty marvellous and the film’s 29 minutes pass quickly. However, those of you familiar with the original story may raise an eyebrow at the reimagined ending, in which the wolf is released back into the wild – no doubt to resume his predatory ways – and the witless duck is presumably digested.

Part 1: 

For newcomers, three items from the archives:

Art Bollocks Revisited 

Artspeak and political lockstep.

“The more sceptical among us might suspect that the unintelligible nature of much postmodern ‘analysis’ is a convenient contrivance, if only because it’s difficult to determine exactly how wrong an unintelligible analysis is.”

Lefties Revisited 

In which we follow a bizarrely inept attempt to launch a radical left wing tabloid. Dogma prevails, hilarity ensues. From Vanessa Engle’s documentary series, Lefties.

“I was interested in free speech… I was a Communist.”

The Greater Good (2) 

Arabella Weir passes among the proles, hoping to be noticed.

“Here we see crystallised one of socialism’s moral inversions. By Weir’s thinking, even if you had a grim and frustrating experience at a state comprehensive you should still want to inflict that same experience on your children. Ideally by sending them to a really disreputable school with plenty of rough council estate kids and people for whom English is, at best, a second language. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Ms Weir regards children, even her own, not as ends in themselves, but as instruments for the advancement of an egalitarian worldview. That, or as playthings of her own vanity. Which may well add up to much the same thing.”

Feel free to rummage in the greatest hits.

Does art progress? Theodore Dalrymple has his doubts: 

One often hears of ‘cutting-edge’ art; indeed, the much older term, avant garde, is of the same ilk. This suggests that there is progress in the arts, as there is in science, and that what comes after must, in some sense, be better than what came before. Art has some kind of destination, with later artists further along the road to it than earlier.

In science, progress is a fact (except for the most extreme of epistemological sceptics, none of whom, nevertheless, would be entirely indifferent as to whether their surgeon used the surgical techniques of, say, the 1830s, rather than those of this century). The most mediocre bacteriologist alive today knows incomparably more that did Louis Pasteur or Robert Koch, for example; the most mediocre physics graduate knows incomparably more than Sir Isaac Newton ever did. This is because scientific knowledge is cumulative. But no one would suggest that the paintings of Rothko were better than those, say, of Chardin because he lived a long time after Chardin, and that Chardin’s were better than those of Velasquez for the same reason.

Art teachers and critics use the false analogy with science in order to deny the importance of tradition in artistic production. They do not realise that science is entirely dependent on tradition for its progress. It is not just that most competent scientists know a lot about the history of their subject, but that the very problems that they set about solving, their entire mental worlds, are inherited by them. No scientist has to discover everything anew for himself: no mind, however great, is expected to begin again from zero. Tradition is the precondition of progress, not its antithesis or enemy.

The comparison of art with science isn’t entirely convincing. One could argue, at least notionally, that the destination of science – its conclusion, as it were – would be a complete explanation of the entire physical universe, including the people in it who happen to ponder such things. It’s a pretty fanciful idea, perhaps, but a comprehensible one. But what would an analogous artistic destination be – a work of such staggering beauty that those who see it burst into tears and die contentedly?