Over at Carnal Reason, Pwyll has some rules of art appreciation.

I developed my first rule of art while studying a purported work of art on display at the University of South Florida. The work consisted of a beat to hell La-Z-boy style recliner. It was cloth covered, or once was. The cloth was trashed, at least one spring was sticking out. The thing was probably ugly when new, and time had not been kind to it. It looked like it must smell bad. I examined it closely, searching for some sign of deliberate modification, a hint of an artist’s hand. I saw nothing not attributable to abuse, neglect, or decay.

I was with a young lady who asked me what I thought. I proposed a thought experiment. Imagine someone died and left you an old and neglected property. You find an object in the garage. The question is whether that object is a work of art. If your first impulse is to wonder whether the county land fill will accept the object, then with high probability that object is not art.

My second rule of art was born in an art gallery in NYC. On display was a brand new galvanised steel garbage can. In it was a cinder block. A rope was tied to the block, and to a hook in the wall, in such a way that the garbage can stayed tilted, but did not fall over. My second rule of art: anything I can reproduce in under fifteen minutes with materials available at a hardware store is not art.

I will not recount the disgusting details of the Aliza Shvarts episode at Yale. If you have not heard about it, you can get the details straight from the source. Ms Shvarts has inspired my latest rule of art: anything which appears to be hazardous medical waste, or the product of a sewage system malfunction, is not art.

The mention of sewage naturally brings to mind the towering works of Wim Delvoye and Michelle Hines, whose names may not be familiar to newcomers. Delvoye is perhaps best known for his x-rays of blowjobs and for creating Cloaca, a machine that generates artificial shit, and which the artist describes as “a highly pungent comment on the folly of human achievement.” Ms Hines is remembered, no doubt fondly, for her apparent hands-on production of a single, continuous turd measuring some 26 feet in length. Readers with a sturdy constitution can click here to see Ms Hines in action, as it were.

Never let it be said this site neglects the finer things.

Update:

In the comments, Georges offers the following:

There are two different qualities: impact and resonance. Impact is about grabbing the audience’s attention by any means necessary. Resonance is about leaving something lingering in their consciousness afterwards.

Exactly. There’s a difference between shock and awe. And between wonderment and tedious disgust. Righteous deconstruction and ludicrous parroted theory are poor substitutes for being captivated by beauty. Another guide to art appreciation might be to ask the question: Does this object make me wish I could make something beautiful? Or: Does the world of possibility feel bigger as a result, or has it actually shrunk?

Theory is cheap, in every sense, and easy to reproduce. Talent is not.

A disgruntled Guardian reader attempts to summarise the politics of associate editor, Seumas Milne:

To recap: if we leave dictators in place in a Muslim country and do business with them, we are responsible for repression in those countries and this will encourage terrorism. If we do remove them forcefully, which means war, we are responsible for the subsequent sectarian carnage in the country and this will encourage terrorism. The only other solution is a system of sanctions as with between-wars Iraq, which I don’t remember Milne as being a particular supporter of. In summary, whatever happens we’ll get bombed and it’ll serve us right.

Pretty good, I thought. Certainly, it captures something of the knotted logic typical of Milne, and of countless resentful teenagers in sixth form common rooms. It isn’t just Milne, of course. Contorted self-abasement and pretentious agonising are practically default settings among Guardian regulars. Scanning the paper’s archives, it’s remarkable just how often one trips over headings such as Collective Complicity, How Could We Let This Happen? and – a personal favourite – Their Homophobia is Our Fault. And two weeks rarely pass without some claim that Islamic zealotry and efforts to blow up infidels are entirely our own doing – a result of “gross social inequality” and “Islamophobia” (but never the other way round). Or that alcoholism and overeating have nothing whatsoever to do with personal choices and everything to do with supermarkets, pornography and the crushing social force that is Heat magazine. Or that “hyper-frantic consumerism” and our wicked materialism must be punished, and quite severely, with rationing by the state. 

It’s a strange moral landscape at the Guardian, and frequently disgusting. Yet it’s hard to look away.

Update:

Another reader weighs in with an imaginary classified ad:

Puerile spokesman for defeated revolutionary movement seeks violent theocratic reactionaries for a long term relationship based on shared interests of killing westerners (commuters or office workers will do fine) and subjugating the global masses to the dictatorship of a monopoly doctrine (any doctrine will now do) and to generally obtain revenge against liberal market democracies for failing to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions as predicted by the delusional ‘revolutionary’ mass murderers of an early era.

Again, not bad at all.

Speaking of phantom guilt and those it afflicts, over at the Augean Stables, another, related, malady has been found.

Like all potent and difficult psychological talents, however, self-criticism has its pathologies. Whereas most people dislike and avoid self-criticism at all costs, some few find it exhilarating, and engage in it unilaterally. This passion for self-criticism has created, in our day, a kind messianic pathology, what I call masochistic omnipotence syndrome, in which, “everything is our fault, and if only we could be better, we could fix anything.”

To this end, we forfeit normal protections. “Who are we to judge?” we say, as we accept as valid the stories and deeds of the oppressed “other,” no matter how dishonest the narrative and its intentions might be… From moral equivalence: “We’re as bad as you are”; to moral inversion: “No, we’re worse than you are.” The Muslim terrorists who blow up fellow Muslims at prayer in Iraq are thus to Michael Moore “Minute Men” resisting American soldiers who represent the forces of the evil empire. And if we just do this kind of moral reckoning enough, we seem to reason, we will eventually elicit good will and negotiate an end to all conflicts. “War,” we all know, “is not the answer.” We have the responsibility to repent for our imperialism and ask forgiveness for our crimes against native peoples. And all of this might be reasonable in the framework of good intentions on both sides.

But some use these principles to criticise us, not because they respect and admire the values they invoke, but only because of the positional advantage it gives them. They have no intention of reciprocating. They do not believe in these values, and they see us as irremediably stupid and effeminate for embracing self-criticism and commitments to treating others fairly… For them, our self-criticism registers as signs of weakness and an invitation to further aggression. The vulnerability we painfully but magnanimously adopt triggers not reciprocity and reconciliation, but predatory hopes.

Related ground is covered in the latest Shire Network News podcasts, which include a two-part exchange between Nick Cohen and Douglas Murray on left, right and the decidedly non-reciprocal nature of jihadi Islam. Part one. Part two. Well worth a listen.

Update:

Democratiya’s Alan Johnson chances his arm by sharing with Guardian readers a few unflattering truths.

By reducing the complexity of the post-cold war world to a single great contest in which “imperialism” or “empire” faced “anti-imperialism” or “the resistance”, parts of the left had transformed themselves into a reactionary post-left that took its enemy’s enemy for its friend. We were “all Hizbullah now” as the placards had it. Listen to John Rees, a leader of the Stop the War Coalition and Respect: “Socialists should unconditionally stand with the oppressed against the oppressor, even if the people who run the oppressed country are undemocratic and persecute minorities, like Saddam Hussein.”

America was the global oppressor and Bush was the “Number 1 terrorist”. Anyone shooting at Americans became, by that act, the resistance to empire. A collapse of sensibility followed. The reductionism in the theory licensed habits of mind and structures of feeling well-known among the older fellow travellers of Stalinism – apologia, denial, grossly simplifying tendencies of thought, moral relativism. The consequence was profound political disorientation. Tony Benn sat in front of the mass murderer, Saddam Hussein, and asked him, “I wonder whether you could say something yourself directly through this interview to the peace movement of the world that might help to advance the cause they have in mind?” Days later, Benn was less kind to an Iraqi oppositionist, spitting the words “CIA stooge!”

Naturally, Johnson’s comments don’t go down terribly well with the devout:

The only ones on the (supposed) left who “lost their way” were those who happily allied themselves with an unholy alliance of NeoConservative apologists for authoritarianism, free-market oligarchs and far-right fundamentalist Christians.

It’s dizzying stuff, and just a bit grubby.

Help fund my filthy excavations.

Plan 59 has a fine collection of photographs and artwork featuring mid-twentieth century cars and trucks.

Some pretty good station wagons, too.

In the arts pages of today’s Guardian, there’s a suitably incoherent piece by the playwright David Edgar. It includes the following assertion:

Whether they like it or not, the current defectors [from the left] are seeking to provide a vocabulary for the progressive intelligentsia to abandon the poor.

I scarcely need to say much about that statement or its ludicrous assumptions, or the half dozen or so other claims that rival its stupidity, save to add that Mr Edgar’s formulation is not as rare as one might wish. But over at Harry’s Place a discussion of the above is a’rumbling and among its gems is this one:

There is another dynamic… which I would argue over-rides all the others that you have listed, and that is based on power: the weak versus the strong. This manifests itself in different ways, in different times, be it the King oppressing his serfs, the State oppressing its citizens, a religion oppressing its adherents or adversaries, a corporation oppressing its workers, etc. The progressive always stands with the weak, against the strong. And that is the difference between left and right, and it matters a lot.

Setting aside the tendentious particulars, what’s interesting to me is the broad ideological dynamic – the romantic elevation of victimhood, real or imagined – and the tangle of contradictions that necessarily follow. A position of relative weakness is, bizarrely, deemed one of de facto virtue, one that “overrides” other considerations, no doubt in the interests of convenience. Thus, for instance, a random Muslim can be designated a member of some put-upon category of mankind, by virtue of simply being Muslim. What matters, by this logic, is group affiliation and collective identity, regardless of how patronising or cartoonish that collective identity is, and regardless of how partial or notional that affiliation may be. Whether any given individual is actually put-upon, or puts upon others, or hopes to, doesn’t seem to feature in this calculation. What matters, and matters very much, is group “disadvantage” – irrespective of how that “disadvantage” came about or why it persists. Where, I wonder, does self-inflicted “disadvantage” – arrived at by vanity, ideology, stupidity or incompetence – sit in such lofty moral calculus?

Another HP commenter, one much clearer in his thoughts, replies:

The fact that somebody is weak doesn’t make that somebody automatically just or right. In Spring 1945, the Wehrmacht was weak, the Allies strong: by your logic, you should have sided with the Wehrmacht.

It seems remarkable to me that the observation directly above should need pointing out, and pointing out quite often. Yet, apparently, it does. With that in mind, I’ll repeat two passages from an essay I wrote some time ago:

For some commentators, innocence and guilt depend less upon personal actions than on the racial, economic or religious group a person can be said to belong to. Hence we’re presented with a menu of Designated Victim Groups, members of which may be afforded a measure of immunity from individual responsibility, while claiming privilege on grounds that something bad happened to someone else ostensibly a bit like them. Conversely, members of Designated Oppressor Groups are often expected to bear responsibility for actions other than their own – even the actions of strangers who lived centuries earlier. Variations of this premise underlie practically any utterance involving the term “post-colonial”.

Regarding that urge to “always stand with the weak against the strong,” which is, apparently, “the difference between left and right,” this seems apposite: 

The phrase “asymmetric warfare” has entered popular usage and many of those who use it focus primarily on the asymmetry of military capability, rather than the asymmetry of morality, tactics and intention. Again, this follows from the notion that the ability to defend oneself is a very bad thing indeed, with the exception of certain perceived underdogs, for whom an entirely different moral standard is available. (The words “Israel-Palestine conflict” spring immediately to mind.) Those of a critical disposition may wish to object at this point on the basis that the asymmetry of military capability is for most purposes a moral non sequitur. Simply put, if a person threatens me or my family with a baseball bat and I happen to be carrying a gun, the fact that I’m better armed is in no meaningful sense “unfair”.

With luck, I won’t feel a need to repeat this for at least six months or so. But I make no promises.