We all laughed indulgently when that crackpottie Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal R.MUTT and named it “The Fountain”. A century later Damien Hirst soaks a skinned beast in formaldehyde and we gaze solemnly like we’ve just been gifted with the Beatific Vision. Just as the Evangelicals tell us we’re approaching the End Time, I, like Camille Paglia, an affable atheist, declare that our aesthetic Ism Spasm that began funnily with Marcel and turned truly groaningly gruesome with Damien is approaching its own Apocalypse. Prelapsarian, I too played the Anything Goes game. Now I regard 99 and 44/100ths of It as aesthetic masturbation, alone or multiple. And it doesn’t float.
It is time to blow the whistle on the artist’s spurious century-long use of the term “experimental” that has been surreptitiously stolen from serious science. It is the intellectual glory of the hard sciences that no genius no matter how widely hailed is free from the discipline of gathering evidence to support hypotheses.
The semi-hard social sciences have developed their own analogous empirical methods—almost guaranteeing that their generalizations are credible. But our soft, so-called gut courses speculate in freely floating ways so blatantly evident in the Frenchification of critical discourse in the last generation, practicing which eagerly ambitious intellectuals plan to rise on the gas of their quirky “hype”-otheses, no matter than it gets in the way of students understanding literature, music, or art at their feet, or better their feetnotes. Blah plus Blah equals Blather, an obnoxious equation.
In “Creative” (the real God must shiver gruesomely at this distortion of his six day week) Art, the crisis is even worse. Beginning back in the 1920’s freaky gasbags like Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus in Weimar designed warming up exercises for students before they exerted themselves esthetically. And the other superstars on the faculty (Kandinsky, Feininger, Schlemmer, and lessers) added to the confusions, as they got off on dumping the old Academic Curriculum where students actually learned to draw.
(I exempt Paul Klee from this indictment, because I love his quirky work too much to consider him a bad influence on anyone.) Today so-called “Freie Kunst” covers anything an undereducated art student considers any Damien Hirst type shtick (to get a rep that sells) goes. Simultaneously our urban landscape gets more and more disgraceful. Underinhabitable. Museums flourish while our cities get nearer and nearer to their End Time.
How could this happen? I wasn’t certain until I read about the Moscow Luxury Fair where their few new gazillionaires show off their indiscretionary income by buying baubles for billions. At the same time that Green Refs warn that the proliferation of airplanes constitutes a grave climatic threat, the Virgin man Branson has announced a new space tourism for the young at heart and obese of wallet.
And that Irish Lepercon Mike O’Leary of Ryanair responds to criticism of his overexpansion with a “fuck you” attitude: Go take British Airways old planes away from it if you want to reduce carbon emissions. I have started to form a GREED WATCH, gathering examples of how our technopia is digging its own (and our) grave. Meanwhile, we have art and architecture schools where the little aesthetic dwarfs, mainly middle class kids with parental subsidies, fiddle while their suburban Romes burn, dreaming of a Pritzker SurPrize some day.
What to do? Call a rotten art establishment rotten, to begin with. Pampered rich pampering the rich. Alan Riding, my favorite art outrider (IHT, 11/2/06) exults at how the Tate Modern is attracting kids with gizmos like the current one of a hyperslide that gives their visitors a creative surge, according to its German designer. P.T.Barnum did the same thing better in New York two centuries ago. A Sucker Born Every Minute? Make that Every Nano-second!
My son, Michael, a documentary maker, expressed pleased astonishment today in an e-mail about the Tate’s actually putting real artists on its Board. Incidentally, the architects who made the originally grand power station that Herzog and deMeuron (the Swiss Twins--they have been pals since age seven! I just discovered) turned into the Tate Modern were not seeking to create quirky Titanic Squibbles. They wanted to turn the superfluous structure into a convenient, useful place to look at art.
Ditto, Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer, the two unknown geniuses who created the most beautful building in Germany, Zeche Zollverein in Essen. Most beautiful? Absolutely. After all it was the Midwestern American grain silos which turned Gropius and Mies onto Modernism in the first place
I always remember at this point what Marshall Mcluhan told me in an intense esthetic debate I was having with him. “Remember, Pat,the Balis don’t pretend to have ART at all: they just do everything they do as well as they can.” It was during the Ages of European Kings that we started distinguishing between Capital A Art and small c craft. Art was for the rich;craft for the poor. We were supposed to have learned to get over that false distinction from the Bauhaus. But as long as there are auction houses eager to let the rich chase each others bankrolls, we will have overvalued art and undervalued lives. And artless museum execs eager to expand, expand, expand.
We have too many “artists” in the developed world today scrambling over each other.We need to thin out that noisome crowd with more needed occupations. When I watch the Berlin Zoo on TV, I am sure we need more vets and animal custodians. They are blessed people helping helpless animals. We need more garden planters. Trees and flowers could diminish the visual disasters of our cities and countrysides. Better street furniture. Newer elementary schools. More prefab houses for the underpaid workers. Individualism has run amok. We need artists who want to create a community, not an instant rep for sellable schtick.
DaDa is DoDo. Dada is Daid. Long live communal vitality.
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