Ai Weiwei

The latest update on the Ai Weiwei story: The New York Times reports that supporters have chipped in over a quarter of his "tax bill". And what major arts institution in the United States has made a statement recently? You guessed it.*

*None. That I'm aware of, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Why we should subsidize arts majors

The Economist argues that we should continue to subsidize college arts majors, responding to critics who quake at the thought of more and more young Americans directing their attention to Yeats instead of cancer cures. The Economist's response?

What is economic growth for, anyway? It's for expanding our choices and making life better. Is it really so surprising that, as we grow wealthier as a society, more and more of our young people, when the amazing resources of the modern university are put at their disposal, choose to use them learning something satisfying and enriching and not for anything except cherishing the rest of their lives? Is it really so surprising that taxpayers are not in revolt over the existence of poetry professors?

Yoko Ono's twitter

Twitter is great for some things, and certain comedians have mastered the art of the hilarious tweet. I'm still on the fence about whether Twitter is good for contemporary visual artists. Case study? Some gems from Yoko Ono:

Anna Ostoya

An old classmate works at MoMA and produced this short exploration of Anna Ostoya's Fluxkit piece.

 

Marcel Duchamp archive

Check out an excellent archive of Marcel Duchamp-related audio, including interviews (English and French) and Duchamp's sound recordings.

Links

• Anastasia Rudenko's powerful portfolio on domestic violence. (via)
• Gary Stix on why car ads seem to foster an unusually robust identification between driver and machine.
• This a little old - Justice Stephen Breyer on his passion for architecture and his service on the Pritzker Prize jury.

Alfredo Jaar

I'm not really a fan of the artist questionnaires in Frieze. Sarah Lucas is a fantastic artist and I've kept her riveting self-portrait (above) on my wall for years, but who really cares what Sarah Lucas wishes she knew? (The fact that the answer is "Everything I don’t know, I suppose" is hardly encouraging).

But I keep reading the feature because every now and then a gem comes along. Alfredo Jaar's turn is one such find, even though he basically wishes he knew what Sarah Lucas wishes she knew:

I became an artist because I do not understand the world. Everything I know I learned from being an artist. And I am still learning. I wish I knew more of everything.

The difference being that Jaar starts with a disclaimer, a direct rebuke to philosophers of science and sociobiology like Lee Cronk who neatly section art off from any question of understanding the world:

In the arts and humanities, in contrast to the sciences, the goal is not to expand and refine our understanding of the workings of the universe in which we find ourselves, but rather to produce things of beauty and meaning and to understand the significance they have for people.

I challenge you to explore Jaar a little further and see if he doesn't challenge Cronk's simple dichotomy.

More Libya

Struck by another photo from the death of Gaddafi, this one of the dead leader surrounded by a constellation of cellphones.

Libya

For those who don't know, former Libyan leader has been killed. There's the obligatory bloody trophy shot, captured on cellphone video and flashed around the globe (The Atlantic has a comprehensive selection of images including the kill shot), but I'm more interested in the profusion of photographs from the warzone. In one compelling shot (above), a rebel fighter serenades his comrades as they fight a pitched street battle. In nearly all photographs, fighters record each other with camera phones and lightweight digital cameras (see two examples below). These are examples of battle being performed as it's executed, the ultimate example of the 'Rambo syndrome' that sees fighters worldwide modeling themselves on Sylvester Stallone's caricature of masculinity.

Update - see this post on Conscientious on the believability quality of cellphone footage.

Science and art

Robert Irwin. Way Out West.

What happens when artists move into high-tech scientific set-ups? As a variety of artists head for a residency program at CERN, their stay will be limited to three months:

"When they're working with physicists, there's a tipping point where artists want to prove that they have the brains of the physicist. The minute they do that they start to lose their artistic creativity."

That's according to Ariane Koek, head of "international arts development" at CERN. I think back to the days when James Turrell and Robert Irwin headed to Garrett Corporation as part of LACMA's Art & Technology program, an episode chronicled beautifully in Lawrence Weschler's Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. Irwin's exposure to science certainly changed his art, but his art also changed the lives of the scientists he worked with, at least one of whom dropped his science career for a life of transcendental meditation.

Panoramic ball camera

File this under the latest line of gadgets that expand the realms of what's possible in portable filming. BLDG BLOG writes about Jonas Pfeil's "throwable panoramic camera," a ball that captures a panoramic view when tossed in the air.

Ryan Trecartin

Ryan Trecartin in conversation:

As the project gets underway, the script disperses: sometimes the centre drops out and no longer even ends up in the final work. I write alone, but what’s actually shot and edited into the movie is also the product of synergy between the script, situation and performers. Within the work there are platforms for free agency, for people to create something new, for meaning that I never necessarily intended to be there.

Links

• The New York Times reports on the find of a neolithic "paint factory."
• An unusually clear and in-depth discussion of the Prince copyright case at Brooklyn Rail.
• A great interview with Eliane Radigue:

This immediately opened up a new world; it’s enriching once you’ve educated your ear to that, because when you’re annoyed by the sound of the street you can make music out of it. You can make music out of almost everything! So the discovery of the wild electronic sounds was important, namely the ones like feedback, which are accidents, garbage sounds, but they contain a lot.

Art and Athens

Stefania Strouza. The Condition of (Im)Possibility. 2010.

The arts seem to have flourished in Greece, even as the economy has tanked. Artists and filmmakers have joined their Arabic and Chinese compatriots in crafting an explosion of ground-up art that examines social ills as an increasingly prevalent condition of daily life. I'm particularly taken with the work of Stefania Strouza, a trained artist-architect.

Link

The Atlantic has a short article on the first computer-cataloging of art museums.

Andy Warhol and Liz Taylor

Check out Liz Taylor's note of thanks to Andy Warhol after she acquired her own versions of Warhol's 'Taylor' pieces.

Links

• Donn Zaretsky does a typically fine job of skewering the Deaccession Police, taking Lee Rosenbaum to task this time.
• The Atlantic is really excited about Austin Kleon's call for combinatorial creativity.
• Is there any public arts festival that looks more exciting than the Chicago Humanities Festival? Umberto Eco, Iain Baxter&, and Laurie Anderson head the list of arts luminaries. Worth a cross-country trip?

Video games link

Sean Maden interviews game designer Krystian Majewski about his inspirations and source material.

Menil collection returning frescoes

In a deviation from the standard antiquities narrative (American museum turns up artifact with shady provenance, outraged foreign government demands return of artifact, drawn-out legal battle ensues with typical loss of goodwill on both sides), the Menil Collection will return its 13th-century Byzantine frescoes to Cyprus. The museum's founder purchased the frescoes on behalf of the Greek Orthodox church, after discovering that they had been looted. New York Times details the terms of an agreement brokered between the church and the Menil, as the Dominique de Menil's foundation both purchased and restored the frescoes in return for a long-term loan. It's encouraging to see such a positive interaction between the market, a museum, and the rightful owners of an outstanding cultural artifact and artwork.

Poor artists not welcome

Laurie Fendrich articulates some of the reasons why MoMA's latest admission price hike is a bad idea.

In one of the sadder ironies surrounding MoMA’s decision to increase its admission fee, a large number of the artists whose work hangs on MoMA’s walls were poor during their own lifetimes. Many were so poor, in fact, that were they alive today, they would not be able to afford to go see their own art hanging on the museum’s walls.

Richard Prince and copyright

Richard Prince has announced his intention to contest his loss in a recent copyright case. I think it's probably a good decision for Prince, as courts are still in the process of figuring out the legal standards of appropriation art, but I think it's probably a bad thing for the art world. While some critics have decried the decision as a victory for philistinism and/or censorship, I agree with Peter Friedman who approved of the decision, noting:

if we realize how plainly and directly Prince’s appropriations damaged Cariou’s opportunities to economically benefit from his own work, the outcome (if not all of the reasoning) of this new case is obviously correct.

Appropriation art, like most art, only exists in the guise of "art for art's sake." Whenever art enters a market, is reproduced, or hangs in a gallery, it enters a world of commerce that has tangible impact on a great many people, including other artists. Courts have signaled that they are far from hostile to the idea of appropriation art in general (see Blanch v. Koons) and in Gordon v. McGinley the judge memorably stated his unwillingness to find copyright infringement in a recent case. As far as I can tell, appropriation art per se isn't under siege; rather, courts are holding artists responsible for actions that might adversely affect the well-being of other artists - and I'm ok with that.

See a summary of responses to the case.

Hamilton update

As more updates come in about Richard Hamilton's death, check out Frieze's look at some of Hamilton's work.

Richard Hamilton is dead

Richard Hamilton, often described as the "father of pop art" has died, aged 89. He was in the midst of preparing for a major retrospective - always renowned as a hard worker, he was still going strong. Although a number of his works have stood out for me, his cover for the Beatles' White Album will always be my personal favorite. His painting of Mick Jagger's arrest is above.

• NYTimes obituary.
• NPR obituary.
• The Guardian has Hamilton's life in pictures.

Links

• The Museum of Children's Art in Oakland has bowed to pressure and decided against exhibiting art by Palestinian children.
• A missing Jean-Leon Gerome painting has been found.
• Frieze reviews Thomas Struth (Struth's Swinemünde Bridge is above).

9/11 pt. 2

For one of the more interesting artistic responses to 9/11, see Charlotte Dumas' portraits of 9/11 rescue dogs. ArtInfo has the back story.

9/11

It's hard to know how to adequately memorialize something on the scale of 9/11, a problem Megan Amram described with a mixture of biting humor and straight-shooting. Suffice to say, the event was tragic loss of life that left a complex and enduring legacy in the lives of millions around the globe.

USA Today describes the loss of documents, libraries, and artworks in the tragedy. The scale of that destruction is also tragic: Al-Qaeda destroyed twenty-one libraries, a cast of The Thinker, and seventy percent of a Calder sculpture. Wikipedia also has a partial list of destroyed art, while ArtInfo cites seven post-9/11 art controversies, including the debate about where to move the Koenig sphere (above).

Surviving the attack, badly damaged, the sculpture has attained iconic status. Installed in 1971, The Sphere celebrated the idea that world peace could be brought about through world trade. Given the devastating impact of free-trade agreements like NAFTA, it's perhaps appropriate that the sphere became, in the artist's words, "now...a monument." Intriguingly, Koenig has increasingly turned to the theme of memorialization in his work, using human bones in his sculpture. His commissions since The Sphere have included memorials to the Holocaust and the "Munich massacre."

9/11 has made it almost impossible to evaluate The Sphere aesthetically. Falling debris didn't do much damage to the sculpture's surface but they completely re-oriented the work's presence. As an active participant in the very disaster it memorializes, it's a far more effective (and emotion-laden) testament to tragedy than many of the specially-commissioned memorials dotting public squares around the world.

Links

• Alice Schwarz of the Met discusses her passion for hands in, and outside, of art.
• Steven Pyke on his Los Muertos series.
• Steven Soderbergh has decided to stop ruining great films and become a painter.

MLK and The Economist

 The Economist has been venturing into borderline art criticism lately, interpreting a Libyan mural and critiquing the new Martin Luther King, Jr. monument (above) in Washington, DC. It's the latter article that intrigues me, and although I have nothing to add to their insightful critique, I'm impressed by The Economist's aversion to "cheap grandeur" and embrace of Maya Lin's subtlety in crafting the Vietnam War memorial. Of course it's now good form to embrace Lin's sculpture but the article, preferring that the sculptor had interpreted Dr. King in recognition of his complicated and very human life, reflects a good understanding of the nuanced art of portraiture.

Links

This has been a newsworthy week for the arts.

• Ai Weiwei on his captivity. Highlight: "Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare."
• Check out the Qadaffi family photo album.
• LA law enforcement has been in the headlines for the last few months for targeting artists and photographers. The latest.

Ken Lum

Jen Graves reviews a Ken Lum show for Art in America. She sounds impressed, as was I by the survey of his work at the Vancouver Art Gallery. In many ways, Lum's ouevre represents the most thematically consistent portfolio of any of the Vancouver photographers, and the show's impressive collection of his works illustrated how rigorously he has developed his ideas about language, culture, and methods of experience.

Representing race in Mac Miller

Mac Miller is an upcoming rapper with a little talent and a respectable knowledge of hip-hop history. In the video for his song Kool Aid & Frozen Pizza, however, he does little to allay concerns about white appropriation of hip-hop, which one academic recently called "an unambiguously African-American form." The Awl points out that:

He shows that he has black friends in his videos (let's dap each other up on camera!), sports a bunch of awful tattoos, constantly refers to getting high, and displays a nice collection of sneakers.

Most troubling, the video features Mac Miller wandering around an urban environment while a shirtless black teen with a boom-box follows him around. The implication may be that Miller channels authenticity as he pays homage to hip-hop's genesis in the Bronx, but it comes off as yet another instance of a white creator "speaking for" black artists. Michele Wallace writes persuasively in Invisibility Blues of how Stephen Spielberg's big-screen translation of The Color Purple neutered its relevance to the black community. There was the white writer William Dufty ghostwriting Billie Holiday's autobiography, which extended a long lineage of white writers telling the stories of black women.

While these examples don't quite parallel Mac Miller's music video, they do help illustrate his lack of self-awareness about the kinds of discourses (visual and otherwise) that his video engages with.

Links

• Texas prisons have banned the magazine Art+Auction for being "too damn sexy," according to Artinfo.
• Frieze has a great obit for Beuys student, avant-garde sound pioneer, and general artistic badass, Conrad Schnitzler.
• Paul Connerton's interview with Cabinet on historical amensias is well worth a read. I'll be doing a post on it soon.

Race and nostalgia

Political bloggers have been buzzing about the rhetoric of conservative politicians like John Boehner, who are worried that Obama and his Democrats are "snuffing out the America that I grew up in." Matthew Yglesias and The Economist agree that "conservative nostalgics like Boehner are primarily driven by regret at the loss of social privilege by white men," noting that pretty much everything else about American society in the fifties and sixties is antithetical to the Tea Party program (powerful unions, foreign interventionism, high taxes, to name a few). Some of the differences between the present-day and Boehner's childhood America? No more immigration quotas, plenty of civil rights, and a far more diverse population.

Taking a look at African American art from the days of Boehner's childhood is a fascinating (if totally unscientific) way of reminding ourselves that not everyone shared his America. For instance, in 1975 Robert Colescott painted his seminal piece George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (top). A parody of Emmanuel Leutze's famous painting, it lampoons the way African Americans were marginalized in seventies America. When Colescott looked around him, and then back at history, he saw hypocrisy and the absurd gap between reality and the rhetorical promises to African Americans by politicians and leaders of all stripes.

Of course, Colescott was a fantastically intelligent artist whose narrative-bending paintings are too complicated (and slyly witty) to reduce to talking points. Unlike Boehner, he's aware of the way contradictions settle into any conversation about the past, and he embraces them to his advantage. In 2009, Huey Copeland wrote in Artforum about Colescott's attitude toward "the blackness of comedy and the comedy of blackness," quoting the artist:

If you decide to laugh, don't forget the 'humor is the bait,' and once you've bitten, you may have to do some serious chewing. The tears may come later.

The way forward will not come from a yearning look back. While Boehner played with his toys in Reading, Ohio, powerful voices like Colescott were rattling cages and letting the world know that all, in fact, was not well.

More Blade Runner in Hip-Hop

I'm noticing more and more Blade Runner references cropping up in hip-hop songs and videos (I noted a few previous references here). The film even crops up on the new Beastie Boys record. In the video for J. Dilla's 2006 song Won't Do, a blimp floats overhead (above), quoting the film (below).

While the Blade Runner blimp promises a utopian off-world life, the Won't Do blimp memorializes J. Dilla's death from lupus.

Mad Men

In Season 4, Episode 12 of Mad Men, the show's mercurial lead Don Draper sits, mesmerized by an abstract painting. Recently purchased from a Greenwich Village artist (a heroin addict caught in the upheaval of the sixties), the painting is standard abstract fare. The artist's husband-of-convenience describes it as motivated by her interest in 'afterimages', giving form to the blurred line between dreams and reality.

Ink has been spilled about the art in, and of, Mad Men before. Era-appropriate art adorns the walls of Draper's ad agency, and the characters are alternately beguiled and intrigued by the emergence of trends like Abstract-Expressionism. I'm more interested in the way the show sometimes gives currency to the art's power.

In the scene above, for instance, something in the painting catches Don's eye. He pulls up a chair and gazes into it as the camera swirls around him, before the shot dissolves into a picture of inspiration as he works up a desperate gambit to save his ad company from sure destruction. The painting functions as a catalyst for thought, pushing him in a new direction as he maps out new ways of working with his world. I wonder what strategies a Gorky, an Eakins, or a Giacometti might have prompted.

News

• Artforum reports that the Catholic Church is leading all manner of activities in response to the exhibition of Mideo Cruz's "blasphemous" Christ figure.
• Janine Gordon's copyright infringement suit against Ryan McGinley has been dismissed (one of McGinley's photographs graces the top of this post).
• Christopher Thomas on a soon-to-be-iconic image of the London Riots.

Art catalogues

Louis Marchesano, the Getty's curator of prints and drawings, gives a highly readable account of the origins of the art catalogue. In the eighteenth-century, the collection of the Düsseldorf prince Johann Wilhelm II von der Pfalz found its way into independent galleries, where its director began to hang the paintings thematically. After a series of failed attempts (bankruptcy seemed to be a recurring eighteenth-century problem), the court architect of Prince Johann's nephew printed up a "systematic overview" of the art collection.

Significantly, this catalogue was intended to do two things: publicize an art collection in order to raise the prestige of its owner, and to serve as an educational tool for artists and other members of the educated aristocracy. Each painting got an analysis and a printed reproduction. These days, catalogues of private collections are something of a rarity. Even large public collections rarely provide complete overviews in printed volumes, instead diverting their resources to chronicling their thematic or historical exhibitions and reserving their collections for websites (some well-designed, some not).

As for those exhibition catalogues, they vary tremendously in shape and size. We have coffee table tomes with rarely-read academic essays and lavish reproductions. We sometimes have splashy layouts with banal quotes, and we sometimes have multimedia extravaganzas. How, I wonder, will exhibitions and catalogues be presented in the future (near and distant) as tools like iPads gain currency?

291

 This is too good to not share: Ubuweb has posted pdfs of Alfred Stieglitz's journal 291. This is a golden opportunity to check out the journal, published between 1915 and 1916, in all it's glory. Above is Francis Picabia's illustration for the July-August issue of 1915.

The iconography of "Otis"

For those plugged into pop-culture (even just a little bit), the release of Kanye West and Jay-Z's album Watch the Throne has been impossible to ignore. With the release of a video for the album's single "Otis," the album's mess of contradictions between the rappers' luxurious lifestyles and the street sensibility they've tried to maintain becomes glaringly apparent.

Let's start with the video's placement of Jay-Z and Kanye in front of a giant American flag, in an industrial wasteland. Reminiscent of Budweiser's shameless appropriation of the flag to hawk beer, and Ford's caricature of blue-collar life in endless truck commercials, the video tries to place two mightily successful rappers in a narrative best described as "struggle begets success."

Taking the theme one step further, the camera follows the rappers as they advance on a luxury car (a Maybach, hip-hop's new ride of choice) with power tools they've probably never had to use. This is the mythologizing of their commitment to manual labor, with its connotations of hard work and authentic hustle.

Of course, the lyrics of the song pay unashamed homage to the power of capital. Kanye and Jay-Z rap over a very recognizable (and thus, very expensive) sample and exult in their multiple Rolexes, their fleet of luxury cars, and their appearance as "photo shoot fresh, looking like wealth." Compare and contrast to another buzzed-about rapper of the moment, Mississippi's Big K.R.I.T. Paying homage to his working class roots, Big K.R.I.T.'s song "Dreamin'" relates the story of a hard-working rapper who makes good. In the song's video, Big K.R.I.T. dons a janitor costume and raps on the same empty stage he has to wipe clean (above).

Big K.R.I.T.'s video smartly picks up on a visual tradition of labor that alludes to racial and socio-economic oppression. While "Otis" merely taps a hyperbolic vein of American exceptionalism, "Dreamin'"references works like Gordon Parks' seminal American Gothic (below) or Io Palmer's Janitorial Supplies (above). This, I think, is a better way to tackle questions of heritage and authenticity in hip-hop.

Links

The photographers of the so-called Vancouver school have done an excellent job of branding their public identity, aided and abetted by one of the most engaged art institutions I've come across, the Vancouver Art Gallery. Every time I'm in Vancouver B.C., somewhere in the city is celebrating the achievements (still continuing) of Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, and their compatriots. Roy Arden is one of my personal favorites of the group, and his work Supernatural seems oddly appropriate (still above, watch the video on his website), given the recent events in London.

While I enjoy my time in Vancouver, some links:

• Peter Richmond bemoans the lack of ambition and vision in American stadium architecture.
• The New York Times describes the conditions of Ai Weiwei's imprisonment.

Beauty in the Philippines

Imelda Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines, is back in the headlines. Artist Mideo Cruz was included in a controversial show at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) that featured a sculpture of Jesus, complete with dildo (above). The outraged Marcos, who reportedly considers herself a patron of the arts, led the charge to shut the show down. How did she resolve the apparent contradiction between her sponsorship of the arts (including her support by the CCP's founding) and her call for censorship? Well, The Manila Bulletin quotes her as saying "you can express yourself but express yourself in a beautiful way."

Although volumes could probably written about that statement, I'll just limit myself to the observation that Marcos pays lip service to the worst kind of censorship, one that denies art the possibility to be anything more than a soothing, insipid purveyor of pleasure.

McQueen at the Met

Reaction to the Met's Alexander McQueen has been decidedly mixed. It was a popular smash, with thousands lining up to get into the exhibition's last weekend, and garnered the title of eighth most visited exhibition in the Met's history. The New York Times reports that attendees frequently dressed to the nines, sometimes in McQueen imitations, and the Met spokesperson told Artinfo that he'd seen nothing like it.

On the other hand, Holland Cotter took the Met to task for failing to ask "critical questions" about McQueen's possibly-racist stereotyping, producing a scholarship-lite catalog, and effectively renting museum space to the Alexander McQueen fashion house. Tyler Green picked up the last thread, a pet hate of his, and did the math. The Met's pay-to-play approach, while not unheard of in the art-museum world, isn't exactly the norm, and is anathema to many museums and curatorial departments nationwide.

It's easy, therefore, to cast the McQueen show as a testing ground for a number of oppositions plaguing the art world. It's even easier to see the show as a limit case for the art-museum's role these days. The relentless pace of admission hikes means that most museums are effectively off-limits for anyone lacking a student card or deep pockets. That holds true for some of the country's best-known institutions in the country's strongest arts communities; MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are all now prohibitively expensive. And, unlike the Met, they don't charge "suggested" admission prices. So, if museums are suggesting through their ticket fees that they're exclusive strongholds of culture, strictly upper-middle-class and up, why hold shows pandering to popular appeal?

Make no mistake, populist shows aren't inherently bad. They do good things for the local economy, they prompt large swathes of the local population to get involved in the art scene, and (as the McQueen show has obviously done) inspire visitors to greater creative heights. These are all tangible benefits. So, just because the Met has stressed some parts of a museum mission over others (sacrificing scholarship and ethical integrity), is that a reason to castigate the show? I tend to say yes, but McQueen's not really my cup of tea anyway, and it's a conversation that needs more voices than frustrated scholars in the blogosphere.

Identity politics

In 1993, art historian Ann Gibson wrote in the journal American Art about her embrace of identity politics. For her, borrowing the insights from African-American studies, gay and lesbian studies, and feminism (to name but a few of the disciplines that lent their weight to identity politics) was a handy way to navigate the "extras" left over from her dissertation on Abstract-Expressionism: namely, the social contexts that helped explain why some (white, male) artists found success while others fell by the wayside. Of course, this approach didn't come without its drawbacks. The legacy of deconstructionism means that identity politics has increasingly focused on everything except the work itself.

I had a professor who bemoaned the fact that practitioners of identity politics rarely let the artwork speak, caught up as they were in fitting artists and their works into grander social narratives. They simply exchanged the idea of a canonical history for a variety of competing histories, never really acknowledging that artworks can themselves be multi-faceted objects. I've always remembered Martha Sandweiss' description of photographs as stable objects with unstable meanings.

Of course the value of any theory (or discipline) lies in the use-value of the insights it can glean. Leonardo Drew is one artist who seems to demand good writing from the practitioners of identity politics. Critics tend to interpret his work in light of his African-American heritage, and usually note that his large installations use materials like cotton that explicitly reference African-American history. But as works like Number 54 (above) testify, his art has to be understood through its formal properties, its qualities of touch and smell, the way it looms in the space of a gallery. A sculpture made from rust, fabric, plastic, and wood affects viewers on a visceral level as well as an intellectual one. His work, in fact, seems tailor-made to push the practice of identity politics to the next level.

Borders

Back in June, Andrew Berardini chided Doug Aitken for his "theatrical posturing" about the porous nature of geo-political boundaries. Aitken, the darling of bienales and billionaires alike, used a large-budget commission to stage a film-driven "happening" aboard Dakis Jannou's yacht. Berardini's description of Aitken's theatrical installation has to be read to be believed, but, most notably, the artist seems to have missed the irony of his own work. Riding the the flow of art-collecting capital as it sloshes around the globe, Aitken can easily sing the praises of "international permeability." But, as Berardini points out, this is a permeability made possible mostly for the bored rich.

I'm consider myself a fan of Aitken's work, and I'm sure he produced a visually compelling piece of work. His films are generally aesthetically flawless, and often unsettling in their depiction of slightly surreal places. But there are more interesting, relevant, and (perhaps) truthful things to be said about borders and the conditions of bordering, and other people are saying them.

There was the project that erected a temporary crossing point between the U.S.A. and Mexico. There was Emily Jacir's work Where We Come From, where she repeatedly crossed the Palestinian border to fulfill the requests of Palestinian exiles. There is Clemens von Wdemeyer's short film Otjezd [Leaving], which creates an imaginary consulate scene, eerily mimicking the disorienting experiences of navigating different cultures and their bureaucracies (still above). These works go a long way towards confronting conditions of bordering that shape the lives of the not-so-wealthy billions, and I'm betting that they make for more engaging art as well.

Jean Epstein

The director Jean Epstein (above), fascinated with cinema's power, wrote:

To discover unexpectedly, as if for the first time, everything from a divine perspective, with it symbolic profile and vaster sense of analogy, suffused with an aura of personal identity, that is the great joy of cinema.

I'd say that's a pretty good summation of why film fascinates me too.

Spending cuts

Just how much damage did the recent budget deal do to the arts in the United States?

Michael M. Kaiser notes in the New York Times that in government funding cuts "the organizations that tend to get hit the most are rural, organizations of color, avant-garde institutions — those that have a harder time raising individual and corporate money." States already spend a fraction of their budget on the arts (the governor of Kansas recently vetoed an arts budget of just $689,000), and that amount looks to diminish in the near future as many NEA grants require matching state funds. While slashed funding at the federal level won't hurt big, donor-rich museums like the Met, it will winnow out smaller institutions that lack the support of wealthy communities.

South Carolina just successfully resisted a zero-funding attempt, with the New York Times reporting that creative industries pay the state a handsome return in both jobs and economic growth. Meanwhile, the National Endowment for the Arts, already running on a shoestring budget, argues that the arts generated $287 billion in 2009. That's considerably more than the $275 million appropriated for the arts nationwide this year (granted, the arts will probably generate less money anyway in a slower economy), but it's a disservice to view the arts in economic terms. After all, in Washington State the governor proposed eliminating the Washington State Arts Commission and handing its duties off to the Department of Commerce. Simply handing the arts off to a commerce department and scrutinizing them for payoff has obvious, negative, ramifications. And some apologists just weaken the position by holding up projects that the general public (let alone hardline deficit hawks) will scoff at.

Happy birthday Giorgio Vasari!

Today Giorgio Vasari turns 500. If not the founding father of art history (Winckelmann, Philostratus the Elder, and Vitruvius might all possess equally good claims to the position), he was the one who made it sexy and set the discipline's tone for generations. He was a character, who remained convinced that making music would lead to an artist's downfall and reveled in the salacious gossip of his day. Art history might have got more responsible since his day, but it was rarely as much fun. So, as they might have said in Tuscany, felice compleanno!

A roundup of coverage of Giorgio's big day:

• Noah Charney uses Vasari's birthday to talk about efforts to uncover a lost da Vinci.
• The Guardian recounts some of the best moments from Vasari's Lives.
• The Uffizi has a special Vasari-centric exhibition up.

Links

Installation view of Fred Wilson's Objects and Installations.

• The Art Law Blog skewers critics and snobs who predictably decry blockbuster shows.
• Tyler Green with a must-read post on Fred Wilson's latest project. Like much of Wilson's work, it's polarized a community and got a lot of people talking (heatedly) about how art, history, and public attitudes towards both intermingle.
• Hol Art Books thought it was a good idea to bootleg ArtForum and mail the magazine the bootleg copies. They were then, for some reason, surprised and hurt to hear from ArtForum lawyers. Still, their explanation of the project has some interesting points.
• MoMA's admission price hike has garnered a lot of attention. Jon Bruner at Forbes thinks it's an OK plan, Choire Sicha at The Awl disagrees.

Geoff Dyer vs. Michael Fried

Geoff Dyer kicks off a new column for the New York Times by launching an attack on the unsuspecting Michael Fried. The Atlantic's Ujala Sehgal likes it, New York Observer's Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke wants to see a good literary feud, and Tyler Green thinks Dyer did a "deft" job. Others are a little more charitable.

The general social media consensus seems to be in favor of Dyer, and Ian Bogost's blog post sums up most of the reasons why. Dyer wittily mimics Fried's style to critique the turgid prose of academia, a prose-style that has become increasingly inaccessible to non-academics. His article isn't a piece of anti-intellectualism, as some of Bogost's academic friends claim, but it plays on the ivory tower's well-cemented position as object of ridicule. From Thales falling down the well to Fried endlessly introducing his ideas, academics make themselves easy targets. Folks largely re-tweeted Dyer's article with glee for the same reason that my non-academic parents switch off when I try to explain the appeal of Hubert Damisch.

But, as someone who spends the majority of their time wading through academic publications, I've come to appreciate the occasional economy of academic prose. Some academics, like Joseph Leo Koerner, write beautifully and prove that Dyer's punches can't be generalized too far  (Yale University's Alexander Nemerov is a joy to read, but since his father was poet laureate he should probably be considered a special case). Ultimately, I think Bogost was right to link to Damon Horotwitz's article which points out the benefits of cultivating a well-informed, readable humanism that snatches the best of both worlds.

Jerry Saltz and the art world

This year's Venice Biennale provoked an impressive number of hostile reviews, particularly of the American Pavilion. Jerry Saltz penned a cogent critique of the Biennale, seeing an insidious trend in contemporary art towards a generic style of "aesthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements." Highlights of this style include:

Neo-Structuralist film with overlapping geometric colors, photographs about photographs, projectors screening loops of grainy black-and-white archival footage, abstraction that’s supposed to be referencing other abstraction...

Saltz concludes that much of the problem lies in the education of artists:

This generation of artists is the first to have been so widely credentialed, and its young members so fetishize the work beloved by their teachers that their work ceases to talk about anything else. Instead of enlarging our view of being human, it contains safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas. This is a melancholy romance with artistic ruins, homesickness for a bygone era. This yearning may be earnest, but it stunts their work, and by turn the broader culture.

Having studied art in an academic environment, this critique largely rings true. That's not to say there's anything wrong with earnest yearning, nor that artists shouldn't learn the history of their art. Robert Indiana's extended homage to Marsden Hartley, for instance (below), demonstrates how contemporary artists can craft rich, subtle pieces that reference and rehash old art. But even Indiana's elegies enlarge our view of being human in a slow, stilted way that demands years of study and ultimately proffer an intellectual stimulation.

I read this as confirmation that the most exciting artistic work rarely happens in the art world. Instead, the worlds of film, graphic design, and architecture pulse with the kind of life the art world left behind years ago. Rather than enlarging our worldview slowly and subtly, films like The Thin Red Line or Taste of Cherry shatter it and (more importantly) offer profound creative insight.

Data display

New Scientist describes a collaborative project between a Boston University researcher and an atmospheric analysis company to measure and visualize methane leaks in major U.S. cities (a screen grab from their video of Boston is above). Their videos graph measurements onto Google Earth simulations. The mustard-colored pixelated spikes indicate that all may not be well in our city streets, grafting danger onto the street-view function. As yet another example of scientific illustration that attempts to make the invisible (literally) visible, the video embodies a key assumption about scientific inquiry that developed in the wake of the Enlightenment.

Barbara Maria Stafford, analyzing shifts in scientific imagery notes that before the advent of invasive imaging (brought to a head in contemporary techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging), notes that "diseases only existed when they became manifest on the skin." When Gericault painted the heads of convicts (below), J.T. Zealy photographed slaves for Louis Agassiz, or phrenologists drafted painstakingly precise guides to the human head, they worked from the exterior in. The keys to the world lay in experience and keen observation.

In contrast, the methane video dramatizes a mistrust of the naked eye. As the data display industry grows (check out Periscopic, where a friend of mine works, for example) and visual literacy evolves in a media-heavy environment, what kind of assumptions about looking and visualization will change? Already, smartphone apps augment vision in real-time. Stafford's work turns on the opposition between interiority and exteriority; will other oppositions reverse or fall?

Links

• Lucian Freud, the man who declared “for me the paint is the person,” is dead. His Girl With a White Dog is above.
• Apparently art crime is dumb crime.
• Jonathon Jones on the vandalized Poussins in London. Jones concludes that:

modern society cannot be trusted – there is too much craziness out there. Museums should be more severe on visitors.

Links

 I'm in New England, hence the sparsity of posts, and William Stanley Haseltine's sketch of the Rhode Island coastline.

• Terry Hart posts at Copyhype on the "protectable elements of a photograph," summarizing several key copyright cases.
• NYTimes on a prolific art thief.
• The Secret Service visits an artist who installed spyware on computers on Apple stores.
• In case the news hasn't hit you yet - the Brandeis has elected NOT to sell its art collection.

The beauty differential

The latest attempt to use science to explain art pulled people from different cultures, and used fMRI to evaluate their brain patterns as they made aesthetic judgments about paintings and pieces of music (the original study can be found here). Aiming to "formulate a brain-based theory of beauty," the study's authors from University College London walk into an arena fraught with tension - after all, countless hours have been spent composing tenuous (and racist, sexist, ethnocentric) scientific criteria for evaluating beauty.

Twenty-one subjects ranked pieces on a scale of beauty, from 1-9, and the study's authors used these rankings to sort pieces into the categories of beautiful, ugly, and indifference-inspiring. Attempting to side-step entrenched art-historical debates about cultural conceptions of beauty (typically opposed to traditional, humanist claims of universally appreciable beauty: see Winckelmann), the study's authors left the actual evaluation of beauty up to each individual subject. Leaving aside the question of what makes the beautiful beautiful, the study's authors seem to ask whether the human brain even recognizes beauty as a phenomenon.

Apparently, they found that the human brain responds to "beautiful" stimuli very differently from "ugly" stimuli. While I can't speak to the science of their findings, it's important to note (as Katherine Harmon does) that the study has significant limitations. It doesn't attempt to define what made subjects rank a painting more beautiful; nor does it bear on the role of beauty in evaluating art by other criteria. Notably, subjects made their judgments on 16-second flashes of paintings and pieces of music. "Slow art," or forms of beauty that take time to emerge, disappear from the study's purview.

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly has died.

Video games

More on video games: the Supreme Court has ruled that states cannot restrict the sale of video games to minors because of violent content. Scientific American rounds up the science behind the decision.

Karlheinz Weinberger

Karlheinz Weinberger spent decades shooting the disaffected youth of Switzerland as they styled themselves after fifties biker gangs and the stars of the silver screen. Adorned with patches, badges, and tattoos proclaiming allegiance to Elvis or James Dean, his subjects scandalized the Swiss public. Weinberger chronicled their daily life, as well as shooting posed portraits.

A show of his works is currently running at Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver, B.C., titled Intimate Stranger. The show also includes articles of clothing, postcards, and other paraphernalia related to Weinberger's subjects. Their obsessive attention to detail comes through clearly, as well as their proclivity for misinterpreting American icons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Weinberger's experience as a photographer of Swiss gay culture, the exhibition hums with the ghost of Kenneth Anger.

As well as their formal similarities to Weinberger's photographs, films like Scorpio Rising (Anger, 1963, stills above and below) share a sense that something's amiss in the staid world of the bourgeoisie. More importantly, they uncover that something living on in an occult, seductive, and grittily sensual world of the symbolic: both Anger and Weinberger treat us to the spectacle of false idols (embraced and emulated) working through sympathetic magic. Whether it's the belt buckles of the Swiss youth, adorned with the image of Little Richard, or Anger's fascist-chic boys caressing their highly-polished motorbikes, however, these symbols fade into leather, flesh, and blood.

Weinberger's work begs for scholarly attention, of which it has received little to none. Perhaps a point of departure could take the photographer and Anger as kindred spirits, concerned with the fuzzy boundaries of the real and the symbolic: but only insofar as they meet in the mode of living on edge, in the kind of violence that held lenses but repelled polite society.