Conscientious | Art

The Artist, the (possibly) Genius

2012-12-17T15:16:20Z

Tom Griggs wrote a lengthy article, reacting to a comment I (and others) had to something he had written earlier (all the relevant information can be found in his recent piece). I thought I'd respond. (more)

]]> First of all, nobody denies that all artists follow a tradition. That's not an issue. The problem, however, arises when Griggs tries to deal with the topic of "originality." He writes

"To say your work is original is to see yourself as removed from history and context, to see yourself in a vacuum and alone."

I suppose you could do that, but obviously that doesn't make any sense. You can in fact be an artist being fully embedded in the historical context of your medium and be original. There is no conflict here. As a matter of fact, those artists whose work becomes recognized by large numbers of people usually do just that: They stand out from the crowd (of other artists), not because they pretend they have nothing to do with the tradition, but rather because the strength of their artistic convictions and abilities adds so much originality to their work.

As an aside, I don't get why Griggs insists on throwing in comments about conservative versus liberal minds in his piece. To frame your argument in such a way that anyone disagreeing is conservative (and thus, it seems, bad) strikes me not only as incredibly counterproductive, but also as misguided in all kinds of ways. There are no such things as liberal and conservative art - there is good art, and there is bad art. What is more, unlike politics (especially American politics), art offers shades of grey - instead of insisting on a black-vs.-white dichotomy.

I don't see art as a collective endeavour. No, we're not "doing this together" (Griggs' words). Or maybe more accurately, we're doing this as much together as we're buying bread together or flossing our teeth together - or whatever else we're doing together simply because we're living at the same time, being subject of a culture and society (not the same thing!) with rules, conventions and ideas.

To say that we all somehow work on all of this together strikes me as little more than a feel-good exercise, which, unfortunately, suffers from the same problems as, for example, claiming that photography is the most democratic medium. It sounds good, but it doesn't actually say anything.

A lot of artists might in fact be working on the same things, at this very same time. Some people even have the same ideas at the same time. But that doesn't mean that somehow, art is a collective endeavour. All it says is that artists are embedded in a culture, and they all reflect their culture to some extent, some artists more than others. There is nothing particularly new about this. The history of art is filled with movements and periods, where dozens if not hundreds or thousands of artists worked on similar styles or off similar (or even the same) ideas.

But when we look back, it's the Michelangelo's we remember, the da Vinci's, the Goya's, the Picasso's. And we remember them for exactly the very thing that Griggs would have us deny: Their ability, willingness, and aspiration to move beyond their peers: Their, yes, originality. It's the same willingness and aspirations that all artists share (ability is another issue, of course), their attempt to be original, that would make taking away their names so profoundly wrong - regardless of how many there are! Art is not made by ants, it is made by people, by individuals (Btw, whether or not people are trying to make a quick dime by having contests or by selling stuff is utterly irrelevant).

So when Griggs reduces art to some sort of collective endeavour, denying the unique imagination and abilities individuals (but never the collective!) might have, that - and only that - will truly lead us to the world of artistic stasis.

And you cannot insist on the experience of art, while throwing away the most crucial aspect of it, namely that here you have one individual, speaking to you across time and space (god, that's awful cliche writing, but I don't know how to express it any other way - you get the idea), one individual you're connecting with. Not some anonymous crowd, no, just one individual who somehow, seemingly magically, triggers something in you (and you secretly enjoy it even more thinking that it's just for you and nobody else).

That has got to tell you something

2012-10-30T12:16:11Z

Someone told me the other day that the art market in its current form was unsustainable. I don't know whether that's true. But it might as well be. A few days later, I found a piece written by Sarah Thornton entitled Top 10 reasons not to report on the art market, which you want to read. Again a few days later, the art world experienced the wrath of Dave Hickey: "Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class. All we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It's not worth my time."

Julie Cockburn

2012-10-01T14:36:52Z

Julie Cockburn works with photographs (alongside other media), by cutting them up and re-assembling them, or by embroidering on top of them.

International Art English

2012-08-15T16:26:40Z

Brilliant: A study of art speak ("International Art English" - IAE): "How did we end up writing in a way that sounds like inexpertly translated French?" (via the inimitable Carolina Miranda)

R.I.P. Robert Hughes

2012-08-07T11:38:26Z

"Influential Australian art critic and writer Robert Hughes has died in New York after a long illness." - BBC. In a world where the vapidness of the art world is being increasingly mirrored in the writing about it, Hughes will be missed. Watch this clip to get an idea of his fearlessness to call out what he thought needed to be called out: "Isn't it a miracle what so much money and so little ability can produce?"

Believe the Hype?

2012-06-27T15:29:39Z

Via LPV Magazine's Twitter feed comes the link to an article describing the massive role PR has come to play in the art world. All of this easily applies for photography. Over the past few years, we have witnessed an explosion of PR, in part triggered by so-called social media, but also by sites like Kickstarter, where many campaigns result in a flurry of PR emails. It's a bit like the nuclear arms race where each side is trying to out-PR everybody else. Needless to say, the overall effect is simply that everybody's is just getting more PR.

Court Jester

2012-05-30T14:20:11Z

I don't know how convincing I find this article about Richard Prince and his antics in court. There are quite a few interesting nuggets in it, though, such as this one: "Any case where lawyers argue what is or isn't art tends to have some kind of critical value, if only because it serves as a kind of plain-English catalog essay reduction. The Prince case goes beyond this, though, and begins to enter the realm of technical support in the artist's bizarre refusal to defend his works on a basic level, which, regardless of Mr. Prince's intent, makes a curious statement about them at a time when the courts have, in some instances, become a place for artistic expression."

The price of being female

2012-05-24T20:50:58Z

"Much fanfare greeted the $388m made by Christie's post-war and contemporary evening sale in New York earlier this month--its highest total ever. Few seemed to notice that the auction was unprecedented in another way: it had ten lots by eight women artists, amounting to a male-to-female ratio of five-to-one. (Sotheby's evening sale offered a more typical display of male-domination with an 11-to-one ratio.) Yet proceeds on all the works by women artists in the Christie's sale tallied up to a mere $17m--less than 5% of the total and not even half the price achieved that night by a single picture of two naked women by Yves Klein. Indeed, depictions of women often command the highest prices, whereas works by them do not." - The Economist

Is Internet Art Commercially Viable?

2012-05-17T14:03:13Z

"Internet artists, for all of their digital-native wisdom, should know better than to think .JPEGs are a viable commodity when they've seen multi-billion dollar industries like music, film, and newspapers run around like baffled idiots for the past decade trying to figure out why they can't sell MP3s, MOVs, and PDFs like they used to in traditional media." - Brad Troemel

a Matruschka doll of inside jokes

2012-02-26T18:52:36Z

"Art Basel can be read as a Matruschka doll of inside jokes--on the inside, authorities and newcomers locked in a perpetual accusation of nihilism; on the outside, a cryptically silly facade. The aura of exclusion - the gated lounges, the endless line of black BMWs, and the backdrop of raucous invite-only parties - suggests to the casual fairgoer that the art itself is part of an elaborate set, and she is a duped extra." - Mostafa Heddaya (via)

Saatchi fires art world

2011-12-14T18:13:42Z

I was out of town for a bit over a week, so I only noticed Charles Saatchi dissing the art world in passing, and I missed the art world's reaction entirely. I'm assuming it was something between a shrug and a yawn. As amusing as Saatchi's rant might be, it's about as credible as a Donald Trump rant about the real-estate business.

an unbalanced but self-replicating chain

2011-11-15T18:46:58Z

"The making of art has very little to do with galleries. These places are, in the sense that they are commercial galleries, interested in a particular and very narrow kind of art that can be displayed within a space in a particular kind of way, they are interested in people who can produce work that galleries can show. And so people produce the kind of work that they can show, they kind of work that sells, the kind of work that wealthy people like - which is problematic. It's a symbiotic relationship where what galleries, gallery consumers, and gallery feeders produce is intricately linked in an unbalanced but self-replicating chain." - Colin Pantall

Ai Weiwei: Beijing a prison where people go mad

2011-08-29T16:40:53Z

Ai Weiwei, earlier this year "detained" by Chinese authorities and then released, has written a piece about Beijing and his experience: "This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare."

Lucian Freud, RIP

2011-07-21T19:34:55Z

"Lucian Freud, whose stark and revealing paintings of friends and intimates, splayed nude in his studio, recast the art of portraiture and offered a new approach to figurative art, died on Wednesday night at his home in London. He was 88." - obituary

The art of the book: Emil Ortik illustrating Lafcadio Hearn

2011-06-23T17:38:35Z

A little while ago, while checking whether a local second-hand book shop had got any new photobooks in (it hadn't) I noticed there was a largeish pile of German language book, somewhat shoddily stacked on the floor. It's hard to get German language books in the US, so I had a peek at what they had. Most of it had been published in the 1970s, with a few dating back way earlier. There wasn't much that interested me, with the exception of some old books by Lafcadio Hearn. I usually don't buy books in translation if I can read the original language, but a quick glance into these had me get these. Printed in 1921, they all are rather lavish productions. (more)

]]> The books are in a pretty good shape given their age. But I didn't want to put them on my scanner, so I photographed some pages. Each book is illustrated very beautifully as you can see in these images. The title page says that the book's ornaments (my translation for the German "Buchschmuck") were done by Emil Orlik, an artist I had not heard of before. (If you look at that page closely, you'll notice it claims that Orlik also translated the books, which, however, is not true. The translator is given as Berta Franzos.) I don't usually look for old books too much, so I don't know how commonly old books were illustrated this way. I do not, however, remember seeing a whole lot of book like these ones.

There is a lot of talk about ebooks now. There is a lot of talk about how we're (supposedly) going to lose the physical object. Seeing these books had me think that we might be justified to bemoan the transition from books to ebooks. But I think we should also be aware of the fact that most contemporary books on paper don't compare too well with older productions. The Lafcadio Hearn books might be an extreme example, of course. But today's books as objects are rather reduced versions of what books used to be.

In fact, wouldn't it make much more sense to complain about today's books being so uniformly bland (with effort mostly put into the covers)?

I thought I'd bring this up, not because I want to pine for the "good old days" (1921 in Germany certainly wasn't such a grand time if you know your history). But a lot of the talk about our transition from a purely physical world to one that also has a significant electronic component seems to one-dimensional, as if once you make the jump from a book to an ebook the end of the book is nigh. But it's not. In fact, given that most book really are just text on paper - without any of the illustrations you can find in Hearn's books - is looking at that text on some sort of computer such a big loss?

In fact, I'm cautiously hopeful that ebooks might bring back part of what one can find in these illustrated books - in whatever form possible - since a computer allows for all kinds of additional materials (multimedia). And ultimately, reading or looking at a book is an experience, with the handling of the book being a rather small part. The real experience will be delivered by whatever it is that authors (here including photographers) will add to the original content. I'm looking forward to seeing where that's going.