Mess or Masterpiece?


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From where I see it, "bad art" isn't art at all. just like there is no such thing as "bad surgery". There's just surgery and butchery.

So, then, what term would you use for "bad butchery" if there's no such thing as bad butchery?

There's no such thing as "good butchery" so there's no such thing as "bad butchery". There's only surgery and butchery.

In a similar manner there's only art and leftist crap slinging being pimped as "art" to leftist suckers who share the same values as the crap slingers.

It's perfect moral justice that predator and prey each deserve the other.

Greg

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Jonathan,

Re your post #69, I'm interested to see your self-description of your output. To me, a high percentage of what you post looks dopey - caricaturings, distortions, out-of-context harpings, non-substantiatable accusations, tauntings, shape-shifting definitions, and, above all, poor reasoning. Repetitively and lengthily, producing so much smoke, real issues become obscured from view.

Plus touches which I can only interpret as clowning, like this:

I think you have, however, doubted the genuineness of Objectivists gushing over "approved" art.

I don't doubt their "genuineness." I think that they truly value and maybe even love what Rand told them to. They genuinely feel what they've been told to feel. And I think that they could genuinely make themselves stop feeling it if they discovered that they had been mistaken in believing that Rand told them to love it. They're not pretending. They're genuinely surrendering to Rand and obeying her tastes and theories. They're true believers, and they feel their beliefs very deeply and sincerely.

Genuine non-genuineness. Yeah.

---

Speaking of "out-of-context harpings":

BritArt is to the Council of American Artists in Rand's novel, as Hirst's pickled animal parts are to the cow in Berger's novel. And in case there's any doubt, the final artistic wonder in Hirst's repititions of his plagerism, each heralded as a greater work of genius than the last, was indeed a cow cut in half. Here's Rand's 1943 description of Saatchi's wretched, sneering, 1980s assembly's:

"...and another who discovered a new technique of painting: he blackened a sheet of paper and then painted with a rubber eraser..."

So, this Alan G. Carter fellow is among those who have never heard of the traditional technique of removing pigment from a surface as a means of creating an image? Heh. And he's upset about how wretched, sneering and "Sith-like" such techniques are? Or perhaps he didn't actually read, comprehend and critically consider any of the details of what he was mocking and opposing before emoting about it?

His opinions, emotings, conspiracy theories and psychologizings are interesting though, even in spite of their lacking any evidence to back them up.

That particular sentence seems to loom for you until it obviates all the rest. Suppose Rand had used a different example, would you then have been satisfied?

And what of the issue of the pickled shark, and how its elevation provides a real-world example of what Rand was dramatizing in the scene from The Fountainhead?

Ellen

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I think the danger is sticking Rand into one context when only she was privileged to be one person containing many facets of personality and ideas some of which may be said to clash or even be contradictory. If we experience Rand as a simple person full of non-contradictions, we aren't experiencing Rand at all, just a caricature. But we don't have to do to her what she did to herself, at least for display. You'll find this in her esthetics in their different expression in The Fountainhead as revealed in this thread. The novel is a work of art and so too the characters within. Take Howard Roark as a statue. First he's very young and very naked at the top of a cliff and he dives into the water below. Then he walks home dressed in sandals and tattered clothes befitting a college student. He's so self contained he could have walked home naked without concern of others looking. Then he's home--at the Keatings for God's sake. You have to read a lot more of the novel to wonder why he spent even a few weeks with them much less a few years. Oh, yes, I forgot, he's so self contained even Peter's mother can't bug him. Then the famous scene with the dean. Finally we find out something that bugs him--never mind it shouldn't but it does--the Parthenon. Now Roark's a critic--a fascist critic. The Parthenon is flawed. It's not good enough for him. Only Roark is good enough for Roark, until he meets Steven Mallory. (But Mallory's not an architect so he's not going to be evaluated as one by our hero.) Well, for me Roark is flawed. So too for him the Parthenon is flawed. But just as I don't think Roark would have the Parthenon destroyed, for I do think he could have praised it except for the God-awful God-worship of it of the dean, I wouldn't want Roark changed. I mean to go back in time and to destroy the Parthenon (with modern alterations) would mean destroying the entirety of the culture that created it. Changing the novel would destroy the novel. Destroy Rand the novelist and she'd never have written another word you'd have the least interest in reading.

--Brant

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I think the danger is sticking Rand into one context when only she was privileged to be one person containing many facets of personality and ideas some of which may be said to clash or even be contradictory.

While it's entertaining to read all of the highly creative opinions on what Ayn Rand was and wasn't, you won't ever hear me engaging in that theoretical intellectual exercise... as my sole interest is how I can actually apply practical useful ideas in building my life.

I'm only interested in what works in the real world...

...and her ideas work. :smile:

Greg

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I think the danger is sticking Rand into one context when only she was privileged to be one person containing many facets of personality and ideas some of which may be said to clash or even be contradictory.

While it's entertaining to read all of the highly creative opinions on what Ayn Rand was and wasn't, you won't ever hear me engaging in that theoretical intellectual exercise... as my sole interest is how I can actually apply practical useful ideas in building my life.

I'm only interested in what works in the real world...

...and her ideas work. :smile:

Greg

Are you the guy wearing clothes who has suddenly appeared in a nudist camp--or vice versa?

--Brant

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I think the danger is sticking Rand into one context when only she was privileged to be one person containing many facets of personality and ideas some of which may be said to clash or even be contradictory.

While it's entertaining to read all of the highly creative opinions on what Ayn Rand was and wasn't, you won't ever hear me engaging in that theoretical intellectual exercise... as my sole interest is how I can actually apply practical useful ideas in building my life.

I'm only interested in what works in the real world...

...and her ideas work. :smile:

Greg

Are you the guy wearing clothes who has suddenly appeared in a nudist camp--or vice versa?

--Brant

Only your own life can answer that for you, Brant.

Mine already has for me.

Greg

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The 1999 Brooklyn Museum Sensation Exhibit

Here's "bossy and controlling" - according to Jonathan - Michelle Marder Kamhi with further material relevant to Charles Saatchi, BritArt, and the pickled shark (see my post #63).

Who Says That's Art?

from Chapter 9: "Today's Dysfunctional Artworld - Who Is to Blame?"

pp. 199-200

[bold emphases added]

Needless to say, artists and would-be artists in a free society have the right to follow their own dictates and inspiration - provided they do no harm to others. That, however, is a condition that some have not hesitated to violate in recent years. [An endnote gives references to examples.] Would-be artists even have the liberty to claim that whatever they create is art. By the same token, others are free to accept or reject it, and to draw their own conclusion as to whether it qualifies as art at all, much less as good art. Ideally, the broad cultural value assigned to any work would result from a consensus of individual choices, and would be guided in large measure by rational values.

[....]

[Today, however, various interests] have instead tended to legitimize, even glorify, the worst rather than the best. My purpose in this chapter is to shed light on how they have served to prop up a cultural house of cards. [....]

In the visual arts, there are now two parallel universes. One is the realm of the pseudo artists favored by prominent collectors and promoted by major galleries, museums, and the media. The other is that of genuine artists laboring in a cultural underground, little known by the public and cut off from the lively criticism and engagement, not to mention income, that broad exposure could provide them. If traditional painting and sculpture seem to be dead in our time, it is not because they have been replaced by something better or more meaningful. It is because institutional bias and a distorted art market have eclipsed them, depriving them of the interest and support required for their flourishing.

The Seamy Inside of Today's Artworld

A good way to begin to understand the sordid inner workings of the contemporary artworld is to consider the highly controversial 1999 Brooklyn Museum exhibit Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. It demonstrates how museums, acting in concert with prominent auction houses, dealers, and high-profile private collectors, elevate the status of contemporary work having little or no artistic merit and little respectable appeal for the public. In addition to Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary, which I cited in Chapter 7, the show included such pieces as Damien Hirst's pickled shark, Marc Quinn's Self (a sculptured head made from nine pints of his frozen blood), Tracey Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (a tent appliquéd with the names of all the individuals she had ever slept with, sexually or otherwise), and Jake and Dinos Chapman's Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-sublimated Libidinal Model - a piece so weirdly perverse that I refrain from describing it here.

Virtually none of the pieces in Sensation qualify as art by the standards advocated in this book. All were from the cutting-edge private collection of Charles Saatchi, the British advertising mogul who has been one of the contemporary artworld's most influential collectors. Most troubling, the exhibition was directly underwritten by those who would profit monetarily by it [including, prominently, Saatchi himself and Christie's International].

[....] At the same time, the museum would reap the benefit of a surge in attendance, owing to the public controversy and media attention generated by the show's often shocking content, which was emphasized in the museum's advertising and publicity.

Such objectives are surely a far cry from philosopher-critic Arthur Danto's assumption that

the fact that an artist's work has been selected for a museum exhibition . . . is evidence that a number of individuals, who have undergone training and acquired the experience that entitles them to make such decisions, have come to the shared conclusion that the work merits display, and that the public will benefit in various ways by seeing the work in this format. The work will have made its way into the consciousness of the art world, and a consensus will have emerged as to [its value].

[The quote is from Danto's "The Fly in the Fly Bottle: The Explanation and Critical Judgment of Works of Art," in Raphael Rubinstein, ed., Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice (Stockbridge, Mass.: Hard Press, 2006), 62.]

[Danto was significant in producing the "Critical Mess." Of his role, another time.]

Ellen

PS: I just realized that I misspelled "Saatchi" - left out the "t" - in my post #63. Too late to correct it.

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Needless to say, artists and would-be artists in a free society have the right to follow their own dictates and inspiration - provided they do no harm to others. That, however, is a condition that some have not hesitated to violate in recent years. [An endnote gives references to examples.] Would-be artists even have the liberty to claim that whatever they create is art. By the same token, others are free to accept or reject it, and to draw their own conclusion as to whether it qualifies as art at all, much less as good art. Ideally, the broad cultural value assigned to any work would result from a consensus of individual choices, and would be guided in large measure by rational values.

"Would-be humans even have the liberty to claim that whatever they create is human. These are the Jews. They are everywhere. But Germans are free to reject their claim. The purity of the race demands it. Our broad cultural values must be protected. Heil Volk!"

--Hitler

_____________________________

I assume somewhere in her book Kamhi defines "art" so we can really know by her lights a "would be artist" so we can evaluate her appellation. Without that she's only a "would be" art critic even though likely still a would be art critic, but let's see if she's really flying her airplane or just pretending. I just see what looks sort of like an airplane erratically taxiing around the Ayn Rand airport, bumping into things like a drunken sailor.

I don't think "art" can be defined except as a general label for creative categories as literature, painting, music, etc. Each of those categories seems more susceptible to definition. These categories are all over the landscape as in the "art of medicine" the "art of the novel" and even "the art of science," etc. Thus "art" seems based in "the art of creation." What is created may be described as "crap." Who is an artist, though? If you are a doctor and practice "the art of medicine" you are not an artist. So your "art" qua art is of a lower sort than that of the guy who painted the Mona Lisa. Da Vinci was an artist (but greatness is not required--I just threw him in for lucidity). The doctor is not an artist. The scientist is not an artist.

I'm not trying to be definitive here. I'm just trying to think some of this stuff through. If Kamhi did me better tell me about it; I might even read her book--someday. My only real interest is her using cultural fascism to fight cultural fascism destroying artistic creation if by that we mean good creation and bad creation both, hopefully(?) leaving behind pathetic Objectivist dreck. If Howard Roark, an architect, can create his art in spite of the dominant world of architectural crap and Toohey, good and great art can certainly be created and sold in this electronic, Internet, communicative age. But Roark succeeded, as depicted by Ayn Rand, because of his integrity, perserverance and genius and those who saw and appreciated his work, not because he had his own Toohey to counter Toohey unless Rand was his Toohey. Existentially she might have been, but she was not in the novel.

All I get so far is Kamhi's possible envy of the dominant culture. (I wonder if Rand had political envy, of the collectivists. Envy informs and distorts and can destroy.)

--Brant

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Most troubling

, the exhibition was directly underwritten by those who would profit monetarily by it [including, prominently, Saatchi himself and Christie's International].

[....] At the same time, the museum would reap the benefit of a surge in attendance, owing to the public controversy and media attention generated by the show's often shocking content, which was emphasized in the museum's advertising and publicity.

The decent may be troubled... but not the degenerate.

This "art" swindle does not trouble the leftist crap slingers. The saving grace is that they are only able to prey on their own kind who share their values.

Greg

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Greg, Although I think I know what you mean, "leftist" doesn't swing it for everything - it's a package deal you're making from a political term. For the art like Saatchi's, I'd go with "nihilist", without value and of deliberate anti-value to men's lives. Even 'leftist' artists don't necessarily translate their left ideology into nihilist art - for instance, many would be good Naturalist artists. Who at least, some with the highest skill and aesthetics, reflect what they believe our state of existence is, not what it can be (and actually is), and which is usually somewhere between pretty bad and plain boring. (IOW, generally honest, but wrong).

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From where I see it, "bad art" isn't art at all. just like there is no such thing as "bad surgery". There's just surgery and butchery.

So, then, what term would you use for "bad butchery" if there's no such thing as bad butchery?

There's no such thing as "good butchery" so there's no such thing as "bad butchery". There's only surgery and butchery.

In a similar manner there's only art and leftist crap slinging being pimped as "art" to leftist suckers who share the same values as the crap slingers.

It's perfect moral justice that predator and prey each deserve the other.

Greg

"Butchery" is the trade/skill of cutting up and selling meat in a shop. So your little theory is that there are no people who are good at cutting up and selling meat? Think, Greg. Think.

J

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From where I see it, "bad art" isn't art at all. just like there is no such thing as "bad surgery". There's just surgery and butchery.

So, then, what term would you use for "bad butchery" if there's no such thing as bad butchery?

There's no such thing as "good butchery" so there's no such thing as "bad butchery". There's only surgery and butchery.

In a similar manner there's only art and leftist crap slinging being pimped as "art" to leftist suckers who share the same values as the crap slingers.

It's perfect moral justice that predator and prey each deserve the other.

Greg

"Butchery" is the trade/skill of cutting up and selling meat in a shop.

As a contrast to surgery was the context within which the term was used.

Greg

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From where I see it, "bad art" isn't art at all. just like there is no such thing as "bad surgery". There's just surgery and butchery.

So, then, what term would you use for "bad butchery" if there's no such thing as bad butchery?

There's no such thing as "good butchery" so there's no such thing as "bad butchery". There's only surgery and butchery.

In a similar manner there's only art and leftist crap slinging being pimped as "art" to leftist suckers who share the same values as the crap slingers.

It's perfect moral justice that predator and prey each deserve the other.

Greg

"Butchery" is the trade/skill of cutting up and selling meat in a shop.

As a contrast to surgery was the context within which the term was used.

Greg

Yes, I know that. And then I asked what term you would use for "bad butchery" in a different context. What term do you apply to a person who is bad at being a butcher in the context of cutting up and selling meat in a shop?

J

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Jonathan,

Re your post #69, I'm interested to see your self-description of your output. To me, a high percentage of what you post looks dopey...

That would make sense. Given your inability lately to pay attention to the big picture due to your petty electron chasing -- or perhaps it's something else, like the beginnings of senility? -- it's only natural that you would see me as being the problem, or the cause of your confusions and frustrations.

It's gotten bad. Despite my intentionally repeating my positions many times and in many different ways over the years, you've been getting them completely mixed up in your head lately. The Kamhi thread is full of examples of you misrepresenting my positions. Within the past year you've even gotten so confused that you thought that I had taken positions that Roger took in arguments with me -- positions that I've opposed for years.

...caricaturings, distortions, out-of-context harpings, non-substantiatable accusations, tauntings, shape-shifting definitions, and, above all, poor reasoning.

You're projecting.

But, anyway, please give examples. If my reasoning is so poor, why is that there are still so many substantive questions I've asked that remain unanswered, dodged and evaded, by my opponents? Specifically which definitions have I "shape-shifted"? Enough with the hollow accusations and unsubstantiated judgments. Back them up.

Repetitively and lengthily...

Oh, I'm definitely repetitive and often lengthy. But that's intentional. I find that I have to be, in order to get through to certain people, including you lately. And even then I can't get through to those who are set on resisting and misrepresenting what I write. The Kamhi thread is a great example. It begins with you making the false claim that my position was that of accusing Kamhi of attempting to establish her personal tastes as universal, despite the fact that I've repeated over and over again, including in the parent thread that spawned the Kamhi thread, that my position has always been that Kamhi (as well as similar Objectivist Tooheys) wishes to establish her "aesthetic personal limitations as the standard and limit of all mankind," and to therefore arbitrarily "deny the reality of others' experiences of art," and to suggest or outright diagnose the "psychological deficiency or fraudulence" of those "who claim to experience in a work of art what Kamhi does not."

...producing so much smoke, real issues become obscured from view...

Ah, you want to talk about the "real issues," do you? Heh. And I've been preventing that?

Please, identify the "real issues." No one's stopping you from getting deep and substantive. Please. Pretty please. Expose us to the fire and brilliance of the "real issues" instead of all the smoke and shadows with which I've been obscuring everyone's views.

Speaking of "out-of-context harpings":

BritArt is to the Council of American Artists in Rand's novel, as Hirst's pickled animal parts are to the cow in Berger's novel. And in case there's any doubt, the final artistic wonder in Hirst's repititions of his plagerism, each heralded as a greater work of genius than the last, was indeed a cow cut in half. Here's Rand's 1943 description of Saatchi's wretched, sneering, 1980s assembly's:

"...and another who discovered a new technique of painting: he blackened a sheet of paper and then painted with a rubber eraser..."

So, this Alan G. Carter fellow is among those who have never heard of the traditional technique of removing pigment from a surface as a means of creating an image? Heh. And he's upset about how wretched, sneering and "Sith-like" such techniques are? Or perhaps he didn't actually read, comprehend and critically consider any of the details of what he was mocking and opposing before emoting about it?

His opinions, emotings, conspiracy theories and psychologizings are interesting though, even in spite of their lacking any evidence to back them up.

That particular sentence seems to loom for you until it obviates all the rest. Suppose Rand had used a different example, would you then have been satisfied?

She did include other examples, which are just as invalid as the pigment-erasing example. I focused primarily on the pigment one because it's the easiest and most obvious. It's so clear and evident that even pig-headed Randians should be able to recognize and accept that Rand's gripe was not a rationally valid one.

The fact that Rand didn't like certain methods or techniques doesn't make them illegitimate. She blew a gasket about something without having a clue what she was talking about, but what's worse is that others, like Carter, then feel that they've been invited to blow their own gaskets while citing Rand as supporting their case, despite the fact that they haven't actually investigated whether or not her gripes had any merit.

It's really hard to take someone seriously when they're trying to ridicule things that they clearly don't understand. It's like if someone were to learn that Rand, say, arbitrarily rejected the idea of the Mona Lisa qualifying as art. And then, citing that opinion of Rand's, he tried to reject a pickled shark as qualifying as art by saying that accepting it as art is like accepting the Mona Lisa as qualifying as art. It's a total failure of a statement, because there is no reason for anyone to follow Rand in being opposed to accepting the Mona Lisa as qualifying as art, just as there is no reason to be opposed to accepting the pigment-erasing method as a legitimate means of creating art.

It's stupidity citing stupidity. It's one person quoting another's purely irrational emotings in order to prop up his own, while not critically thinking any of it through.

And what of the issue of the pickled shark, and how its elevation provides a real-world example of what Rand was dramatizing in the scene from The Fountainhead?

In what way do you think that the pickled shark's elevation is a real-world example of what Rand dramatized?

Are you under the impression that the influence of the tastes of wealthy patrons of the arts is a new thing? Are you assuming that Saatchi must have had evil, destructive motives because you or Kamhi or Carter don't like or get anything out of Hirst's work? Are you under the assumption that Hirst is the first artist in the history of the world to have come to prominence due to the financial assistance and promotional support of a wealthy patron? Are you suggesting that any such emerging artists throughout history who have benefited from such circumstances are, by definition, the pawns of a Toohey who has nefarious motives?

In short, what, specifically, is the question that you're asking but neglected to actually ask? What conclusions have you come to about the pickled shark issue? Are you suggesting that you somehow know the motivations of all of the players involved simply because you read an online blog which opined and made inferences and presumptions about others' motivations?

J

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The 1999 Brooklyn Museum Sensation Exhibit

Here's "bossy and controlling" - according to Jonathan - Michelle Marder Kamhi with further material relevant to Charles Saatchi, BritArt, and the pickled shark (see my post #63).

Who Says That's Art?

from Chapter 9: "Today's Dysfunctional Artworld - Who Is to Blame?"

pp. 199-200

[bold emphases added]

Needless to say, artists and would-be artists in a free society have the right to follow their own dictates and inspiration - provided they do no harm to others. That, however, is a condition that some have not hesitated to violate in recent years. [An endnote gives references to examples.] Would-be artists even have the liberty to claim that whatever they create is art. By the same token, others are free to accept or reject it, and to draw their own conclusion...

Yes, and in the context of the book, the bolded statement means the same thing as if Kamhi had said that others are free to reject reality, and to believe any crazy notion that they wish.

And to be sure, she is not proposing the use of force. But then again, no one has claimed that she was. My calling her "bossy and controlling" in no way suggests that I have interpreted her as wanting to use force. Rather, she wishes to use nagging, psychological smearing, moral vilification, etc., as her means of attempting to boss and control others.

...as to whether it qualifies as art at all, much less as good art. Ideally, the broad cultural value assigned to any work would result from a consensus of individual choices, and would be guided in large measure by rational values.

What Kamhi describes above is generally exactly what happens, but Kamhi rejects the consensus of individual choices when that consensus doesn't go her way. She knows nothing about which values others have, how rational they are, or how common their views and interpretations are, but she just arbitrarily declares others to be irrational when they experience and value in art what she does not, and she smears them as a destructive, distorting minority.

...however, various interests] have instead tended to legitimize, even glorify, the worst rather than the best...

The "worst" or "best" by specifically what standard? Answer: The arbitrary standard of Kamhi's personal tastes, experiences, interpretations and limitations. She offers no actual objective standard for making such judgments, and, as I've pointed out, her personal preferences in art, as well as Torres's, are often for works of art which are, by any actual objective standard, inferior.

Why are these people referred to as "various interests" in the above? It smacks of a conspiracy theory mindset. When someone voluntarily puts their own time and money toward promoting the art that they love, especially if they are rich people, then they are being naughty and disrupting and disturbing "the market" rather than simply participating in it? But those who don't spend money on art are not "various interests," but they represent the true undisturbed market? Even though they are not actually engaged in the market (the exchange of their wealth for art), their opinions and tastes should be allowed to have more influence than those who do have skin in the game?

In the visual arts, there are now two parallel universes. One is the realm of the pseudo artists favored by prominent collectors and promoted by major galleries, museums, and the media.

The above statement conflicts with her earlier statement: "Ideally, the broad cultural value assigned to any work would result from a consensus of individual choices, and would be guided in large measure by rational values."

The "broad culture" accepts and assigns value to art, but Kamhi doesn't like it or get anything out of it, and therefore immediately abandons her own statement of the ideal of accepting the consensus of individual choices.

How does she imagine that some of her favorite artists gained prominence despite not being worthy of it if we base our judgments only on the objectively demonstrable technical/academic merit or their skills or lack thereof?

If traditional painting and sculpture seem to be dead in our time, it is not because they have been replaced by something better or more meaningful.

"Better" and "more meaningful" to whom, and by what specific, rational and objective standard? Answer, once again: Kamhi is the universal standard; if she doesn't like something or get any meaning out of it, then it is non-art or bad art, and meaningless to anyone who is to be considered rational. Kamhi is the universal limit of cognitive normalcy and aesthetic sensitivity.

It is because institutional bias and a distorted art market have eclipsed them, depriving them of the interest and support required for their flourishing.

So, in other words, the artists whom Kamhi subjectively likes and whose work she responds to are "better," and they are therefore deserving of -- they are in effect owed -- other people's money. Kamhi's tastes and limits of aesthetic sensitivity and response are the universal standard by which other art consumers should be spending their money. If they don't finance and promote Kamhi's preferences in art, but instead prefer to finance and promote their own, then they are "biased" and are "distorting the art market." The true nature of the "art market," therefore, is to reflect only Kamhi's preferences. That is it's universally natural state. Any deviation from Kamhi's preferences is a "distortion" or an "eclipse."

Quite a smug and anti-capitalist view of the nature of markets!

The Seamy Inside of Today's Artworld

A good way to begin to understand the sordid inner workings of the contemporary artworld is to consider the highly controversial 1999 Brooklyn Museum exhibit Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. It demonstrates how museums, acting in concert with prominent auction houses, dealers, and high-profile private collectors, elevate the status of contemporary work having little or no artistic merit and little respectable appeal for the public. In addition to Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary, which I cited in Chapter 7, the show included such pieces as Damien Hirst's pickled shark, Marc Quinn's Self (a sculptured head made from nine pints of his frozen blood), Tracey Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (a tent appliquéd with the names of all the individuals she had ever slept with, sexually or otherwise), and Jake and Dinos Chapman's Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-sublimated Libidinal Model - a piece so weirdly perverse that I refrain from describing it here.

Virtually none of the pieces in Sensation qualify as art by the standards advocated in this book.

And? So what? The "standards" advocated in the book are nothing but Kamhi's subjective tastes and personal aesthetic limitations lamely tarted up as objective judgments, universal truths, and cultural consensuses.

All were from the cutting-edge private collection of Charles Saatchi, the British advertising mogul who has been one of the contemporary artworld's most influential collectors. Most troubling, the exhibition was directly underwritten by those who would profit monetarily by it [including, prominently, Saatchi himself and Christie's International].

[....] At the same time, the museum would reap the benefit of a surge in attendance, owing to the public controversy and media attention generated by the show's often shocking content, which was emphasized in the museum's advertising and publicity.

Such objectives are surely a far cry from philosopher-critic Arthur Danto's assumption that

the fact that an artist's work has been selected for a museum exhibition . . . is evidence that a number of individuals, who have undergone training and acquired the experience that entitles them to make such decisions, have come to the shared conclusion that the work merits display, and that the public will benefit in various ways by seeing the work in this format. The work will have made its way into the consciousness of the art world, and a consensus will have emerged as to [its value].

Should we take the same method of judgment and apply it to all of history? Are we to reconsider the status and value of all of the art of the past which came to prominence in the same of similar ways? It sounds to me as if Kamhi is opposing the idea of people freely supporting and promoting artists whose work they love and making money off of doing so.

And she also seems to be implying that she and those who share her opinions, tastes and aesthetic limitations are the only ones who count as having "undergone training and acquired the experience that entitles them to make such decisions," even though she actually doesn't have the relevant hands-on art training (she's a historian, and not educated or experienced in judging actual technique, skill and talent).

J

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Senility? C'mon. Unlike Greg I know you have some grace, so please have the grace to revert to it.

--Brant

I give what I get. If someone wants to be treated with grace, she should show some.

J

Grace is not for trading. Grace in a person is one expression of a person. I, for instance, do not want to be "treated with grace." I like to see it expressed.

--Brant

Ellen couldn't care less, I suspect

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Grace is not for trading. Grace in a person is one expression of a person. I, for instance, do not want to be "treated with grace." I like to see it expressed.

Is this grace in your opinion:

"To me, a high percentage of what you post looks dopey - caricaturings, distortions, out-of-context harpings, non-substantiatable accusations, tauntings, shape-shifting definitions, and, above all, poor reasoning. Repetitively and lengthily, producing so much smoke, real issues become obscured from view."

J

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It's better not to enable Jonathan's addiction.

Greg

Everybody is as they are--you, me, Ellen, Jonathan and others elsewhere on OL--and will remain going forward. The older you get the less plasticity for youth makes itself then keeps what it has made. All we are doing here is maintaining our own space in this sandbox. Being rational and knowledgeable is the least of it; first we have to be then we may try to achieve more of what we want by altering a little of what's already in our heads. In that sense it doesn't matter that Jonathan did a better job--if he did--of chopping up Ellen than Ellen did of chopping up Jonathan. That's because chopping is what he does best. Chopping maintains his space. It doesn't matter to Ellen, I think, that she got chopped better than she chopped for she doesn't have time for chopping but she does keep coming back enough to maintain herself here. Calling her "senile," however, is not chopping but using a club. No fair. That's why I objected to what Jonathan did. I didn't object to the chopping, just that kind of smashing. It upset my delicate sensibilities. (Ellen's supposed to demonstrate that she's not senile?) All our views are ego views. "Vanity! All is vanity"? What you post here, I post here; all the other polloi post here, puts no money in anyone's pocket, save a little for Michael through ads displayed and clicked on and that doesn't cover the costs. My primary motivation is to keep my mind working and sharp (Senile? No, no senility for me, thank you! No, no thank you!) and, as for you, entertainment. And I want to better understand this philosophy a little more in the greater cultural-intellectual scheme of things so I can go out still--AND SAVE THE WORLD! (Oops!)

--Brant

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Everybody is as they are--you, me, Ellen, Jonathan and others elsewhere on OL--and will remain going forward.

I know.

No one changes their view by virtual squiggles appearing on their monitor. Only the objective reality of life has the power to change a view. Only the consequences of our own actions can change our view.

An alternative to chopping is to be in an unoccupied space that can't be chopped. :wink:

Greg

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I don't think that Ellen is senile. She's just so dedicated to being irrationally contentious with me -- due to my having apprarently wounded her in some way in the recent past -- that she's willing to ~appear~ to be senile.

J

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