Art and Money

They go together like a horse and carriage.

The prices of paintings have often appeared to follow the logic of acreage for income. The larger the work, the higher the price. How good the work might be didn't enter the equation, or even seem relevant. At one time the more careerist artists were painting for corporate lobbies, and that meant big. It grew out of a tradition where artists would create Salon works which were to make their name and migrated into the art markets — the corporations thought they were getting something good because it was big, and like corporate buildings themselves, it enhanced the ego. The personal, suggestive, magical, meditative, poetical and spiritual values of art were abandoned — adopting the value system of the popular culture.

This article says that value and price are distinct. Big surprise there.

…Meyer Schapiro argued that there was a radical difference between art’s spiritual value and its commercial value. He warned against the nihilistic effect of collapsing their difference. I will argue that today, in the public mind, and perhaps in the unconscious of many artists, there is no difference. The commercial value of art has usurped its spiritual value, indeed, seems to determine it. Art’s esthetic, cognitive, emotional and moral value — its value for the dialectical varieties of critical consciousness — has been subsumed by the value of money.

The Wire

The Wire has received so much good press. We are only at disc 1 of season 1. I'm not sure we'll stick through the whole run — the well-done series has an off-putting feel to it. Exactly what makes that so I'm not sure — an unease about the underlying assumptions perhaps. It is well directed, the writing snappy. The performances have a feel of reality to them. So what is not to like?

The creator of the series, David Simon, said that he wanted to show two institutions — the world of the inner city and the world of the police — and how they parallel one another and affect individuals. This is moral equivalence by another name. The ponderous parallels between the two worlds is fake and feels forced.

In this interview, after season 3, Simon talks about the inner city, about American life — and on the DVD commentary managed to pull in Melville.

Simon may have convinced himself that these large issues are a conceptual underpinning to his show, but in reality The Wire hasn't thus far even come close to that depth or suggestiveness. Simon even managed to mention Iraq. Maybe as the series plays out it will pay the bill — his grand literary ambition fulfilled. At present The Wire is a better than average TV show.

At one point Simon, speaking of an actress who plays a performer in a strip club, said, “She graduated Harvard. So much for audience expectations.” But Simon himself has some expectations about the audience in that assertion — some of his own stereotypes.

Military Hillary

Camille Paglia in this article argues that women need to, um, bone up on military matters if they are to be serious contenders for commander in chief. Paglia praises Hillary Clinton for having the smarts to realize this and got on the Armed Services Committee when first joining the Senate. It turns out that her dad was a Navy drill instructor.

It doesn't hurt that Paglia places the whole issue within a cultural and historical context, going from Hatshepsut to Thatcher to Hedda Gabler. This depth of sensibility offers so much more than the usual political bloviating.

I have to add that savvy about the military or not, Hillary has to lose the scolding manner which many say is not evident in her warm personal interactions; reminiscent of observations made about Al Gore's personal conviviality and wooden public face during his candidacy. Voters watch demeanor as least as attentively as they parse a resume.

Net Neutrality

“Net neutrality” just means first come, first served. That is the way it has been on the internet but telephone companies want to prioritize traffic, giving preferential treatment for higher fees.

If you want to preserve the current situation, which has worked so well, write to Heather Hendrickson and reference Docket No. 07-52. Tell Heather you want things to remain as they have been. If telephone companies want to make more money, they can innovate new services and charge all they want.

Martin Rees

This talk by astronomer Martin Rees succeeds in its effort to offer a cosmic perspective: an “awareness of the immense future”. Rees says we are at the beginning of the emergence of complexity, the science of which is “the greatest challenge of all”; which could lead in six billion years to creatures as unlike ourselves as we are distinct from bacteria.

In this 18 minute talk, Rees with his sharply chiseled features, looks like an old wizard hunched over his podium. Rees champions the “wisdom of Einstein”, which he describes as “humane, global and far seeing”.

Kundera

This article about Milan Kundera rises to the subject and generates some good quotes from Kundera:

“The novel alone could reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless,” in opposition to the “pre-interpretation” of reality. The novel, in Kundera’s view, is not a genre; it’s a way of busting through the myriad lies regarding human nature and our collective and individual fates, lies that serve the purposes of bureaucracy and greed and the joyless quest for power. The “pre-interpretation” of reality is the curtain referred to by the book’s title, “a magic curtain, woven of legends … already made-up, masked, reinterpreted. … It is by tearing through the curtain of pre-interpretation that Cervantes set the new art going; his destructive act echoes and extends to every novel worthy of the name; it is the identifying sign of the art of the novel.”

Picasso said art lies to tell the truth.

Hitchens and Hirsi Ali

Christopher Hitchens here replies to those who are attacking Ayaan Hirsi Ali. This woman, who at great risk is fighting for better treatment for women and a reformative process in the religion of her birth is portrayed as absolutist. It is no surprise that Newsweek would get it wrong. But there is a true despair in the tortured reasoning of those who should know better, like Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma.

Much of what Hitchens has to say has general application. About moral equivalence:

It's always the same with these bogus equivalences: They start by pretending loftily to find no difference between aggressor and victim, and they end up by saying that it's the victim of violence who is “really” inciting it.

About the grotesque logic of political correctness, which in this case allows a false deference to religion to trump human rights and a call for positive change:

This is a very complex question, which will require a lot of ingenuity in its handling. The pathetic oversimplification, which describes skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism as equally “fundamentalist,” is of no help here. And notice what happens when Newsweek takes up the cry: The enemy of fundamentalism is defined as someone on the fringe while, before you have had time to notice the sleight of hand, the aggrieved, self-pitying Muslim has become the uncontested tenant of the middle ground.

Hitchens' devastating sign-off:

To flirt with this equivalence is to give in to the demagogues…Perhaps, though, if I said that my principles were a matter of unalterable divine revelation and that I was prepared to use random violence in order to get “respect” for them, I could hope for a more sympathetic audience from some of our intellectuals.

Invitation to Another World

This article by an artist invites the world back to the world of painting. Not a bad invitation.

As painters invite back all that was banished — sunsets, flowers, history, philosophy, the body — they have a responsibility to painting's special powers. Painting is, I think we can now admit, a very effective way to play the game of the box and the rectangle. Unlike the gallery box, a good painting does not disintegrate after a month. Some have held our attention for hundreds of years. A good painting also does not depend on textual support and can thus cross national and linguistic borders and communicate over time. In a word, good paintings are autonomous.

He is correct that words are not a true support for images, which must stand on their own. When words are used as justifications (and explanations) for visual work you know the work is weak and the focus is on the ego of the person claiming authority, not the art, nor the artist. The artist pays deference to the theoretician in the current art world. There is little satisfaction in looking at textually formed images, little pleasure in producing them — for they are products more than creations.

I think the invitation offered by painters should be to the world created by painting — all real arts create a separate space, a dream world that offers perspective by its detachment from the everyday; a place of entry and meditation, where the premium is on the interior life, on the evolved spirit bringing something to the work, not on passively absorbing the false reassurance of slogans which the media provides so artfully. The real power of art lies in its suggestiveness.

Statistics and American Idol

Shows like American Idol celebrate the average devoid of values other than marketability to the largest public possible.

This review discusses an assessment of the effect statistical analysis has had on modern culture.

…it’s about social science data — specifically, about the increasing use of surveys, polls and other forms of statistical measurements beginning in the years after World War I.

The average mind is what mass culture is about. There isn't any such thing as the average mind. We are as individual as snowflakes; our behavior and attitudes a complex web that sometimes glances the norm (average) only to bounce quickly back to our own destiny — a mix of genetics, circumstance, and personal decisions. But conformism is given an authentic aura when turned into “scientific” data — numbers. Conventional thinking is bolstered by the herd instinct manifested in statistics.

…government bureaucrats used them in an effort to better manage the burgeoning technocratic state…

The uses of statistics can make them socially dangerous. Years ago feminists used a study that indicated that young girls were falling behind academically in their early teens. Funds were shifted to help these young women, conferences assembled to discuss the unfairness. It later turned out that the “study” was a speculation, and the scientist who made the suggestion disavowed any scientific basis. Later studies showed just the opposite — young women were doing better, graduating more than their male counterparts. Presumably millions of boys were denied help based on a misuse, perhaps a cynically ideological misuse, of statistics.

Finally, the reviewer is correct:

Is the statistical average rendered by pollsters the distillation of America? Or its grinding down into porridge? For all of the hunger Americans have always expressed for cold, hard data about who we are, literary ways of knowing may be profounder than statistical ones. (You can learn as much about life on Main Street from Sinclair Lewis as from… [statisticians].)