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Spin Paintings
In contrast to the perspective offered by distance, our daily living favors the immediate and the fashionable, and sometimes persuaded by that immediacy as well as by cultural repetition and the desire to seem informed, people praise the artistic merit of dubious artworks, and moral flexibility and status anxiety encourage these colorful evaluations.
On September 15, 2008, the same day the Stock Market lost more than 500 points, partly as a result of whimsical investments in the financial field gone bad, more than 200 pieces of new work by Damien Hirst sold through Sotheby's for more than 200 million dollars. The offering of pickled animals, butterflies and dots, which were made by the more than 180 people who work for Hirst, was the first time an artist used an auction house to sell new work. Hirst’s action and it's success are part of a larger condition, which Robert Hughes appropriately described in the following way, “Where you see Hirsts you will also see Jeff Koons's balloons, Jean-Michel Basquiat's stoned scribbles, Richard Prince's feeble jokes and pin-ups of nurses and, inevitably, scads of really bad, really late Warhols. Such works of art are bound to hang out together, a uniform message from our fin-de-siècle decadence.”
Some of us feel like hypocrites when we call for ambition of spirit and authenticity in the work of art, knowing we don’t ask for the same in our own lives. And so we learn to accept trivial and cowardly gestures as significant and brave because in them we sense our own failings. We become practiced in self-serving praise of the meager and the vicious, but irrespectively of these moral accommodations, when time has passed and our fears and status no longer matter, the diamond-encrusted skulls and spin paintings will become, mainly, symbols of our dishonesty and lack of clarity.
What we need in art is ambition of spirit, quality and authenticity, not because those imperatives are abundant in our lives but precisely because they are not.
On September 15, 2008, the same day the Stock Market lost more than 500 points, partly as a result of whimsical investments in the financial field gone bad, more than 200 pieces of new work by Damien Hirst sold through Sotheby's for more than 200 million dollars. The offering of pickled animals, butterflies and dots, which were made by the more than 180 people who work for Hirst, was the first time an artist used an auction house to sell new work. Hirst’s action and it's success are part of a larger condition, which Robert Hughes appropriately described in the following way, “Where you see Hirsts you will also see Jeff Koons's balloons, Jean-Michel Basquiat's stoned scribbles, Richard Prince's feeble jokes and pin-ups of nurses and, inevitably, scads of really bad, really late Warhols. Such works of art are bound to hang out together, a uniform message from our fin-de-siècle decadence.”
Some of us feel like hypocrites when we call for ambition of spirit and authenticity in the work of art, knowing we don’t ask for the same in our own lives. And so we learn to accept trivial and cowardly gestures as significant and brave because in them we sense our own failings. We become practiced in self-serving praise of the meager and the vicious, but irrespectively of these moral accommodations, when time has passed and our fears and status no longer matter, the diamond-encrusted skulls and spin paintings will become, mainly, symbols of our dishonesty and lack of clarity.
What we need in art is ambition of spirit, quality and authenticity, not because those imperatives are abundant in our lives but precisely because they are not.
Labels: Caution
posted by EMC at
5:56 PM
5 Comments:
If one removes the amount of money that was paid for these types of work they become simple art fairs knick-knacks. Money is a large portion of the equation. At the same time, art is very subjective to judge across cultures. Perhaps one asks too much from these artists. An orange can only give so much juice and fashion and trends always had something perverse in them. For some artists, an honest search is a matter of choice which is tied directly to The bigger question which is not why there is more acceptance for futile works of art but what leads a person to search for more ambitious types of work. The same could be applied to war and peace where the answer for peace resides not on figuring out why we fight but rather why (sometimes) we make peace.
It is tragic that artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons are held up in the contemporary art world and in graduate studio art departments as exemplars of sophisticated "strategic" practice as artists, with their "business models." It is a shame that many in the art world and in academia who don't like their work still "admire" these strategies without recognizing that these strategies ultimately account for the work.
We (people in the art world and academia) are part of the problem. It is easy to carp about the practices of particular artists and their seemingly undeserved success - I often imagine the back rooms of galleries and museums as chock full of big business fat cats smoking cigars like an Georg Grosz etching - but we are part of the same system. Personally, I don't feel like I am in a position to take moral high ground against other artists, but I am in a position to critique or reject the models proposed by their work, or the critical interpretation of their work. I think it is important to maintain the distinctions between artists' practices and the theoretical and economic validation of those practices. Jeff Koons's work is less of a problem than the critical and promotional apparatus which props it up. Ultimately, I believe it is this structure and its attendant doctrines (commercial and academic) which finds strategies more efficient and convenient than ambition and authenticity. As Dan says, the strategies are the work and without our collective credulity they would evaporate.
surely the artist has some responsibility about how their work enters the marketplace. I am concerned that using the expression "moral high ground" -it's almost funny - reflects how little judgement and discernment goes into the romance of the marketplace. Currently it seems there is less romance and more hussle in the market. When I look at the two most popular art magazines, Artnews and Art in America, I find myself less and less inspired by what I find there. As a young woman I fantasized being involved with these magazines - as a place of acceptance; now I don't know. Viewing the contents often leaves me with a bad feeling in my stomach - not a good review! I look to, and hope for, a healthy art community, where relationships of trust and forthright criticsm carry the day.
"Yet ignorance(of being in despair) is so far from breaking the despair or changing despair to nondespairing that it can in fact be the most dangerous form of despair..." The Sickness Unto Death, S. Kierkegaard.
This passage came to mind as I recently rewatched Hirst being interviewed by Charlie Rose. I don't think he knows that we know that he doesn't know.
Glad to hear your hand is healing well.
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