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.

A Witty Age

The moralists are running to the microphones, their chest inflamed with indignation. They make an example of Eliot Spitzer and their theatrics remind me of that other Eliot, who thought the world would end with a whimper rather than a bang. If only some would avoid speech, as in that other line of “The Hollow Men.”

“What an age,” Thomas Hoveling once said and then, when I didn’t say anything, he added, “Wit. Don’t forget the wit.”

Here is a little fantasy:

I settle for smelling the orange blossoms as the powdered wigs walk by. Everyone looks so good under the glass tears of the chandeliers. Everyone but me, I say to Thomas, and with a finger smeared in saliva, I remove the dirt from my shoes. I sit in a corner trying to fit in. Experts in irony, the moralists, with their flaring cuffs, hold the little hands of the academics as they glide on the dance floor. The entertainers and the financiers talk about their retirement accounts while the rebels listen in.

I do fit in. And where are the arts?

They waive at me from the other side of the room where a small auction is being held. All of them, even the critics, are wearing Hirst’s Manolo Blahniks. On the men, the Manolos seem a bit puffy.

Soul Searching

“A great nation deserves great art” is the slogan of the National Endowment for the Arts. It is catchy but what does it mean?

A nation inches towards greatness, in part, by assuming it doesn’t deserve much, and it maintains its greatness, in part, by understanding “greatness” is not a coronation or a title but a reflection of the quality of becoming.

Moreover, the relationship between great art and great nations is by no means tidy. Spain in the Seventeenth Century, for instance, was losing its hold on the empire and was burdened by disease. It was also entrenched in the Inquisition and abusing the American provinces. So did it deserve Velazquez, Zurbaran, Lope de Vega, Luis de Gongora, etc?

Perhaps it is more accurate to say—in the case of Spain as well as in many others—that nations get the soul searching they deserve in the work of their artists. Art is the mirror in which nations who think of themselves as great must see themselves, often, as otherwise. But that is a less catchy slogan.

The Prince

Richard Prince recently said something along the lines of “my favorite place is the studio.”

It would be nice to see his passion somewhere else other than the market.

Complexity and Tidy Packages

One can appreciate the complexity of a notion and work within that complexity, or one can try to simplify it to fit into a tidy package. Both ways have their merits but, usually, only the former advances the notion in ways that can be called something other than trivial. Why then pursue the “tidy package"? There are many motivations but I think most of them focus on the immediacy of certain rewards: tidy packages are portable, allowing application in a wide variety of situations; they usually don’t require intense engagement; and they are frequently all that is required to advance socially and professionally (not only do tidy packages foster advances because they are sufficient to quench most people’s thirst for knowledge and truth, but also because deeper engagements are usually not welcomed).

A while back I was at a gallery with a well-known collector who considers himself quite sharp. He stopped in front of one of Sol LeWitt’s numbered pictograms. He leaned into the work. He squinted and tightened his lips, as if he was in thought. After a while he turned to me with something like insight in his eyes, and he spoke of the mathematical and conceptual power of the sets of numbers arranged in boxes. I told him I didn’t see it and he looked at me with contempt. What serious mathematics could there be in those drawings, really? I don’t know anyone, other than “art people,” who goes to LeWitt’s work in order to get structural or mathematical insight. It is math-lite, in the same way that some art works are politics-lite and and so on.

Remarkably (remarkably considering what one sees and reads) few people would admit to be interested in tidy packages.

Art and Embarrassment

Today I received the following announcement regarding the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art (don't laugh for too long: there's something not so funny hiding underneath the foolery):


2007 Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art

00s - The history of a decade that has not yet been named
September 19, 2007 - January 6, 2008

Artistic direction : Thierry Raspail
Conception : Stéphanie Moisdon & Hans Ulrich Obrist
Production Management : Thierry Prat
Visual Identity : M/M (Paris)

Membres du jury:
Présidente Susanne Pagé, directrice de la Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris
Gunnar Kvaran, directeur du Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo
Knight Landesman, Artforum
Samuel Keller, Art Basel
Elaine Sturtevant, artiste
Kasper König, Sculpture Project, Münster
Silvia Karman Cubina, The Moore Space, Miami

Preview : September 17-18, 2007
Opening : September 18, 2007

Conceived of as a history and geography manual in the form of a game, the 2007 Lyon Biennial is inviting sixty-six Players from all over the world, distributed in two circles. Forty-nine of them (curators, art critics...) are being asked to answer the following question: "Who, in your opinion, is the artist who best represents this decade?" A second circle is composed of nineteen other Players - mostly artists - each devising a program, a system or a problematics intended to define the decade in progress.

Criticism and Imitation

It is interesting to consider “Art’s Prospect: the challenge of tradition in an age of celebrity” by Roger Kimball in relation to “Stranger Shores: literary essays, 1986-1999” by J.M. Coetzee. While quite different, and their difference is what I would like to highlight here, there are reasons to place them together for a moment: they are both non-aligned with the contemporary discourse—this is less true of Coetzee; both share a certain impatience with mediocrity; both writers have a considerable following; and they both feel it is reasonable to pass judgments on the work of others.

It is instructive to compare how they construct those judgments.

Roger Kimball usually makes his arguments by concatenating colorful sentences which are not always constrained by logic and that often sacrifice accuracy for energy. Here are two representative examples,

“A quick glance around our culture shows that the avant-garde assault on tradition has long since degenerated into a sclerotic orthodoxy. What established taste makers now herald a cutting-edge turns out time and again to be a stale reminder of past impotence.”

“It is a good rule of thumb in the contemporary art world that the level of pretension is inversely proportional to the level of artistic achievement.”

Roger Kimball is annoyed with the art world and his writings convey his annoyance through a writing style that is both ironic and bombastic. He has an extensive group of people and institutions he dislikes, and he also has a pantheon of artists he admires. The shared qualities of the former are easy to recognize—their cult of novelty, their “semi-beatified status,” their “unbearable pretentiousness”—but the latter, the pantheon, does not seem to respond to a unified philosophy, instead Kimball would most likely say they share “quality.”

What I find remarkable about Roger Kimball’s writing is how thin it is. Once the exaggerated adjectives, the insults, the condescension and the many occurrences of “undoubtedly” and “it is clear,” are removed there is very little left; and what's leftover is neither interesting nor new. This scarcity of substance is surprising considering Kimball stands for quality and lack of artifice above novelty and pretentiousness.

While I share much of Roger Kimball’s dislike for the art world, I find “Art’s Prospect” to be a weak argument in favor of or against anything. J.M. Coetzee’s “Stranger Shores,” on the other hand, is an impressive example of what is possible when seriousness, quality and originality of thought combine.

The best case against the pretentious obscurity of Rosalind Krauss’s writing is not Kimball’s essay “Feeling Sorry for Rosalind Krauss” but the lucidity and intelligence of Coetzee’s writings. Unlike Krauss or Kimball, Coetzee downplays rather than exaggerates his intellectuality, and his judgments on the work of others seem carefully assessed and measured in his effort to not be petty or arrogant. Coetzee’s writing has a distinct voice without the need for the decorative flair and it comes across as profoundly knowledgeable without pedantic poses or fancy terminology.

Although other claims are voiced, we like to imitate and in an environment like art and academia imitating intellectual stars (who Kimball is not but Coetzee and Krauss are) has significant rewards. It is easy to figure out how to write and think like Kimball. The reason we don’t read more Kimball-like writings is because the people who write like him are usually standing on soap boxes not, unlike him, editing intellectual journals. It is also easy to figure out, but harder to execute, how to write and think like Krauss, and since the Krauss-type writings fit well within the vehicles of intellectual dissemination, we often read thinkers like Krauss—for instance, in the magazine October, which Krauss helped found. Coetzee is a different story. It is easy to see how he writes and thinks but he is very difficult to imitate because at the heart of his writing there is formidable intelligence, erudition and strength of character. I expect more Coetzee imitators to continue to appear but unlike the case of Krauss or Kimball, the Coetzee imitators are easy to distinguish from the original.

Intellectual Affectations

Today a press release arrived via email. Here it is:

In his first solo exhibition at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Timothy Buwalda presents ambitious, large scale paintings, and several mono-prints that investigate the theme of hope in the negative; or, to take it a step further, hope in negation. They are reminiscent of what Richard Diebenkorn wrote in Notes to Myself on Beginning a Painting: "Mistakes can't be erased but they move you from your present position."
Buwalda uses wrecked cars as a metaphor for potential being squandered or not realized, but is ironically hopeful and quiet. The images weave back and forth between photorealism and abstraction. The use of various painting techniques within the same painting points to a search of painting language and the exploration of its limitations (this too at times explores negation).
Buwalda writes, "These paintings arrived from two distinct places for me. Firstly, reflection of my own life and how there are these 'check points' you are supposed to arrive at by certain time constraints (what do you do if you miss these?). Secondly, the process of paint itself. I feel these things overlap along the way, that there is a parallel between the process of painting and life, how you have to work with the negative, oftentimes, to get somewhere further than your original vision."
The exhibition will be on view at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery 2247 NW 1st PL Miami, FL 33127. Hours are 10am to 5pm Tuesday through Saturday. There will be an opening reception held on Saturday, September 8th, from 7:30 - 10 pm.


For some time now people have been exploiting the potential of art and its discourse as signs of intellectual prowess. In my experience of the contemporary art world, the desire to be brilliant trumps most other whims and vanities.

In this brief entry I will not explore why this might be the case. Instead, I will suggest that there are better ways to give the impression of intellectual rigor than this press release. It should be apparent that, even if poorly executed, a strategy is at play here: the press release could have mentioned Robert Bechtle or Charles Ray instead of the somewhat puzzling Diebenkorn reference (that R.D. is sharing space with the claims in this press release shows no one is safe in the art world), or the emphasis could have been on the choice of subject matter or on another other topic that the artist and his representatives actually understood. But instead they chose to write of negation, painting language and its limitations hoping to decorate what is obviously fairly thin content with the afterglow of Saussure, Baudrillard, et.al.

This gesture is, unfortunately, commonplace—it is a strategy of choice.

Intellectual ornament is popular because it only demands minor understanding of the ideas at play (perhaps as little as just the names) and it works because it only requires recognition, not understanding, from its audience. It relies on fast reads on the hope of getting away with statements like, “The use of various painting techniques within the same painting points to a search of painting language and the exploration of its limitations (this too at times explores negation).”

The "hard thinking" which has been de rigueur in the last forty years (just to pick a time) is at best amusing and at worst pathetic. Wasted time. I wonder how much could be done by Timothy Buwalda if he were to actually consider and work within the complexity of painting, without the tiresome escape of theories he has heard mentioned. Authentic engagement might show him, as it shows us all, that it is easier to hit against one’s limitations than those of painting.