Comments on: Who are we?

By: Tessa DeCarlo

Tessa DeCarlo — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:53:00 +0000

“Social” questions have been trumping class politics for a long time, and mobilizing the angry masses against the cosmopolite elites has become a reflex. So it’s not surprising that the arts are readily seen as one more example of decadent know-it-all “Thems” who are ruining things for the “real American” “Us,” even though (as in so much of current politics) “Them” and “Us” are pretty much the same in most important respects.

At the same time, the professionalization of art (the idea that you need a degree to be an artist, the importance of theory and exclusionary jargon) and the art world’s continued adherence to difficulty, transgressiveness, and epateing the bourgeoisie certainly make it easy to demonize. I am continually surprised by how puzzled and threatened even well-educated, museum-going people sometimes are by art that’s hardly cutting edge. I’m not sure if that’s a failure of education or something intrinsic to contemporary art’s vision of itself. Maybe all us middle-class kids stlll, on some level, need to feel that we’re shocking Aunt Gladys.

By: Renny Pritikin

Renny Pritikin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:13:35 +0000

Sorry for the bad links Vance. I think they’re fixed now. Don’t know what happened.
I agree that art, especially contemporary, partakes of many of these values indirectly, or obliquely. I’m not equating art and craft, but pointing to the shared values.

By: Vance Maverick

Vance Maverick — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:47:32 +0000

Art certainly partakes in the aesthetic of polish, perfection, mastery, etc. But I don’t think there’s much modern art that does so straightforwardly — that approaches an accepted task in an accepted way and satisfies the viewer by doing it well. For better or worse, modernism has been a repeated challenge to such notions of quality. Some artists have gone so far as to reject them, and certainly many viewers have taken modernism as a rejection of traditional criteria. And even if we take a Martin Puryear, who builds (so to speak) on the aesthetics of craftsmanship in construction, we have to move beyond mere “quality” to get what he’s doing: if you judge his work solely as cabinetry, it fails in the end, obviously, because it doesn’t actually hold cups. (Plus, it mostly isn’t shiny.)

By the way, lots of broken links on this blog lately.