golden calf and other animals

Now I don’t know if Jeff Koons has ever made a golden calf, but maybe he should. The golden calf has had symbolic meaning since the first was made, about 3500 years ago, out in the desert east of the sea. Seems Moses needed time to think, and went off into the wilderness for forty days – a European vacation. When he came back they had setted up an alter and on it placed a golden calf. They don’t describe it in detail, but it isn’t necessary. A bovine of shinny metal, even on Wall Street these days, always means the same thing – “We’re all in for the material world, wealth and carnality.” Moses took exception, because, he said, it would turn out badly. He suggested a list of simple rules he hoped would get people thinking about something besides money.

Seems we keep slipping back, and we pay the price. Thinking about money all the time turns humans into pigs, and commercial TV pours on vicarious sex and violence to seal the deal. Where’s Moses with his almighty authority to save humanity from winding up in the gutter, again, herded like sheep by great wealth with private security? You say he’s gone away, and no one would listen to him now, anyway? Maybe we’ll have to throw down the golden calf ourselves this time, and in its place establish an art that asserts human dignity has a higher value than yellow metal dug from the ground, made into the shape of a muscular phallus with horns.

devolution

Just saw ‘Cave of Dreams’, about artwork so old, 32,000 years, and so graphically sophisticated it calls into question what it means to be human. It was preceded by previews of two animated movies, one the antics of blue elves and the other about anthro-racecars, apparently produced to entertain morons, or, in the case of young children, morons in training. Oh what have we become, my only friend…………….

truth, lies, and vampire art

Andy was absolutely truthful, and his art helped a generation lie. Instead of creating an engaging, thoughtful image people would want to see, he reproduced the Brillo box and the soup can with the most varieties, already the most commonly seen images by the largest number of people, banal and empty. This inversion of cognitive process became his brilliant gimmick, selling out art with a candid panache, and universally lowering expectations with his crude counterfeiting. He ran a sweatshop art production operation he called “the factory”, without irony, and expressed total disinterest in the subject of art –- “that’s a man’s name”, said he. He derided human aspiration, most famously stating that, “in the world of the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” The ensuing total desolation of the human spirit he kept to himself.

So the evening news degenerates into tabloid sensation, communal credit cards have been maxed-out, and we are confronted with presidential candidates simply unworthy of ridicule. Surely, there’s no connection. Could it be that reducing the notion of art to blotty celebrity posters and squeezing the dollars out of the corpse is the direct visual metaphor for the atavistic mentality that wrecked the economy, abandoned and exploited vast constituencies, and declared the highest attainment of all to be the acquisition of enormous wealth, banal and empty? If there was a connection, not a correlation but, actually, an identity, art would be ‘real’, and would both reflect and determine how we see ourselves and how we see the world. Time to take art more seriously --