David Brooks in the times is known for political opinion and he wrote a column about art, it was in today’s paper -- ‘Who will teach us how to feel?’ reprint HL 7-26. He was responding to an article in ‘T magazine,’ which asked artists and museum curators ‘to name the artworks that define the contemporary age -- pieces created anywhere in the world since 1970..... Most of the pieces selected are intellectual concepts or political attitudes expressed through video, photographs, installations or words.’ He cites examples.
I was already aware he had written something because earlier in the morning I had seen online the withering ridicule heaped upon him by what seemed like the entire industry, and it had a familiar ring. It was a line by line, post by post, rebuking of the first order, dripping with ice cold condescension, mean and bitter, eloquent and deadly, these are literate people. With only a slightly larger vocabulary it sounded just like what the russian trolls have been saying about Obama on facebook, a piling on by hangers on, the cultural equivalent of a virtual lynching. Just who are these people, the only ones qualified to discuss these high-brow matters? They’re just a lot of wealthy folks with free time, a high court of stuffed shirts with enormous influence over a fake industry, propped up in the end by public money. Theirs is an art characterized by half-baked gestures, crude signifiers mostly exalting impotent rage -- the cocktail party conversation of the ‘smart set.' They seem to think art is their own exclusive archdiocese, and by proclamation they’ve excommunicated David Brooks, but most of us were never baptized and don’t care to be, you self-important morally and ethically adolescent trust fund nobodies.
These guys don’t seem to care much about the visual part. The art and artists they’ve selected are all about what art ‘says,’ a coded and by-the-moment confirmation the insider intuitively understands, but it’s definitely not about how it looks, and at the risk of sounding unforgivably naive, wasn’t this category of human endeavor once called ‘visual’ art? I know you guys have moved on, but have you looked down recently? Pity poor Brooks, wondering if art shouldn’t convey something significant, 'widening the repertoire of ways we can feel and can communicate feelings to others,' and we just can’t laugh hard enough. Well, he didn’t come up with it on his own, not that long on imagination, it’s not his job. His occupation involves identifying the swells in community thinking before new ideas break on the shore, and being the first to say them out loud. He’s called a pundit, and this time he may be on to something.
It’s all a sham, all that emerald city art, and someday soon we’ll all wake up back in Kansas, where art is something that encourages us to look and see and think, even to realize capacities we didn’t know we had. Art supplies are sold everywhere and people are making paintings out to remote corners, and it can’t be for the money plain to see. What they accomplish is as sneered at by art’s self-appointed inquisitors as this poor political columnist, educated and living in the world, but who doesn’t know enough to ‘stay in his lane,‘ and other rude comments. They’re a dying breed, these cultural racketeers, this cabal of tricksters pretending to have the last word about what art ‘is.’ As their enchantment ends, the whole tawdry mess will eventually be dismissed as the aberrant expression of society in chaos, as art itself escapes back into the lives of ordinary people, everywhere, all at once.
I was already aware he had written something because earlier in the morning I had seen online the withering ridicule heaped upon him by what seemed like the entire industry, and it had a familiar ring. It was a line by line, post by post, rebuking of the first order, dripping with ice cold condescension, mean and bitter, eloquent and deadly, these are literate people. With only a slightly larger vocabulary it sounded just like what the russian trolls have been saying about Obama on facebook, a piling on by hangers on, the cultural equivalent of a virtual lynching. Just who are these people, the only ones qualified to discuss these high-brow matters? They’re just a lot of wealthy folks with free time, a high court of stuffed shirts with enormous influence over a fake industry, propped up in the end by public money. Theirs is an art characterized by half-baked gestures, crude signifiers mostly exalting impotent rage -- the cocktail party conversation of the ‘smart set.' They seem to think art is their own exclusive archdiocese, and by proclamation they’ve excommunicated David Brooks, but most of us were never baptized and don’t care to be, you self-important morally and ethically adolescent trust fund nobodies.
These guys don’t seem to care much about the visual part. The art and artists they’ve selected are all about what art ‘says,’ a coded and by-the-moment confirmation the insider intuitively understands, but it’s definitely not about how it looks, and at the risk of sounding unforgivably naive, wasn’t this category of human endeavor once called ‘visual’ art? I know you guys have moved on, but have you looked down recently? Pity poor Brooks, wondering if art shouldn’t convey something significant, 'widening the repertoire of ways we can feel and can communicate feelings to others,' and we just can’t laugh hard enough. Well, he didn’t come up with it on his own, not that long on imagination, it’s not his job. His occupation involves identifying the swells in community thinking before new ideas break on the shore, and being the first to say them out loud. He’s called a pundit, and this time he may be on to something.
It’s all a sham, all that emerald city art, and someday soon we’ll all wake up back in Kansas, where art is something that encourages us to look and see and think, even to realize capacities we didn’t know we had. Art supplies are sold everywhere and people are making paintings out to remote corners, and it can’t be for the money plain to see. What they accomplish is as sneered at by art’s self-appointed inquisitors as this poor political columnist, educated and living in the world, but who doesn’t know enough to ‘stay in his lane,‘ and other rude comments. They’re a dying breed, these cultural racketeers, this cabal of tricksters pretending to have the last word about what art ‘is.’ As their enchantment ends, the whole tawdry mess will eventually be dismissed as the aberrant expression of society in chaos, as art itself escapes back into the lives of ordinary people, everywhere, all at once.
