10 concepts about hating concepts
Jan. 19th, 2009 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusA friend who lurks on Click Opera sent me the following -- I think interesting -- question by email: "I wonder why your readers were not pleased to know the concepts behind your art performance, but were glad to read about the concept behind your music when the topic was your old CDs. These concepts relate to art works of yours equally, don't they? What made your readers aggressive this time?"
1. I agree that this is odd if we look at it from a perspective of extraterrestrial objectivity. I'll try and speculate on possible reasons why art concepts make people angry, while music concepts don't. To be fair, there are usually just one or two overtly hostile voices on the art threads. What's more, the internet is full of hostile voices. Though, it's true, I don't recall any in the Creation Advent Calendar threads.
2. The first thing we might want to speculate about is demarcation lines and the idea of the "master identity". Although it may be considered a virtue to be a polymath capable of operating in many fields at once, it also comes close to ideas like dilettantism and being "jack of all trades, master of none". For someone considered first and foremost a musician, therefore, dabbling in art looks like pretension. It might even relate to some sort of guild system: one serves an apprenticeship and joins a guild, and cannot suddenly switch (especially without the apprenticeship of art school) to another profession, another guild.
3. But it isn't just a matter of hopping from one guild to another. We cannot avoid the question of class. Although music costs money at every stage (record, concert, merchandising) whereas concepts presented in the art world are freely accessible in art galleries (and -- in my case -- not sold for money), there is a perceived class difference between the two activities. The art world has its roots in a kind of ancien regime patronage system. Aristocrats (in the form of collectors) patronize and protect artists, who don't need to make any appeal to the general public, nor sell any mass manufactured product or spectacle. This is essentially an elitist alliance between advanced craftspeople and aristocrats. Musicians, on the other hand, have been ushered into the commercial world of the petty commercant, the essentially lower middle class world of mass production, salesmen, shops, promotion and publicity. Even if this world charges money for access to the artist's concepts and the art world doesn't, the middle class world of the petty commercant is not attacked, because it is the dominant model of our time. We live in bourgeois societies, not aristocratic ones. To charge money makes one down-to-earth and trustworthy. To offer things free smacks of suspicious privilege. It also implies that what one is offering is worthless.
4. As an aside, following on from that point, I'd like to mention that the art world began to take serious notice of me when I released my Stars Forever album in 1999, with its accompanying concept of "patronage pop". It intrigued curators and gallerists that a pop musician would switch from the mass market commercant model of financing to the art world's patronage model (where, instead of trying to make a hundred people part with ten dollars each, you try to find a single person willing to part with a thousand). During my first meeting with Philippe Vergne, the curator who put me in the Whitney Biennial, he spoke specifically about Stars Forever, saying how much it had impressed and interested him. It was essentially Stars Forever that Vergne wanted to put into the Whitney (although we came up with a different idea in the end).
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5. We now have to raise the stereotype of the turncoat. In the wonderful video above Jacques Dutronc is singing -- in 1968, the year of the student riots -- in the role of an opportunist who "turns his coat, but always to the good side". It's true that my embrace of the art world might be seen in this light. When, in 1997, I came back to London after living in Paris for a couple of years, I found that the "rock stars" were all art stars. Britpop had faded, and nothing really new or interesting was happening in music. Art, though, was booming, bringing whole sections of the east of the city to life. I began to "turn my vest" from 1997 onwards. Perhaps some diehard music fans saw this as a betrayal.
6. Something strange happened to music from the late 90s onward. It began to lose its commercant nature as filesharing and internet distribution made it a free commodity. Art, meanwhile, was also changing. On the one hand, art began to appeal to a much wider audience, and to use the publicity and promotional devices once the preserve of rock. Pink Floyd might have floated an inflated pig above Battersea power station in 1977, but twenty years later such attention-grabbing stunts were the preserve of fine artists. Tate Modern's Turbine Hall became a place where artists competed to outdo each other in scale and popularity, to make installations people would talk about and visit as they'd once visited rock festivals (Olafur Eliasson's The Weather installation was a music-free music festival).
7. At the same time, the art world kept its connection to the aristocracy. It drew its optimism and energy from its connection to a world of super-rich people who -- high-Gini neoliberal politics ensured -- would keep doing well no matter how badly the rest of us were doing. From this emerged the paradox that art managed to stay bubbly and buoyant even when everybody else was as gloomy as a Radiohead song. Art's direct connection to the world of money, together with its use of rock-style publicity and showmanship, allowed it to distribute a kind of effervescence and joy even when there was no objective reason for the middle classes to feel this joy. It became a kind of drug. Some people remained deeply suspicious of art, though, for this very reason. To cross from the world of music (which "tells the truth" and "comes from below") to the world of art (which "tells lies" and "comes from above") was not just to turn one's coat, but to become a purveyor of lies and illusions, and an apologist for privilege.
8. Recently on Click Opera we were talking about how the vitality of a medium is reflected by the number of moral panics around it; if a medium is not being described as "evil", it's dead. In that entry, we concluded that computer games were healthy at the moment because they were attracting the sort of censorship debates literature hasn't seen for decades. By the same token, the art world is pretty healthy too; last year I quoted a Matthew Collings piece headed Evil Zeitgeist: "Art today is understood as a series of moves that you have to comprehend and absorb, in order to position and advance yourself in a game for a group of people whose creativity has become repellent without their realizing it. That is, if you're an artist. Your whole role in society has become weirdly hateful. What on earth happened? The shows roll by, feeding the art industry, not feeding anything else, just seeming like object versions of shouting, or someone reading familiar, acceptable meanings off a list, or idiotically droning or mumbling in a childish attempt to come across as a mystical genius or someone highly educated. It's very rare to see a contemporary art show that isn't like toys for children." Books like High Art Lite, or blog rants like the one I delivered against Damien Hirst last year compounded this sense of the art world as evil; too commercial, to machiavellian, and so on. But it's worth bearing in mind that nobody really bothered to attack Robbie Williams for his big advances, or Kylie Minogue for her superficiality; bad motives were so taken for granted in the music industry that they hardly seemed worth commenting on. Moral panics about art happen because people think art has a higher, nobler calling.
9. 2009 is a year in which I'll publish two books. Will this bring in a flood of piqued anonymous comments about pretension? Probably not; books don't strike anybody as evil and affected the way the art world does. Books are not currently a litmus test, a flag, a red rag, a flashpoint, a battleground. More's the pity.
10. It's worth adding that talk about "concepts" in music is unpopular too. When I released a concept album in the early 80s (The Man on Your Street), it was seen as a return to the bourgeois excesses and baroque pretensions of prog rock by some critics. Punk had, in their view, brought a healthy dose of directness and anti-intellectualism to music, an explosion of working class energy. In the old binary which pits the heart against the head -- and which links the working classes to the heart and the middle classes to the head -- the heart had won. Anyone who tried to bring back the head -- and therefore, by extension, elite class values -- was the enemy. To some extent that thinking never went away. To talk about the concepts behind songs is already a little bit taboo -- you'll notice that British music commentary is mostly about drugs and the effects of sudden wealth and success, not about the concepts behind particular songs. It's also worth noting that even a shift from guitars to synthesisers can bring the wrath of some conservative music fans, and is likely to be seen, in microscopic scale, as an exemplification of many of the betrayals listed here: demarcation lines, class betrayal, opportunism, moral panics, inauthenticity, undue intellectualism, lack of virility.
Is there anything I left out? Why do people clamour for more talk of concepts in music, but less talk of concepts in art? Is it because there's too little intellectual fibre in music commentary, and rather too much of it in art criticism? Are people like me valuable in music, but over-represented in art? Is hawking concepts in music valuable missionary work, while doing the exact same thing in art is overkill? Is the art world a place one "disappears into, never to return"? Is it -- despite the fact that an art gallery is, theoretically, free to walk into -- much more inaccessible than the world of pop music? Is there some kind of "disappearance anxiety" behind criticism of a musician who dabbles in art?
1. I agree that this is odd if we look at it from a perspective of extraterrestrial objectivity. I'll try and speculate on possible reasons why art concepts make people angry, while music concepts don't. To be fair, there are usually just one or two overtly hostile voices on the art threads. What's more, the internet is full of hostile voices. Though, it's true, I don't recall any in the Creation Advent Calendar threads.
2. The first thing we might want to speculate about is demarcation lines and the idea of the "master identity". Although it may be considered a virtue to be a polymath capable of operating in many fields at once, it also comes close to ideas like dilettantism and being "jack of all trades, master of none". For someone considered first and foremost a musician, therefore, dabbling in art looks like pretension. It might even relate to some sort of guild system: one serves an apprenticeship and joins a guild, and cannot suddenly switch (especially without the apprenticeship of art school) to another profession, another guild.
3. But it isn't just a matter of hopping from one guild to another. We cannot avoid the question of class. Although music costs money at every stage (record, concert, merchandising) whereas concepts presented in the art world are freely accessible in art galleries (and -- in my case -- not sold for money), there is a perceived class difference between the two activities. The art world has its roots in a kind of ancien regime patronage system. Aristocrats (in the form of collectors) patronize and protect artists, who don't need to make any appeal to the general public, nor sell any mass manufactured product or spectacle. This is essentially an elitist alliance between advanced craftspeople and aristocrats. Musicians, on the other hand, have been ushered into the commercial world of the petty commercant, the essentially lower middle class world of mass production, salesmen, shops, promotion and publicity. Even if this world charges money for access to the artist's concepts and the art world doesn't, the middle class world of the petty commercant is not attacked, because it is the dominant model of our time. We live in bourgeois societies, not aristocratic ones. To charge money makes one down-to-earth and trustworthy. To offer things free smacks of suspicious privilege. It also implies that what one is offering is worthless.
4. As an aside, following on from that point, I'd like to mention that the art world began to take serious notice of me when I released my Stars Forever album in 1999, with its accompanying concept of "patronage pop". It intrigued curators and gallerists that a pop musician would switch from the mass market commercant model of financing to the art world's patronage model (where, instead of trying to make a hundred people part with ten dollars each, you try to find a single person willing to part with a thousand). During my first meeting with Philippe Vergne, the curator who put me in the Whitney Biennial, he spoke specifically about Stars Forever, saying how much it had impressed and interested him. It was essentially Stars Forever that Vergne wanted to put into the Whitney (although we came up with a different idea in the end).
[Error: unknown template video]
5. We now have to raise the stereotype of the turncoat. In the wonderful video above Jacques Dutronc is singing -- in 1968, the year of the student riots -- in the role of an opportunist who "turns his coat, but always to the good side". It's true that my embrace of the art world might be seen in this light. When, in 1997, I came back to London after living in Paris for a couple of years, I found that the "rock stars" were all art stars. Britpop had faded, and nothing really new or interesting was happening in music. Art, though, was booming, bringing whole sections of the east of the city to life. I began to "turn my vest" from 1997 onwards. Perhaps some diehard music fans saw this as a betrayal.
6. Something strange happened to music from the late 90s onward. It began to lose its commercant nature as filesharing and internet distribution made it a free commodity. Art, meanwhile, was also changing. On the one hand, art began to appeal to a much wider audience, and to use the publicity and promotional devices once the preserve of rock. Pink Floyd might have floated an inflated pig above Battersea power station in 1977, but twenty years later such attention-grabbing stunts were the preserve of fine artists. Tate Modern's Turbine Hall became a place where artists competed to outdo each other in scale and popularity, to make installations people would talk about and visit as they'd once visited rock festivals (Olafur Eliasson's The Weather installation was a music-free music festival).
7. At the same time, the art world kept its connection to the aristocracy. It drew its optimism and energy from its connection to a world of super-rich people who -- high-Gini neoliberal politics ensured -- would keep doing well no matter how badly the rest of us were doing. From this emerged the paradox that art managed to stay bubbly and buoyant even when everybody else was as gloomy as a Radiohead song. Art's direct connection to the world of money, together with its use of rock-style publicity and showmanship, allowed it to distribute a kind of effervescence and joy even when there was no objective reason for the middle classes to feel this joy. It became a kind of drug. Some people remained deeply suspicious of art, though, for this very reason. To cross from the world of music (which "tells the truth" and "comes from below") to the world of art (which "tells lies" and "comes from above") was not just to turn one's coat, but to become a purveyor of lies and illusions, and an apologist for privilege.
8. Recently on Click Opera we were talking about how the vitality of a medium is reflected by the number of moral panics around it; if a medium is not being described as "evil", it's dead. In that entry, we concluded that computer games were healthy at the moment because they were attracting the sort of censorship debates literature hasn't seen for decades. By the same token, the art world is pretty healthy too; last year I quoted a Matthew Collings piece headed Evil Zeitgeist: "Art today is understood as a series of moves that you have to comprehend and absorb, in order to position and advance yourself in a game for a group of people whose creativity has become repellent without their realizing it. That is, if you're an artist. Your whole role in society has become weirdly hateful. What on earth happened? The shows roll by, feeding the art industry, not feeding anything else, just seeming like object versions of shouting, or someone reading familiar, acceptable meanings off a list, or idiotically droning or mumbling in a childish attempt to come across as a mystical genius or someone highly educated. It's very rare to see a contemporary art show that isn't like toys for children." Books like High Art Lite, or blog rants like the one I delivered against Damien Hirst last year compounded this sense of the art world as evil; too commercial, to machiavellian, and so on. But it's worth bearing in mind that nobody really bothered to attack Robbie Williams for his big advances, or Kylie Minogue for her superficiality; bad motives were so taken for granted in the music industry that they hardly seemed worth commenting on. Moral panics about art happen because people think art has a higher, nobler calling.
9. 2009 is a year in which I'll publish two books. Will this bring in a flood of piqued anonymous comments about pretension? Probably not; books don't strike anybody as evil and affected the way the art world does. Books are not currently a litmus test, a flag, a red rag, a flashpoint, a battleground. More's the pity.
10. It's worth adding that talk about "concepts" in music is unpopular too. When I released a concept album in the early 80s (The Man on Your Street), it was seen as a return to the bourgeois excesses and baroque pretensions of prog rock by some critics. Punk had, in their view, brought a healthy dose of directness and anti-intellectualism to music, an explosion of working class energy. In the old binary which pits the heart against the head -- and which links the working classes to the heart and the middle classes to the head -- the heart had won. Anyone who tried to bring back the head -- and therefore, by extension, elite class values -- was the enemy. To some extent that thinking never went away. To talk about the concepts behind songs is already a little bit taboo -- you'll notice that British music commentary is mostly about drugs and the effects of sudden wealth and success, not about the concepts behind particular songs. It's also worth noting that even a shift from guitars to synthesisers can bring the wrath of some conservative music fans, and is likely to be seen, in microscopic scale, as an exemplification of many of the betrayals listed here: demarcation lines, class betrayal, opportunism, moral panics, inauthenticity, undue intellectualism, lack of virility.
Is there anything I left out? Why do people clamour for more talk of concepts in music, but less talk of concepts in art? Is it because there's too little intellectual fibre in music commentary, and rather too much of it in art criticism? Are people like me valuable in music, but over-represented in art? Is hawking concepts in music valuable missionary work, while doing the exact same thing in art is overkill? Is the art world a place one "disappears into, never to return"? Is it -- despite the fact that an art gallery is, theoretically, free to walk into -- much more inaccessible than the world of pop music? Is there some kind of "disappearance anxiety" behind criticism of a musician who dabbles in art?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-19 10:47 pm (UTC)Granted we haven't seen this particular piece of performance art yet, but will people be able to connect to it emotionally in any way? Or will it just be self-indulgent wankery, by a European man with a Japanese girl who got flown half way across the world to sit around in a gallery space and screw around while other people actually make meaningful contributions to the world?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 12:15 am (UTC)Now, this is something I forgot to mention. This equation of self-expression with masturbation. It spurts up quite a lot, and I'm not really sure why. Quite frankly, any human activity, from tag team wrestling to llama shearing could be compared to masturbation. Why single out art? And what's so wrong with masturbation, anyway? If only art were such a sure and quick route to such intense pleasure! Start hating sex and you're on a slippery slope to hating everything good.
Aki, by the way, is not flying around the world; she lives in New York, where the show is taking place.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 12:23 am (UTC)This is the real achilles heel of your argument. Art is one of the few really meaningful things people get to do. 90% of what humans do just keeps the plate spinning on the stick -- our everyday activity is depressingly tautological.
"Why do you do what you do?"
"Because I have to keep on doing what I do to keep doing what I do."
Art is the modern remnant of ritual. Every society has done it, and every society has needed it, despite not "needing" it.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 01:59 am (UTC)Society has always needed art, but it's always been an emotional, awe-inspiring, uplifting, transcendent, insight-into-the-human-condition type of art. Avant garde/exclusively formalistic exercises hardly fit the traditional needs of art. What can playing "meta" games with "unreliability" do but hope to make a couple of people look clever to the art press? Your music was perhaps similarly conceptual, but had an emotional or personal aspect which reached people, however accidental it may've been in hindsight.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 02:30 am (UTC)A portrait of Elvis done in velvet performs this function just as nicely as the Mona Lisa.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 04:33 am (UTC)Then consider how feeble formalism is as a medium for art. This is not a subjective determination, but a case of enumerating what it excludes.
If the point of art was just fucking around, doing something inconsequential just for the sake of affirming our humanity, as you say, then why did
we bother for so many thousands of years with trying to express the human condition through all these varied media?
Momus thinks that the art world is the most vital because it's under attack. This seems like a safe bet when, looking back through history, you see the mainstream, the academies, the censors, all slow to pick up on to what would inevitably be hailed as great art.
But the difference now is that the avant garde has no value other than formalistic novelty. It's a cheap, fleeting effect with no substance. Looking back on the controversies over Baudelaire, Wagner, the Impressionists, the Decadents, Stravinsky, etc.. take away the subversive aspect and you are still left with an artist utilizing his superior technical ability to transcend the common place and communicate something extraordinary. Vito Acconci masturbating under the floor does not give us a glimpse of the heights of human creativity, it's just an idiotic joke done for the sake of publicity.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 04:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 05:17 am (UTC)It cannot be denied that an artist with greater technical ability has a wider palette with which to express the human condition. Whatever effect an F7#9#11 might have in a certain place in a song, it is an option that the ignorant, amateur artist does not have. There is no possibility of comparing the richness of expression.
As to the question of whether a work of art is awe-inspiring or uplifting, it goes without saying that the commonplace and the vulgar would not inspire these exceptional feelings.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 06:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 04:57 am (UTC)And Vito Acconci in Seedbed, what is that but conveying emotional impressions, a revolutionary social message, a moral aspect, and so on?
Come on, your arguments aren't even internally consistent. Under them seems to be fear of something. I'm not quite sure what.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 05:21 am (UTC)RE: Acconci, you are being disingenuous when you argue that his performance had emotional content. I will own that it had a subversive element. This is about all the avant garde can ever hope to claim. It was not moral, it was amoral. It was a joke, pure and simple.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 11:13 am (UTC)Honestly, you're just parading your ignorant predjudice by telling us that Seedbed was a joke, or that it was done for publicity. Acconci doesn't think of it that way, and the art world doesn't think of it that way either. Read this (http://imomus.livejournal.com/190858.html), and listen to Acconci talking about Seedbed in this audio clip (http://imomus.com/seedbed.mp3). Does this sound like a man making a joke? Acconci tells us it's about making himself part of the architecture of the Sonnabend gallery. It was also live poetry -- he was improvising fantasies about visitors as they walked over the floor. Acconci began as a poet, became an artist, then became an architect. All his work, though, shares themes. One of the biggest themes is making links between the public and private realms. For instance, he made a table that begins inside a room, but penetrates through the wall and juts out over the street below. That transition is pure Acconci, and it's in Seedbed too.
By asserting that Seedbed is a joke, all you're saying is that it's a joke for you, which is really just an admission that you don't understand the piece correctly. People said Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was a joke at its premiere too. They said its rhythms were too full of sex and violence.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 03:09 am (UTC)Secondly, there could hardly have been anything more trad (in an ancient culture sense) than my 2005 show. "Mr Currie resembled an ancient storyteller," said the New York Times review (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E05E5DC1231F932A35754C0A9639C8B63). I was a griot, a shaman, an oral tale-teller. You may say that the kind of art society has always needed has "always been an emotional, awe-inspiring, uplifting, transcendent, insight-into-the-human-condition type of art". Well, sometimes it's been those things, sometimes it hasn't. Sometimes it was someone beating a drum, and someone else going in and out of time with it. Or a particular dance move. Or a mask, cunningly made. My performances are much more basic, much closer to ritual, than my music, which relies on lots of high-tech equipment and a relatively modern, relatively commercial format. What I don't understand is why the people who constantly attack art for being "formalistic games" don't attack pop music. And I think it's something to do with us being so emotionally bound up with our own culture, and pop music being a very direct expression of that culture, and particularly its petit bourgeois, consumerist core. Art scares people precisely because it seems to come from somewhere else. Aristocratic times, ancient times. It's got some otherness to it that people want to keep attacking. I think they should attack TV and pop music and the internet if they want to attack something, and listen with respect to art's otherness.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 12:17 am (UTC)You mean he is of no Ornette Coleman or Tonny Bennett caliber?
Yeah, I came to the same conclusion myself.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-20 01:36 am (UTC)