"Must-see" Anti-Art in Miami
Writing Meets "Art" in Meaninglessness
Witness to American Hackdom: The standout works of “art” the Observer (which observes much and sees little) says one must (!) see at a Miami “gallery.” Gallery of the Credulous, perhaps.
The commentary by Dan Duray (a pen name? like Willie Womble, Dick Black or Bart McFarson?) is virtually totally incomprehensible; it is the perfect coffee table companion for the junk passed off as “art.” Don’t believe me? Take a gander at the “art” at the link below and then read the copy.
“The background for this work was created by an A.I. trained on his Pastoral series, though he’s used his skilled hand—and there are many hands in this new body of work—to populate the painting with the majority of the elements you see, so these are not A.I. but make you wonder about just how much of your visual cortex is assembled in the same way.”
Makes you wonder, indeed! What can it mean?
“It folds in on itself, not like John Chamberlain but in ways where you can still recognize all the constituent parts. It’s the problem of modern life in many ways: self-obsessive and still far too reminiscent of what it no longer is.”
Is he getting paid to come up with this?
“The patina captures the drawing’s roughness, and this may be the rare case in which Feinstein has made something less sexual than its inspiration, though, despite all its points, it’s still pretty kinky.”
There must be, of course, a reference to SEX. Sex sells!
John Cleese’s advertising man Adrian Wap-Caplet in Eric Idle’s, “I Inherited 5,000 Miles of String in 3 Inch Lengths” advertising sketch, hurriedly brainstorming, blurts out:
Sex, sex, sex, must get sex into it. Wait, I see a television commercial. There's a nude woman in a bath holding a bit of your string. That's great. Great! But we need a doctor, gotta have a medical opinion. There's a nude woman in a bath with a doctor. That's too sexy.
Back to the Observer. The writing in Mr. Duray’s article evinces a quasi-sentence format of initial observations, followed by a kind of conclusion, delivered in apparently subject / verb / object order and generally grammatical, though conversational; but, in fact, even though so structured, the writing fails to deliver meaning.
This meaninglessness is precisely akin to the phenomenon of modern “art.” One sees color, some brushwork, shapes which could be familiar, a kind of haphazard organization, the odd juxtaposition of unrelated and weird objects which pretend at meaning, but which to an observer who looks for meaning, achieves only irrationality, chaos and ugliness. Who needs that? Who wants that? Only nihilists who wish to have confirmation of their own mental states. And anyone can create garbage — human beings do that every day by means of natural processes. The Artist — with a capital “A” — never devotes his talent, skill, sight and insight to the achievement of the grotesque. Beauty — it always MUST be Beauty.
Anti-writers have taken on the job of anti-art criticism, which is always laudatory, because like must “like” like. Kissing cousins in an incestuous tryst. A century ago, when art “critics” were tepidly assessing the nascent, ironical anti-art of the time, writers could still put together cogent sentences.
Look at what the art movement that indulged in “experimentation” has led to: widespread nonsense. Beginning with the Futurists in the early 20th century — mostly the Russians where the plague of ugliness was most aggrieved — the talented abandoned their aesthetic divinity, traditional standards of excellence in a search for what is beautiful and true, for something they chased that was never there. Thereby, they let in all and sundry to force the genuinely talented and insightful Artists out of the public’s admiration, and the space from which they retreated was claimed for Hackdom!
I get your drift but Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is considered the first big break with traditional western culture - African masks on whores, expressionism, flattened space). Which led to Cubism and then Futurism. You could go back further to Fauvism and Symbolism in the 19th century. Gaugin leaving his wife and kids for the noble savages of Tahiti, for instance.
I don't think Modernism is so much a product of nihilism, although that is certainly a big factor, but hatred of everything the petit bourgeoisie stood – and stands – for. The communists, after all, rejected Modernism as bourgeois decadence and they supposedly weren't nihilists. Christianity rejected Greek ideals of beauty and I doubt one could say that was a result of nihilism. That said, there's a lot of nihilism out there in the "art industry."
I generally agree with you. I just think Dadaism is probably more of a grandparent to contemporary art than Futurism. Dada was emptiness and irony in spades whereas Futurism seemed to be more vital, more animated by masculine tumescent energy, like an earlier version of Jackson Pollack. Dada seems to me more feminine, passive and subversive like Andy Warhol, Gerhand Richter or Jean-Michel Basquiat (one of his just sold at auction for $110M).
Well done!