I was blown away by the Met and the Gugg. The thoughts of Hirst being displayed in the Met makes me shudder. Why not an interative recording of a Spice Girls concert?

Very sad.

Horseshit:!

Western Civiization may or may not be fine, but Jeff Koons has nothing to do with any unthing unfine: just the opposite. In the visual arts, it's the old farts--and you are as an old a fart as you smell old--whose gaseousness is making its last gasp. The genius of Koons is, in the traditiion of Warhol, his reclamation of aesthetic possibility in the world as commonly lived and concretely and commonly experienced and to deconstruct *taste* that presumes to aesthetic prescription. His aesthetic is to invert art as sentimentality into sentimemtality as art and in doing so to explode the rigidities of self-congratulatory, unknowing-of-itself,  ironic detachment. One goes from Koons into the world with dialectically wider eyes, open in a child's way--in the best sense--to what *taste*  instructs is worthless.  

For example, The Spice Girls are a pop phenomenon--which is to say, they captured the imagination of the world, visually compelling and aurally affecting. They got millions of people responding in range from singing and clapping  to moving their bodies to rhythms to screaming and even fainting, no mean feat and  a tremendous tableau for visual and aural aesthetic  possibility: indeed, "Why not an interactive recording of a Spice Girls concert"?

If basman is a fair representative of of western civilization then we are indeed doomed.  Blah!

the last refuge for a cranky old man is...

gratuitous shots at modern art....and the deconstruction of art museum invitations.

Wow, must be a slow Carter, Kerry, Kofi, Soros, Clinton, Columbia, NY Times week...

But Marty look on the Bright Side.

Lee Bollinger and the Columbia Trustees just gave a Pulitzer Prize to Bob Dylan.

I am in the middle of a serious Jones on Bob Dylan.  Fed by YouTube, Wikipedia and Martin Scorsese's film biography No Direction Home.  The Pulitzer is just amusing.

Another example of Ashkenazi Genius.

Mozier, have you ever had,  like the rest of mankind, a guilty aesthetic pleasure? Take it from the doctor, old dude: take two Koons and call me in the morning.

"Yeah Yeah Yeah"!

CRS9TNR  what I need from you is a complete and persuasive explication of Like A Rolling Stone. I just read Greil Marcus's book on it and still don't totally understand its lyrics.

Due in tomorrow.

CRS9TNR said:  "But Marty look on the Bright Side. Lee Bollinger and the Columbia Trustees just gave a Pulitzer Prize to Bob Dylan."

Bob Dylan recieved the award:

"For his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."

He has certainly had a impact on our culture.

And looking at past awards I find this award more interesting than the ones meted out to Charles Wuorinen in 1970. Anyone ever hear of him?

You are just being jealous. Did you think you should have gotten it?

Isn't Jeff Koons that one that was married to Cicciolina?

Horseshit indeed Basman

...was married to Cicciolina?...

Married 1n 1991 divorced in 1992; I'd have given up a vital organ to be married to her for a year.

...Horseshit indeed Basman...

Ain't it the truth.

This is to complicated for my simple mind.

And Basman: Cicciolina does not deserve your kidneys. Go to a 5 star brothel and have it your way. But please do not think about such moves.

...does not deserve your kidneys....

Uhhm, I was thinking more along the lines of my spleen or in a pinch my gall bladder.

I have never been to a one star brothel, or any brothel,  let alone a 5 star one: who does the ranking Michelin, Fodor?

basman, I've had and hope to have more guilty pleasures; I just don't call them art and try to defend them with boring sophistry.  Who's got time for that shit?  What does Greil Marcus, by the way, think of the Spice Girls?

Basman, the Spice Girls provoked reactions, surely, but let's not confuse getting reactions to making art.  I could go on a subway during rush hour and start vomiting on people, or I could jump out of alleys right when people walk by.  Getting a strong reaction?  Yes.  Art?  No.  And as far as large balloon animals being good art, you said that Koons's genius was in his "reclamation of aesthetic possibility in the world as commonly lived and concretely and commonly experienced and to deconstruct *taste* that presumes to aesthetic prescription. His aesthetic is to invert art as sentimentality into sentimentality as art and in doing so to explode the rigidities of self-congratulatory, unknowing-of-itself,  ironic detachment."  When the justification of an art piece requires more skill and artistry than the art itself, my BS-sense (like a spider-sense) tingles.

Oh, and am I going to be the first to ask the obvious question.  Does this mean that the Met has jumped the shark?

Never went to a brothel myself Basman. I was just trying to be funny. Apparently without success.

bigfish --

"When the justification of an art piece requires more skill and artistry than the art itself, my BS-sense (like a spider-sense) tingles."

I think that's an excellent metric.  Mind if I steal it?

"Does this mean that the Met has jumped the shark?"

Nah.  Just installed it.  

Basman - right on.

Cato the Elder declared that the end of civilisation was night - in 200 BCE.  It took another 300 years for the greatest of all Roman leaders to come forth.  Every time I hear about the end of civilisation, my only urge is to say yada yada yada.  

Any way, no wonder the Old Civilization is dying out.  If the only defence we have is to denigrate the new, well, the old will die.  And good riddance.

Beethoven's Third was considered a lunacy; people walked out of Rites of Spring; the Firebird was booed; Bruchner was ignored throughout his life; Mahler would never have crawled out of his Bohemain resting ground were it not for "Death in Venice", the movie; van Gogh died penniless; Picasso caused a scandal with his early cubism paintings .... Redundant point: we'll know in a hundred years or so whether Koons or the Spice Girls or Madonna will be considered Art, part of our civilisation or simply a passing fad.  For now, I say let competition rule; let Darwinian evolution weed out the weak.

Part of the "weeding" out process involves thoughtful people making judgments about what is  good and what isn't. One cannot avoid judgment, and judgment needn't imply that one is "highbrow", "old", or worse.  Sorry basman, I rather like Bigfish's dissection of your tedious, sense-numbing affirmation.  

...What does Greil Marcus, by the way, think of the Spice Girls?...

Don't know:  but he was huge on Elvis and Punk, for example.

Luis, I was trying to be funny too, also apparently without success, though I have never been to a brothel.

bigfish, Mozier, others: You misunderstand part of my point. My partial point is that no thing cannot (ie everything can) be the subject of art. I was not affirming the Spice Girls' musical virtue as such, though they are pleasant enough. I was arguing that their pop phenomenality, with all that is obviously fantastic in that,  makes them in the hands of an artist a potentially great subject for a visual/musical/interactive--call it what you will--artistic experience. What is visual art after all but the framing of experience? And what is a gallery/museum but the larger framing of what conevntion calls art? God bless those, Koons, Warhol whomever, that send us out into the world with bigger eyes and expanded sensibilities.

I'll leave "weeding" to the gardeners and be content to respond honestly to what gives me undeniable pleasure.

What Icarus said and I'll just bring his list of examples even more current. I can imagine what Mozier and Big Fish and Peretz and others might have said when bebop hit the scene. It was excoriated by jazz critics with more sophisticated sets of the same arguments  being rehearsed on this little thread. "It isn't music" we were told." It's musical squalor" we were told. "It marks the death of jazz and civilization as we know it" we were told.

Lo to those  who need conventional packaging and labelling before calling something art or just taking pleasure from it. I remember reading about a small expreiment in the early twentieth century when Yeats's more obscure poems without attribution were presented to a literate class of somebodies at a high toned English university and the class was befuddled and could not comment on their quality.

The need of Peretz's and others here to denigrate so violently what they do not understand speaks implicit volumes  as to their defensiveness and their need defensively  to fortify their taste as critically prescriptive for fear of losing some small sense of purchase on the world as they know it.

And no aoplogies needed for whomever said what.  It's a lively topic on which  people can disagree vigorously without giving offense.

“Jeff Koons And the End of Western Civilization”

It may not be the end of civilization, but as some posts here show that knowledge of Western art is perfunctory at best.

icarusr said:  “Beethoven's Third was considered a lunacy;”

Most art in the 19c was thought of in political terms and people reacted to it as if the artist was offering some political manifesto with their work. In Beethoven’s case this seems to have been true. (People also rioted when Brahms played his music because they saw him and rightly so an anti-Wagnerian.)

Moreover, in Beethoven time the world of art connoisseurs was very small and consisted mostly of the Aristocracy which subsidized most of it and the wealthy bourgeoisies. In any case if people reacted with horror at his third symphony it was because of its tonal intricacies and not because it was too facile as is the case with Koons.

“people walked out of Rites of Spring; the Firebird was booed;”

The ballet was recognized as a work of genius and Stravinsky was hailed as an innovative composer along with Debussy. Again it was the intricacies of the music that some people had trouble with.  

“Bruchner was ignored throughout his life;”

Did you mean Anton Bruckner? Or did you mean the Jewish composer Max Bruch?

And who ignored Bruckner? He was one of the most popular composers in Germany especially after National socialists came to power.

Ironically, Mahler admirer the antisemitic Bruckner even though he was rebuffed by him.

Bruckner’s fifth, btw, is one of my favorite symphonies.

“Mahler would never have crawled out of his Bohemain resting ground were it not for "Death in Venice", the movie;”

That Mahler was “ignored” is news to me also. He had a difficult time because of his Jewish background in an antisemitic environment but he was not ignored.

Years before Death in Venice Mahler was one of the most often played composers in the U.S. Your comment tells me more about your knowledge of music than about Mahler’s popularity.

Btw: is there any music being written today that can much the richness of tonality, innovativeness, and power of orchestration that can be compared to the ones by the composers mentioned above?

“van Gogh died penniless;”

Cliché alert. Have you read anything about Van Gogh? Do you know about his family background, his brother who was an art dealer, his mental illness?

“Picasso caused a scandal with his early cubism paintings .... “

Another cliché. Picasso’s scandal made him famous and rich.

“Redundant point: we'll know in a hundred years or so whether Koons or the Spice Girls or Madonna will be considered Art, part of our civilisation or simply a passing fad.”

More clichés.  

“For now, I say let competition rule; let Darwinian evolution weed out the weak.”

What a lot of bull. You sound like one of those 19c boors who would have booed the composers above and spat on van Gogh or Picasso.

Itzik, I am not sure you are right.

Marty's son Jesse Peretz is a film director who among other things has brought an Ian McEwen book to the screen: First Love Last Rites.

McEwen is an innovative writer and I doubt that anyone drawn to this kind of literature would despise Jazz. Jesse's taste in art must have been passed on to him by his family.

There is no reason to suppose that Marty hates jazz.

Jeff Koons on the other hand is a facile artist. My wife who loves avant-garde art, more than I do, in fact, doesn't care for him at all.

Marty loves to use overblown and shocking phrases: end of civilization, Israelis must be crazy, etc. He does it I think to get people’s attention. It seems to be working.

Compare Jeff koons "art" (his images remind one of Andy Warhol)  to that of Bridget Riley a remarkable contemporary artist:

www.google.com/imgres

here is Riley:

www.mishabittleston.com/.../bridget_riley

I am stunned by the art market's indecent cash preference for Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol and Damien

For the record, I love Elvis, jazz, and also some punk.  Also liked some of Greil Marcus ' work, although he's a little over the top sometimes.  To imply, basman,  that Elvis contribution to the world is kitsch means that you don't understand Marcus, and don't understand why Elvis' music is considered art by intelligent people.

Basman, I think we may be arguing past each other.  I agree completely that anything can be the subject of art, and even good art.  Certainly an exhibition about the Spice Girls, if the artist treated his/her subject with serious thought and attempted to communicate to their audience has the possibility of being enlightening or moving in some way.

I am wary, however, of expanding definitions just to expand them.  I have a BA in Theatre and will be starting my MFA in Acting in the fall, so I've heard plenty of times an argument I think I hear you making, that expanding what we think good art can be is good on its face.  I think it can be good, but only if the expansion takes place to include things that are actually good but were excluded for some reason apart from their artistic worth.  If I walk out of an art museum thinking that every bit of art I see is good, the definitions become worthless and the waters become muddy.  I like some Fall Out Boy songs, but I don't confuse their artistic worth with Chopin's.

And drdannyu, yes you can!

...To imply, basman,  that Elvis contribution to the world is kitsch means ...

Moze, I implied no such thing.

"To imply, basman,  that Elvis contribution to the world is kitsch means that you don't understand Marcus, and don't understand why Elvis' music is considered art by intelligent people." Mozier

The phrase "intelligent people" is question begging.

Why in your opinion is Elvis’ contribution to culture on a par with that of, say, Bob Dylan, or even Johnny Cash, not to mention Aaron Copland or Elliott Carter?

Besides when you speak of Elvis’ artistry are you referring to the music he sang or the way in which he sang it?  

Yes, the phrase may be  question begging to some.  But I didn't compare Elvis to anyone; I was referring to the fact that Elvis is widely considered by rock critics and historians to be a major figure in the creation of a new musical form.  If you want a bibliography I'll find a few titles.  

One measure of an artist's impact is the degree of influence upon his/her peers.  Dylan, for example, names both Cash and Presley as big influences.  While Presley was standing on the shoulders of existing traditions, the fact is that few others combined them quite like he did in those early records.

mozier...

having traveled in many an egg head circles, I appreciate your efforts to rescue Elvis' music from the smart alecky tentacles of people like Albert Goldman, who probably personified better than anyone, the artsy intellengensia's class addled disdain for Presley and his music. I sense that slowly, Elvis's music, which can only be understood as the confluence of rock form and function, is gaining more traction as a true art form. With the Goldmans of the world - what a jerk that little nerd was while he polluted American arts society - Elvis will always be perceived as a dumb, uncircumsized (Goldman must have dedicated about 5 pages alone to Elvis' "hillbilly pecker", I kid you not, I read that book...telling idee fixe I may add) clod. But, Goldman just could not understand anything beyond his blinkered and New York based art aesthetic...

"The Spice Girls are a pop phenomenon--which is to say, they captured the imagination of the world, visually compelling and aurally affecting. They got millions of people responding in range from singing and clapping  to moving their bodies to rhythms to screaming and even fainting, no mean feat and  a tremendous tableau for visual and aural aesthetic  possibility"

The same could be said, if memory serves, about the Nuremberg rallies orchestrated by Albert Speer. On the one hand, civilisation survived him and his boss, so I doubt Jeff Koons will make much of a dent. On the other hand, regarding those who put dung on a pedestal, George Orwell said it best: Only an intellectual could be so stupid.

...The same could be said, if memory serves, about the Nuremberg rallies orchestrated by Albert Speer....

It had to come, a variant of Godwin's law. Not on point and goes to no point being argued here. Give me a break.

Moze, I 'm having trouble putting my finger on it, but your saying  "...and don't understand why Elvis' music is considered art by intelligent people..." is problematic and runs trhough your entire argument on this thread. Why do you need to keep justifying things by saying that intelligent people consider isuch and such art as though you could not otherwise enjoy them? What is it this need in you to suck at the canonical teat? I loved Elvis when I first him when I was about 10 years old and got introduced to the fabulousness of rock and roll, and I have loved him to this day for most of the same reasons--great voice and he rocked in a way that spoke to me. But there are quite a few Elvi and if you don't think more than one of them contributed "to the world (of) kitsch", you don't know whereof you speak. But, and this is the precise point, what's wrong with the world of kitsch? If you like it , dig it; if you don't, don't. But really I think you need to get past worrying about what intelligent people consider art.

"The same could be said, if memory serves, about the Nuremberg rallies orchestrated by Albert Speer." emcgargle

There is no need to evoke such dark precedents. Any typical organized mass entertainment or sports event like a  super-bowl game will do just as well.

"On the one hand, civilisation survived him and his boss, so I doubt Jeff Koons will make much of a dent. "

Oh, and you were doing so well. Civilization survived, just barely.

Koons isn't on the same level and in himself is insignificant, however, justifying and pushing his mediocrity is significant.

"what's wrong with the world of kitsch? If you like it , dig it; if you don't, don't"

Short answer, it isn’t art and it’s a challenge to art. While genuine art challenges us to see the world differently and from different perspectives while maintaining an integral unity, Kitsch sensationalizes our every day experiences without transcending them.

Koons art is an example of kitsch (not all of it, but for the most part). It appeals to our narcissism. It is pretentious in as much as it looks as if it is showing us something new and original but fails to deliver. It neither challenges our perception of the quotidian the way Picasso, or my favorite artist Matisse does, nor does it make a statement about the nature of art.

Nothing wrong with liking kitsch: I too like (not love) Elvis, however, there is a sameness there that is numbing.

jackson,

any Elvis fan is good by me.

The whole rhythmn section was a purple gang....

...Short answer, it isn’t art and it’s a challenge to art...

Alll of what you say in the above post is nicely aphoristic , and succinctly and thoughtfully said, and yet and yet...

There are I guess different definitions of kitsch and I had in mind is  (including some of what Koons transforms): art of high sentimentality or of high exaggeration as well as the kinds of sentimentalities that occupy us in everyday life--from black velvet  backed paintings of  a big eyed girl with a single tear drop rolling down her face to puppies and plastic figurines of Michael Jackson to Elvis in Vegas in gold lame doing karate moves to pop standards.

I wouldn't be so quick to distinguish between what allows us (who exactly?) to see the world differently and what does not. I have all my life heard  those pieties in relation to art conventionally regarded as worthwhile and I have all my life heard  the deprecations of the low brow and the sentimental. and the supposedly worthless. Judging by my own true responses to what I experience and to what I have seen in others, I cannot for myself gneuinely sustain the validity of your well put distnction. I remember a weekend not so long ago when on a Friday night I sat bored out of my head while Kiri te Kanawa, admittedly not in her best voice, sang a bunch of Leider,of her  and the very next night stood moving from head to toe while a much too old Wanda Jackson belted out some of her golden oldies. I once taught--in another long ago life-- the so called middle brow novel I Never Promised You A Rose Garden to a class of grade ten students and remember vividly still a particular scene when the young girl now mentally ill struggles enormously  simply to get on a bus, pay the fare and nake her way to an empty seat. To this day I think that scene is the best literay evocation of the practical reality of the devastation of mental illness I have ever read (and what a bracing antidote it was to all the faux mystical romanticizations of insanity as a great mode of perception).

Who is to say how any work affects anybody; and who is to say and what is affecting and expanding as opposed to what is simply confirming? And who is to prescribe that for anyone else or second guess the meaningfulness of anyone else's responses?  I think your distinction is too pat and does not work as a practical matter.

And that is what I think and argue lies at the essence of Koons and why it may be  "facile"  to dismiss hiis work as "facile". What animates such a rush, and such a need to rush,  to such self assured judgments? Apart from just liking his work (and Warhol's) an awful lot and deriving great pleasure from ithem, I contend  these works have an argument: as I say, they aestheticize the world and explode encrusted hierarchies of taste that pretend to prescription. Hence, for example Koons's Puppy of which it was said: "Jeff Koons' Puppy is a staggering achievement of sculptural imagination, horticultural dexterity and engineering skill." Iand "Jeff Koons' Puppy is one of the most significant sculptures of the 20th century." I wouldn't say these things; I don't know what they mean; but somebody apparently knowledgable said them and for myself  I saw the Puppy, was blown away and had some of the reactions to it and thoughts about it I have tried to argue for here and above.

I once had a version of this argument with a very literate friend of mine in the context of literature--on which ground I confess I stand  slightly more firmly --on whether Jane Austen--whom I adore by the way--did something like, in literature's terms, "challenge our perception of the quotidian ...."  He argued for Austen being transformative or consciousness expanding or some such thing that allwowed himself the world anew or differently or more deeply or whatever. And I asked him to explain that to me in very practical terms. He could not as he was forced to admit--and to get this guy to concede anything in argument was like pulling teeth. So I guess I 'd ask you to tell me in a way I could understand, and I don't presume you cannot, in straight forward terms concerning Matisse what exactly was the transformation of your "perception of the quotidian " that he brought about?

Sidebar: here is a nice lyrical (almost) counterpoint to Fear And Trembling:

Story of Isaac

The door it opened slowly,

my father he came in,

I was nine years old.

And he stood so tall above me,

his blue eyes they were shining

and his voice was very cold.

He said, "I've had a vision

and you know I'm strong and holy,

I must do what I've been told."

So he started up the mountain,

I was running, he was walking,

and his axe was made of gold.

Well, the trees they got much smaller,

the lake a lady's mirror,

we stopped to drink some wine.

Then he threw the bottle over.

Broke a minute later

and he put his hand on mine.

Thought I saw an eagle

but it might have been a vulture,

I never could decide.

Then my father built an altar,

he looked once behind his shoulder,

he knew I would not hide.

You who build these altars now

to sacrifice these children,

you must not do it anymore.

A scheme is not a vision

and you never have been tempted

by a demon or a god.

You who stand above them now,

your hatchets blunt and bloody,

you were not there before,

when I lay upon a mountain

and my father's hand was trembling

with the beauty of the word.

And if you call me brother now,

forgive me if I inquire,

"Just according to whose plan?"

When it all comes down to dust

I will kill you if I must,

I will help you if I can.

When it all comes down to dust

I will help you if I must,

I will kill you if I can.

And mercy on our uniform,

man of peace or man of war,

the peacock spreads his fan.

Elvis, of course, quickly succumbed to the trappings of his own image like many rock stars have since.  I certainly won't deny that the man became a grotesque parody .   Elvis, not a writer or a thinker, had little within to fight back.  

Jaunty, I too found Goldman's book a haughty reprise.  He did have a good chapter on the musical roots of Memphis, as I recall.

Basman, don't mean to beat a dead horse here, but to refer to something as good art implies more than "I like it, therefore it's art."  I'm not deferring to the canon to define what I like, but I do try to understand what people more expert than I define as art.  (I know something about music, but others know more.)

I apologize for the length of this post. I’ll post it in separate parts, Itzik.  

1

basman said:  “There are I guess different definitions of kitsch and I had in mind is  (including some of what Koons transforms): art of high sentimentality or of high exaggeration as well as the kinds of sentimentalities that occupy us in everyday life--from black velvet  backed paintings of  a big eyed girl with a single tear drop rolling down her face to puppies and plastic figurines of Michael Jackson to Elvis in Vegas in gold lame doing karate moves to pop standards.”

Yes but none of them challenge our assumptions about the every day world we live in.

Not do they deepen out understanding of what we take to be real or even question our basic assumptions. They merely confirm our habits of thought.

“I wouldn't be so quick to distinguish between what allows us (who exactly?) to see the world differently and what does not.”

Well look at some Bridget Riley paintings I linked to above. She is a contemporary. I could have spoken of all the different experimental schools from the early part of the last century all the way from impressionism, cubism, expressionism, to action painting.

“I have all my life heard  those pieties in relation to art conventionally regarded as worthwhile and I have all my life heard  the deprecations of the low brow and the sentimental. and the supposedly worthless. Judging by my own true responses to what I experience and to what I have seen in others, I cannot for myself gneuinely sustain the validity of your well put distnction.”

Well, your responses are your own and one gets out of art what one puts into it. Read Proust’s second volume of his “In Search of Lost Time: Within a Budding Grove” where he describes the way impressionism transformed our sense of the world: the way we apprehend reality. He lived while these transformations where in progress and he was one of the first to describe them. There is no better guide to understanding art than Proust’s novel. It’s and very exciting in parts and very tedious in other parts. But methinks it is worth the journey.

The camera too changed the way we perceive reality, btw, and the motion picture camera even more so.

“I remember a weekend not so long ago when on a Friday night I sat bored out of my head while Kiri te Kanawa, admittedly not in her best voice, sang a bunch of Leider,of her  and the very next night stood moving from head to toe while a much too old Wanda Jackson belted out some of her golden oldies. I once taught--in another long ago life-- the so called middle brow novel I Never Promised You A Rose Garden to a class of grade ten students and remember vividly still a particular scene when the young girl now mentally ill struggles enormously  simply to get on a bus, pay the fare and nake her way to an empty seat. To this day I think that scene is the best literay evocation of the practical reality of the devastation of mental illness I have ever read (and what a bracing antidote it was to all the faux mystical romanticizations of insanity as a great mode of perception).”

Well, you are changing the subject now. I never said either that insanity “is a great mode of perception,” not did I valorize changing our mode of perception for its own sake.

More modestly I suggested that good art challenges the way we see the, habitually. It challenges our stay at home habits. I don’t council doing it as a thrill. That would be sensationalism. It’s not mindful and its not lasting, not does it work.

That a work of art is a great vehicle for challenging our perceptions is due to the fact that art is difficult, difficult to make and difficult to understand. It’s a challenges not just our perceptions but our conceptual frameworks.

Looking at great art listening to great music is work and we are not always nor should we be predisposed to work.

Besides not all great art is satisfying or to our liking. We don’t have duty to love it, or love it all the time. We do have a duty to recognize the difference in the main between great art and inferior art, call it what you will.

2

“Who is to say how any work affects anybody; and who is to say and what is affecting and expanding as opposed to what is simply confirming? And who is to prescribe that for anyone else or second guess the meaningfulness of anyone else's responses?  I think your distinction is too pat and does not work as a practical matter.”

But I am not speaking of prescriptive mode of apprehension. That would defeat the purpose of great art. Individual viewers or listeners react differently to same works. However, a knowing audience will be able to explain in language that any one of us would understand his own specific reactions. That is what counts.

Individual impressionistic reactions belong to the realm of the ineffable, while prescriptive reactions are as deadening to the spirit as bad works of art.

“And that is what I think and argue lies at the essence of Koons and why it may be  "facile"  to dismiss hiis work as "facile". What animates such a rush, and such a need to rush,  to such self assured judgments? Apart from just liking his work (and Warhol's) an awful lot and deriving great pleasure from ithem, I contend  these works have an argument: as I say, they aestheticize the world and explode encrusted hierarchies of taste that pretend to prescription.”

I don’t agree that they “aestheticize” the world. To me they de-aestheticize the world. I agree that that may be part of their intent, but Warhol’s images which mock our assembly line culture and duplicate it with the intent of offering an infinity of images and combinations of images in collage form seem too gimmicky. The Campbell Soup paintings had the merit of novelty when they first appeared but have since become just another commercial for that product.

There has to be some distance between the art image and the actual world, otherwise to aestheticize the world, which btw was the Italian futurists’ school of art ideal (and no, I am not making a political argument, I am being historically descriptive here), would mean the destruction of art itself as a separate mode of apprehension. Or, to put it otherwise to collapse the distinction between art and actual reality doesn’t aestheticize reality it destroys art, as well as the actual world as a neutral medium in which we move and act.

“Hence, for example Koons's Puppy of which it was said: "Jeff Koons' Puppy is a staggering achievement of sculptural imagination, horticultural dexterity and engineering skill." Iand "Jeff Koons' Puppy is one of the most significant sculptures of the 20th century." I wouldn't say these things; I don't know what they mean; but somebody apparently knowledgable said them and for myself  I saw the Puppy, was blown away and had some of the reactions to it and thoughts about it I have tried to argue for here and above.”

Well aside from its novelty and shock value, (the shock of the new) I see little merit in the statue. Someone can be “blown away” by a work of art, but the test is if you can come back and look at it again and again and still find new insight.

I noticed that you are also 9a) appealing to authority in order to validate you perception, and (b) you seem unable to express what it is that blew you away.

3

“I once had a version of this argument with a very literate friend of mine in the context of literature--on which ground I confess I stand  slightly more firmly --on whether Jane Austen--whom I adore by the way--did something like, in literature's terms, "challenge our perception of the quotidian ...."  He argued for Austen being transformative or consciousness expanding or some such thing that allwowed himself the world anew or differently or more deeply or whatever. And I asked him to explain that to me in very practical terms. He could not as he was forced to admit--and to get this guy to concede anything in argument was like pulling teeth. So I guess I 'd ask you to tell me in a way I could understand, and I don't presume you cannot, in straight forward terms concerning Matisse what exactly was the transformation of your "perception of the quotidian " that he brought about?

I accept your challenge, but since this post is way too long I’ll come back to this in a few days. I have some other pressing matters in the next few days but I’ll get back to you on this by Thursday or Friday.

All I should say now is that the Jane Austen is a bad example for the simple reason that her books have already transformed the consciousness of our apprehension of the real through subsequent writers. If you want to understand who she changed perception read E. M. Forster.

It will be easier to explain, btw, if I use Marcel Proust as an example along with Matisse.  But, as I said I’ll come back to this later on.

"Sidebar: here is a nice lyrical (almost) counterpoint to Fear And Trembling:"

This sounds like a Leonard Cohen song to me. Is it?

It is Cohen. jack, Thanks for going to the lengths you did in answering me. But I'll wait for you to finish what you want to say, before I reply so that it all does not get too serrated.

Sorry by the way I left out Cohen's name; it was an oversight. But trust you to know who it was--impressive to say the least.

My wife and I have been huge Leonard Cohen fans since the sixties. If you like "The Story of Isaac" check out "Who by Fire?", based on the Yom kippur liturgy, and "Joan of Arc". Jackson, you amaze me with all you seem to know and I am jealous as to how much time you have to display your many talents and insights.

I'm enjoying this discussion.  (Hope it's not quite over.)  A few cents to add:

Just so you know where I stand, my reaction to Koons's stuff is "Fuck you."  More on that in a minute....

I try not to get too excited about the label debate.  This monkey poop is art! says critic A.  That monkey poop isn't art; it's monkey poop! says critic B.  A discussion of the concept of art follows, which may well be intellectually fun and constitute good mental exercise.  Ultimately, though, "art" is but a word, and words refer to what people use them to refer to.  The tricky question is, "Which people?"  I think the answer is, recognized authorities in the field, such as the Metropolitan Museum of "Art."  There are those who would regard a great deal of modern art as non-art.  There comes a point, though, when such critics are simply using the word wrong.  Like it or not, presenting things like Brillo pad boxes and urinals was first regarded as art long ago.  Art of that sort will have a chapter in "Art for Dummies."  The word is expansive enough and elastic enough to encompass such projects, even if many will regard them as frivolous.  They may appear in "art" museums, may be discussed in "art" schools or "art" appreciation courses, may be commented upon by "art" critics, may be depicted in books about "art," may be presented as "art," and may be sold as "art."  If all that is going on, they're art, okay?  They have captured the attention of the art world, a highly relevant interpretive community, to use a Wittgensteinian notion, when you're talking about what words mean.  In other words, art is as "art" does.  You may not get it or like it or understand why it's made it, but you can't escape the fact that you're standing in an "art" museum looking at it.  Similar debates go on in my field of law, where philosophers laboriously ponder the concept of law and say something like, "An unjust law is no law at all."  That's sort of like saying a lousy painting is no painting at all.  Alas, it is a painting, just as what the Spice Girls inflicted is, without doubt, music.  The real question isn't whether the monkey poop is art, but whether it's any good.

When we're in that realm, we can start to look at the traditional criteria for what makes art art without being needlessly burdened with the conceptual problem.  That problem in a nutshell: Someone will say something like, "Art characteristically does X," and someone else will respond, "But *that* universally recognized work of art doesn't do X, so your definition is wrong."  That sort of thing strikes me as beside the point.  We *want* certain things out of art, and we don't necessarily want or require the same things out of every work or want everything we look for out of every work.  Doing one thing we're looking for very well may make up for doing something else poorly or not at all.  To make another anology to law, the question of whether a given piece of art is any good is a multi-factor balancing test.  Some art may dazzle with evident skill and craft.  Other works may express, communicate, and inspire emotion with some depth.  Others may convey a convincing intellectual insight, perhaps a self-referential insight about art or an insight about the world at large or both.  Others may be particularly striking in itheir revelation of the human condition or human nature.  Others may simply be beautiful.  In all of the above, we value some measure of originality.  These are the "factors," or at least some of them -- the things we're looking for art, as art, to do.  Many works will do more than one of these things, and a few will do all of them.

The project for the critic -- the person trying to pass judgment on whether something is any good or not -- is to (1) understand the ambitions of the work (what it's trying to do), (2) evaluate the worthiness of its ambitions (is it trying to do anything interesting or important, or does it merely, for example, purport to be wallpaper or a knick-knack?), and (3) assuming the ambitions are worthy, evaluate whether the work succeeds on its own terms; whether it lives up to its ambitions and accomplishes its goals.

Case in point:  Koons's vacuum cleaners in cases.  These "works" inspire in me a firm "Fuck you, Mr. Koons."  The reason I respond with such disdain is because disdain is what I'm feeling communicated by the artist.  *He* seems to be saying "Fuck you," and I'm not inclined to agree.  I say not "inclined" to agree, because if he manages to say "fuck you" to me and I lap it up, then maybe he's an artist to be reckoned with.  It's the same test for stand-up comedians.  If they can say "Fuck you" to their audience and the audience response is "Yes, Fuck me!," they're pretty awesome comedians.  Is Koons a good comedian?  A good artist?

Back to the critic's project:  What's Koons up to?  Basman says, to start with, he's doing a "reclamation of aesthetic possibility in the world as commonly lived and concretely and commonly experienced."  In other words, he's asking us to notice shit -- shit like vacuum cleaners, balloon animals, and wrapping paper -- in an aesthetic way.  (I'll set aside the "reclamation" aspect, as I'm not sure what's supposedly being reclaimed.)  Is he asking us to see American beauty in a plastic bag floating in a light breeze?  Ugh.  I hope not.  Sometimes garbage is just garbage.  I'm a big fan of great industrial design and great graphic design and great furniture and great architecture -- useful art, art that fuses beauty and functionality and blurs the distinction.  I have a lovely old Electrolux, and I notice and appreciate its iconic design each time I use it.  But Koons's Hoovers are not particularly elegant, and, anyway, he's not the designer.  He's asking us to look at these vacuum cleaners he didn't design, and, what?  See them as aesthetic objects?  Okay, fine.  They're so-so.  What else you got?  Basketballs?  Big deal.

Koons is doing more, though, than just asking us to notice shit.  He's trying "to deconstruct *taste* that presumes to aesthetic prescription. His aesthetic is to invert art as sentimentality into sentimemtality as art and in doing so to explode the rigidities of self-congratulatory, unknowing-of-itself, ironic detachment."  That is a mouthful from Basman.  One problem is that he allows no escape from sentimentality.  Koons is turning around the criticism of some art that it's sentimental and saying that the sentimentality is itself the art?  What if you're not looking for sentimentality at all?  What if you regard sentimentality as, well, sentimental -- that is, banal and boring and superificial and tedious and commonplace?  What if "sentimental" does little for you?  I, for one, don't see great art in most everyday crap or most everyday sentiment.  Someone, one day, will put Hallmark cards in an art museum, and we will be asked to consider them as art.  Answer:  As Hallmark cards, they will vary in quality.  As art, they're not very good.  See the multi-factor balancing test.  Does that make me an unknowing ironically detached boob?  Jeez, I hope not.

Basman continues, "One goes from Koons into the world with dialectically wider eyes, open in a child's way--in the best sense--to what *taste*  instructs is worthless."  Yes, well, I still think balloon animals are lame, even after having my eyes widened by a giant statue of one.  Children are relatively stupid and easily impressed.  Adults have gone through the ringer to some extent.  They may want to recapture a child-like state, but that's impossible and, therefore, dishonest as a function or goal of art.  Besides, innocence is an ugly concept -- a distraction from reality, a denial of humanity.  Those who ardently crave it are, frankly, sick.  Better to deepen our understanding of ourselves and our reality than to, like a drug addict, try to revert.

"Taste" is not necessarily political, and, though it can be a pain in the ass for the lazy and somewhat mysterious for the uneducated, it need not be oppressive or threatening.  The fact is that great music, for example -- serious music, music that demonstrates technical achievement, intellectual achievement, originality, and conveys a far greater depth of emotion and a far greater range of emotion than most popular music -- is actually better music by any artistic standard.  See, again, the multi-factor balancing test.  I think great art is important.  I think kids should be taught that it's important and not encouraged to think that their fatuous knee-jerk resistance to it is somehow legitimate.  Not only does Koons fail at his adolescent project to deconstruct taste, democratize art, and blow our minds, but he and his accomplices end up shitting on good art by insisting on the dubious propositions that there's nothing so good about it -- that it might as well be a coffee maker on a wall or monkey poop.  It's just not persuasive.

“So I guess I 'd ask you to tell me in a way I could understand, and I don't presume you cannot, in straight forward terms concerning Matisse what exactly was the transformation of your "perception of the quotidian " that he brought about?”  Basman

I am having a hard time understanding why your friend would have been unable to explain what is about Jane Austen that makes her an important writer, but more importantly why you wouldn’t have been able to figure it out for yourself?

Jane Austen as a writer who challenged conventions and our perceptions of the quotidian is something that a 19c writer would have been able to see much better than we can. Whatever is original and challenging in her work has already been absorbed by the literary tradition: these include her portrayal of character mostly middle class women, but not only women in a way that was new.  More stunningly she showed the kinds of complex and passionate drama that could have been created in small social settings.

She opened up a whole new realm of experience which other writers have since taken up and explored in even more depth.

She lived at time of intense artistic exploration and Samuel Richardson also opened up with Clarissa a new of dramatizing and finally exploring reality. It was his epistolary novels that in the 18th allied bourgeois subject matter with ancient narrative plots, mostly the Hellenistic novel, (not always written by Greeks) and created a news form: the epistolary novel.

The question I take it then is why do we read Austen today? One answer is her importance in the history of the novel. Another is the satisfying nature of her plot constructions, her deployment of language, specifically her balanced syntax, her use of irony and the construction of interesting characters that speak to us even today.  She is to the novel what Vermeer is to painting: she took a limited subject her narrow milieu and translated it into a cosmos in the Greek sense of the word: a universe with its own special order.

In any case a real discussion about Jane Austen would have to include references to the history of the novel just as a discussion of Matisse or any painted would have to include references to the history of art.

I’ll turn to Matisse in my next posting

This is an extremely long topic and I’ll try to be a brief as I can. However, you need to contribute some to this discourse by familiarizing yourself with the work of Matisse and some of the issues involved in this discussion. No passive observer will ever understand these issues.

In any case, the quotidian here is in the context of our perception of art in relation to the world. To become fully engaged with Matisse’s aims one has to keep in mind his understanding and rejection of certain aspects of the history of Western art.

Most Western art since the quattrocento has been powered by an impulse towards perspectivism which placed the viewer in a privileged position vis-à-vis the scene in the painting.  

Matisse too, certainly belongs to this tradition as does Picasso in spite of his Platonic idealization of his object in his cubist paintings.

Now there is also since almost the very beginning of perspectivism a counter tradition, a pull towards a criticism of perspectivism which took a number of forms. (The 19c British pre-Raphaelites, for example, was a school that attempted to go beyond perspectivism by going back to certain medieval styles.)

One of its more interesting ones is in the painting Las Meninas by Velasquez (1656). In that painting the painter shows us a painter at work. He also seems the painter as a conjurer who perpetrates a trompe d'oeil. This is because all art is, as we all know illusion: it creates the illusion of a three dimensional reality on a two dimensional surface.

Velasquez by showing the painter within the painting both deepens the illusion and makes it visible: the painting then both mirrors the world as well as creates it.

Fifty years earlier towards the beginning of the 17th c Cervantes had done something similar: he showed in his novel Don Quixote that narratives influence our view of reality. In the novel the main character goes mad because he takes the fiction he reads literally.

This is the comic part of the novel. In a more serious vein the novel shows that all the characters and by implication even his readers take the fictions we read literally.

I assume that you already know about this novel and I won’t go into it in detail.

I do want to point the historic parallel between DQ and Las Meninas.

I also want to make a further claim. These works not only challenged the individual’s view of reality they were cultural transformative as well. It’s no ideal claim to say that all novels in one way or another go back to DQ and that most of them either consciously or not have adopted the theme that fictions are not just imitative but also creative of what we call the real world.

In the same way mimetic painting also created our experience of the visual world.

If this is harder to see it is because we are bombarded today by both stories of all kinds (true narratives as well as invented ones). We are also saturated be images of all sorts (from photography, cinema, 24hrs TV, images on i-phones and i-pods, etc.) most of which seem real to us.

Hence in order to see how radical mimetic art as well as realistic fiction were you need to imagine a world without such images and without fictional stories.

In fact, a good quality mirror in which we could see our own likeness was not invented till the Renaissance and didn’t go into mass production till the 19c.

Most people throughout our history didn’t know what they looked like much less had a sense of framing visual images of daily events. They saw sacred images in Churches, but there few if any images available of daily life.

I don’t have time go through all the details of this fascinating history.

My point is that our sense of reality took centuries to take shape. This view of the real was challenged though, covertly, by paintings like Las Meninas and overtly by art movements like the Pre-Raphaelites in 19c England.

It eventually came to be dissolved first by Impressionist painters and their successors (especially important here is Cezanne) of which Matisse was an outstanding example. Picasso and other Cubists too played an important role but these painters opted for more abstract forms.

Matisse on the other challenged the mimetic, which to say the perspectival, view of reality but never veered towards the absolute abstract.

Instead he adopted techniques from pre-perspective art especially the art of China and the Arabesques of North Africa.

Now to my mind while eschewing pure abstraction but not embracing traditional mimesis Matisse challenges our daily habits of perceiving art as well as the actual world. (Not all his paintings are equally successful, but each one is interesting in its own way.)

He frustrates out desire for mimetic representation especially because so many of his paintings offer us as a tease actual recognizable which when looked at closely turn out to be merely decorative objects. Even his portraits have a static and unreal quality to them. Matisse said that he didn’t paint objects but “the difference between things.

To me he is the Cervantes of art.

Itzik, look through some paintings of Matisse and if you want me to explicate one in terms of what I just said let me know.

Also I was gong to bring in Proust, but this would mean many more hours of work et je n'ai pas le temps.

Many excellent points, jhildner, though I would take issue with the notion that an artist can "deconstruct art" in his own work and still call it art.

Deconstruction is itself an operation (and act and not just an idea) and as such it belongs to the content of the work and not its form. To use deconstruction in ones work then is to obscure the form/content distinction so crucial in art.

Derrida tried to deal with this issue in his essay about “framing" in art (he wanted to deconstruct the framing mechanism that makes art possible) and I don't think he quite succeeded either.

Take away the frame and you don’t just deconstruct art you destroy it. Moreover, as any good deconstructionist knows the work of deconstruction requires constant work since one can always reconstruct the deconstruction.  In fact, deconstruction implies reconstruction as well as the obverse.

jack and jh

I've just seen your posts and will try to reply as best i can in a bit, just give me a couple or 3 days.

jh your fuck you has some of the most rigorous thinking behind it in the history of fuck yous.

Is La Staller/Ciciiolina's pre-Koons oeuvre "art"? If Koons' stuff is considerd art, why not Cicciolina's?

Or Ciccio Chong's?

At some point, perhaps, Warhol wanted to be a serious artist; he left commercial work to pursue a gallery career.  But his stuff was never as charming or witty as the English artists who created Pop Art, and by the end, it was just a way to make money, lots of it.

As for Koons, he seems to have gone into art the way some people go into accounting.  It's ALL about the money . . .

I see that I am in a slight minority here: one brave fool staring down the multitudes.

keep staring until your eyeballs dry out.

will reply this weekend

Norvall 13 it isn't all about the money, but as empty pleasures go, having it is one of the best.

I am looking forward to your post, Itzik.

To Jack and Jhildner:

(Jack it would take 6 of me, maybe more, to know what you know, and even that many may not be enough, and I said to you before you probably forget in a day more than I will know or learn in a month and that I invariably learn from my exchanges with you, but, that preemptively said in my own defence, here goes.)

Post # 1

Jack I want to argue against your notion that great art challenges "our assumptions about the every day world we live in." In doing so, I don't want to argue against your claim, a conceptually different claim, that great art deepens (and heightens I’d add) "our understanding of what we take to be real" because I agree with that. But then I would quarrel with the notion that great art causes "us to question our basic assumptions" as opposed to being merely confirmatory, which is what you say that kitsch is, in the way I defined it--"art of high sentimentality or of high exaggeration..." In so arguing I would not say that great art never challenges our assumptions or can never cause us to question them, I just want to say that  your “great art criteria" are not even close to being necessary conditions of great art.

I want to, in discussing Koons, turn your criteria back on you some by contending--leaving aside the question of the quality of his work--his intent is precisely, and some might say didactically at the expense of artistic merit and complexity, to challenge assumptions and cause them to be questioned.

I want to suggest to you that you are conflating art as challenging and causing us to question our assumptions about the lived world, with doing that to our assumptions about the artistic tradition in which the work finds itself situated. I think the former notion is a piety and the latter notion, best expressed by T. S. Eliot in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, to be correct as Eliot has it, but not as you have it. For, on your criteria, an excellent period piece or specific work within a particular tradition or genre, will not amount to great art on either separated out branch of your conflation: the particular piece or work will be excellent in itself but will neither challenge our assumptions about the world or cause us to question them; nor will it, being solidly within a tradition or a genre, question or cause us to challenge the aesthetics of that tradition or genre. But it will in Eliot's sense have a dynamic relation to its tradition, both affecting it and being contextualized by it.

Again leaving Koons's merits to the side, he tries to climb both of the conflated branches. He wants to challenge the tradition in which he finds himself and he wants to challenge, and cause us to challenge, the world.

Three further markers:

(1) There is some slippage between our agreed upon notion of art causing us "to see the world more deeply"--actually both an idea and a metaphor that require an immense amount of untangling, which I will not here try-- and that which is "confirmatory". I contend they are not so easily distinguished as you suggest. What I really think you mean by "confirmatory" is "unaffected", for when  the responses  are: "yes this is so much what that is like" or "yes I have felt this" or "that is exactly what I think" and like responses, we are midst of generally being deeply affected and simultaneously of having our own sense of experience confirmed and deepened too.

(2) I continue to take issue with any notion that holds that any person cannot have, in his or her own subjectivity, responses to what you might consider banal or low and middle brow that are as intense or complex as whatever affects anyone taking in and responding to great art. And here, in the comparability of subjective response, it will be good to distinguish sharply between those responses that take us to the world as such and those responses that take us into the artistic context referable to the work. For with respect to the latter, for the initiated and the knowing, those immersed in the tradition, there will be a necessarily more rich and complex response. (Remember how Monkey climaxed in Portnoy’s Complaint on hearing recited to her Yeats’s Leda And The Swan.)

(3) I think there may also be some conflation in your comment that "The camera too changed the way we perceive reality btw, and the motion picture camera even more so”. Here you may be, with respect, running different themes together. We can debate the hallmarks of great art, its effects, and so on, centered on the thesis of it necessarily questioning and challenging assumptions, but that is entirely a separate issue from the effects of technology--for now I am not defining artistic technique or artistic tools as coming within technology, for which coming within a good argument can be made. The effects of technology, in the way I am defining that term, do not, I don't think, go to our central question.

I have not read Proust. And I am also, from what I do not know, unable to discuss the idea of how "impressionism transformed our sense of the world" without pretending that I know something I don't know much about. But, just along the lines of our argument, clearly impressionism is, among other things, a collection of discernable techniques, a time (and somewhat of a place) marked by, and identified with, particular artists, and with an impact on literature and music. So I will not for one moment argue with its aesthetic impact as a matter of apprehending art. But I would need (and want) to understand how impressionism challenged and brought into question our apprehension of reality as distinct from art itself. There is a very large sense in which art and culture--understood in the broad sense of the mind and emotion of a definable group-- reflect and affect each other; but I do not imagine you mean to put your argument in these terms, because works of greater or lesser worth can willy nilly have a huge impact on that broader culture.

I take your comments on my rambling on about my seeing the two very different singers back to back and about teaching the "middle brow"--solely confirmatory?--I Never Promised You A Rose Garden. But in that bit of rambling I wanted to support some of my arguments. My comment about insanity as a great mode of perception was not aimed at you saying it was, and if you mistook my meaning I am sorry. In any event, the issue is not insanity as a great mode of perception as such; rather it was aimed at either that as a theme in literature or simply artistic representations of madness. The point I was trying to make--going to art as not challenging assumptions, art as confirmatory, and the validity of subjective reaction to art that takes one to the world--was that I myself in that one passage of a not very heralded little book encountered a scene which told me something more concrete and moving about mental illness than anything I have ever encountered. Its very prosaicness, getting on a bus, struggling to pay the fare, not wilting under strangers' (imagined or real) gazes, and falling thankfully into an empty seat, made it searing and revelatory and deepened my sense of the world. Again I am sorry that my comments took you off topic and gave you impression that I was attributing to you an argument that you did not make.

With you, I make no brief for sensationalism as art or for art as sensationalism. But that which thrills us, excites us, arouses us, devastates us, exhilarates us, and so on, is, in another sense of the word, "sensational". The eliciting of these responses is not a necessary condition for great art, but they are significantly often the responses great art elicits and they can range from virtually the purely emotional to virtually the purely intellectual. But my point is, continuing my main argument, these responses need have nothing to do with challenging or questioning assumptions, either aesthetic ones or real world ones, as you re-describe your "modest" claim near to the end of your post # 1.

Post # 2

I agree with your rejection of prescribed response to any art, which was something I never argued for. I agree with you, as I would put it, that response is ultimately ineffable in being inherently "subjective" and that prescription defeats art and our response to it. And I have often thought that one essential constituent of criticism is being able to make response intellectual by explaining it and amplifying it clearly and accessibly. There will always and necessarily be a gap between the experience of our response and its critical articulation, a kind of heresy of paraphrase lurking here.

And here in fact we become bedevilled and get to an intellectual problem: because you will make one set of evaluative statements, say about Koons, and I will make another set of statements about him: he aestheticizes the world or he de-aestheticizes it; his work is or is not facile; he is genuinely artistic or he is an art hustler; and so on. Taking what I take to be implicit in Jhildner's point--and before him explicitly Matthew Arnold's--that what is great is what the most discerning minds over time (and it should be considerable time at that) say is great, what allows one set of evaluative statements to triumph over another. There seem to be at least two means: one is a flat out argument--civil one hopes--between the two contending views and it may be that A will persuade B or B A, usually that does not happen; or, two, there can be resort to authority in the Arnoldian sense. By that latter means the Koonians have an argument: he is feted and celebrated; he is shown at places like the Sonnabend Gallery or The Met or wherever; you can line up critical comment pro and con. And it gets even more tangled when you say “that such and such may have been Koons's intent, but that that did not get implemented in his work”, because then the argument is precisely about means

And that's really where I came in initially. I don't understand the need to be so prescriptive--and that's the prescription I am talking about--in rejecting his work. In fact, by the vehemence of the lead post--I understand that "the end of Western Civilization" trope was simply an attention grabber--which vehemence was underscored by the grab at attention--there was a prescribing and pseudo elitist privileging of response: only fools or the gulled or riff raff, generically plebians, so to speak, can speak of liking him. One can say the emperor has no clothes, but such ego centric, ego-implicating assertion in the face of a divided art world should better, I suggest, tread with slightly more measure, humility and tentativeness. I think of all the examples of newly introduced and mould breaking art--breaking aesthetic assumptions--and really new assumption breaking anything. Those entrenched in flimsy senses of themselves will feel threatened and seek to critically destroy. I come back to the former example I offered of the advent of bebop--only because I have just finished reading a book about it--and it is amazingly parallel to me what reactions this supposed "Chinese squalling" elicited and what reactions Koons elicits—the same dynamics at work.

By the way, to say that Koons aestheticizes the world is not argue for the collapse between the difference between art and actuality. It is to say we go from (his) art to the world with heightened/deepened apprehensions about the world that may or may not challenge or call into question our assumptions about actuality. Koons may have it mind to aim at what you describe the Italian Futurists aimed at, but he is certainly not a fool and he knows the difference between art and life.

I don't understand how I am appealing to authority to validate my perception and I could go on a while and talk about what I, no maven, found so affecting about The Puppy. But let me try a different tack, and about which the greatness of the art is not in question. Here is Wallace Stevens's brilliant small poem The Snowman:

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

________________

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

_____________

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

 ___________

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

______________

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

_________________

I know this poem backwards and forwards, virtually very syllable, have taught it, have written about it, and it absolutely knocks me out, or to be more critically precise blows me away. And I can talk about its craft much more than I can talk about Koons's. I can to some extent, not very well probably, describe the effect this poems has on me, how it makes me feel, but I don't think I can convey why very well. Nor with my enrapt responses to Mahalia Jackson or Maria Callas or Renee Fleming or Janis Joplin or Browning or Saul Bellow or Sophocles or Keats or Rembrandt or Brueghel or The Deer Hunter or Tender Mercies or Chopin or Kind Of Blue and ten trillion others. So what I am raising is the distinction between technical analysis, thematic analysis, and what you call the "ineffability of response" and what I would call "the ultimately ineffability of response.”

Hildner's Post

I have with flagging energy just re-read your post. Clearly I know where you stand.

I think you contradict yourself in your first paragraph. You start by saying, in trying to dispose of the question of labels, that art is "ultimately" what recognized authorities in the field call art. I don't have the energy to try to unpack what sounds so circular about that, but in any event does it not follow that what is good art is what these same folks say is good art. And if it is the case that mavens are saying that Koons is a good artist, then on your criterion that's what he is. Or at least on your criterion that propostion is arguable. But then you say, authoritatively that he is bad—and you say--goodness or badness-- is the real question.

I don't think, having regard to your second paragraph, you can approach artistic evaluation the way you would analyze the existence of say the quantifiable constituents of promissory estoppel or the tort of malicious prosecution. Those latter are essentially self defining and await only the judicial determination, possibly arbitrary but binding, subject to appeal, of the evidence and then the application of the law--the three or four fold or how many ever fold test--to the evidence based facts as found. Artistic evaluation is different. There are no fixed criteria for judgment. There is no binding authority as evaluation changes dramatically over time as cultural change informs the shifting criteria for judgment. Singular judicial determination, save for appeals, and save as precedent, are not in any determinative way reevaluated, though like  works of art outstanding decisions will be constantly be reviewed as to their reasoning and *objective* correctness. The only analogy I can see is the trivial one that like a legal test artistic evaluation goes on more than one criterion.

Thanks for letting me know about "The project of the critic" and I am glad that's settled. Not really of course. Who is to say what the "project of the critic is"? I say there is no project as such and criticism is generally speaking any discourse about art and artists from any point of view and in any context. I'm sure that the evaluation of the quality of a work, one aspect of criticism, takes into account some of things you mention, but not in the lock step way you suggest, and takes other things into account as well. What do you mean by "the ambitions of the work"? Do you mean thematically, stylistically, generically, symbolically, archetypally, the use of the materials at hand, the work's relation to a tradition, the anxiety of influence, the types of responses it wants to elicit, its comparative context--other art forms, other cultures, and so on? Do you mean the play as theatre, as poetry, as a dramatic work; the poem's aurality, its imagery, prosody, rhythms, diction, theme, its use of caesura, enjambment, whatever? So you will see that that criterion is rather inexhaustible and while it is not unhelpful to mention it, doing so barely hints at the virtually infinite richness of perspectives that might be brought to bear. And who is going to say what's "important" once the "authorities in the field" consider whatever art?

Something that purports to be wallpaper isn't art I suppose. I'd think it's wallpaper, although it could be nice or artful wallpaper at that. There is some general distinction operating here--is it some idea of the utilitarian-- that will allow me to distinguish between a car manual not being art and say a novella of the same length being art. With knick knacks one could go either way I'd think, but if they are trivial then that is what they are. But between the trivial and the sublime lies a vast gray spectrum that will bedevil the hard criterion of what is worthwhile or important.

Case in point Koons's vacuum cleaners and his rug shampoo machine don't necessarily merit a "fuck you" back to his "fuck you." Maybe he is not saying "fuck you"? Maybe he is, as has been suggested, trying to say something about, depict, the value of newness in a commodity culture, something about them being brand new and unsoiled, about them being empty containers, hollow at the core, about artifacts of mass culture and its commodities as values. Perhaps by placing them in plexi glass he withholds them, seals them off so that they cannot be gotten to and used, and so goes right to and plays with the notion of the utilitarian as a boundary separating art from non art. In this regard maybe there is something playfully serious and creative in detaching these objects from their function and re-contextualizing them as something wholly beautiful in their design and their lines, or on another view, as in instance of their emptiness and stasis in a commodified world.

Amongst his purposes, Koons wants to transform the content of a specific object by putting it into a specific context, specifically juxtapose specific objects, and so reform the objects to be seen in a new light, confuse and confound and blur artistic space and utilitarian space--a trade show say and gallery space. But the point is while clearly you detest his work, others, knowing, are enthusiastic about it and by your own first introduced criterion, that counts.

And on these ideas, Koons's ideas, why isn't there any escape from sentimentality?  My argument is that Koons refigures sentimentality, instructing and delighting those that apprehend his work that they should have confidence in their own judgment and taste, that they understand the possibilities for beauty in whatever they behold, embrace what they are drawn to and not worry about being artistically correct. And flowing through all this are a whole series of ideas and levels of irony that allow one to ascend with Koons to putting sentimentality in context. If this is not for you, that's fine. But it need not merit a "fuck you" because in my view Koons is saying "unfuck you" and giving his adherents a starting point in their art appreciation. If you are not looking for sentimentality at all, or not interested in the reconceiving  it through new contexts, avoid Koons. If you regard Koons as simply boring and banal and tedious then avoid him. And if you want to tender him a “fuck you”, that's good, I'm sure he'll survive.

Koons', as noted, aims at the exact opposite of what you denigrate him for. A child's eye is an eye of wonder; it is an eye of fascination with shape, texture, colour, pattern. Its apotheosis is perhaps captured in Freud's notion, regardless of its objective accuracy, of the polymorphous perverse. As we grow older, leave childhood behind, leave paradise behind, trudge through the world of experience, bear its burdens, become ironically detached boobs, what profundity and virtue lie in an art that would incline us to that sense of wonder, to that infatuation with sensuousness. We will not be children, but we may be able to respond as adults in the way of children. This also is a huge part of what Koons is about and aims at. And it is in its own way a similar reconciling ideal to what Blake sought after in his songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience and expressed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; it is the theme of the Tempest; it underlies all pastoral art; it is

Implicit in Imagism in English and American Poetry; it is magnificently there in Huckleberry Finn; it

is there in the complement of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained; it is pregnant in all coming of age literature that I can think of; it is pregnant in Catcher In The Rye; Dostovesky is shot through with it; it is implicit in the religious and literary notion of epiphany. It resides I the incantatory magic of oral poetry. Innocence to paradise lost to paradise regained is an archetypal theme. And along its contours sits Koons in his art. Koons may or may not achieve what he intends, but your notion that art in its apprehension cannot reconnect adults with child likeness in a dialectical way is, respectfully, grievously mistaken.

Koons understood as he would wish to be is not a knee jerk reaction to anything. At a minimum he provides a starting point for seeing art in all things, for restoring a connection with child like wonder that aging beats out of us. One can if one wishes, with work and study, move with him up a scale of more complex understandings of his work. It is trite that effort and study of art will reap their own rewards, but that is up to the individual and how he is raised and educated.. Most of us, I suspect, certainly me, enjoy a wide variety or art without having done the work and study for a lot of it.

Finally a word about music: what is this serious music you speak of; and what is this popular music you speak of? Do you draw a distinction between popular music and pop music? Do you want to articulate the standards by which the classical Wynton Marsails is technically, intellectually, emotionally, originally superior to the jazz man Wynton Marsalis, playing popular music and going back to jazz's roots before bebop when it jazz considered by some as an art music? Marsalis an equally adept classical and jazz player does not buy the distinction you make at least as far as jazz is concerned. How can you even speak of originality when jazz is by definition a music of improvisation? And how are you going to articulate a standard by which to measure "emotional depth"? (If you are meaning pop music as opposed to other kinds of music, you will get less of an argument from me, particularly considering your qualifier "most pop music." )

Back to Jack

You misunderstand my example of Jane Austen. I think I understand why she is a great writer though am grateful for any instruction on the subject. The issue I mooted with my friend was a version of the question I put to you about Matisse. Starting from the premise of her greatness I argued against my friend that that did not consist of her transforming our senses of reality, or in the terms you are I are discussing, her greatness did not consist of her challenging or calling into question my or his or any modern reader's assumptions. I take your good point that she challenged and called into question the assumptions of her day, though I can see that being argued both ways, that, rather, working within the confines of and accepting of the tightly structured social world of her day, she did not so much as challenge assumptions as penetrate the material and psychological depths of her world, which may be a way of saying the same thing you are. But the intellectual problem is that her greatness is universal. So in coming to the greatness of her art, given our issue, I expect to find in reading her, on your criteria as I understand them, something that, in your words, "challenges our assumptions about the every day world we live in" or at least causes us "to question our basic assumptions" as opposed to merely being confirmatory. I don't find in her what you say. Rather I find among other things brilliant prose, an authoritative and intensely appealing narrative voice laced with all modalities of tone as a way of expressing favor and disfavor, and much in between, her penetration, as I say, of the material conditions of her society, its graces and grim realities, and the psychological depths of her main characters, as you note her location of passion in the interstices of her tightly drawn world, and her great and sympathetic moral sensibility. My friend generally agreed with the foregoing, though he would put it into his own words and his own way. And while we both agreed that reading Austen perforce deepened and heightened our sense of the world, she was not in any way transformative nor altering of our habitual ways of looking at things.

Matisse

The good faith question was how Matisse transformed your "perception of the quotidian."

Your discussion of him in answering that question is somewhat beyond me.

But let me try, having done some homework.

You define the quotidian, which literally means daily or daily recurrence and what more or less was what  I meant, as "our perception of art in relation to the world." I am not precisely sure what you mean by that, but from the context of your post I am construing your phrase as meaning something like how art affects how we see the world, or, how we perceive art affects how we see the world, which construction is more or less what I had in mind.

You come to an answer to that by way of describing, and I am again grateful for your time and effort, how perspectivism puts the viewer in a dominant or privileged position in relation to the painted scene, in taking it in. That is a bit cryptic for me so some digging on my own has brought me this understanding. Perspectivism refers to the means by which the illusion of depth of created on a flat plane. It involved positing the point of greatest depth in the painting--the "vanishing point," and every aspect of composition was aligned to suggest that every aspect of a given painting is organized in a linear relation to its vanishing point. As I understand it artists came to use two or more vanishing points in their works. In any case, artists have been capable of recreating a realistic sense of three-dimensional space upon the flat surfaces of their canvases.

So ok I sort of get that and I sort of get the idea that the viewer is in a dominant position because

the points of depth are created with his perspective in mind and it is the distance between the viewer and the vanishing point which constitutes the illusion of depth.

So you say that Matisse belongs to this tradition (though you also seem to say he comes after the dissolving of this tradition by the Impressionists who he succeeded, but no matter.) And you note a counter tradition that attempts as you say to go beyond perspectivism. That also is not entirely clear to me so I sought out Les Meninas and looked at it with my untutored eyes. What I gather is that it is not clear who the true subject of the painting is. The viewer rather than being in a magisterial position in relation to the scene is left guessing about its true subject what with the screens, mirrors and the fluctuations between surface and interior, its essence being, to me, the confounding of perception.

So I sort of get the contrast between the tradition and the counter tradition as an aesthetic and as a theme about the nature of apprehending reality. And I understand your comment about the painting's meta-theme or comment on itself by depicting the painter painting.

I come to your point how mimesis--mimetic painting-- creates our experience of the visual world. But I am not certain how you establish that claim. You ask me to imagine a world without mimetic images and realistic fiction. But the notion of mimesis is an old story: the idea of art as a representation of nature is at least as old as Plato, notwithstanding admonitions as to poets being too "touched" to be truth tellers. I imagine a world where the quotidian was generally apprehended not so much differently than how it is apprehended today. Chaucer for one tells me that; so does Rabelais, albeit about 125 years later. So for that matter do Plato and Aristotle for

the portions of Aristotle that I have read—when it comes to him I prefer small portions.

Again I'd need to be persuaded that mimetic art transformed how men generally perceived actuality. I'd perhaps agree to agree with your proposition that our sense of reality, in our context, what it means to apprehend the world, to experience it sensorially, including visually, but I feel

that your are loading a notion of cultural change into your phrase "our sense of reality." Nevertheless, my agreement goes to a slow moving, centuries’ long process, where by means of a multitude of events and developments, men's sense of things profoundly changed. Given that immensely complex process, I see little sanction for your abiding argument here.

Just to be clear, you will get no argument from me that over the time you sketch artists were challenging and subverting aesthetic assumptions and that the representations of reality in art changed transformatively, but not so in life as a result of art. It is that claim that I am resisting.

The point gets a little easier to argue when you get to Matisse, who himself was the subject of the question prompting your discussion in the first place, because he lived until 1954. I have looked at his paintings in the past, never studiously or in any great depth that I recall, and looked at some more as a result of your post and read a bit about him. (I have always liked very much his self-portrait.) I take your word as to his place in challenge to mimesis, though not going over to Abstract Impressionism; I take your word as to the techniques he adopted from pre-perspective art; and I take what I read about his style and themes, who influenced him and who he influenced and so on. I take what you say and what I read about how his techniques constituted a new way of representing and apprehending reality. And I take what you say and what I read and what I untutoredly sense is his artistic greatness.

But let me ask you two questions: how did he transformatively affect, ie transform, your own taking in of the world, not the world of art, but the world, and how did he affect, transform from say 1900 onwards our perception of reality, again not the world of art, but the world?

Over and out!

p.s.

...though I would take issue with the notion that an artist can "deconstruct art" in his own work and still call it art.

Deconstruction is itself an operation (and act and not just an idea) and as such it belongs to the content of the work and not its form. To use deconstruction in ones work then is to obscure the form/content distinction so crucial in art.

Derrida tried to deal with this issue in his essay about “framing" in art (he wanted to deconstruct the framing mechanism that makes art possible) and I don't think he quite succeeded either.

Take away the frame and you don’t just deconstruct art you destroy it. Moreover, as any good deconstructionist knows the work of deconstruction requires constant work since one can always reconstruct the deconstruction.  In fact, deconstruction implies reconstruction as well as the obverse...

I had wanted but then omitted to say a word or three on this.

I have trouble following part of your line of reasoning here if we all can agree with what deconstruction means. That word like existentialism is used frequently in different contexts and starts to lose  universally consistent meaning. My sense of its use here is along the lines of the artist self consciously subverting his art in his art, which is different from my understanding of Derrrida's use of it. I take the element of self consciousness from your phrase "the artist 'can deconstruct'..." and from your notion that "Deconstruction is itself an operation..."

That said, I am not totally following your point that deconstruction belongs to content and not to form. Why would that be? And how do you even separate from from content?  Content emerges from form:; they are different ways of talking about the same thing; they are inseparable. Take the painting you referred me to Les Meninas is there any aspect of the form of that painting, its composition, its use of light and contrasting darkness, the texture of its brush strokes, the compositional relationships and ten trillion other things, do they all not merge into the complex imgae which thematically suggests (at least in part) something along the lines of, as you say, "...the painter as a conjurer who perpetrates a trompe d'oeil. This is because all art is, as we all know illusion..." and "Velasquez by showing the painter within the painting both deepens the illusion and makes it visible..."

There is deconstruction in this painting, I think, in the sense I think you are using it. It operates formally and tecnically, I'd say. I'd be interested in you making  the case otherwise. And how does deconstruction here obscure the "form content distinction" (which, as noted,  is a problematic distinction in any event)?

I agree with the thrust of your final above cited comment. I am not familiar with where Derrida tried to destroy art's frame. Where was that?  I'd be interested in following his argument.  In any event, it seems self evidently true that, as you note, if one erases art's frame one erases the meaning of art. But I have never understood deconstruction to be assimilable to destruction, which is why I am interested in seeing that being argued for by Derrrida.

Itzik,

I will for now offer a quick reply to one or two points in you interesting post. (I’ll come back to the rest later on.)

I had an inkling that you would bring up the distinction between art deepening and heightening our sense of what we take to be real and art challenging our assumptions about the every day world we live in. These are not conceptually different claims from my point of view but are different aspects of the same issue.

Firstly, we are discussing art and arts relation to the world. But art (as every human activity looked at conceptually) on has to be viewed simultaneously as in its generality as well as in its specificity. In this case, I tried to discuss art in general or more specifically western art in general as well as Matisse’s art in particular. I never did get around to discussing a specific painting by this artist. Perhaps I should do so later on.

In any case, art in general challenges our assumptions about the every day world and it has been doing so for hundreds of years. A great artist through his or her art working within that tradition will challenge our view of the reality (assumptions) but the artist will do so through the medium of his art, by re-conceptualizing the very idea of art.

In other words an artist will challenge our assumptions indirectly by asking us to look a new at both the world of art and through it at the real world.

This is a complex operation because we are asked to view afresh something (the actual world) which art itself has already given us as “the real world.” I tried to explain through the example of the history of mirrors.

We don’t know what we look like. None of us can see ourselves directly. We can only see ourselves through the medium of the mirror.   Some will say, ‘but the mirror is an imperfect tool since it distorts the image it projects.’  (The photograph is a kind of mirror which fixes the image.) True enough but how are we to tell how it distorts it since we have no access to the original image which is ourselves. Other than that we only see ourselves through the medium of the community. Other people tell us what we look like.

In any case, we have no access to the real us. Our view of ourselves is mediated through different mediums. Similarly our view of the world is mediated through different mediums and one of the most powerful of these is the medium of the arts: visual, verbal, auditory arts.

Now, we are born into a word already fixed by the arts. We don’t know what the actual world is like in itself outside the medium of the arts any more than we know what we look like outside the medium of man made objects such as mirrors or photographs.

Secondly, another comparison: I said above that Cervantes challenged our every day view of reality in his novel Don Quixote. He did so by showing us that our narrative view of the world was already mediated by other stories. Hence Quixote’s predicament in the novel is the predicament of the reader: how can we know the real world directly outside the medium of narratives.

I don’t want to make a universal claim about this since I believe that there are distinctions to be made between fictional narratives and historical ones. However, the point is that Cervantes through his novel mounted a four hundred years plus challenge to our view of the actual world. He did so by changing the nature of the narrative art and by making readers aware of the important perhaps decisive mediatory function of narrative fiction in our view of the world.

Now, back to Matisse:

It’s through the medium of his art that he challenges our view of the every day world and not directly. First he does so by asking us to look again at the history of painting with its easy assumption, for his point of view, that realist painting presents us with an actual representation of the real world.  

He does so mainly, but not exclusively, through the reintroduction of the pre-perspectivist point of view in painting along side perspectivism.

This interplay between perspective and non perspective (ornamental) points of view create a tension which forces the viewer to reassess his understanding of perspectivism and ask himself questions about the relation between perspectivism and actual reality behind it.

Hence the challenge he mounts to our assumptions about our assumptions about actual reality.  The challenge is not direct as in say an Escher or a Magritte painting where they play with perspectivism and created visual paradoxes. No, Matisse is no trickster. He is interesting in working within the tradition of Western art. His challenge hence is much deeper long lasting and more influential than that of the other painters. He revolutionized modern art. Only Picasso, who was doing something different, has had a similar influence on modern art. I prefer Matisse because his influence is longer lasting, it seems to me, and because he never turned away from the essential nature of Western art which is mimesis. Picasso abandons mimesis and moves towards a Platonic conception of the image.

Of course I need to discuss some actual Matisse paintings and if you are interested I will do so in my next post.

 I will answer the rest of you post later on.

On Derrida’s notions of framing see:

La Verite En Peinture by Jacques Derrida

www.amazon.com/.../ref=sr_1_2

There is an English translation:

The Truth in Painting by Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bennington, and Ian McLeod

www.amazon.com/.../ref=sr_adv_b

Look at the Kantian concept of “the Parergon” which he tried to deconstruct.

“I want to, in discussing Koons, turn your criteria back on you some by contending--leaving aside the question of the quality of his work--his intent is precisely, and some might say didactically at the expense of artistic merit and complexity, to challenge assumptions and cause them to be questioned.”

I don’t get this Itzik, I thought your whole point was that Koons was a great artist?

It’s the excellent quality of one’s work that makes an artist great. Also, I fear that your “your criteria back on you” makes it seem that you are arguing to win a point rather than a thesis in which you truly believe. I hope I am wrong.

Ina any case you also say:

“I want to suggest to you that you are conflating art as challenging and causing us to question our assumptions about the lived world, with doing that to our assumptions about the artistic tradition in which the work finds itself situated.”

Well, not exactly. My argument was and is that art (as a whole---see my previous post) mediates our sense of the real and hence any challenge to the artistic tradition will of necessity also be a challenge to our sense of the real. A challenge is not a negation of the real, Itzik.

“I think the former notion is a piety and the latter notion, best expressed by T. S. Eliot in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, to be correct as Eliot has it, but not as you have it. For, on your criteria, an excellent period piece or specific work within a particular tradition or genre, will not amount to great art on either separated out branch of your conflation: the particular piece or work will be excellent in itself but will neither challenge our assumptions about the world or cause us to question them; nor will it, being solidly within a tradition or a genre, question or cause us to challenge the aesthetics of that tradition or genre. But it will in Eliot's sense have a dynamic relation to its tradition, both affecting it and being contextualized by it.”

I find this confusing, Itzik. Hence I will not attempt to disentangle it, less I add to the confusion.

“Again leaving Koons's merits to the side, he tries to climb both of the conflated branches. He wants to challenge the tradition in which he finds himself and he wants to challenge, and cause us to challenge, the world.”

Again, I don’t see how you can leave the issue of Koon’s merit as an artist aside and argue that his art challenges “the tradition.” Which tradition, doe she challenge, the tradition of bad art?

Then you say:

“Three further markers:”

But after the three markers unrelated to Koons you go one to talk about Proust and then talk about other matters without coming back to Koons.

You also introduce an Arnoldian concept:

“Taking what I take to be implicit in Jhildner's point--and before him explicitly Matthew Arnold's--that what is great is what the most discerning minds over time (and it should be considerable time at that) say is great, what allows one set of evaluative statements to triumph over another.”

Now, since at least here you came back to the question of merit in art if not the specific question of Koons merit I’ll answer this point.

I agree with Arnold that great art is “what the most discerning minds over time say is great.” Great art also is both a challenge to other artists and a source of inspiration. Matisse didn’t care for Cubism (he actually gave that art form its name). Yet, he was profoundly influenced by Picasso and the cubist form of art.

I doubt Arnold meant by discerning minds art curators who exhibit cars belonging to famous people as happened recently at the Boston Museum of Fine (sic) Arts:

“Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection

Sunday, March 6, 2005 - Sunday, July 3, 2005”

www.mfa.org/.../sub.asp

Finally you come back in an overt manner to Koons as an artist.

“By that latter means the Koonians have an argument: he is feted and celebrated; he is shown at places like the Sonnabend Gallery or The Met or wherever; you can line up critical comment pro and con. And it gets even more tangled when you say “that such and such may have been Koons's intent, but that that did not get implemented in his work”, because then the argument is precisely about means

And that's really where I came in initially. I don't understand the need to be so prescriptive--and that's the prescription I am talking about--in rejecting his work. In fact, by the vehemence of the lead post--I understand that "the end of Western Civilization" trope was simply an attention grabber--which vehemence was underscored by the grab at attention--there was a prescribing and pseudo elitist privileging of response: only fools or the gulled or riff raff, generically plebians, so to speak, can speak of liking him. One can say the emperor has no clothes, but such ego centric, ego-implicating assertion in the face of a divided art world should better, I suggest, tread with slightly more measure, humility and tentativeness. I think of all the examples of newly introduced and mould breaking art--breaking aesthetic assumptions--and really new assumption breaking anything. Those entrenched in flimsy senses of themselves will feel threatened and seek to critically destroy. I come back to the former example I offered of the advent of bebop--only because I have just finished reading a book about it--and it is amazingly parallel to me what reactions this supposed "Chinese squalling" elicited and what reactions Koons elicits—the same dynamics at work.”

I quoted the whole passage because again of its dizzying wordiness and because I am sorry to say that I don’t understand the point you are making.

Why do you think Koons’ intent is, “to challenge assumptions and cause them to be questioned?”

Then you go on to say in the next paragraph that:

“By the way, to say that Koons aestheticizes the world is not argue for the collapse between the difference between art and actuality. It is to say we go from (his) art to the world with heightened/deepened apprehensions about the world that may or may not challenge or call into question our assumptions about actuality. Koons may have it mind to aim at what you describe the Italian Futurists aimed at, but he is certainly not a fool and he knows the difference between art and life.”

Now, can you tell me how you go from looking at his statue of the Puppy “to “heightened/deepened apprehensions about the world?” Perhaps you can choose an example of a work of his which does “deepen your apprehension of reality?”

I love the Stevens poem you mentioned also but I don’t see its relevance to the Koons statue.  Your explanations didn’t enlighten me, Itzik. I see very well that you loved the statue and that, as you say, you don’t have the “technical expertise to explain it,” yet what is at issue isn’t just an explanation about your love for the statue, but its transformative effect on you: “how it deepened your apprehension of reality.”

You say to Hildner apropos Koon’s vacuum cleaners:

“Amongst his purposes, Koons wants to transform the content of a specific object by putting it into a specific context, specifically juxtapose specific objects, and so reform the objects to be seen in a new light, confuse and confound and blur artistic space and utilitarian space--a trade show say and gallery space. But the point is while clearly you detest his work, others, knowing, are enthusiastic about it and by your own first introduced criterion, that counts.”

That may be his reason for producing “consumer art” but my question to you is once one has understood his rational (what he is trying to do) why would you want to see it again, and again, and yet again? (Assuming that one is not a journalist or professional art student in need of a thesis.)

Still addressing Hildner, you then go on to make large claims for Koons as someone who

“aims at the exact opposite of what you denigrate him for. A child's eye is an eye of wonder; it is an eye of fascination with shape, texture, colour, pattern. Its apotheosis is perhaps captured in Freud's notion, regardless of its objective accuracy, of the polymorphous perverse. As we grow older, leave childhood behind, leave paradise behind, trudge through the world of experience, bear its burdens, become ironically detached boobs, what profundity and virtue lie in an art that would incline us to that sense of wonder, to that infatuation with sensuousness. We will not be children, but we may be able to respond as adults in the way of children. This also is a huge part of what Koons is about and aims at. And it is in its own way a similar reconciling ideal to what Blake sought after in his songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience and expressed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; it is the theme of the Tempest; it underlies all pastoral art; it is…”

Do you really believe this? So now, Koons is appealing to the innocence of childhood. I am surprised you didn’t bring in Wordsworth’s “Intimation of immortality from recollections of early childhood?”

But earlier you said that Koons wanted “to transform the content of a specific object by putting it into a specific context, specifically juxtapose specific objects, and so reform the objects to be seen in a new light, confuse and confound and blur artistic space and utilitarian space--a trade show say and gallery space.”

In other words, that he was making a sophisticate conceptual argument. So is he appealing to the spontaneous playful and creative imagination of viewers or is he appealing to our rational mind?

Finally the queston of evaluation of modern artist like Koons becomes complicated in an age when Museum curators and many critics who write on art for a living have a monitary vested interest in the subject they pursue. The Ralph Lauren car exhibit above is but one example of how Museums compromise their institutions by introducing object which while attracting viewers are clearly not art. Koons is a mediocre artist, but he at least is an artist.

I'll reply to the rest of your post later on.

Jack I sent you a note here this morning that never got here. Its gists were that I just noted your posts, thanked you for them, have not yet read them carefully but will and will rely after getting any further post from you.

Itzik, each and every paragraph you wrote, no each sentence could be answered by a chapter in a book.

Instead of   typing my way to carpal tunnel, I’ll abbreviate my comments:

First about perspectivism, my point was quite simple: it’s a technique in painting which we have come to feel represents the world realistically. Moreover, since the discovery of photography and photographical means of reproduction, we take it for granted that perspectivism offers us a “slice of reality.”

Second: Mimesis is a different thing in literature and in art. I used the term interchangeably with artistic realism since it also refers to the representation of the actual world either in painting as well as in literature.

Mimesis in painting changed in the western world after the introduction of perspectivism.

It also changed our view of the world.  

There have been many studies on the subject from the early cursory histories such as from Giorgio Vasari’s Life of the great Artists to the 20c Gombrich and beyond. There have been moments of great realism in western art (and I presume also in other cultures) such as we see in some Roman frescos and presumably in Greek art painting also but too little of it survives for it have had a major influence on the tradition.

Also Plato’s and Aristotle’s view of mimesis differ and Aristotle’s had more to do with the structure of literature (drama) than with painting. Plato’s challenge to realism in art was very influential in as much as it fed the counter realist movement in art, albeit indirectly.

In any case, one could devote many posts on a single aspect of any of the hundreds of issues raised here: hence the need to narrow our focus.

As to the “realism” one sees in Chaucer, it is certainly there but it is subsumed by the allegorical design of the whole work. (Are you familiar with Auerbach’s study of Mimesis in Western Literature?) Works such as  Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose which Chaucer translated, or Dante’s Divine Comedy, or Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian Romances, or Gawain and the Green Knight are more representative of Medieval narrative.

There are many studies on the medieval mentality which show how different their world view was to ours.

In any case coming back to Matisse, he like most western painters worked within the tradition of perspectivist painting. He also challenged it and consequently challenged our view about perspectivism and about reality. This is all I meant to say about it. Whether you (or I) agree with him or not is immaterial. You asked me why I liked Matisse and why I thought he challenged our view of actual reality and this is my short answer.

Jack I'm just off to England.

Catch you when I get back.

Have a good and enjoyable trip, Itzik.

Thanks for your good wishes Jack. I'll be tramping around the Lake District. Maybe I can find Tintern Abbey and  maybe I can spot a few Daffodils.

p.s.

1. Go Hillary!

Yes, go Hillary.

Lake district? Sounds educational.

Have fun there and say hello to a daffodil for me.

You may know by now that I think Jeff Koons, whom the Metropolitan is now showing on its roof garden