Posts tagged art

I'm not sure this a helpful model for charity per se, but it does feel a bit like a prophetic act. I wonder if our dollar-distributor would have fared much better near the same spot 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. An economist would likely note that what our prophet found out was that most people priced the amount of effort and risk involved in figuring out what was really going on, making a promise to a stranger, and then either carrying it out or reneging on it, at something more than a buck.

re: art, cultural worlds, economics, money, prophesy

Nate:

About the same time that Ibnale was handing out umbrellas, Brett Lockspeiser took $100 worth of dollar bills to the 16th Street Mission BART Station and held up a sign.

"I will give you $1 for you to give to someone else," the sign said. Throughout the evening rush, Lockspeiser stood in the station, trying to give away dollar bills.

"Everyone though I was trying to scam them," he said. "They wanted to know what I was up to. I told them they just had to promise to give the $1 to someone else."

After three hours, Lockspeiser had managed to give away only $52. One passer-by did not take the $1 but, suspecting that Lockspeiser was down and out, handed him a pair of socks.

Reflections on critic Dave Hickey's essay "Frivolity and Unction," from his book Air Guitar, about what's gained and lost by considering a work of art to be "important." If perceived importance (or, in a parallel that comes up later in this article, percieved holiness) keeps us from fully taking in and making something of a cultural artifact, then the unimportant and the unsanctified might have an advantage. But I wonder whether we can hope for a concept of importance, and of holiness, that doesn't shut out but rather welcomes in.

re: art, criticism, holiness, importance

Nate:

[Dave] Hickey’s essay “Frivolity and Unction” is an assault against “puritanical,” non-profit interests in the 1990s that aimed to sanctify the practice of artmaking, leaving it immune to real critical appraisal. He says in the essay that art would benefit from being considered a “bad, silly and frivolous thing to do,” for, if we could admit that art was frivolous, it could fail, and thus, by contrast, be allowed to succeed in ways sacred objects aren’t. The essay is a staple of art criticism courses and is usually met with fierce resistance, as it ruffles most people’s sense of what’s proper too much to actually listen to what Hickey is saying. By “silly, bad and frivolous,” he means art should be unimportant enough to be criticized. Ascribing general terms like “silly” and “frivolous” might seem belittling, but they should be distinguished from more active and specific terms about how art directly communicates, such as “unmoving” or “ineffective.” “Art” can be unimportant and still allow for the experience of a work of art to be life-changing. I value the memories I have of listening to baseball games on my grandparents’ porch, but Baseball, as a concept, remains entirely unimportant. Such concepts as baseball, art, and Hickey’s example of rock and roll, are wholly unimportant except for the experiences they foster and the history to which they contribute.

This sounds like a fantastic exhibition. I love the more casual draftsmanship of this detail from one of the drawings on display at the Met's Pen and Parchement blog: the Evangelist Mathew, from the 11th-century Arenberg Gospels.

re: art, books, cultural worlds, drawing, europe, museums

Nate:

The exhibition is a knockout, at once sumptuous and restrained. The entire show fits into three galleries, but what galleries they are! Holcomb has gathered books and manuscripts from museums, libraries, and religious institutions in Europe and the United States. And it is in these bound volumes that the signal graphic achievements of the Middle Ages are to be found. Everybody, of course, knows the illuminated manuscripts of those centuries, with their dazzlingly colored pages, finished to a jewel-like shimmer. Holcomb's great idea has been to set those works aside for the time being, and focus instead on what have traditionally perhaps been regarded as humbler fare. These are the pictures done with black or brown or sometimes colored ink, many of which have, at least at first glance, a more casual, more informal character. Such works, she argues, put us in touch with the medieval artist's most immediate impressions and responses. I think she is absolutely right. There is an easygoing, wonderfully lowdown quality about a lot of the work in this show. We have gotten beyond the delicious formality of the illuminated manuscript. We are seeing artists in a variety of moods, sometimes ruminative or contemplative, at other times more intuitive, more playful. Even when the artists are doing something wonderfully elegant, it is an off-the-cuff elegance, an improvisational elegance. There are so many different kinds of lines to be seen in this show, from skeletal and attenuated to athletic and even frenetic. We see flashes of humor and wit, but also agitation, anxiety, and melancholy.

What happens when a creative field known for resisting commodification enters the world of reality television competition? Will the contemporary art world accept Bravo's show as a curator for the twenty-first century?

re: art, irony, pop culture

Christy:

Over the last few years reality-show casting calls have become almost as much of a cultural commonplace as the shows themselves — the familiar scenes of hundreds of anxious strangers converging on a street corner with their résumés, their headshots and their A games, hoping for some kind of immortality or at least a more interesting career.

But few such casting calls have looked like the one that began in the wee hours of Saturday morning in the West Village, where Jeff Lipsky, a 37-year-old painter and digital artist from Tyngsboro, Mass., unfolded his New England Patriots lawn chair and camped out for the night in front of the White Columns gallery, first in line to audition for a new reality show being created for Bravo. Produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, the show, which doesn’t have a title or a broadcast date, will try to do for the contemporary art world what the cable channel has done for the worlds of fine cuisine (“Top Chef”) and fashion (“Project Runway”): discover young, or maybe even middle-aged or old, unknowns with the talent to command the attention of both a television audience and a serious audience in the creative field to which they aspire.

The 13 finalists eventually chosen — from among hundreds who have already auditioned in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and now in New York — will compete for a gallery show, a cash prize and a sponsored national museum tour, though the producers have not revealed how much money is at stake or which museums or galleries will participate.