Brad Carlile Photo Blog

Somebody woke up o the wrong side of the bed… the wrong side of the contemporary art bed that is.

Jed Perl wrote this latest attack in “Postcards from Nowhere” for the The New Republic (Published: Wednesday, June 25, 2008)

I found his attacks to bounce around a bit, cherry pick, and lack some clear arguments for some of his political, metaphysical and stylistic attacks.  He starts out spearing a variety of recent shows:

I have not had much of anything to say after visiting a number of widely discussed events: the 2008 Whitney Biennial; the opening show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (aptly titled “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century“); the survey of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum; the Olafur Eliasson show at the Museum of Modern Art; the exhibition of Jeff Koons’s sculpture on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have had thoughts, sure; but they are the thoughts of an anthropologist rather than a museumgoer, of a student of the art world rather than a person who has had an encounter with a work of art. What there is to discuss is not visual experiences so much as visual stunts, which are frequently mind-boggling in their size and complexity.

Clearly he thinks the emperors have no clothes:

It is the artists, and a certain line of thinking about art, that have given the people with the cash permission to buy and sell what amounts to nothing, and to do so for ever larger and more insane sums of money. All this sensational commerce is fueled by the anti-aesthetics that were born nearly a century ago among the Dadaists, and have by now morphed into the laissez-faire aesthetics that give collectors sanction to regard one of Jeff Koons’s stainless-steel balloon animals as simultaneously a camp joke and a modern equivalent of a Tang dynasty horse.

…he goes on to say can’t even hear what they are saying…

Those who defend Murakami–and Koons and Hirst–may want to argue that what we have here is nothing more than a new version of the old search for a personal style. Some may even argue that Mondrian’s primary colors and right angles are no less a look, a logo, than Koons’s shiny chromium surfaces and curvaceous forms. The difference is that for Mondrian a style is a dynamic principle, not a fixed attitude. (I cannot believe that I must make a distinction between Mondrian and Koons, but this is where we are.) An artist’s style is a vocabulary, the medium through which something is expressed. The more expressive the artist becomes, the richer the possibilities of that vocabulary turn out to be. To the extent that Koons or Murakami can be said to have a style, it is a frozen style, an inert vocabulary.

Then he attacks the institutions…

For Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, and now Cai Guo-Qiang, having a retrospective at the Guggenheim is like being a Visigoth who has been given the keys to Rome. At the Guggenheim, the staff no longer curates exhibitions. They simply invite an artist to come in and rape the place.

…and we are not spared either…

A work of art–any work of art–is a particularity. The trouble with so much of the work at BCAM and the other contemporary art extravaganzas is that it trades in generalities that are passed off as universalities. I do not really believe that the educated audience that surveys the work of Koons at BCAM and the Metropolitan, or the work of Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, sees some deep meaning in these overblown comic-book heroes and factory-produced baubles. A lot of the visitors to these shows have a knowing, ironic look fixed on their faces. They can see that what is presented as art with a universalist message is really just global marketing swill–but these trumped-up universalities have a way of eclipsing everything else.

For a lot more, read the whole thing at the link at the top.

Tags: art