[DrBenway]

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Originally Posted by catachresis /img/forum/go_quote.gif Maybe Dali *was* a technical genius and an aesthetic jackass. I've heard it suggested before. I read the old _Harpers_ piece about him selling art to Hallmark Greeting Cards out of his Manhattan hotel room.

One can be a technical genius and an aesthetic jackass. But if one's technical prowess is sufficiently great, one can nevertheless still legitimately be called an artist. Conversely, one can have absolutely no technical prowess, but have a unique, aesthetic vision and perspective, and still legitimately be called an artist. But in order to be legitimately called an artist, one must have one or the other, or some combination of both.

Damien Hirst has neither. To any degree. Unless you consider what he does to be some deliberately absurd form of performance art, which I reject utterly.

As for the idea that Dali is damned by his consorting with a greeting card company, forget it. Artists do all sorts of things to keep body and soul together until they can sustain themselves with the work they would prefer to do. Andy Warhol ran a highly successful illustration practise (drawings for ladies garment ads, etc.) before he became, you know...Andy Warhol. He was a trained artist with far more technique than he is given credit for in retrospect. He graduated from the art program at what is now Carnegie Mellon. And his monumental impact on the art world resonates to this day.

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Originally Posted by catachresis /img/forum/go_quote.gif I lapse into ecstatic raptures admiring the technique and verisimilitude of realistic lighting in a Caravaggio crucifixion. I then piss myself larfing at Homer Simpson in a rerun that I've seen on Fox four times. Both are equally valid, piquant aesthetic experiences.

I miss your point here. There is enormous technical capability on display in any Simpson's episode you could cite. From brilliant cartooning, in the unique style developed by Matt Groening, to sharply pointed satirical writing. There is nothing "low" in the art embodied by the Simpsons, and, while it quite different from Caravaggio or other classical artwork, it nevertheless qualifies as art for the very same reasons.

If everything is art, then nothing is art. And Damien Hirst's work suggests that everything is art. This pig could spit on a square of toilet paper and sell it for six figures. Or maybe he would have an assistant do the spitting.

Nonsense.

 

[catachresis]

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Originally Posted by DrBenway /img/forum/go_quote.gif One can be a technical genius and an aesthetic jackass. But if one's technical prowess is sufficiently great, one can nevertheless still legitimately be called an artist. Conversely, one can have absolutely no technical prowess, but have a unique, aesthetic vision and perspective, and still legitimately be called an artist. But in order to be legitimately called an artist, one must have one or the other, or some combination of both.

Your formula of either/or both technical mastery or "unique, aesthetic vision and perspective" seems to be inclusive, but I remain unmoved. The ideal of technical prowess seems to imply some shared convention, practice, or craft of artistry or "art" in the old significance of an instructed skill: the cobbler who must learn to make good shoes rather than intuiting 'shoe-ness'--the painter who first trains as a draftsman. But "unique, aesthetic vision" is just more of the same old romantic, high aesthetic blather. Is it *your* experience of Dali's unique vision that makes it art, just as it's *your* experience of Hirst's farragoes that makes them non-art? Surely no one would contend that he possesses no mastery of technique, even if these are the jejune pranks of the art school student enhanced with the project-management skills of the industrial designer and publicist. Aren't these skills technically admirable? Wouldn't one argue that there is a communal 'public' consensus that he is a serious artist: would this consensus outweigh *your* experience? !!Charles Saatchi!! has paid a buttload to venerate and advertise Hirst's importance. Look at all that money! Does !!Saatchi's!! patronage establish Hirst's canonical legitimacy, which collective acclaim correctly affirms?

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Damien Hirst has neither. To any degree. Unless you consider what he does to be some deliberately absurd form of performance art, which I reject utterly.

Well, which is the real *art*? Is it the 'object' or the 'experience'? If you say that it is the beautiful, harmonious, astonishing object, then you're buying into the old 'bourgeois' paradigm of the artwork as externalized manifestation of intentional genius. Yay!-but, according to the current arbiters of serious art, that also makes you retrograde, conservative, banal, superseded, atavistic, obviated, irrelevant, and unnecessary--totally "Stuck," as Tracy Emin has opined. Charles Saatchi and the conceptual artists churned out by the art schools like a warehouse filled with new-minted Tickle-Me-Elmos don't need you. They'll point you to the pile of remaindered Time-Life Great Works of Western Civilization coffee table books at Barnes and Noble.

Is Dali a great artist because his unique *genius* was recognized by art appreciators with similar *genius* (deep-souled and perceptive patrons who would have been equally profound artists--if they had bothered to learn to make art)? Are Saatchi, Hirst, and Emin the great intellects who have recognized the genuine, culturally exhausted zeitgeist of new art--all surface display, consumed and dispensed with in an instant? The fact that Dali shilled his little empty jokes to Hallmark out of his hotel bedroom suggests an understanding of the emptiness of artistic meaning that is not far removed from Hirst and his monumental taxidermies. Or was Dali so immense a genius that the trivialities of cranking out ephemera didn't degrade his work? Do the repeated jokes undermine Warhol's poptacles? Do they diminish Hirst's?

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As for the idea that Dali is damned by his consorting with a greeting card company, forget it. Artists do all sorts of things to keep body and soul together until they can sustain themselves with the work they would prefer to do. Andy Warhol ran a highly successful illustration practise (drawings for ladies garment ads, etc.) before he became, you know...Andy Warhol. He was a trained artist with far more technique than he is given credit for in retrospect. He graduated from the art program at what is now Carnegie Mellon. And his monumental impact on the art world resonates to this day.

I completely agree that Warhol was a technical master and a towering innovator in the realm of commercial and publicity design. Few *artists* have made so profound a contribution to our treating art works as remarkable doohickies with big price-tags. He could really knock-'em out of a silk-screener, and everybody who ever read Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" nodded her or his clever head in sage agreement. But is the whole making a living--or making a fortune--thing superfluous to art or the real gilded centerpiece?

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I miss your point here. There is enormous technical capability on display in any Simpson's episode you could cite. From brilliant cartooning, in the unique style developed by Matt Groening, to sharply pointed satirical writing. There is nothing "low" in the art embodied by the Simpsons, and, while it quite different from Caravaggio or other classical artwork, it nevertheless qualifies as art for the very same reasons.

Hey, I like The Simpsons too, but somebody could get tired of a show that satirized everything; indeed, if everything were susceptible to parodic dismissal, then it would be no satire at all--would it? It would just be a realistic portrayal of a world that actually was truth-less, amoral, and meaningless--with the sole exception that it was still making tons of money. In fact, that would suggest that, like a Hirst stuffed-shark prominently displayed over the sashimi counter at the hot new branch of Nobu, The Simpsons is extremely *high* art. It makes fun at all the people who extol the virtues of its 'satire', and it convinces them that they should continue to pay for the privilege of having their lack of conviction ridiculed by a show that has similarly bankrupt beliefs. Meanwhile in London, Rupert Murdoch has lunch with Charles Saatchi at The Ivy. They share a 200 year old bottle of sherry and laugh urbanely with equal interest over the fortunes of New Labor, Fox News, and Maggie's first word.

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If everything is art, then nothing is art. And Damien Hirst's work suggests that everything is art. This pig could spit on a square of toilet paper and sell it for six figures. Or maybe he would have an assistant do the spitting.

I reject this characterization. Damien Hirst's work suggests that everything that Damien Hirst markets and that Charles Saatchi buys is art. It's a free market: you are welcome to disagree. But if you're going to be an advocate of modern art, you'd better buy some of what they're selling. Either that, or explain more compellingly why what they sell isn't art.

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Nonsense.

Agreed. But the question is, What is not nonsense?

If we thought about it harder, we'd come up with some stronger ideas about this.