Recently in Aesthetics Category

http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk/further/?p=908

The great fortean surrealist, performer, actor and theatre director Ken Campbell has died suddenly aged 66.

:-(

The way artists make art often reflect the means of production of their age. The artist of feudalism was an artisan or alchemist, the Renaissance artist was adept at mathematics and geometry inspired by trade and war, and Andy Warhol's factory embodied the spirit of mass production.

If you looked in the jobs pages in the early 1990s, you'd see adverts for "Mac Operators". A Mac Operator would use the only Apple Macintosh in the company to do design work using Illustrator, Photoshop and Quark at a low rate of pay.

When I got to art school at around that time I begged and borrowed access to Macs to make art using Photoshop and Illustrator. I acted out the role of the Mac Operator (rather than alchemist, merchant or factory worker) without realising it to make art.

The Mac Operator is a kind of knowledge worker. Knowledge work is post-industrial work. Another example of post-industrialism is brand-based outsourcing. The production of Jeff Koon's artistic brand is outsourced. But Koons is a manager rather than a worker.

Mac Operators were representative producers of mass culture at that time. But Web 2.0 means that everyone can now use a computer to produce culture as part of the crowd. Outsourcing has become crowdsourcing. Mac Operators, like sign painters, are not now a contemporary phenomenon.

I started out remixing images, and I continue to do so, aided now by the Creative Commons licences so beloved of Web 2.0. I am still sat at a computer producing art as an individual, rather than using the crowd to do so. But I am using a GNU laptop rather than a Power Mac desktop system.

The laptop-based knowledge work figure is the "laptop warrior" or the Bay-area coffee-shop wifi leeching "bedouin". These are the people who start the Web 2.0 companies and web applications that the crowd use to produce their culture.

So I haven't ended up as far from the contemporary creative practice of computing as I'd feared. And I'm not criticising artists who mimic Web 2.0 strategies without adding anything to them, when I do criticise them, from a position of historical irrelevance. I'm just reflecting a different aspect of current computer-based production.

Adbusters have noticed hipsterism:

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation

Apparently The The aren't on Gnutella.

K-punk has a good critique of the article and Hipsterism in general that is well worth reading in full:

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/010588.html

the problem with "hipsters" is precisely that they are pathologically well-adjusted, untroubled by sexual anxieties or financial worries. Vulgar Freudianism is not without its point - where is the motivation to produce art in people who can get any satisfaction they want, at any time? The very seamlessness of these unalienated, guilt-free lives leaves no material for sublimation.

I loathe hipsterism, but what else *can* there be in a society where most of the history of mass culture is a mouse click away and where everyone can broadcast their lives (also with a click of the mouse) in a way that only mass media personalities could previously? The cultural smog of the post-Napster Internet works against the scarcity and instant obsolescence that defined previous mass culture.

And besides, the aim of youth culture has always been to upset the eldsters. ;-) Punk parents would need something pretty radical to upset them. The laid-back ambient historicism of hipsterism certainly does the trick if its lack of something new is something new.

I remember watching a 1960s documentary from Swinging London that announced in a voice-over that "The Forties Are Back". As a kid in the late 80s, 60s psychedelia was big with my cooler friends. The past has always been big. And postmodernism was an 80s thing.

If it's not the case that hipsterism is just the usual 20-year cycle hitting 80s postmodernism and sample culture then perhaps the hipster generation is just the first with both the economic and technological power to beat the twenty year limit.

(Extended from a comment on Art Fag City.)

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/010588.html

Whereas I would say the opposite: the problem with "hipsters" is precisely that they are pathologically well-adjusted, untroubled by sexual anxieties or financial worries.

I don't resent web 2.0 kiddies doing what net.artists used to. I object to careerist net.artists using them as human shields.

Tom Moody is a talented New-York-based visual artist with a penchant for bitmap imagery. He can draw more expressively in Microsoft Paint than I can with a box of soft pastels, and his use of this skill in such a restrictive medium to pull in fine art and low culture references is good stuff. Solving the technical problems of representing the forms that society creates is what art is about.

Tom's image work is an embodiment of the current forms and means of production of internet-based society. But, and this is crucial, it is phrased unavoidably in terms of art history and artistic production that mean it would fail as simple web illustration. It is too interesting and has too much internal complexity. It makes a context for itself. History, problem solving and interiority are anathema to the easy post-historical consumerist cool of Web 2.0.

Tom's pixels-as-symbolic-form MS Paint drawings of graffitti, or of found image elements then mixed in with art-historical precedents, present the viewer and critic with work to do both visually and conceptually. They are vivid and timely images without being tricksy or issue-illustrating. These stand-alone pieces are where I feel the best of Tom's work is. You can gain a lot of insight into contemporary culture by looking at them.

When I got to art school in the early 90s, cultural studies was the face of the literary theory land grab in that part of the academy. Its stranglehold wouldn't be broken until the Sokal Hoax some years later. I resisted semiotics and deconstruction as the hegemonic narratives of a coercive authoritarian culture. The long cry of denial of those who'd missed the boat in '68 echoed through the postmodern era. It was vapid, tedious bullshit entirely congruent with the managerial ideology of the day.

Technology was opaque to the Derrida-and-Deleuze brigade, however much they protested to the contrary, so mid-90s interactive multimedia was a good place to resist Theory from. Computing machinery was part of another land grab, but criticism of it was possible. And numbers were at least a means of resisting the claim that everything was a text(e).

You'd think given this that I'd be all for the Cognitive Science land grab on literature, but no. To try to explain Shakespeare or Austen in terms of evolution, cognition or economics is fucked up. Literature and the aesthetic are what is needed. Parsing the literary into consumable and mashable data is complicit with corporate (and academic) information culture, the terrible cool of Alan Liu's excellent "Laws Of Cool".

The literary and the aesthetic are desperately needed by a culture that threatens to prolapse into mere information. Cognitive Science can explain why you see stripes or why events follow one another in time, and economics can excuse any crime, but the indigestible objects of THE literary and THE aesthetic, not as mystifications but as emergent (epi)phenomena of socialized humanity are needed as an irrational to the sociopathic "rationality" of neoliberalism and managerialism.

We do need another hero. Because no amount of economic incentives or cognitive exegesis is going to escape the gravity well of vapid cool.

If art cannot be grounded in cognitive science, where can it be grounded? In a non-cognitive aesthetic. What can a non-cognitive aesthetic be in the post-postmodern era?

There are often two sides to any story and trying to flatten it breaks both. Contradictions are ever present.

Fine art is absolutely dependent on money. It is all but an economic category. Taste (and aesthetics) is the product of social class, it is a socioeconomic shibboleth. Yet art historians and artists are often dismissive of the profit motive. Artists' behaviour, starving if not in the garret then in bedsits on three or more jobs for decades to make art that may or may not eventually sell for much more than they will ever see, is economically irrational.

The current insane prices for art instrumentalized as stock-market-beating commodities is a problem for aesthetics. Should aesthetics recognize the importance of works paid attention by the market? To do so all but discards the artwork as the subject of aesthetics. It is aesthetics in quotation marks, a state of being that makes hipsterism seem authentic (sic). Should aesthetics try to ignore the market? To do so leads to the clammy embraces of academic radicalism or state art.

How can the aesthetic flatland of the market be escaped by an art that may nonetheless be destined for it? How can that question be answered without the word "crash"? How can the Hardt-and-Negri-and-Zizek dinner party radicalism of the academy and the equally instrumentalised art-as-a-substitute-for-regeneration of state art be avoided into the bargain?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/arts/design/04pica.html

David Galenson seems to be part of the wave of culturally triumphant economic explainers who are dining out on neoliberalism's success since that nasty business with Keynesianism in the 70s meant the economic paradigm had to be reset. They definitely have it right this time, it's a science. You know, like Marxism was.

Galenson's mission is to bring the explanatory pixie-dust of market economic analysis to art. The NY Times article linked above contains a number of extraordinary claims about art inspired by Galenson's latest book. Not all are made by Galenson, but they do not contradict the quotes from him. I am hoping that Galenson's book has been misrepresented by the article, but the article itself requires addressing.

Galenson apparently claims that markets and conceptual innovation are what differentiates Twentieth Century art from previous art. But markets in art have existed since classical times. Particularly wherever a merchant class has emerged but also with nobles and royalty. Courts are, in economic terms, markets. And the competition of different dynasties, courts or worthies for the scarce resources of artistic production constituted a monopoly only in so much as everyone who buys a can of coke does.

Michael Rushton goes further than Galenson by claiming that innovation requires markets. If there was no innovation in art prior to the existence of markets then the historical emergence of cave art is inexplicable, and tribal art must be an haullucination.

Galenson seems to claim that quantitative methods or market economics have not often been applied to art and that art history is hostile to them. This is ahistorical. There is a long history of Marxist analyses of art history, and the history of aesthetics is largely a history of economic class and economic development. The question of who pays for art, and how the sale price of a work of art relates to its aesthetic worth, is not a new one.

Galenson follows these claims with a quick count of image frequency in recent art history textbooks in order to establish the most important works of the twentieth century. But text books are not the same as the museums, journals, catalogues or collections that create the importance of works of art that these books report. Applying simple quantitative methods to this tertiary information renders them both information destroying and parasitic. At best they can prove only that someone else has proved something somewhere else.

Books were chosen because actual great art does not come to market often enough to provide useful data for quantitative analysis of what the market determines great art to be. Read that sentence again. It is fortunate indeed that Galenson didn't have to rely on the art market to provide the information he needs to prove that markets are the producers of great works. But is there not a problem with a thesis when attempting to follow it through disproves it on a practical level?

Economics can tell us much about the sociology and history of art, as it always has. Galenson is wrong if he thinks that he is bringing new cargo to the art world. And his premises and methodology are bogus.

That said, let us suppose for a moment that Galenson is right. What would Galensonist art look like?

Since it cannot be measured by sales, it need not be expensive. No Damien Hirst skull bonds for hedge fund managers and oil oligarchs to use to out-pace the market for lesser commodities, you could sell an unmade bed as long as you get in the next art textbook. Since the interior structure of the work is irrelevant, it need not be aesthetic. Easy reproducability is more valuable than beauty or internal complexity. Since it must get in the textbooks it needs to be popular, but this need not be because of its artistic worth. It could illustrate fashionable theory or trends, and/or be produced by an artist who is good at parties.

Galenson's artist is Tracy Emin. He is welcome to her.

The post-historical Hegelian idealism of market economics is anti-humanistic. But art is part of the human condition. It is no surprise that the figures an economist is interested in are numeric rather than compositional. The problem is that art considered quantitatively has no interior, yet it is the content of art that makes it "great".

The failure of Galenson's project is the failure of neoliberalism laid bare without the concealing effects of economic transition or state intervention. Markets cannot provide Galenson with the material he needs to fulfill his project. It's a good thing we don't have to rely on them for anything more important. Such as, say, food or energy...

Duchamp's readymades are acts of ontological transubstantiation, they nominate non-artistic objects as artworks. This is aesthetic blasphemy.

Nominating a non-art object as an artwork requires that the object not be an art object. But imagine that you have a time machine. Now you can go back in time to ancient Rome or Greece with any non-art object the artist seeks to nominate as an artwork and have it accepted as a work of art. Not declared, displayed and accepted.

Assuming you avoid paradoxes, the object will not have been nominated as an art object and will never have been a non-art object. Is this just nomination at an extra level of indirection, or does it undo the readymade?

(From a conversation with Evie.)