Items of Interest, Aesthetic Turn Edition
"The professional critics—and not just the old, curmudgeonly ones—are fed up with moralizing."
Lola Salem, The Right Patronage. “Culture used to be the potent wrapper that bound a society together — a fundamental act of faith. Repackaged and neutered, blocks of subcultures alongside fantasmagorical blasts from our cultural heritage don’t offer enough coherence for populations to find a sense of shared identity and a telos.”
Joseph Phelan, Understanding the Antique. “Since the Renaissance, young artists learned to draw the human figure by looking at antique sculptures and live models. Rubens thought that to attain painting’s ‘highest perfection,’ it was necessary to understand the antique. He cautioned young artists to concentrate on the form, not the material, and above all to avoid the ‘smell of stone’ in their paintings or the effect of ‘tinted marble’ for the flesh.”
, Why Artists are Pro-Censorship. “Artists are in the business of making us feel. And we are in an age when hurty feelings must be avoided at all costs.”Anastasia Berg, On the Aesthetic Turn. “The professional critics—and not just the old, curmudgeonly ones—are fed up with moralizing, and they are willing to speak about it in public. …the critical vanguard has made its judgment clear. For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop.”
, The Promise of Individualism. “The power of this fatalism is weakened by the concept of methodological individualism, what can be understood as an embrace of free will with an acknowledgement that we live an interdependent existence, i.e., ‘no man is an island.’”Recently featured in the “From the Archives” missive of The New Criterion: Hilton Kramer on Kandinsky (1995), Karen Wilkin on Rothko (2012), Mario Naves on Schiele (2005).1
Laura Dodsworth, Why Are Intelligent People So Easily Tricked? “Our instinct has developed over millions of years of evolution and, though we may call it irrational, it has actually served us very well. Without our emotional intuition, we would actually be rather bad at decision-making.”
, Art That Threatens The Way of the World. “As a millennial artist, squished between the looming threat of AI art, and former art movements that were only notable because they revolted against their stylistic predecessors, I found myself looking back on movements that changed the world as if the capacity for globe-shaking change was trapped in the pre-industrial-revolution era. I thought that every injustice that could be globally addressed had been addressed, and any lingering sentiment of revolution was purely factional—nothing universally relevant. That was until I saw the movie Sound of Freedom.”Browse the stacks of the Judd Library.
RIP Harry Frankfurt.2
On now: “Lois Dodd: No one else can really help you...” organized by Robert Gober at Hopkins Wharf Gallery in North Haven, Maine.
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I once titled an exhitibition “The Importance of What We Care About.”
Frankfurt's analysis of bullshit is indispensable reading for our times. We need more thinkers like him.
Forget about understanding the antique. It's no longer considered relevant to know about, let alone understand, much of anything except sociopolitical or ideological fashion. Never mind art history--who cares? Just make sure to be PC and focus on "content," not artistic quality. Pathetic.