How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

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Re: Indigo: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Allegro » Sun Mar 13, 2011 3:42 pm

.
Indigo is an interdisciplinary artist who's exploring
placing her art in natural settings outside the city.
Although, she says, “...substance must support the hype.”

Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: Scholars in the Marketplace

Postby Allegro » Sun Mar 13, 2011 3:42 pm

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PWillow, a few articles found during searches have given me a field to circle without a place to land for attempting answers to your queries at the bottom of your original post. You could say I'm especially fascinatingly unfamiliar with visual art histories (as I'm especially fascinatingly familiar with performance arts, specifically piano). The links in this article and the underscore were added by me.

    ‘NOT FOR SALE’; Scholars in the Marketplace
    Published: New York Times | February 18, 2007

    To the Editor:

    Re ‘‘What They Keep for Love’’ by Randy Kennedy [Feb. 11]:

      Alanna Heiss, whose P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center is showing works that artists refuse to sell, says of the exhibition: ‘‘We are talking about religion here, aren’t we? We’re talking about God.’’ As an artist I have to ask: How much God is there in art theories like appropriation, deconstructivism, simulation and consumerism, which from the mid-1970s on have dominated the syllabus of many institutions that teach, critique and exhibit art?

      Blame for the current state of the art world lies not only with the legions of wealthy collectors purchasing status in the souks that make quantity art shopping easy, but also with the style of art that our contemporary scholars have valued above all, art that illustrates what we know intellectually in place of art illuminating what we do not.

      Sara Klar
      Brooklyn
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: Mystery, violence, and popular culture: essays

Postby Allegro » Sun Mar 13, 2011 3:43 pm

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PWillow, this piece kind of gives me vocabulary that I think would help distinguish my thoughts wrt visual arts, in general, and perhaps, more specifically, to your most recent exhibit. Anyway, maybe there's a place where I can land and hang my cap once I've done more looking around.

< excerpt begins at the bottom of page 15;
bolds and underscore are mine >

A personally transcribed excerpt from
Mystery, violence, and popular culture: essays By John G. Cawelti

    While explaining and defining his distinction between “professional” and “artist” Hardison goes on to create a superb contemporary formulation of Plato’s Gorgias distinction:

      Consider the professional a rhetorician. The purpose of art, says Aristotle, is to give pleasure. Not any kind of pleasure, but the sort that comes from learning. The experience of art is an insight, an illumination of the action being imitated. Rhetoric, on the other hand, is oriented toward the market place. Its purpose is not illumination but persuasion, and its governing concept is that the work produced must be adjusted to the mind of the audience. Rhetorical art succeeds by saying what the audience has secretly known (or wanted to know) all along. Its language is disguised flattery, its norm fantasy, and its symbols surrogates for unconscious cravings. Given the passionate desire that everyone has to suspend disbelief, almost anything works, as witness the comic book and the exploits of Mike Hammer and James Bond; but some kinds of rhetoric work better than others. (And here Hardison departs sharply from Plato) just as there is good and bad art, there is good and bad rhetoric.

    Hardison’s essay is somewhat ambiguous on the relative value of art and rhetoric. At times he seems to be saying, like Socrates, that rhetoric is an Inferior mode of creation: (“Nobody would seriously compare Hitchcock to a dozen directors and producers who have used the film medium as an art form”). But, on the other hand he seems to suggest that rhetoric, though different from art, is equally valid: “If [Hitchcock’s thrillers] are rhetoric and shaped by the needs of the audience, they are just as significant as art and just as necessary”. This uncertainty about the aesthetic value of Hitchcock’s work leads Hardison to a particular mode of analysis of his films. Instead of treating them as independent works, Hardison exams Hitchcock’s thrillers as embodiment of the middle-class mind of the twentieth century. “Because Hitchcock has continued to produce successful thrillers for over thirty years, his films are a kind of contour map of the middle-class mind during this period”.

    This approach implies that the work of “rhetorical” or popular artists like Hitchcock is successful because it embodies or expresses the values of the popular mind in a particularly effective or direct fashion. This assumption, shared by many scholars and critics of the popular arts, has made social and psychological analysis the dominant mode of interpretation and analysis in dealing with this kind of material. Thus, the distinction between high art is commonly treated aesthetic structure or individual vision; the popular arts are studied as social and psychological data.

< Excerpt end >
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Sun Mar 13, 2011 5:07 pm

Sara Klar wrote:Blame for the current state of the art world lies not only with the legions of wealthy collectors purchasing status in the souks that make quantity art shopping easy, but also with the style of art that our contemporary scholars have valued above all, art that illustrates what we know intellectually in place of art illuminating what we do not.


Yes, what a great line at the end there.

Cawelti on the Hardison essay begins to outline one of the central paradoxes of being an artist in a market driven world. Audiences sometimes won't or can't immediately value what might be important over the long haul. It's situational as well. I said to someone recently, when everything outside is difficult, people want to shut down rather than be confronted with a lot of feeling, unless it serves as salve or cover.

I'm looking forward to reading more of it.

Thanks Allegro.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Allegro » Sun Mar 13, 2011 5:09 pm

.
Thanks, PWillow, for the two links in your first post. The readings got me headed in the right direction, but I got sidetracked by the findings during my first search.

What I’ve neglected to mention is that I’m bound by the idea of citing flows of capital: from whom to whom. Is that too much to ask :help:? Funny :lol: one, that.

I know, I know there are many facets to artists’ dilemmas, psychological and financial notwithstanding, probably now on every continent. Over the years, many of us musicians have watched the dilemmas and mourned them as they began to show up in North America during the 1970s; we’ve watched them play out, and are watching, still.

[Edited a bit in the second paragraph.]
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Sun Mar 13, 2011 7:14 pm

Allegro wrote:.
What I’ve neglected to mention is that I’m bound by the idea of citing flows of capital: from whom to whom. Is that too much to ask :help:? Funny :lol: one, that.


I think that's pretty much a necessity regarding most subjects we tackle here. We had a thread not too long ago that touched on what Ms. Stoner Saunders documented, and that is definitely a major factor to consider.

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30033&hilit=saunders
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby vanlose kid » Sun Mar 13, 2011 9:16 pm

AgiTate
The performances of art activists Liberate Tate are celebrated in a new postcard collection.

Image
Beginning in May 2010, in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, art activists Liberate Tate staged a dramatic series of performances in cultural institutions to protest against oil companies such as BP and Shell sponsoring gallery spaces. Gushing from floral skirts, spilling elegantly from giant white eggs, jetting from paint tubes across the floor of the iconic Tate Turbine Hall, the flood of oily resistance that followed has generated a fierce debate in the art world around oil, ethics and sponsorship.

Working in association with Platform and Art Not Oil, these performance-interventions have been documented in the postcard pack ‘Liberate Tate: Collected Works 2010’. The sales of these packs are being used to fund a participatory event/exhibition in an art space in 2011 that will provide a space for planning more actions of creative resistance.

Image
'As crude oil continues to devastate coastlines and communities in the Gulf of Mexico, BP executives will be enjoying a cocktail reception with curators and artists at Tate Britain. These relationships enable big oil companies to mask the environmentally destructive nature of their activities with the social legitimacy that is associated with such high‑profile cultural associations.'
A letter in the Guardian signed by 171 people in the art world on the day of the Tate summer party celebrating 20 years of BP sponsorship

'We are seeing a terrifyingly high rate of cancer in Fort Chipewyan where I live. We are convinced that these cancers are linked to the Tar Sands development on our doorstep. It is shortening our lives. That’s why we no longer call it “dirty oil” but “bloody oil”. The blood of Fort Chipewyan people is on these companies’ hands.'
George Poitras, a former chief of Mikisew Cree First Nation, Canada, attending the BP annual general meeting in 2010

The ‘Liberate Tate: Collected Works 2010’ postcard books are available at the online New Internationalist shop, or you can send £5 on Paypal to kevin@platformlondon.org

If you would like to be involved with Liberate Tate, email liberatetate@gmail.com

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/agitate/


*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
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How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Allegro » Sun Mar 13, 2011 10:05 pm

.
    Hidden Art of War | Hidden Treasures
      From CBS Sunday Morning | November 15, 2009


    FROM YOUTUBE NOTES. A major art collection of 15,500+ works done mostly by United States Army soldiers active in America’s earliest wars to present day includes paintings, drawing and sculptures by famous American artists including Norman Rockwell, as well as by infamous Nazis including Adolph Hitler, all hidden from public view behind securely locked doors in the basement of an office building in Washington, D.C.

REFER original post.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Allegro » Mon Mar 14, 2011 4:18 pm

Project Willow wrote:... So, who has been or is writing about these issues, with a view that is aware and critical of the system?... [Refer.]
Culture Incorporated | Museums, Artists, And Corporate Sponsorships

    Editorial Reviews | Amazon Product Description

      Photographer Annie Leibowitz collaborates with American Express on a portrait exhibition. Absolut Vodka engages artists for their advertisements. Philip Morris mounts an “Arts Against Hunger” campaign in partnership with prominent museums. Is it art or PR, and where is the line that separates the artistic from the corporate? According to Mark Rectanus, that line has blurred. These mergers of art, business, and museums, he argues, are examples of the worldwide privatization of cultural funding.

      In Culture Incorporated, Rectanus calls for full disclosure of corporate involvement in cultural events and examines how corporations, art institutions, and foundations are reshaping the cultural terrain. In turn, he also shows how that ground is destabilized by artists subverting these same institutions to create a heightened awareness of critical alternatives.

      Rectanus exposes the way sponsorship helps maintain social legitimation in a time when corporations are the target of significant criticism. He provides wide-ranging examples of artists and institutions grappling with corporate sponsorship, including artists’ collaboration with sponsors, corporate sponsorship of museum exhibitions, festivals, and rock concerts, and cybersponsoring. Throughout, Rectanus’s analyzes the convergence of cultural institutions with global corporate politics and the way this shapes our culture and our communities.

    Mark W. Rectanus is professor of German at Iowa State University.

REFER AMAZON.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby norton ash » Mon Mar 14, 2011 4:34 pm

It's beautiful. Now, could you change the frame and paint a little more of a violet type of blue in the storm clouds?

It would just match the suite so totally better that way!
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Arc » Mon Mar 14, 2011 6:37 pm

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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Tue Mar 15, 2011 5:42 am

Welcome to RI Arc. I am not fan of Hughes. Like a lot of male critics, I find him closed off to the emotional content in some specific artists' works, much as he may speak to the issue I contend in this video.

Apparently the author of the following will be in attendance tomorrow night for a general discussion on art. I haven't read the work yet, but perhaps I'll see you there...

http://paramipress.com/books/persist

Persist
In Praise of the Creative Spirit in a World Gone Mad with Commerce


by Peter Clothier
Persist: In Praise of the Creative Spirit in a World Gone Mad with Commerce is a collection of essays spanning thirty years of engagement with the culture of our times. Peter Clothier is a long-time student of the dharma and a meditation practitioner. In this context he examines the qualities of compassion, perseverance, and discernment in his reflections on the artist’s predicament in a world that judges success in terms of celebrity and material reward. Persist explores ways today's artists in any medium can find fulfillment, a sense of purpose, and joy in alternative and more lasting values.

"If most people understand how commerce accounts for functional necessities and luxuries, not nearly enough people comprehend how art shapes and evolves who we in fact truly are. This book helps us better understand why this lack of understanding is so, and why it is important."
Bill Lasarow, ArtScene

"This engaging book provides the reader with a rare insight into the practice and appreciation of art. Peter Clothier shows the courage and wisdom of someone who is not afraid to go "where we are most exposed and vulnerable," to discover the true source of artistic creativity."
Edward Goldman, Art Talk KCRW radio commentator


Everyone has their own POV I suppose.


norton ash wrote:It's beautiful. Now, could you change the frame and paint a little more of a violet type of blue in the storm clouds?

It would just match the suite so totally better that way!


Norton, what do I with this? There is too much to reply to, should I joke with you about sterno in the Saloon? That would be cruel, but really is that what it all boils down to? I don't know, I think there's an unanswered hunger, especially amongst those who pursue hangings to match their suites, or maybe not, but it's lurking somewhere, perhaps with those without suites.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby norton ash » Tue Mar 15, 2011 9:13 am

It's a joke, Willow, but too many people who buy art will match it to the room they might want it for.

It's understandable, only human as far as many people understand art. And I DID hear a similar request at an art fair to a hack watercolourist who appeared quite willing to modify the painting being discussed.

EDIT: I will confess to counselling hackery among artist friends who were desperate for money. One is skilled in academic style, oils, and I had mentioned that 'guardian angels' and Christian-themed kitsch did very well at local arts-and-crafts shows. He knocked a few off and made some quick revenue.

The same guy's cutting-and-skidding pulpwood in the bush right now, has many kids from many marriages. He paints when he can.

Low commerce, of course, but at the top it's also about fashion and commodity-trading, innit...
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby nathan28 » Tue Mar 15, 2011 8:37 pm

norton ash wrote:It's a joke, Willow, but too many people who buy art will match it to the room they might want it for.

It's understandable, only human as far as many people understand art. And I DID hear a similar request at an art fair to a hack watercolourist who appeared quite willing to modify the painting being discussed.



I was going to ask why it's a problem, but it's ridiculous to expect that a finished piece you didn't commission be altered for your preferences. Just... find... one... that already works. That's narcissism, right there--too grandiose to compromise and too stupid to realize that you might have to do some footwork to find it.

There are actually a lot of good reasons to care about color and your room ensemble, though, but IMO if you hang something on a wall it might be better to 'break' the overall design, not complement it, or to complement neglected aspects, like the electrical fixtures or curtain rods or something. And to start, painting is expensive, more than it seems. Light shades need white primer and one or two coats. Dark shades need expensive, heavy shaded primer and multiple coats. Trim takes a long time to paint. A small bungalow or large apartment could easily run >$500 and lots of hours to repaint. So expecting a picture to match...

And there was a sociological survey from years ago that asked 'average' people what could be done to make photograph of something 'artsy' like pebbles or whatever else people use for computer wallpaper now, that they initially said they didn't like, more pleasant. Almost all of them answered to that adding color would work.


I also think you're neglecting the eccentricity of the noveau riche, too. There's a dude in a three-quarters-of-a-million house not all that far from my current abode who has, I am not kidding, giant pterodactyl bronze skulptures on a carosel-like-thing in his backyard. I can't say I blame him but damn. If you handed me a big wad of cash I'd probably use some of the leftovers to buy a still-working Survival Research Industries ("We needed diesel... We would never pay money for products from an evil company like BP. But we do steal them.") flame-throwing machine somewhere outside.


EDIT: I will confess to counselling hackery among artist friends who were desperate for money. One is skilled in academic style, oils, and I had mentioned that 'guardian angels' and Christian-themed kitsch did very well at local arts-and-crafts shows. He knocked a few off and made some quick revenue.


"skilled in... oils" and "quick" are contradictions. But I hate oil paint except as an excuse to buy solvents, because I solvents are so good at so many things. (I do *not* huff them, which may be the only mind-altering substance line I'll draw.) I did like encaustic though, as time-consuming and annoying as it is.

Low commerce, of course, but at the top it's also about fashion and commodity-trading, innit...


It's also about who you know and how much money you can convince your rich parents to give you.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Wed Mar 16, 2011 3:52 am

:scaredhide:
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