“Saying that the market
is corrupt was like saying that the cancer patient has a hangnail”
“The arguments such
artists mount against beauty come down to one simple gripe: Beauty sells. .
. Beautiful art sells. If it sells
itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells something else, it is a
seductive advertisement. Art is not idolatry, they argue, nor is it
advertising. Idolatry and advertising however, are indeed art, and the greatest
works of art are always and inevitably a bit of both.”
“As Baudelaire says,
“the beautiful is always strange,” by which he means, of course, that it is
always strangely familiar and vaguely surprising. “
“For more than four
centuries, the idea of “making it beautiful” has been the keystone of our
cultural vernacular-the lovers machine gun and the prisoners joy-the last redoubt
of the disenfranchised and the single direct route, without a detour through
church or state, from the image of the individual. Now that generosity, like
Banquo’s host, is doomed to haunt our discourse about contemporary art—no
longer required to recommend images to our attention or to insinuate them to
vernacular memory, no longer welcome even to try. “
“Should we really look
at art, however banal, because looking at art is somehow good for us, while
ignoring any specific good that the individual work or artist might propose to
us?”
“Art is either a
democratic political instrument, or it is not”
“The vernacular of beauty, in its democratic appeal,
remains a potent instrument for change in this civilization”
“Yet the vernacular of
beauty, in its democratic appeal, remains a potent instrument for change.
Mapplethorpe uses it, as does Warhol, as does Ruscha, to engage individuals
within and without the cultural ghetto in arguments about what is good and what
is beautiful. “
“Because, in truth, if a
senator didn’t think an image was dangerous, it wasn’t. “
“I am certain of one
think: images can change the world”
“I would suggest, but
after centuries of bureaucrats employing images to validate, essentialize, and
detoxify institutions, to glorify their battles, celebrate their kinds, and
publicize their doctrines—we now have an institution to validate, essentialize,
ad detoxify our images—to glorify art’s battles, celebrate art’s kinds, and
publicize art’s doctrines—and, of course, to neutralize art’s power. “
“There are issues worth
advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain,"
nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to
neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture
since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is
always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This
is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed
inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially
powerful.”
“A
gorgeous island of gaudy, speculative images was borne forth like blossoms on
the great tsunami of doubt and spiritual confusion that swept through the late
nineteenth century, cresting into the twentieth and exploding across Europe in
a conflagration of wars and revolutions, scattering beauty among the bodies. By
the 1920s, however, answers were once more available, assurances against doubt
and confusion were at hand, and there were men in power to assure our
compliance with these assurances”
Even though this book is
hard to understand, I have been able to get the main ideas from it.
My biggest question is,
I guess, how to we stop this pattern of dominance from “the academy”? How do we
allow beauty to come back into contemporary art?
Another question, and I’ve
actually been thinking about this a lot already, is, how do we make
contemporary art more accessible? Or should it be made more accessible? I think
it should…. I agree that the sort of elitist and highly educated contemporary
art club is basically serving no one but itself. So, do we change how
contemporary art works? That seems impossible? Do we make it easier for non-art
degree people to understand and appreciate and feel welcome in the contemporary
art world? I think that is something worth exploring…
