In a post reproducing and expanding on his op/ed in the Australian Financial Review today, Andrew Leigh writes:
For not-so-surprising reasons, I’ve been thinking lately about lifecycles. My AFR op-ed today (partially written with a newborn babe in the crook of my arm) is on age and creativity.
[The prompt for his reflections, by the way, is explained here.]
Leigh’s piece reports, inter alia, on the work of the American economist David Galenson. Galenson has developed a binary typology of two forms of innovation – conceptual and experimental. Interestingly, this classification is applied to both economists and creative artists; and a taste of what he’s getting at is easily discerned from this excerpt:
What marks a conceptualist from an experimentalist? In art, Galenson distinguishes conceptual artists (Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch) whose work aims to communicate specific ideas and emotions; from experimental artists (Edgar Degas, Wasily [sic] Kandinsky) whose ideas are vaguer, and often regard the artistic process as a journey.
I don’t know about that. Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art has recently been republished, and it’s freely available online. It seems to me either a gross simplification, charitably, or just empirically wrong to suggest that his ideas are vague. I’d also want to quibble, I think, with the other visual artists cited, and I suspect some holes could be shot in the application of the typology to other artists in different forms named.
That’s the problem with a binary classification – it sacrifices explanatory depth for conceptual neatness, because it accentuates some qualities but forces far too many phenomena into a polarised typology that’s just too simple. It’s not difficult to make the obvious point that Galenson might have been better off doing a little more experimental work before leaping into the conceptual. It’s also a bit difficult to see the connection with the later arguments made about shifts in the type of knowledge produced over the life course, and it’s completely unclear what critical judgements underpin assertions such as “Kandinsky painted his best work around age 50″.
There is some fascinating humanistic work published about shifts in style in the creative arts over time and with age. For instance, in classical music and literature, Edward Said’s very interesting and suggestive On Late Style. I’m not sure what underlies the assimilation of the work economists do to that of creative artists, but sadly, I think once again we’re seeing – in Galenson’s oeuvre – the all too predictable results of an imperialistic profession which – far too often – simply refuses to credit the work of other disciplines and knowledges. All too predictable, and not very creative at all, but more exemplary of this big a Age than Galenson himself would probably credit.
Binary classifions don’t work for creative endeavours very well. Simply look at that offered above. Kandinsky is widely credited with painting the first abstract. That is an experiment. But is it not also conceptual as well? I think his colleagues at the Bauhaus would very surprised if someone denied it. And how can anyone say that Picasso is not experimental – Jay-sus!
.
and it’s completely unclear what critical judgements underpin assertions such as “Kandinsky painted his best work around age 50
.
Well it’s subjective innit? But his work in the 20s was the maturantion of the style to which we are accustomed. I like his later Klee-esque minimalist stuff. I also think Mark Rothko was way more intereting after he abandoned figurative painting but before he arrived at his flat bits of layered colour.
.
What critical judgements underpin this assertion? It’s really funky man.
.
Christ it woulda been boring being Rothko after 1950. Get up: Gee what colour flat squares will I paint today. Snore.
.
Someone had to do it.
Agreed Mark, though I would say this kind of thinking more replicates a positivism that knows no particular profession.
Where’s your hermeneutics, damn you Leigh! lol. What a wonderful categorisation, though, it reminds me of that quote:
It is astonishing to me, the seemingly eternal allure that these simplistic binaries hold for people.
Good post Mark. The remark about the imperialism of economics sums up what annoys me most about it – although I’d agree with patrickg too that is a strategy shared by practitioners of other disciplines.
Incredibly daft to say Picasso was not an experimenter. wtf.
Thanks, Laura.
Yes, (and patrickg too) – that’s a fair point. It’s a sort of weird positivism that defeats itself, and it’s certainly around in other disciplines. Among many of the things that annoy me about this Galenson character’s work is that he evidently doesn’t have a clue about the extensive protocols for doing typification… I guess maybe it is creative in that it’s ex nihilo – without taking into account anything from sociological or cultural studies methodology, humanist and other studies of creativity and the personality, hermeneutics, any contextual or aesthetic assessment of value that can be communicated in terms of accountable critical methods or judgement, etc, almost ad infinitum.
And, surprise, surprise, the result of the thing is trite, even if you accept the premises and the method (which obviously I don’t)…
It’s also a nuisance that you have to pay to read the dude’s papers!
“I don’t know about that”
Oh Mark you conceptualist you!
Hahahaha! I’ll pay that one, Steve!
And I hate to get nitpicky, but Hemingway (and Fitzgerald for that matter), known for his plots. Jumping Jehosephat.
Also, the idea that Kubrick didn’t make massive changes to his films is entirely incorrect. He did make many changes – also as meticulously planned – hence why they always ran over-budget and over time.
Oh shucks, I can’t go on, the ‘analysis’ and categorisation is so ad hoc, and fatuous (at least for areas I’m versed in), it’s hard not to argue that the category came first, and the artist to shoe-horn second.
I remember reading this geezer’s stuff a couple years ago; didn’t rate it then, don’t rate it now. I hope he’s the experimental type.
I think I agree with Leigh – a bit. Let me explain from a techie point o’ view.
Yer got yer “tech demo” and then, later, you get yer art.
It’s a bit like Les Paul inventin’ guitars, but Hendrix knowin’ what to do with ‘em.
Or like “Toy Story” was the tech demo, but “The Incredibles” was the art.
I’m not sayin’ there was no art in what Les Paul did or what Kandinsky did weren’t art or didn’t have artistic properties, but the people who came after mebbe had a better idea of where it could be pushed into something genuinely new, rather than something old that was maybe just done with new tools.
But it’s definitely not a black and white thing.
I know!!!
Take Tender Is The Night, for instance. I love that book. What’s the plot? Love triangle with younger woman. What’s MUCH more interesting, apart from the writing itself, are the themes of how relationships work, class and age and gender, psychic wholeness, etc, etc.
It can’t have been any other way, can it?
T.S. Eliot not “drawing from ordinary speech and observation”?
Has this Galenson character ever read a book? The stuff about architecture is shite, too, by the way.
It’s disappointing to see this stuff published under Andrew Leigh’s byline in the Fin, because Galenson’s stuff is just fatuous, frankly. As you say, again quite charitably.
Hmmm, Ute Man. I’d invite you to read the link on Kandinsky. He had a very good idea of what he was doing in terms of art history (not art history particularly familiar to the West, but anyway…) and an exceptionally well developed concept of innovation in art… all of which existed in a particular historical context – and it was his ideas that led to the moves to first exhibit his work in the US and the UK, and which were extensively commented on in contemporary criticism.
Galenson doesn’t have to have a PhD in art history or cultural history to find all this out. Google is his friend. But I suppose with art, he knows what he likes…
Anyway, I’m going to log off now and read F. Scott Fitzgerald in protest!
Actually Mark, you don’t have to pay to read his papers. You can download them from the NBER website, which your university almost certainly has online access to. I think you might get a little further also if some of you actually read his work, rather than relying on Leigh’s paraphrasing. His definition of a conceptual artist in detail is:
“Conceptual innovators express ideas or emotions. Their goals can be stated precisely, so they usually plan their works, and execute them systematically. Their innovations are conspicuous, transgressive, and often irreverent. Their innovations appear suddenly, as a new idea produces a result quite different not only from other artists’ work, but also from their own previous work.”
His definition of an experimental artist:
“Experimental innovators seek to record visual perceptions. Their goals are imprecise, so they proceed tentatively, by trial and error. The imprecision of their goals rarely allows them to feel that they have succeeded, and they often spend their careers pursuing a single objective. They consider making art a process of searching, in which they want to discover images in the course of making them. They build their skills gradually, and their innovations emerge piecemeal in a body of work.”
So, the definition of experimental and conceptual that he is working with is a bit different from yours and some of the other commentators here.
As for the binary separation, its use is not specific to economists. You will find plenty of work in the other social sciences, including art history that attempts to classify artists in particlar ways. But here, rather than using the period/style of the artist as the organising principle, he uses the artist’s approach to his/her art.
If you think that is a useless endeavour, then fine. I guess it is up to different people analysing his work to think about whether or not his system sheds light on understanding artists and creativity. There is always room for debate about such things, but that would be the case whether he was an economist or not.
One final thing. He doesn’t pretend that as an economist he has some sort of unique insight into the creative process or understanding particular artists. His “imperialism” is not an act of refuting other insights or perspectives. He draws freely on work from a number of disciplines.
Perhaps you should just be a little less sensitive. I think the post reveals as much about you Mark as it does Galenson.
Sorry, LO, I’m well up on the literature on creativity, having been teaching it for a semester just recently. Those definitions are bollocks. Anyone who reflects on them for a moment should be able to recognise a further set of ungrounded binaries, and as concepts, they can’t be adequated to their objects.
Why would one oppose “ideas and emotions” to the “record [of] visual impressions”, for instance? Even as polarities, they don’t make sense because there’s not a logical relation between the two extremes. The dude should also go and read something about Weber’s methods. And then, how ever would you make sense of this in terms of what he thinks F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Dickens (for instance) are doing? Is it based on some notion of authorial intention, or something else?
It’s just wildly incoherent, I’m afraid. Complete rubbish.
I do thank you for citing them, though.
The abstract from one of his papers:
“Art critics and scholars have acknowledged the breakdown of their explanations and narratives of contemporary art in the face of what they consider the incoherent era of “pluralism” or “postmodernism” that began in the late twentieth century. This failure is in fact a result of their inability to understand the nature of the development of advanced art throughout the entire twentieth century, and particularly the novel behavior of young conceptual innovators in a new market environment. The rise of a competitive market for advanced art in the late nineteenth century freed artists from the constraint of having to satisfy powerful patrons, and gave them unprecedented freedom to innovate. As the rewards for radical and conspicuous innovation increased, conceptual artists could respond to these incentives more quickly and decisively than their experimental counterparts. Early in the twentieth century, the young conceptual genius Pablo Picasso initiated two new practices, by alternating styles at will and inventing a new artistic genre, that became basic elements of the art of a series of later conceptual innovators. By the late twentieth century, extensions of these practices had led to the emergence of important individual artists whose work appeared to have no unified style, and to the balkanization of advanced art, as the dominance of painting gave way before novel uses of old genres and the creation of many new ones. Understanding not only contemporary art, but the art of the past century as a whole, will require art scholars to abandon their outmoded insistence on analyzing art in terms of style, and to recognize the many novel patterns of behavior that have been created over the course of the past century by young conceptual innovators.”
Sound like something written by somebody that has never read a book?
Sometimes people just have different ways of thinking about things. Sure you disagree with his classification system, but I reckon there is a fair chance he knows and understands as much about art as you do!
It’s far too schematic and reductive, LO. For a whole range of reasons.
To be fair to him, though, I think probably art is one of his interests, but I think he is probably taking a bit of a metanarrative and forcing categories on the stories he’s telling – which is my main point – which really don’t illuminate much, and I would argue don’t fit.
But my point about his not having read books really went to the grossly silly comments about Dickens, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway etc.
I think you’d have to concede as well that those definitions appear to be derived from the visual arts. They can’t be extrapolated to ‘creativity’ generally. You’d have the devil’s own time trying to show that Dickens’ art rested on “visual impressions” while Hemingway’s rested on “ideas and emotions”. And then you’d find awful difficulty trying to draw a line from those supposed wellsprings of creativity to particular narrative forms or styles. That’s leaving aside the fact that the classifications don’t fit anyway.
That’s the point I was gesturing to.
Sorry, it’s really just so wrong.
Yes, that seems just silly. I prefer Ernest Hemingway’s short stories to his novels (although I’ve only read “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Old Man And The Sea”) and I wouldn’t be surprised if his short stories are more enduring (although they are uneven). Two of his most celebrated stories – “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (which James Joyce apparently thought was one of the best short stories ever written) – have next to no plot at all.
Mark, its not a matter of whether or not you are up on the literature on creativity. And I’m not defending his schema per se – I tend to be very wary of meta-narratives such as his. What I find more disturbing is the lack of civility and the tendency in the blogosphere to turn a disagreement over ideas, into ad hominem attacks on writers’ characters and learning. It is especially disturbing when those attacks are based on only a casual and selective reading of the work in question.
The reason I posted the definition was to point out to Laura that Galenson isn’t implying that Picasso didn’t innovate or that there was no experimentation at all in Picasso’s work. She was applying her own definition of experimental and then asssuming it was the same definition Galenson was working with.
Finally, I have noticed that you have quite a thing about the imperialism of economics. That is fine, but your concerns about economists getting themselves involved in other disciplines that they don’t properly understand hasn’t stopped you from offering comments on economic theory and empirics that are also beyond your expertise and most of the commentators on this blog. Perhaps a bit more circumspection on your behalf also wouldn’t go astray.
I make any comments here on economic theory and economics with due circumspection, and in my capacity as a citizen, LO, not as an academic.
I don’t know that it’s ad hominem to suggest that this gentleman demonstrably knows nothing about literature, because it is demonstrable. The methodology is also dodgy in the extreme.
And there are so many aspects of his work which are far too broadbrush, if not actually factually and historically incorrect. I was suggesting that with regard to Kandinsky, about whom I do know something. But this is also at best a gross generalisation, and at worst, misleading and incorrect:
As to economics, I think it is very widely recognised that a lot of studies applying various theoretical and methodological techniques of the discipline to areas of study which have nothing obvious to do with its traditional domain of study are very often characterised by what can only be deliberate ignorance of the literature in the areas to which such techniques are applied. It’s only descriptive to call such an approach ‘imperialistic’ though clearly at the level of value judgement, it’s something I deplore, and passionately so.
Mark, that quote is from an abstract. Since when are abstracts not generalisations of the more sophisticated arguments presented in academic papers?
I’d be quite intereted if you can provide some references to papers published in high quality economic journals where the authors have applied “various theoretical and methodological techniques of the discipline to areas of study which have nothing obvious to do with its traditional domain of study are very often characterised by what can only be deliberate ignorance of the literature in the areas to which such techniques are applied”.
My point, previously, about the literature on creativity is not meant to be an argument from authority, LO, but coincidentally, one that goes to precisely that issue. In my view, in many instances the problem with studies done from within economics of non-economic behaviour and phenomena goes to the derivation of the hypothesis. It ought really to come from either the literature or from preliminary observation (and therefore to be somewhat inductive). In many studies I’ve read from economics, it’s based on unexamined premises which are in fact deeply value laden and it’s disguised by a sort of scientistic positivism. However, at 1am, I have no intention of justifying that with links to academic papers which in any case are usually inaccessible to the majority of people here not employed in or students of universities. I’d really rather do what I said I was going to do earlier and go reread F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In any case, it doesn’t affect the fact that Galenson’s arguments are patently wrong because of:
(a) the logical incoherence of the typology;
(b) the unwarranted extrapolation of assertions with regard to one area of creativity to other forms;
(c) his inability to classify artists accurately even in his own terms (and what does it say about a supposed relationship with age that T. S. Eliot, for instance, was apparently always a ‘conceptualist’? Is the typology to be applied to the art or the artist? – there’s an important difference and it’s yet another example of conceptual imprecision and confusion…);
(d) the poverty of the concept of innovation, which in any case, represents a misunderstanding of where and when say, Picasso, Eliot, or Kandinsky sit within particular contexts, genres, forms and traditions;
and I could go on and on.
But I won’t.
I will say that if the arguments are accurately represented by Andrew Leigh, then it’s a very poor study and that can be clearly shown.
I think you’ve probably chosen to pick up on my swipe in closing. I don’t intend to justify it fully, because it’s actually tangential to the main point in the post, but I may return to it at some point. Though I must say, I find that sort of discussion rather *dismal*.
Ps -
Ok, LO, I’ll harden my point. The claim that there was a competitive art market that fostered “advanced art” in the nineteenth century is false. So is the claim that Picasso “invented” a new “genre”. There are others I could cite which are flatly wrong.
If the paper has more nuance than the abstract, then so much the worse for his scholarship, because those sort of arguments are clearly central to the point he thinks he is arguing.
Oh, and just on this:
So art critics and scholars have an inability to understand which can suddenly be dispelled by an analysis in terms of market innovation?
Lord, save us.
If that’s not disciplinary imperialism – with very little circumspection – I don’t know what is.
Or this:
There’s an ironic pun in his use of the word mode there which is surely unintended.
But, one more point, and I’ll leave it alone:
I’d have thought that most art historians would understand themselves as humanists, but there’s plenty of stuff on cultural history in sociology.
The apparent conceptual distinction you gesture to collapses or can only be artificially maintained because it’s precisely that the “period/style of the artist” is related to the “artist’s approach” – Galenson’s whole argument, which is misrepresented and overdrawn anyway, about “balkanisation” and “postmodernism”, rests in part on a caricature of debates within art circles themselves (which include art critics and academics) about the end of self-conscious movements. It’s facile to suggest that there’s no identifiable style in contemporary art, and it’s an underhanded way of slipping in his little play for teh market as arbiter of everything. But with regard to movements, in part there’s a coherence to them because they’re concepts reflexively adopted by artists themselves. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of nominalism in studying these domains, if it’s done with attention to what underpins the work of conceptualisation.
In social scientific terms, it’s important to attend to what actors themselves say they’re doing. Such categories as style and movement, then (which are neither typologies nor binaries), are methodologically useful among other reasons because they reflect the self-understanding of people working within a particular set of social and cultural contexts. There’s a really important point to be made here in terms of the philosophy of social science about imposition of a pattern on the data based on theoretical fiat compared to a classificatory approach which is, in a sense, ethnographic and value neutral in that it takes as its starting point contemporary understandings and discourses.
Mark, I basically agree with your whole critique (it seems to me that this guy’s remarks on Eliot alone disqualify him from serious standing.)
But I do have one quibble about Kandinsky and whether or not his ideas are “vague” (speaking as somebody who’s actually read his manifesto, and owns a copy.) It seems to me that since Kandinsky was above all a painter, his “ideas” are for good or ill most completely expounded in his painting practice, not in his contributions to the theoretical literature.
Whether his ideas as set forth in his paintings are ‘vague’ or not, or subject to other criticism, is a different kettle of fish. But I think a practicing artist and a theorist/critic are two different hats one may wear, perhaps one more stylishly than the other. (and Monsieur Artaud reluctantly nods in agreement.)
Meanwhile I want to know what this guy thinks about my favorite comedy troupe, the Futurists. Where does he stand on the subject of the Futurist cookbook? The world is waiting!
Yes, point taken, j_p_z, but then the notion that Picasso as opposed to Kandinsky was motivated by “ideas” falls victim to the same problem, does it not? If anything, it really just shows that the so-called dichotomy of “ideas and emotion” vs. “visual impression” is hopeless and full of holes.
The provision of victuals as a machinic assemblage?
Just a stab at a possible manifesto title!
[With profound apologies to Messrs Deleuze et Guattari.]
Yeah, Mark, your comment at 24 re Picasso v. Kandinsky is spot on.
I reckon you’ve sunk this guy’s battleship.
Actually, j_p_z, there might be a story about the correlation between the actual formation of an international art market centred on NYC after WW2 and the decline in avant-garde art. But I don’t think Dr Galenson’s the one to tell it.
Anyway, I’m just annoyed at the dude for keeping me up arguing on the intertubes with economists when I could be off with Dick and Nicole Diver (remembering that Fitzgerald’s all about the characters… oh hang on, it’s the plot, stupid) or perhaps coming up with some appropriate ideas *and* enjoying some visual impressions over a Mint Julep or a French Martini!
Ps – Cocktails are a great solvent for dissolving binary oppositions…
What on earth is a French martini?
“Oh Italian gin
Is a mother’s curse
And the beer of France
Is septic;
Drinking bourbon in Spain
Is the lonely domain
Of the saint and the epileptic…”
When you speak of “the decline of the avant-garde” I have to wonder if they’ve realized that prima facie there needs to be a ‘garde’ in the first place, for an ‘avant-garde’ to exist.
In this light, much of “post-modernism” can be seen as a species of cannibalism…
Scott Fitzgerald was expert in thinking up plots. He sold them to other writers: Jack London in particular.
And while I’m here, jpz is the best commentor in blogdom.
Word.
And look at his take on directors! Godard is a conceptualist who apprarently hasn’t done anything for years and East is an experimenter. Good God! This binary stuff is utter nonsense.
I find ‘Tender is the Night’ a brilliant, but enormously sad, book given that its background is Zelda Fitzgerald’s mental illness. Mark, have you read ‘Save Me the Waltz’ which is kind of Zelda’s reply to it?
The abstract quoted at #14 is hilarious.
This line sinks his battleship: ;the incoherent era of “pluralism” or “postmodernism” that began in the late twentieth century.’
Postmodernism – as interpreted by someone who doesn’t know what the term really means. Why is it incoherent, it’s not like postmodernism is Derrida, or someone really hard and nothing else.
The assumption that postmodernism hasn’t “worked” somehow is just bizarre. Also bizarre is it acts like postmodernism is the only horse in the stable which is patently untrue.
“This failure is in fact a result of their inability to understand the nature of the development of advanced art throughout the entire twentieth century”.
When did they fail? Wtf? How do you fail interpretation anyway? And if he wants to get into it, well hermeneutics and its derivatives is immensly valuable in this context. Hegel, Gadamer, Habermas particularly and just about every member of the Frankfurt school have much to say on this topic (rate it what you will, there’s many frameworks with interesting explanations to pick from).
So Labor Outsider, Mark is right on here, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It would be like me trying to analyse the real estate markets with semiotics. I’m not saying it wouldn’t provide insight, but the insight would be a cultural one, not one relating to the real estate markets.
Sink these modernist battleships.
It’s kind of disappointing actually that CUP is the publisher for the forthcoming opus “Conceptual Revoluations in Twentieth-Century Art”. But I’ve set up a search alert for book reviews, which ought to be fun. The chapter that remedies the lack of pronouncements about who were the greatest women artists of the twentieth century is a good one. He’s worked that out by counting up who got the most plates in five textbooks. I was interested to learn that whereas Cindy Sherman was played out by the age of 28, Frida Kahlo managed to last until 34 before her work became shite.
@31 – no, I haven’t, Fine, so thanks for the tip!
@29 – j_p_z – this is a French Martini:
http://www.artofdrink.com/2006/09/french-martini.php
Jeez, I been wrong all these years. I thought the novel started in the eighteenth century with people perhaps like Defoe, and certainly with Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Cleland and, that apart from Cleland, who was too high on opium to know what he was doing most of the time, they all made a fair bit of money out of their writing. (Have done a bit of work on this – to the point it might be my next book after the one I’m writing.) Ah, well.
[Climbs back up stairs to icy winter garret somewhere in London.)
I think if you actually had an icy winter garret in London right now Paul, you would be making a motza selling tickets for five minutes inside to escape from the 33 degree heat that they are having at the moment. /end thread derail
If you want to put ‘age’ and ‘creativity’ together, have a look at this guy. Manoel de Oliveira, 100 years and still making feature films. And he’s made some very good ones as well.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0210701/
How about Eric Rohmer, Fine? Romance of Astrea and Celadon released when he was 87!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0823240/
“In social scientific terms, it’s important to attend to what actors themselves say they’re doing. Such categories as style and movement, then (which are neither typologies nor binaries), are methodologically useful among other reasons because they reflect the self-understanding of people working within a particular set of social and cultural contexts. There’s a really important point to be made here in terms of the philosophy of social science about imposition of a pattern on the data based on theoretical fiat compared to a classificatory approach which is, in a sense, ethnographic and value neutral in that it takes as its starting point contemporary understandings and discourses.”
I’m going to leave this alone shortly as well.
Of course it is important to pay attention to what actors themseleves say what they are doing. And I certainly was not trying to imply that his conceptual/experimental distinction should REPLACE existing categories of style and movement. That would be plain silly. But surely you would acknowledge that there are patterns in actors approaches to their art and influence on that art that those actors may not be conscious of? That an actor’s art cannot be solely understood in their own terms? Indeed, the continual reinterpretation of the past – whether that be in the arts or other fields of endeavour – is one of the things that keeps the historical profession going. If historiography were limited to solely interepreting events/actions/creations in the terms of their originators, rather than also seeking alternative patterns and explanations, it would be a much thinner discipline!
Labor Outsider – Art critics and scholars have acknowledged the breakdown of their explanations and narratives of contemporary art in the face of what they consider the incoherent era of “pluralism” or “postmodernism” that began in the late twentieth century.
.
Art history changes at certain times. The story gets reshaped. For example, sometime during the 20th century art history changed into what is still more or less the current orthodoxy. The criteria for ‘serious’ art became, unbeknownst or unadmitted, that of Gustav Courbet and the Realists: a conflagaration of quasi-radical politics and (sorta) rebellious art.
.
As the photograph developed visual artists moved away from the realistic and various painters who’d implicity rejected Courbet’s ideas explored the mythological and the symbolic as a kind of ultra-Romantic negation of the industrial society and aesthetics of the belle epoque. By 1900 this manifested as a radical break with classical forms. The innovations of certain suymbolists and impressionist remet Courbet’s political ideas about art.
.
Thus what follows is a series of movements, stylistic approaches and philosophical hand-wringings. This persists until Rothko and Pollock. Then Warhol et al puts a stop to the avant-garde project. Like zombie, however, it still moves around looking to feed. ‘Movements’ perist but more as fashion trends than any ‘serious’ inquiry into political, psychological and/or social transformation.
.
The experiences of the actual world rendered the aspirations of, say, the Russian suprematists, null and void. Lenin argued with a leading artist viz the perfect conflation of art and politics. Remeber here, that it was Lenin who was skeptical! Within 15 years art and politics were aligned and the result was neither good for Art nor those who made it.
.
Now there’s a predominance of theory descendant and morphed from various post-structuralists with an especial view to promoting identity politics. The new Academy is an ‘avant-garde’ orthodoxy and one gets a sense of this reading the ‘legitimate’ art publications. This work, imho, is mostly cold. (Cue: Damien Hirst.) However there is a counter-culture which rejects theory tho’ not necessarilly the political as featured in new art mags like Juxtapoz. There’s also a renewed interest in Symbolism which for decades was always a little out of place in the avant-garde dominated art history mode.
.
My guess is that within two decades, art history will once again reorganize. The late 20 century will be seen as a time of mannerist decadence and new strands in art that have definetely left the Manifesto Crowd behind will begin to be considered. At the heart of that will be what David Hockney referred to as the reintegration of the optical and the eyeballed – separated for a century – and finally reunited.
“The GFC was the death knell for postmodernism, poststructuralism, and cultural studies.”
Discuss.
A global financial crisis is being analysed here in terms of its impact not on jobs or the political economy of the world, but on what impact it will have on its own analysis philosophically. Postmodernism is alive and well QED. NTTATWWT.
[Points first fingers in the air like Brendan Fevola off on four goals, fifteen good disposals in the first quarter and .15g of cocaine]
So all this talk about “systemic failure” doesn’t get your structuralist oils flowing? Maybe you are stuck on “Get Set” and need to see the “Go” light. Push that structuralist pedal to the metal. Yeah Babbeee!
And here’s where I’ve got to give it up, like JPZ, for the futurists. Now there was a crew who even did their breakdown of social order systematically. In chaos and riots, the screech of machines, as PWEI prophesied postmodernistically. Or is the future revolution to be led by a vanguard of the folk?
BTW, as Flava would scream incoherently, how is Babbeee worn, boyeeeeeee?
Eric Rohmer is an amazing director, Mark. It’s also notable that there’s still quite a few active French dorectors in his age group including Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and even Godard’s getting up there. It says something about age and creativity that surely doesn’t fit into the conceptulist/experimenter binary. They’ve all been making strong work since the 1950s.
Dick Rortee – So all this talk about “systemic failure” doesn’t get your structuralist oils flowing?
.
I think Marx had a go at the ‘systemic failures’ of Capital before there ever was a thing such as structuralism. Postmodernism, for want of an actual word, is still the orthodoxy of what used to be literature departments at universities. No death knell is in evidence. Only a profound and weary groan.
.
So we can’t discuss that. What we could discuss is that the GFC could be such a death knell. To do that we’d need someone to make an argument about how the Hell that’s gonna work tho’.
.
Be my guest.
.
The groan might be the death knell but the moaning started well before the GFC old bean. One thing’s for damn sure. Damien Hirst isn’t gonna be auctioning off hundred million pound skulls for a while. But he doesn’t need to. Unless he invested his money in Lehmann Bros that is.
Age and creativity?
.
Lloyd Reese? Goya? Tom Wolfe? Hitchcock? Hey Clint Eastwood. Their asses aged like wine.