From Denis Dutton (of Arts & Let­ters Daily fame) a mean­der­ing and tepid polemic* in today’s Times:

The pricey med­i­cine cab­i­net belongs to a tra­di­tion of con­cep­tual art: works we admire not for skill­ful hands-​on exe­cu­tion by the artist, but for the artist’s cre­ative con­cept. Mr. Hirst has a talent for coming up with con­cepts that cap­ture the atten­tion of the art market, putting him in the com­pany of other big names who have now and again moved away from making art with their own hands: Jeff Koons, for exam­ple, who has put vacuum clean­ers into Plex­i­glas cases and com­mis­sioned an Ital­ian porce­lain man­u­fac­turer to make a cheesy gold and white sculp­ture of Michael Jack­son and his pet chimp. Mr. Koons need not touch the art his con­trac­tors pro­duce; the ideas are his, and that’s enough.

Sophis­ti­cated gallery owners or cura­tors nor­mally respond with with­er­ing con­de­scen­sion to wor­ries about the lack of crafts­man­ship in con­tem­po­rary art. Art has moved on, I’ve heard it argued, since Vic­to­rian times, when “she’d painted every hair” was ordi­nary aes­thetic praise. What is impor­tant today is not tech­ni­cal skill, but skill in play­ing inven­tively with ideas.

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This morn­ing John Latta quoted a bit out of Jed Rasula’s new Mod­ernism and Poetic Inspiration:

In lieu of its “voca­tion of dis­or­der,” Blan­chot won­ders what qual­i­fies as Roman­ti­cism: “Where it man­i­fests itself, rich in projects, or where it dies out, poor in works?” The answer: equiv­o­ca­tion. Or, to use a term the Roman­tics them­selves were fond of, the arabesque, the abil­ity to wrig­gle simul­ta­ne­ously toward con­trary poles. Although such wrig­gling can remain intran­si­tive, and the work uncom­pleted, “‘this supe­ri­or­ity of intel­li­gence over the power of exe­cu­tion’ is the very sign of authen­tic­ity” as Blan­chot puts it by way of Valéry. Exe­cu­tion is tac­itly the domain of the arti­san, so the artist asserts author­ity in a sov­er­eign ges­ture of dis­dain, as if the poet, con­ceiv­ing the mas­ter­piece, says to the reader, you do it, where doing amounts to a labo­ri­ous tem­po­ral extrac­tion of the divine Idea from a patent muddle (in which James Joyce sets his hen peck­ing at a sus­pi­ciously sodden letter in Finnegans Wake). Resist­ing com­ple­tion can also be deci­sive in its pre­var­i­ca­tion between avail­able means; ter­mi­nal inde­ci­sion is hard to dis­tin­guish from poly­va­lent cre­ative options.

John calls the above “another instance of Paul Valéry’s assert­ing form / invention’s supe­ri­or­ity (the par­tic­u­lar words hardly matter),” and “incredibly spark-throwing,” and a sug­ges­tion of “the mantra of the Lan­guage boys,” which strikes me as thrice true.

But there’s some­thing else in there, too, isn’t there?

“Postcards from Nowhere,” which appears in this week’s New Repub­lic, is Jed Perl’s latest poison-​tipped volley against the ruling elite of con­tem­po­rary art. Some sample copy:

For Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, and now Cai Guo-​Qiang, having a ret­ro­spec­tive at the Guggen­heim is like being a Visig­oth who has been given the keys to Rome. At the Guggen­heim, the staff no longer curates exhi­bi­tions. They simply invite an artist to come in and rape the place.

And, dis­cussing the Broad Con­tem­po­rary Art Museum and the New Museum:

Dis­cussing such muse­ums in archi­tec­tural terms is like dis­cussing a sculp­ture by Jeff Koons in com­po­si­tional terms. You would be kid­ding your­self. These muse­ums are only brands designed to con­tain brands.

I’ve been struck favor­ably by some of the art that Perl hates. Whichever of Damien Hirst’s mir­rored med­i­cine cab­i­nets was hang­ing in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice back in 2006 was impres­sive enough to steal my breath for more than a few seconds.

But far and away the best things at the Grassi were the very uncon­tem­po­rary Rothkos hang­ing in a second-​story alcove. And so, having found myself almost com­pletely bored by the Whit­ney Bien­nial a few weeks back–only Leslie Hewitt’s lean­ing paint­ings held my atten­tion for more than a few min­utes there–I have to count myself gen­er­ally sym­pa­thetic to Perl’s spite.

That said, I thought it inter­est­ing to see how dif­fi­cult Perl found it to explain what exactly it was that gets under his skin about the Matthew Bar­neys and Richard Princes of the world.

Courbet is the new Duchamp. We’re used to genealo­gies that trace the lin­eage of con­tem­po­rary artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst back through Warhol to Marcel Duchamp and his ready­mades. But Petra ten-​Doesschate Chu, in her new book The Most Arro­gant Man in France, pushes that pedi­gree back two gen­er­a­tions, to Gus­tave Courbet.

Accord­ing to Chu, Courbet (who does his best Jack Spar­row in “Desperate Man”)

opened a per­spec­tive on a new cul­ture in the art world in which the public’s approval was valued higher than that of the gov­ern­ment or an offi­cial élite, and money was seen as a more legit­i­mate gauge of artis­tic suc­cess than offi­cial honors….[He] demon­strated that con­tro­versy need not be harm­ful to an artist’s rep­u­ta­tion, as it was just another form of publicity.

Peter Schjel­dahl, review­ing the book for The New Yorker, points to present cir­cum­stances that shape the method and thesis of Chu’s book:

The book advances a present ten­dency among art his­to­ri­ans to recon­sider the Old Mas­ters with ref­er­ence to the art worlds that allo­cated wealth and pres­tige in their times. This empha­sis is a sign of our own times, when money and celebrity—proliferating fairs and bien­ni­als, roar­ing auc­tions, around-the-clock Web jour­nals and blogs—exalt the grand­stand plays of a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, or Matthew Barney.

Schjeldahl’s point is rat­i­fied by a quick glance back at another New Yorker arti­cle about Courbet, this one writ­ten in 1940 by Robert M. Coates. Coates says of Courbet, “it would be hard indeed to think of a painter of his gen­eral period who had a more pow­er­ful influ­ence on the gen­er­a­tion of the Impressionists.” When he speaks of Courbet as a “revolutionary,” he awards the term for the painter’s use of “direct obser­va­tion, homely sub­jects, and ‘realistic’ portrayal.”

Chu’s book and Schjeldahl’s arti­cle (which includes the exquis­itely absurd “reërection,” a con­struc­tion only the New Yorker could pull off—or want to) present a res­olutely dif­fer­ent pic­ture of Courbet than the one pro­posed by Michael Fried. For Fried, Courbet’s impor­tance has to do with his recon­fig­u­ra­tion of the field of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. (Though all three agree that Courbet is proto-​modern, if not quite modern him­self, none agree on what that means.)

A sti­fling nos­tal­gia suf­fuses Schjeldahl’s arti­cle, to the point that it can seem claus­tro­pho­bic even to those who, like the critic, don’t care for “the grand­stand plays” of Koons or Hirst. But still it’s hard not to be swayed by his clos­ing para­graph, in which he issues a procla­ma­tion worthy of Gaddis’s Wyatt Gwyon—

[Baude­laire] saw that the fate of true artists would hence­forth involve forms of inter­nal exile, even in bright cir­cles of cos­mopoli­tan fame.

—before return­ing to his grumpy elegy:

That sort of com­punc­tion was lost on Courbet, and it is hard to imag­ine, let alone detect, in the con­duct of the art world today….Dirty laun­dry has become the emperor’s new clothes.