digital emunction

“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. [Read more]

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.

The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess, John Wikinson’s book of mostly-collected criticism, is now out from Salt. The essays’ main subjects are poets who came of working age during and just after the British Poetry Revival: John James, Denise Riley, Douglas Oliver, J.H. Prynne, and Tom Raworth. A few American poets (John Weiners, Robert Creeley, Mina Loy) attract his attention as well, and the book includes two essays (on Marjorie Welish and Andrea Brady) that made their first appearances in Chicago Review.

(The next issue of CR will include Wilkinson’s response to Peter Riley’s letter about Wilkinson’s review of Simon Jarvis’s Unconditional. For Robert Archambeau’s jaunty summary of that debate, see here and here.)

The question Wilkinson returns to time and again in his criticism has to count as one of the central questions facing any poet working today: can there be lyric poetry that is not somehow Romantic? What both worries and thrills Wilkinson about Romanticism is its excess, an excess capable of both frustrating and inspiring the dream of political justice. But what is poetry without excess? In a sense, this is the same question that American visual artists were grappling with forty years ago, when modernism gave way to minimalism and, in Michael Fried’s terms, art yielded the stage to objects.

(For a clear and convincing demonstration of the political implications of Romantic attitudes about art—also a useful summary of one of the Frankfurt School’s favorite arguments—see Wolf Lepenies’s Tanner Lectures, The End of “German Culture.” [PDF])

Wilkinson’s subjects are not mere props for his own theorizing. As he writes in the introduction, one of the essays’ major objects is to satisfy “an intense need to argue, for myself as well as for others, the value of poets scarcely heard of when I was writing. This is the kind of thing poets should do, and which the academy should better appreciate and promote.”

The Lyric Touch is available from Salt and from Amazon, as is his recent book of poems, Lake Shore Drive (Amazon | Salt)