What's not to like painterdog? For me, these paintings are about formal issues... Like Fairfield Porter without the landscapes-- though I've never seen Plessen in real life. I read they're rather thin. But so what?
It not doing much for me formal issues or not, but I have to say I really can't make a real critcal judgement as the reproduction is not doing the work justice.
Influential? Based on readership you could make a case. But You might want to break this down to audience, and based on the audience, the influence of the collective oppinion.
David Hickey, for example, has a following, I think his books are assigned in colleges. His ideas are easy to grasp, and the books are written almost conversationally.
Baktin is fashionably influencing the influencers - though not a critic. If you were a critic, using Baktin would sort fo synergisticly make you more influential right?
If I wanted to be influential I would try to find the ideas that resonated with people and then become the embodiment of those ideas, through appropriation, superimposition, or hybridity. Like a skin graft from "Face Off" or a Hanibal Lector (Manhunter) sort of deal.
Im pretty miopic, so I dont think my oppinion counts for much.
RS writes for the middle brow audience of the NYT, so what is she influencing with its shrinking readership? Of that readership who reads her articles? The MARKET? Yippie!
JS writes for two audences, the insider, and the credulous. he keeps trying to play the Babylon card but wherefore art thou, Babylon?
Kimmelman, Gardner, Gluek, Cotter, I dunno, no one really stands out as a demagogue like Anne Coulter or O'reilley.
Scheldahl would be good if he wasnt writing for the New Yorker - its like he gets neutered, editorially, I imagine.
The more highbrow publications can't be as influential - who reads October?
My feeling that to get a Times review by Roberta Smith is the best you can do. Respect wise. I like Saltz. I like the Brooklyn Rail. Sometimes read Artforum and Modern Painters and Flash art. I enjoy W magazines coverage of art. Not Vogues.
thats Mikhail Bakhtin, not Bakunin, although he's fine too from what I read on WIkipedia. Him and Thomas "Nightmare" Malthus. Anyone that's channeling those dudes is doing pretty well.
Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau. Why do all the critics shy away or merely hint? Audience? No economic incentive? Not "art"?
Where NYC = Babylon if you can wrap your head around that.
If you will recall Babylon is also an comparable to ROme, although its more about the tower, and you could tie "Snow Crash" by Neil Stephensen into it, if you were so inclined, I am, trendy though it may be, to some.
As WB Yeats said "It was a dark and stormy clusterfuck, and the peg boy whined...'but father, I dont't want any of that'"
In any case these sorts of gravitational waves are hard to detect, and the interferometers are still in development. I imagine the blog matters but who can tell?
It wasnt long ago that in Brooklyn you had to pay for the VV - I wasnt around for the real good old days before Saltz, even. Lester Bangs man! I got nothing against socialites, but its hard to hang with someone who is in a different tax bracket. If you can shoot the shit without worrying about how much a caphirina or a mojito, or a single malt scotch, neat, costs, or which fork to spear the chilli-gruyere dog with.... Man, I don't know, I just think Saltz writes sort of right of where I'm sitting.
Reading critics is like going directly to the cheat codes.
My pleasure is looking at art and trying to figure it out myself. The one's I get--like the Claire Rojas or the Jonathan Meese--really are telling me things I already know in a way that I understand. So they are lovely paintings to me. But the ones I dont get, like the Germans or Merlin james, kind of stick in my head and pester me to unravel what they mean. So I like those for that reason. I like work that compels and confuses simultaneously.
It just gives me something to do besides earning enough money to eat.
Remember when Mortal Kombat was the corrupter of youth? Then it was Grand theft Auto. My vote is America's Army, because it's free, and sponsored by the Army.
But it used to be that the cheat codes were defined by a master code that provided, more-or-less, the framework in which to discuss and qualify art. No longer so in a highly pluralistic world. So in my view, the cheat codes are reduced to scattered educated opinions, smart party banter. Thus I read for entertainment value. Matthew Collins can be hilllllllarious at times. That said, I guess there's still value for the art-buyer who might use criticism as an advisory purchasing tool.
I like Alison Gingeras's ass. Though I've only seen it in reproduction.
The life of an artist is inspired, self sufficient and independent ( unrelated to society ). The direction of attention of an artist is towards mind in order to be aware of inspiration. Following inspiration life unfolds free of any influence. Finally the artist recognizes himself in the work and is happy and contented. Nothing else will satisfy him. An artist's life is an unconventional life. It leads away from the example of the past. It struggles painfully against its own conditioning. It appears to rebel but in reality it is an inspired way of life.
Zip check out this Harvard study on latent inhibition and creativity. These people need to study you extensively. The problem with critics and criticism is most art history people think and sometimes say that artists are unintelligent. Also art history programs are a finishing school for wealthy women and these people are sometimes the most sexist link in the whole chain.
their quoted expert is from what looks like a conservative think tank..
http://www.claremont.org/
So I dont know if its real or not. I can quit anytime I want, anyways.
THat cohen dude on artcritical also writes for the NY Sun (I had a copy lying around) theres an article without a byline that equates the Nue Museum's Klimt with a chuck close. At least thats sort of intertesting.
i to this day have the 'Babylon Now' article on my wall, whatever that means. I had drinks with this chap from the Times one evening who told me about the 'roundtable' and who got to write about what. jobs a job i guess.
we give them a job and reason to feel important who gives a shit what they write
hinging your lifes ambitions on what some dickweed writes about you art? what are they going to teach you that you don't already know about life? 1 critic answered 1 question that i had once.. to this day i still like him.. it wasn't an unsolved mystery, more like relaying a fact.. so i thank him
back in clem's time, critical discourse was a unified front moving toward the end of a certain history. I don't think that the kind of position they held is possible today. Still, for all the reasons you mentioned above, the role of the critic still has great journalistic value. And because of this, they are still powerful.
I was talking to a young artist friend, a Hunter grad, recently who opined that a gushing Jerry Saltz review was worth $100,000. Jules de Balencourt and Amy Sillman both seemed to have benefited greatly from his attentions.
If this is true its so wrong. I have heard about this, that in some circles theres also a fair amount of sexual "payola" also in the mix.
Well I guess I can kiss that smoochy review good-bye, I had a weird e-mail interaction with Mr.Saltz on a review he did that I disagreed with on many levels. Its funny I never thought he would respound, so kudos to him for being a good sport of sorts.
to be a greenberg or rosenberg...today? of course i think this is possible. tell a painter what to do to be important, successful?, they will follow. i think alot of people want to be lead, taught etc.. You just need the right authoritative, intellectual voice,...good propaganda..hitler anyone? so yes it is possible for certain people to be very influential.. saatchi.
todays critics and art writers are in total - educated wimps. who out there has the dong to pick a camp and slag everything else.. I'm not saying that is what is neccassary but i would respect it.
what if on the day of your new gallery show of art, work ..., one of these fanciful writer critics sat down to write a review of it and discovered he had a massive cluster of hemorrhoids? Are critics more flighty than before?
On a positive note: I heard if britany spears writes a poem about your work and posts it on her new website about tigers there is a really good chance you could make out with her in one of her videos..honest.
Is this from when you people were all gang-banging Alex McQuilken? Polyvocality is a post-modern concept but liberal feminism is 300 years old and anti-essentialism dates back to Peter Abelard and the nominalists in the 1100's. There is a lot of history behind anyone who wants to fight bigots who define female or feminist for others. Personally it's one of my favorite fights.
didn't mean to go so far as to say 'polyvocality' and our anti-essentialist climate negates the importance of writing or criticality for that matter. My point is that I feel that critical discourse as a field doesn't have the power that it once had when it comes to shaping the course of art with respect to kalm james' interest "...the consensus makers, the curators, dealers, collectors, and museum board members....". My opinion is that there are other forces more powerful. Need I mention the baby-boomer dollar, in relation to painting's resurgence, as an example. One force out of many.
There is no anti-essentialist climate and our culture is rapidly becoming less secular. I think too many people are soft from sitting around on their asses using Lacanian psychoanalyis to watch Alfred Hitchcock or whatever it is they did to get tenure to notice. There are too few voices both critically and in the marketplace.
Alright, kelli, If you're speaking from either a feminist point of view or in terms of power relations in general then I accept your statement '...there is no anti-essentialist climate...', however I maintain that that very idea has tricked down into our understanding of what makes art good or bad... Producing an art 'climate', if you will, of overall permissiveness.
Anyway, what's you're comment about Lacan/Hitchcock/tenure about? Who are you implicating?
Somebody was implying that Saltz sleeps with artists which is ridiculous. I wondered if they were one of the people who piled on Alex McQuilken after a favorable review by falling back on a totally dated and bigoted type of feminism. Envy dressed up as politics. There are other critics who deserve criticism, people far more authoritarian and enmeshed in material values. I just can't name them because I'm not using a moniker. You guys should.
I said in that in some circles there's also a fair amount of sexual "payola" also in the mix. I never said he was doing that. And I was being ironic...
If anyones needs a life its you mr grandmanelly...
For crying out loud are we not taking ourselves a bit to seriously.
But I like the monicker "National Enquirer of comments"
Since there seems to be some new people here I just wanted to remind you that I don’t host personal remarks. It is hard for me to moderate so many comments all the time, so please respect the forum and your art colleges.
I like Magnus von Plessen's work a lot. There was a show at Gladstone a year or so ago. He pulls apart representation, as someone made reference to at the beginning. But, he gets paint--the thickness. The tension between a mark and the blank canvas, and how that works to make near-images, seems to be where the work is focused. Alison Gingeras' essay for Dear Painter Paint Me was pretty inspiring. I wish Susan Buck-Morss wrote art criticism--more of it--about painting. I think she is very smart. Roberta is smart. Fairfield Porter wrote great things. Agnes Martin's book (gray cover) is a serious force to reckon with. Thank you all artists who write. I love this blog sometimes too.
kjames....at least the artist statement gets your version of your own work into black and white before the crit can create a public one! ... so a good reason to be clear and upfront with your statement... or even to have one at all!
50 comments:
Lives and works in Berlin
It reminds me of Duchamp's Bride Being Stripped Bare. Also a little Rauschenberg combine.
representing the representational.
Dies ist nicht sehr gute Kunst.
Was ist mit dem Objekt?
Ich bin nicht in diese Art der es von der Kunst macht nichts für mich.
Seines besseres als das letzte Gemälde, indem es interessanter ist, und versuchend hart zu so Expressionisten nicht.
What's not to like painterdog?
For me, these paintings are about formal issues...
Like Fairfield Porter without the landscapes-- though
I've never seen Plessen in real life. I read they're rather
thin. But so what?
It not doing much for me formal issues or not, but I have to say I really can't make a real critcal judgement as the reproduction is not doing the work justice.
Ich muß sie sehen, um besseres Urteil zu bilden.
I will have to see them to make better judgement.
i cant see what is going on with this one at all.... meaning i can't see it.
therefore
no comment
On the west coast, I like the folks at stretcher.org
Influential? Based on readership you could make a case. But You might want to break this down to audience, and based on the audience, the influence of the collective oppinion.
David Hickey, for example, has a following, I think his books are assigned in colleges. His ideas are easy to grasp, and the books are written almost conversationally.
Baktin is fashionably influencing the influencers - though not a critic. If you were a critic, using Baktin would sort fo synergisticly make you more influential right?
If I wanted to be influential I would try to find the ideas that resonated with people and then become the embodiment of those ideas, through appropriation, superimposition, or hybridity. Like a skin graft from "Face Off"
or a Hanibal Lector (Manhunter) sort of deal.
Im pretty miopic, so I dont think my oppinion counts for much.
RS writes for the middle brow audience of the NYT, so what is she influencing with its shrinking readership? Of that readership who reads her articles? The MARKET? Yippie!
JS writes for two audences, the insider, and the credulous. he keeps trying to play the Babylon card but wherefore art thou, Babylon?
Kimmelman, Gardner, Gluek, Cotter, I dunno, no one really stands out as a demagogue like Anne Coulter or O'reilley.
Scheldahl would be good if he wasnt writing for the New Yorker - its like he gets neutered, editorially, I imagine.
The more highbrow publications can't be as influential - who reads October?
Just some thoughts off the top.
My feeling that to get a Times review by Roberta Smith is the best you can do. Respect wise.
I like Saltz. I like the Brooklyn Rail. Sometimes read Artforum and Modern Painters and Flash art.
I enjoy W magazines coverage of art. Not Vogues.
thats Mikhail Bakhtin, not Bakunin, although he's fine too from what I read on WIkipedia. Him and Thomas "Nightmare" Malthus.
Anyone that's channeling those dudes is doing pretty well.
Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau. Why do all the critics shy away or merely hint? Audience? No economic incentive? Not "art"?
Did Schjedahl go to far in giving Betty Woodman a rave review? Zip elaborate on the babylon idea please.
Brooklyn rail has some good stuff , although it could be edited for length...I have a short attention span.
ill try to read
Im not the only one to notice the babylon thing - It resonated with me personally cuz Im into apocalyptic visions - if you google you get:
babylon+saltz
Where NYC = Babylon
if you can wrap your head around that.
If you will recall Babylon is also an comparable to ROme, although its more about the tower, and you could tie "Snow Crash" by Neil Stephensen into it, if you were so inclined, I am, trendy though it may be, to some.
As WB Yeats said "It was a dark and stormy clusterfuck, and the peg boy whined...'but father, I dont't want any of that'"
In any case these sorts of gravitational waves are hard to detect, and the interferometers are still in development. I imagine the blog matters but who can tell?
Saltz's Babylon
so from that, another faveorite term termite art
Oh I love David Cohen. Artcritical.com
He has a really pretty dog I have seen him walk around Chelsea too.
It wasnt long ago that in Brooklyn you had to pay for the VV - I wasnt around for the real good old days before Saltz, even. Lester Bangs man!
I got nothing against socialites, but its hard to hang with someone who is in a different tax bracket.
If you can shoot the shit without worrying about how much a caphirina or a mojito, or a single malt scotch, neat, costs, or which fork to spear the chilli-gruyere dog with.... Man, I don't know, I just think Saltz writes sort of right of where I'm sitting.
Reading critics is like going directly to the cheat codes.
My pleasure is looking at art and trying to figure it out myself. The one's I get--like the Claire Rojas or the Jonathan Meese--really are telling me things I already know in a way that I understand. So they are lovely paintings to me. But the ones I dont get, like the Germans or Merlin james, kind of stick in my head and pester me to unravel what they mean. So I like those for that reason. I like work that compels and confuses simultaneously.
It just gives me something to do besides earning enough money to eat.
I really appreciate bread soaked in gravy.
3 KINDS OF i DONT GET IT
Remember when Mortal Kombat was the corrupter of youth? Then it was Grand theft Auto. My vote is America's Army, because it's free, and sponsored by the Army.
I agree with closeuup for the most part...
But it used to be that the cheat codes
were defined by a master code that provided,
more-or-less, the framework in which to
discuss and qualify art. No longer so in a highly
pluralistic world. So in my view, the cheat
codes are reduced to scattered educated opinions,
smart party banter. Thus I read for entertainment
value. Matthew Collins can be hilllllllarious at times.
That said, I guess there's still value for the
art-buyer who might use criticism as an advisory
purchasing tool.
I like Alison Gingeras's ass.
Though I've only seen it in reproduction.
And then there's this:
The life of an artist is inspired, self sufficient and independent
( unrelated to society ).
The direction of attention of an artist is towards mind in order
to be aware of inspiration.
Following inspiration life unfolds free of any influence.
Finally the artist recognizes himself in the work and is happy
and contented. Nothing else will satisfy him.
An artist's life is an unconventional life. It leads away from the
example of the past.
It struggles painfully against its own conditioning. It appears to
rebel but in reality it is an inspired way of life.
Agnes Martin
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031001061055.htm
Zip check out this Harvard study on latent inhibition and creativity. These people need to study you extensively. The problem with critics and criticism is most art history people think and sometimes say that artists are unintelligent. Also art history programs are a finishing school for wealthy women and these people are sometimes the most sexist link in the whole chain.
Thanks, I could use the money. Apparently I could sue...
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=15168
their quoted expert is from what looks like a conservative think tank..
http://www.claremont.org/
So I dont know if its real or not. I can quit anytime I want, anyways.
THat cohen dude on artcritical also writes for the NY Sun (I had a copy lying around) theres an article without a byline that equates the Nue Museum's Klimt with a chuck close. At least thats sort of intertesting.
i to this day have the 'Babylon Now' article on my wall, whatever that means. I had drinks with this chap from the Times one evening who told me about the 'roundtable' and who got to write about what. jobs a job i guess.
we give them a job and reason to feel important
who gives a shit what they write
hinging your lifes ambitions on what some dickweed writes about you art? what are they going to teach you that you don't already know about life?
1 critic answered 1 question that i had once.. to this day i still like him.. it wasn't an unsolved mystery, more like relaying a fact.. so i thank him
I think you should ask the curators dealers collector, etc. Not the artists. All the artists are saying we dont care. Isnt that the way it should be?
back in clem's time, critical discourse was a unified
front moving toward the end of a certain history. I don't
think that the kind of position they held is possible today.
Still, for all the reasons you mentioned above, the role
of the critic still has great journalistic value. And because
of this, they are still powerful.
I was talking to a young artist friend, a Hunter grad, recently who opined that a gushing Jerry Saltz review was worth $100,000. Jules de Balencourt and Amy Sillman both seemed to have benefited greatly from his attentions.
If this is true its so wrong.
I have heard about this, that in some circles theres also a fair amount of sexual "payola" also in the mix.
Well I guess I can kiss that smoochy review good-bye, I had a weird e-mail interaction with Mr.Saltz on a review he did that I disagreed with on many levels. Its funny I never thought he would respound, so kudos to him for being a good sport of sorts.
to be a greenberg or rosenberg...today?
of course i think this is possible.
tell a painter what to do to be important, successful?, they will follow. i think alot of people want to be lead, taught etc.. You just need the right authoritative, intellectual voice,...good propaganda..hitler anyone? so yes it is possible for certain people to be very influential.. saatchi.
todays critics and art writers are in total - educated wimps. who out there has the dong to pick a camp and slag everything else.. I'm not saying that is what is neccassary but i would respect it.
what if on the day of your new gallery show of art, work ..., one of these fanciful writer critics sat down to write a review of it and discovered he had a massive cluster of hemorrhoids?
Are critics more flighty than before?
On a positive note: I heard if britany
spears writes a poem about your work and posts it on her new website about tigers there is a really good chance you could make out with her in one of her videos..honest.
Is this from when you people were all gang-banging Alex McQuilken? Polyvocality is a post-modern concept but liberal feminism is 300 years old and anti-essentialism dates back to Peter Abelard and the nominalists in the 1100's. There is a lot of history behind anyone who wants to fight bigots who define female or feminist for others. Personally it's one of my favorite fights.
...
People talk about me, baby
Say I'm doin' you wrong, doin' you wrong
Well, don't you worry baby
Don't worry Cause I'm right here,
right here, right here,
right here at home
Some people call me the space cowboy
Some call me the gangster of love
Some people call me Maurice
Cause I speak of the pompatus of love
...
kelli,
didn't mean to go so far as to say 'polyvocality' and our anti-essentialist climate negates the importance of writing or criticality for that matter. My point is that I feel that critical discourse as a field doesn't have the power that it once had when it comes to shaping the course of art with respect to kalm james' interest "...the consensus makers, the curators, dealers, collectors, and museum board members....". My opinion is that there are other forces more powerful. Need I mention the baby-boomer dollar, in relation to painting's resurgence, as an example. One force out of many.
There is no anti-essentialist climate and our culture is rapidly becoming less secular. I think too many people are soft from sitting around on their asses using Lacanian psychoanalyis to watch Alfred Hitchcock or whatever it is they did to get tenure to notice. There are too few voices both critically and in the marketplace.
Alright, kelli, If you're speaking from either a
feminist point of view or in terms of power relations
in general then I accept your statement '...there is
no anti-essentialist climate...', however I maintain
that that very idea has tricked down into
our understanding of what makes art good or
bad... Producing an art 'climate', if you will, of
overall permissiveness.
Anyway, what's you're comment about Lacan/Hitchcock/tenure about?
Who are you implicating?
i am going to go with a daily double for: party more, think less...
there is a day a shining day. where it could. b fun.
Somebody was implying that Saltz sleeps with artists which is ridiculous. I wondered if they were one of the people who piled on Alex McQuilken after a favorable review by falling back on a totally dated and bigoted type of feminism. Envy dressed up as politics.
There are other critics who deserve criticism, people far more authoritarian and enmeshed in material values.
I just can't name them because I'm not using a moniker. You guys should.
Uh I never said he(Saltz) slept with anyone.
I said in that in some circles there's also a fair amount of sexual "payola" also in the mix.
I never said he was doing that.
And I was being ironic...
If anyones needs a life its you mr grandmanelly...
For crying out loud are we not taking ourselves a bit to seriously.
But I like the monicker "National Enquirer of comments"
What I said was it would be wrong if that a gushing Jerry Saltz review was worth $100,000.
National enquirer of comments is good. Can I be page six of gossip?
sure, and sports as well...
I miss the sock puppet.
There are sock puppets within all of us my son.
It just takes a bit of mushrooms to realize
and reconnect with them.
Since there seems to be some new people here I just wanted to remind you that I don’t host personal remarks. It is hard for me to moderate so many comments all the time, so please respect the forum and your art colleges.
I like Magnus von Plessen's work a lot. There was a show at Gladstone a year or so ago. He pulls apart representation, as someone made reference to at the beginning. But, he gets paint--the thickness. The tension between a mark and the blank canvas, and how that works to make near-images, seems to be where the work is focused.
Alison Gingeras' essay for Dear Painter Paint Me was pretty inspiring. I wish Susan Buck-Morss wrote art criticism--more of it--about painting. I think she is very smart. Roberta is smart. Fairfield Porter wrote great things. Agnes Martin's book (gray cover) is a serious force to reckon with. Thank you all artists who write. I love this blog sometimes too.
kjames....at least the artist statement gets your version of your own work into black and white before the crit can create a public one! ... so a good reason to be clear and upfront with your statement... or even to have one at all!
that sock puppet has some nice harry balls.
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