I can’t imagine Marcel Proust beating up on anyone. Besides, this happened in the 10th arrondissement, a busy commercial and commuter section of Paris, not an ideal stomping ground for aesthetes.

More of a ground for stomping. This past Saturday, June 6, was the Nuit blanche in Paris, one of those anaesthetizing events I’ve called the Saturnalia: State-sponsored invitations to freely visit and enter social and cultural venues of all sorts, with the implication that these same events aren’t otherwise accessible.

A favor is being done. The Fondation Cartier is opening late, and there is an lighthearted event in front of the Holocaust Museum that “challenges our perception of archival images.” I assume the archival images being challenged are not Holocaust-related, that’s the kind of challenge that gets you arrested in Paris.

The Longue nuit, we are told, is « une grande fête de l’amour » because, as the artistic director informs us, « l’amour est ici revendiqué comme un véritable acte politique ». 1 “Here Love is asserted to be a genuine political act.”

I do not doubt it. Nor did the Catholic fascist thugs who this Saturday past assaulted the mayor of the 10th arondissement in front of the Church of Saint Laurent. The assault was in protest of the imputed politicization of the sacred space of Saint Laurent, though I wish the fascists had protested the language used to describe the event:

« Une installation sonore transforme des voix anonymes du monde entier en matière vivante mêlée aux éclairs, composant une cartographie sensible et poétique des désirs humains entre terre et ciel. »2

Not exactly Proust, but there are parallels. Proust, too, wanted for a while to believe the churches of France—he meant the great Gothic cathedrals—had once served a spiritual function that could only devolve into parody once they were turned over to godless, abstract aestheticism. He was reacting to the laws of 1887 that shifted the protection of the French cultural heritage to the State and away from the Church, followed by the Law on the Secularization of Church Property in 1905, the same law that so disturbs the christofascists nowadays.3 Proust, as early as 1904, had penned an article denouncing the “snobs” who, he prophesied, would someday pour into the great cultural centers for an aesthetic experience emptied of intelligibility.

Was Proust writing of the Venice Biennale? The Vegas glasstist Dale Chihuly has once again populated the sides of the Grand Canal with his giant vampire squids. I imagine the diligent glass workers of Murano feel about this the way voters in Manhattan feel about Schlock Jacksberg, the Tiktok candidate; the way ordinary Russians felt about apparatchiki; the way Italians feel about priests.

Proust’s article was warmly received by Maurice Barrès, the unapologetic National-Socialist; Proust himself continued to have doubts about all this: they are the doubts that propel Remembrance of Things Past until the final section where Proust, in the process of crossing a Venetian campo, realizes that the meaning of the past lies not in the aesthetic experience itself but in the process of extracting meanings from the memory of aesthetic experience. Hegel would have approved; so, too, Bergson, who was a major influence on Proust.4

Fortunately, it hasn’t taken as long for the cultural workers of Italy to grasp the dialectic. Once again a sciopero has been called for this June 12, a “General Strike for Culture,” or “of” Culture, or perhaps against Culture with a capital “C.” The organizers are a segment of those I defined earlier as

“artists and such, those who have an interest in art but are marginally invested, if at all, in the process of valorisation activated in radiating circles by the Biennale itself: artists who may work in Venice or visit Venice or show in Venice; street artists, graphic artists and graffiti artists in considerable numbers; self-described art-workers and activists; and those independent actors whose economic isolation empowers them to make political statements and demonstrations, and little else.”

Comrades, in other terms. I like the fact that the strike is directed against l’under 35, meaning the wannabe youth that supposedly need to be encouraged to participate in Culture, but who in actuality provide its raw material, the primitive cultural labor to be accumulated.

What aligned most with my own thinking, however, was the Collective’s opening statement:

“It’s been long said that ‘Culture is the oil of Italy.’ However, we say culture is not oil, it is not a raw material one stumbles upon, that can be simply extracted and sold. Culture comes already ‘made:’ preserved, and passed on every day by a multitude of workers in the creative and cultural sectors.”

“La cultura è il petrolio d’Italia” si dice da anni. Noi diciamo invece che la cultura non è petrolio, perché non è una materia prima che ci ritroviamo per caso e che ci basta estrarre e vendere: la cultura viene “fatta”, tutelata e trasmessa ogni giorno dalla miriade di lavoratori e lavoratrici dei settori creativi e culturali.5

Culture, in other terms is not a raw material similar to the raw material sensations to be harvested according to the rules of the British Empiricists, guys like Adam Smith-yes-that-Adam-Smith. And now we’re back to our original problem: engaging a cultural space in its historic and social dimensions, instead of colonizing it. This is where the distinction between curating and staging comes in: between art as productive labor and art as capital.

To be Continued

WOID XXV-27d

June 12, 2026

There’s another distinction to be drawn, that cuts across my previous idea of a hub from which the valuation of objects and projects radiates. It’s the distinction between the curated and the staged. In my own artistic practice I’ve been more interested in staging than in curating. The Biennale is, for the most part, about curating.

Curating focuses on the validation of the work of an artist or a group of artists as a whole, a cogent and impervious unit. Anything that distracts from this validation is an impediment to be overcome or eliminated. That includes all obstacles of place, of context, of interpretation.

Art jargon is a constitutive part of this. Many years ago I studied for a Master’s in Art Criticism with Donald Kuspit, the Balzhargon in person. Luckily I was passed over for the advanced seminar. On completion, postulants were handed a freelancer’s job at a then-prestigious arts mag. The job involved writing ten-line reviews of artworks they’d never seen, based on press releases from galleries that advertised with the journal, at $50.00 a pop. As I’ve written elsewhere, the main advantage of art-jargon is its abdication of accountability.1Jargon is the curator’s friend for its posture of transcendent universalism. One size fits all.

And jargon’s only one form of this particular type of suppression. In 1986, Joëlle Kauffmann placed a display on a barge by the Pont-Neuf in Paris, calling for the release of her husband Jean-Paul, who’d been kidnapped and was then being held in Lebanon—he was released in 1988, you’ll want to know. Meanwhile, Christo, who was in the process of wrapping the bridge in gauze, respectfully objected:

“Please understand, Madame, that we are celebrating joy while you are showing tragedy, that’s unfortunate. Perhaps you should move on further.”

« Vous comprenez, madame, nous faisons la fête de la joie, et vous, vous nous montrez le drame, c’est fâcheux. Vous pourriez peut-être aller plus loin. »2

Perhaps there’s some kind of objective measure of the degree to which any given display of art in any given era suppresses the social and political reverberations of its presence. The logic of Modernity demands the erasure of the past with all of its burdens. If not erasure, suppression. If not suppression, supersession:

The French critic Etienne-Jean Delécluze called these public practices “Saturnalia:” He was writing about the popular displays promoted by the Directoire in the period of reactionary consolidation of the French Revolution, 1794-1799. These Saturnalia were, are still, political and social mobilizations in reverse, substituting aesthetic pleasures for social connection.3 In view of this, the outrage that’s been ramped up around the sculptures of Alma Allen on display at the American Pavilion is beside the point. Allen’s work is no worse or better than the “Median Art” it is, the kind of thing that’s put up in the middle of Park Avenue — okay, worse than Sean Scully and on a par with Carol Bove. Allen’s work is there to fill a gap that needs to be filled with the least amount of social or political commitment. He’s been chosen, not for his loyalty in any aesthetic sense, but because no curator or artist is going to risk their reputation by allowing themselves to seem to be endorsed, even tacitly, by the Trump Regime.

I didn’t visit the Austrian Pavilion because I was warned in advance that there would be naked people on view, that even standing outside the pavilion might expose me to the sight of naked Austrians. This is ‘sixties Actionism all over again. Or something else. Or both. Hey, kids. Can you say “apotropaic?”

Let’s try something else. Let’s try to dredge up an image of the real world that in turn allows us to articulate our own response to the real world, as Osip Mandelstam had learned to do from Dante:

“A quotation is a cicada. Its natural state is relentlessness. Having once seized the air, it will not let go.”4

Cicadahood as the operating principle of the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale: visual configurations that are not used as means to wider views, merely reiterated, obsessively, as a means of not letting go. Take the exhibition in the Spanish Pavilion, which does not articulate or state the given space as much as it repeats its pattern:

What the installation at the Spanish Pavilion does to the Spanish Pavilion, likewise, the installation at the Belgian Pavilion does for lettering, meaning: nothing.

The fantasy that lettering represent a transparent conveyance of language is an old one— a guy named Derrida blew a lot of smoke around that one, and there’s a very large amount of that particular smoke floating around Venice nowadays. Letterforms, you see, do not distort language, they only reproduce the world as it is, honest. And the world as it is is as it is amirite?

There’s a lot more than this in Venice, of course; but there’s a lot of this as well, lost souls in a sea of Empiricism, incapable of dredging up any sense outside of a senseless world to which they owe their survival, hoarding the space they occupy to guard against intruders:

WOID XXV-27c

June 6, 2026

To be continued.

Solidarity is a beautiful thing. I’d been planning to visit the main sites of the Venice Biennale at the Giardini and the Arsenale, admission €30.00 full price. But I was staying at the other end of Venice and there was a sciopero that day: the vaporetto, the water bus, was on strike, perhaps to protest the high cost of museum-going. So I started at the edge.

Edge: from a discursive point of view more than a topographical one.

The Biennale works like a kind of wheel. The hub consists of approved and sponsored exhibitions: artists promoted by their home countries as a form of cultural propaganda. Close by geographically and ideologically, are the works chosen by the designated curator for the Biennale according to some theme or other, a fluid ideological collusion with the various national pavilions, the posture of a counterweight to commodification.

Spreading out beyond the hub: exhibitions sponsored by billionaires and corporations and well-heeled galleries. The point is to make those seem as visible, if not more visible, than the Biennale itself. If the exchange-value of the work on display is thought to be dependent on its visibility, then the work’s closeness to the hub is thought to determine its exchange-value. A showplace on the Grand Canal helps, or ads plastered over the vaporetti if they’re running. Better yet, the People’s Republic of Upscale Consumption:

Bulgari has its own pavilion among the nations, with rhetoric to match:

Beyond all that lies the murky world of artists and such, those who have an interest in art but are marginally invested, if at all, in the process of valorisation activated in radiating circles by the Biennale itself: artists who may work in Venice or visit Venice or show in Venice; street artists, graphic artists and graffiti artists in considerable numbers; self-described art-workers and activists; and those independent actors whose economic isolation empowers them to make political statements and demonstrations, and little else.

And critics. I was stuck upriver from the action. The story of my life.

To be continued.

WOID XXV-27b

May 31, 2026

“A call to come together, an invitation to build a different way of being in the world through encounter and sharing with other forms of life, leaving room for wonder, feeling, dialogue, contemplation and the flow of time that transforms everything.”

“This significant commitment solidifies [X]’s strong and enduring bond with art, cultivated over years by promoting creativity as an expression of freedom, fostering cultural dialogue, and driving innovation.”

“In early performances […] [X] invited people to sit at coffee shop tables, share tea, and remove tails from bean sprouts. [X] established a method that blurred art and everyday life.”

“… foregrounding imagination as a tool for rethinking reality.”

“Emotional residue, spiritual presence, and the invisible forces that continue to shape memory and landscape long after physical disappearance.”

“The works ground far-reaching subjects in intimate, material encounters, exploring how meaning and connection are forged in the turmoil of the present day.”

“Filmed in a real sperm bank and a special effects studio, Things To Come is conceived as a musical.”

“points toward a search for languages that emerge through relation, listening, and resonance, beyond what is known and seen.”

“How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin? is a collaborative exhibition…”

WOID XXV-27

May 27, 2026

[Continued:]

« Dire qu’il y a des imbéciles pour puiser des consolations dans les beaux-arts . » Sartre, La Nausée.

945 Madison Ave at 75th Street

Sotheby’s has moved into the Building Formerly Known as Breuer. Two steps from the Met and miles away from the crowds. Also, free. Also, the staff are extremely pleasant. Also, fewer signs to tell you what to think. You’re on your own.

Through May 31, 2026

The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York

Metropolitan Museum of Art

[Gallery 746 North can be reached though the passage on the right as you enter the American Courtyard.]

Virtue Signaling Alert. A workmanlike abstract expressionist, successful enough in his lifetime, is handed a retrospective suggesting (erroneously, from all the evidence), that he was neglected in his lifetime because of his Native American roots. The show is announced by a huge banner on the Museum facade, a banner covering a greater surface than the exhibition itself. Which exhibition is tucked in a corner, right next to the Native American galleries.

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Through June 7, 2026

Ceija Stojka: Making Visible

Drawing Center

[Review forthcoming]

Stojka was an Austrian Roma and a survivor of Ravensbrück. Hopefully her work survives the Drawing Center’s pedantic approach. Go for the art. It’s remarkable. On its own terms. Which happen not to be the terms of the Center.

Through June 28, 2026

Raphael: Sublime Poetry

Metropolitan Museum of Art

There’s a French expression, c’est quand même pas mal, meaning, “despite the fact that everyone says this is good, it’s good, actually.” This could be said of the Raphael show at the Met: it’s vast, it’s thorough, it’s of the highest quality and consistency, it corrects a good number of settled myths. Also it’s Raphael, and I could have told you that and considerably more, but I’m an art critic, not an art historian. That was a previous life.

To paraphrase Goethe, “When you look at a Raphael you don’t become something, you learn something.” Fuck that.

WOID XXV-20

April 4, 2026

Paul Klee in the End Times. Klee’s Angelus novus couldn’t make it out of Israel. Still trying to scream as the bodies pile up.

[Gallery 758 can be reached from the back of the Japanese Galleries on the second floor, through the mezzanine on the second floor, or by taking the elevator to the second floor from the passage on the right as you enter the American Courtyard.]

Weak tea. Don’t go overboard.

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Through August 2, 2026

Carol Bove

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

“The problem isn’t that she fails because she’s a decorator, no more than the kettle-drummer fails for playing the kettle-drum. The problem is, that she fails on her own terms, which happen, incidentally, to be the terms of an interior decorator. I hate to think how she’d fail if she were an artist.”

Review

The Whitney Biennial has already won the prize for most irritating web site:

“Rather than offering a definitive answer to life today, this Whitney Biennial foregrounds mood and texture.”

You’ve let me down, Oh Whitney Guru…

[Review forthcoming]

No way this can be as bad as its press release:

At its core, Said interprets Orientalism as a Eurocentric worldview that essentializes Eastern peoples and cultures as a monolithic other.

While neither discounting nor discrediting the issue of the representation of “subordinated otherness” outlined by Said, this exhibition attempts to propose a less politicized and more positivistic [sic] examination of Orientalism as a site of infinite and unbridled creativity.

Normally I would cancel my plans to fly off to Venice in order to protest the Biennale’s shameful abdication to the Zionist State. On the other hand, the best of the Biennale will likely be outside the confines of the Giardini. For instance:

ART NOT GENOCIDE ALLIANCE

Or:

Gabrielle Goliath: Elegy

Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Castello, Venice

A continuation of the Gaza-focused performance that was rejected by the South African Minister for ahem Culture.

You’ve seen the garish opera production, now see the garish, over the top installation passing for an exhibition. Or rather, don’t.

The scandal of Duchamp, as far as the critics are concerned, is not that the shovel is transfigured into a work of art; it’s that the work of art remains a shovel for all that.

April 12 through August 22, 2026

Marcel Duchamp

Museum of Modern Art

There’s a hoary old joke about men confined in jail—or a barracks or a submarine, whatever, and they’ve grown so bored with the same jokes that they’ve numbered them all. And there’s one man among them who from time to time cries out, say, “78!” and everybody bursts out laughing.

Then there’s another man who shouts out numbers, and all he gets is dead silence in return. Finally, one of his mates explains to him: some people just don’t know how to tell them.

That’s the first thing and the last you’re going to need to know about Duchamp: anybody can make a work of art and most everybody does; few know how to make it work. The Duchamp retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is like an art school thesis show where the candidate is expected to display their competency, with the difference that Duchamp, unlike an art school graduate, had the competency of a pro. Duchamp was very good at saying what art’s supposed to say. He knew better than anyone how to tell the joke called Art.

You can tell at once because the first room in MoMA’s sprawling show is devoted to Duchamp’s early work. By age fifteen he was producing the kind of stuff that lets everybody know you know what’s involved in the making of art:

The signage claims this drawing was produced in 1904, but the signature says 1902 and gives the name of the high-school, possibly the teacher’s. In Duchamp’s time (and mine) the French educational system relied on rigid assignments based on quantifiable criteria, even in the Art class. Know-how was sanctioned over creativity; the system was designed to form technicians, not creative artists.

Duchamp’s particular genius was to get intensely creative with the technical know-how, and you can follow this approach throughout his career. He reminds me of another artist who twisted assignments into pretzels, Keith Haring at the School of Visual Arts. With Duchamp the teenager’s questioning of perspective morphs into a sharp, consistent questioning of perspective as a form of subjectivity, which (if you wish), you can trace back to the Late Classical meaning of the word per-spectiva: a mechanism that organizes forms in their relation to the beholder’s subjective view:

There’s more like that throughout, stuff about art as a social process, stuff about art as accumulation in space and time. Take the Chess Players of 1911, for instance, and note the effortlessness with which Duchamp summons up then-current ideas about Consciousness and the superposition of Time, as opposed to the belabored intellectualism of the Cubists. Duchamp does not borrow from, or illustrate Bergson, or Proust, or Freud or Lukács; he pursues similar concepts by his own means and that, to the theoretician, is unforgiveable.

Seen one work, and you’ve seen one: the man was a Raphael in reverse. Duchamp was too efficient to let all of those ideas and conceptions go to waste; too proficient to stay with one. No-one could upend ideas and conceptions so efficiently, proficiently.

Marcel Duchamp. A regarder (l’autre côté du verre) d’un oeil, de près, pendant presque une heure (The Small Glass), 1918. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Which brings us to the urinal, technically titled Fountain:

Arthur Danto, an artist turned philosopher turned critic and the author of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, used to tell how he’d once submitted an article in which he compared the gleaming white porcelain of Duchamp’s urinal to Jesus at the [ahem] Transfiguration, whose “countenance was altered, and his raiment was white, and glistering” [Luke 9:29]; “shining, exceeding white” [Mark 9:3], the original Piss Christ. The comparison, Danto claimed, was withdrawn before publication; but I suspect there’s more shock than news to that story. The bleached bone of contention isn’t so much the Transfiguration in the biblical sense as Duchamp’s subversion of the philosophical conception of transfiguration itself. It’s the long history of the critical-philosophical conception of Art that overshadows, still, our appreciation of Duchamp, and of art in general.

As early as 1918 the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire claimed that the intended title for Fountain, shown the previous year in New York, was « Le Bouddha de la salle de bain », and the Buddha is as good a candidate for transfiguration as Christ — or is it transcendence? Apollinaire pointed out, with a touch of irritation, that the joke was old hat by then: the critics had learned nothing from a joke orchestrated by himself and others back in 1910, when a painting executed by means of a donkey tail had been shown at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. Artists and jury, Apollinaire suggested, were in on the joke.1 Perhaps the visitors were, too. But the pressure on critics and philosophers to play the art-world insider had left them clueless.

Modernist Joke #45: “Everything changes, only the avant-garde remains the same.” With Duchamp’s Fountain, it’s the critics and philosophers who are stuck in time, as true today as it was then. In Europe, then America, from the 1900s on, the story of Art, especially among American philosophers like Danto and influential American critics like Clement Greenberg or Rosalind Krauss, told of Art moving towards a kind of purification, a gradual discarding of all but its essence, an Artworld Christ cleansed of His vulgar body. Through Art the Search for Truth would lead inevitably to the single, shiny Truth in the Sky, the Idea, as the German philosopher J. W. F. Hegel called it:

“Truth, in fact, is the Idea itself, such as it is thought.”

„Wahr nämlich ist die Idee, wie sie… solches gedacht wird.“2

The Truth of Art, therefore, was the Idea — the critic’s own. What these critics were proposing was, in fact, a grotesque distortion of the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung, a word that’s best translated as “sublation,” and that’s a low bar. Aufhebung is the process by which concepts are superseded through their apparent opposite, thesis-antithesis-synthesis and all that. Where the critics (Greenberg, Danto, Krauss e tutti quanti) depart from Hegel, is over the extent and meaning of Aufhebung. Hegel, in a significant entry to his Encyclopedia, speaks of

“the negative aspect of mental activity, by which this material is transmuted into mind and destroyed as a sensible.”3

Except that’s not what Hegel said, it’s what the English translation says he said. Here’s what Hegel says in the German original:

„Das Negative der Thätigkeit des Geistes, wodurch jener Stoff vergeistigt und als Sinnliches aufgehoben wird, verkannt und übersehen ist. Das Sinnliche ist in jener Stellung nicht bloss das empirische Erste, sondern bleibt so, dass es die wahrhaft substantielle Grundlage sein solle.“4

“The negating activity of the Mind, by which Substance becomes of the Mind and is transmuted as sensual, is misread and overlooked [by Condillac]. In this context, the Sensual is not merely treated as an empirical starting-point; but it remains so, as if it were the true substantive foundation.”

Hegel is saying that the sensual aspect of material objects is erroneously taken by Condillac, the eighteenth-century French philosopher, as the foundation of speculative reason, whereas to Hegel this sensual aspect, to the extent that it’s perceived by the viewer, has been already embraced and modified by the mind — that Tree in the Forest thang.

Of course any system fashioned in the tradition of Condillac, or Locke, or Hume or the rest of La Bande à Bonnot — any system based on British Empiricism or Danto’s Analytical Philosophy, that is, — would be hard put to grasp this. Hegel is in the process of arguing that one cannot claim a solid foundation for thought in material reality as it is: all objects of perception are to the mind as already apprehended.

And this is what Hegel means when he says, in his Aesthetics, that “the beauty of Art is that beauty which is born of the spirit [Geist] and born again” (die Kunstschönheit ist die aus dem Geiste geborene und wiedergeborene Schönheit).5 It’s an oft-quoted line that’s confused the Anglo critics, the philosophers and the aesthetically inclined since the dawn of Modernity, and that confuses them, still. Thus in 1975, T. M. Knox, in a footnote to his English translation of Hegel’s Aesthetics, comments:

“This is obscure. Bosanquet, in his translation of Hegel’s Introduction (London 1905), p. 39 suggests an allusion to ‘born of water and the spirit,’ but this must be wrong. Hegel means that we have beauty originated by man’s mind and also what is reproduced by his mind in his natural world.”6

Born of the water and the spirit is a quote from the Gospels [John 3:5] that’s usually read to signify spiritual rebirth through baptism. The footnote may well have inspired Danto, who heavily annotated his own copy of the Knox translation. Considering the “water” involved in Duchamp’s urinal, the meaning’s limpid.

At any rate the word Geist is notoriously hard to translate into English: something between Mind and Spirit, maybe “The Spirit of Thought.” In the hands of British moral philosophers like Bernard Bosanquet the fons et origo of Hegel’s thought, his Phenomenologie des Geistes (Variously translated as Phenomenology of Mind or Phenomenology of Spirit) becomes a phenomenology of the Spiritual: not of the Spirit that penetrates all of material reality but the Spiritual that stands against it. The same might be said of Danto’s approach to Art, and Greenberg’s, and Krauss’.

Hanna Monaghan, the Nantucket aesthete, tells of an encounter with an elderly Quaker woman. (Monaghan’s family was steeped in the tradition of American Quaker nonconformism.) When Hanna boldly proclaims that “Art is Beauty, Beauty, Truth,” the old Quaker responds in true Quaker fashion that Truth (and by extension Beauty), cannot be found in material objects, but only in inner faith.7 In Duchampian terms: is a Pissoire-as-Art transcendent, inhabited by the Spirit of Art from its very nature as a work of art, from its essential innate artiness, that is? Or, contrariwise, could a pissoire transcend mere Pissoirehood from the sensual qualities inherent in it as a physical object, gleaming white and so forth? These are the fault lines along which the reading and misreading of Hegel operate. Also, the setup for Duchamp’s joke. Do you know philosophers have no sense of humor? Ah yes, „Zur Philosophische Humorlosigkeit.“ Have you read my book?

Hegel is clear—okay, unambiguous. As is often the case, he’s going up against Immanuel Kant’s argument in the Critique of Judgment of 1790 — series of interlocked arguments, rather. For Kant, the material aspect of things lies

“…thick in the physicality of sensation […] , where it is simply directed toward pleasure, of which nothing remains in the Idea.”

„dicht in der Materie der Empfindung […], wo es bloß auf Genuß angelegt ist, welcher nichts in der Idee zurückläßt .“ [§52]

If Beauty is inherent (Wesentlich) in the sensible, as Kant has just proposed, and if the sensible is merely pleasurable, then how can Beauty be raised from the lowly objects and experiences of the sensible world? For Kant there is no answer. Whatever is available to the senses falls under the heading of Genuß: pleasure, the enjoyable, the object of consumption. And true Beauty, if it is to be one with Truth, cannot in any way partake of the material reality of things. Kant was a major influence on American nonconformist spiritualism, and therefore art-making and art appreciation. Somewhere, that old Quaker lady is nodding her bonnet.

Or that aging critic. Knox, in a note to his 1975 translation of Hegel’s Aesthetics, mistakenly applies Kant’s criterion to Hegel:

“A work of art is different from a photograph. Even if it portrays a shop, it is the appearance (Schein) which pleases us and is the essential thing, without our having any interest in the shop or what it sells. Consequently, with this Kantian doctrine in mind…” [Knox, n. 3, p. 4.]

Here Knox conflates Schein (the appearance of things and concepts to the mind), and sinnliche Schein, the sensual appearance of things, which is what distinguishes Hegel’s theory from Kant’s. For Hegel it’s the sublation of the sensual appearance of things by means of natural beauty (Schönheit) that allows for a second sublation by means of the subjective understanding of the Beautiful (Kunstschönheit), which in turn opens up the possibility of a philosophic conceptualization of the Beautiful in general, and Art in general as well. Beauty is nested (bewahrt) in the artwork that in turn is nested in the sensual world, Denn das Schöne hat sein Leben in dem Scheine: “For the life of the Beautiful lies in appearance.” 8

To Kant, all of this is a non-starter because Spirit lies, as it did for the elderly Quaker, outside of the realm of phenomenal perception, much as the artiness of an artwork, according to Danto, lies outside of the realm of perception. Since there’s nothing to distinguish a Brillo box in the gallery from a Brillo box in the kitchen (or a pissoire in the men’s room, you get the idea) the pissoire, from the very fact that there’s nothing to distinguish it, becomes “the evidence of things not seen” [Hebrews 11:1] or at least the evidence that things have not been seen by you and me. To Hegel, contrariwise, Spirit first appears in a raw sensible object, in which the observer perceives certain qualities, one of which is the Beautiful. Once those qualities are understood to harbor the concept of the Beautiful the artist or the observer elevates them to another level, that of the Beauty of Art from whence they are available to philosophical understanding in general. Where Kant saw two distinct and irreconcilable phenomena, the Pleasing (sensual) and the Sublime (abstract), Hegel saw two stages in the ascension of the Beautiful, Schönheit followed by Kunstschönheit. In concrete terms (okay, porcelain term): if an artist finds sensual qualities in a urinal, then by raising the object to the realm of Kunstschönheit (emphasizing its sensual qualities over its utilitarian functions), the artist ensures that Beauty is reborn and made available to the mind on a higher sphere of supra-sensual understanding. According to Knox’s English translation:

“Thus this activity has a spiritual content which yet it configurates sensuously because only in this sensuous guise can it gain knowledge of the content.” [Knox, p. 40].

This passage is underlined in Danto’s copy. The original reads:

„Diese Tätigkeit hat also geistigen Gehalt, den sie aber sinnlich gestaltet, weil sie nur in dieser sinnlichen Weise desselben bewußt zu werden vermag. [Vorlesungen, p. 62.]

where the adjective geistigen, in context, does not mean “spiritual,” but “intellectual,” “abstract,” “supra-sensual.” In other terms: Beauty is not immanent to the phenomena of perception, otherwise all that’s sensed would be beautiful. Beauty, rather, is a category of the perceived that must be transcended through the activity of the mind. Beauty is merely a predicate of Art, no more immanent than linear perspective or production costs, or the glistering surface of a loo, or the loo’s utilitarian value. Das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee is a transient effect, a term in the evolving dialectic; nothing more than a tool in the toolbox, the glistering glow by which we know we’re in the presence of the divine. To return to our original point: even after we’ve transcended (processed, sublated) our perception of the urinal as Art-Beautiful, the urinal remains as it was. We know from photographs that Fountain has been historically displayed lying flat, or alternately upright, facing upside-down. In each case it remains a urinal, only subject to different readings.

Form has been given a new meaning. The urinal facing upside-down, for instance, would suggest at once the outline of a sitting Buddha, and a negation of its utilitarian function. Art has resolved the question of the distinction between the functional and the aesthetic, until next time. It’s called the Negation of the Negation.

All of this was easily available to Duchamp, notably through the writings of Roger Fry, the English aesthetic art critic whose theory of Significant Form is a refashioning of Hegelian aesthetics. Fry was the Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1906 to 1910, and as such was among the first to introduce Modernist Art and Theory to America, where Duchamp gleefully upended it. At any rate, Aufhebung is only one of many, many tools that Duchamp pulls out of the box—one of his many, many tricks. Calvin Tomkins, who was Duchamp’s friend and biographer, called him the Old Fox. The Fox knows many things. The critic only one.

Critics, rather. By the 1960s American art critics had taken up Hegel’s Aesthetics as their own, or at least that aspect of the Aesthetics that posits a permanent tension between the history of the progressive development of artworks in all their multiplicity, and the invariable content, the Ultimate Truth that hovers over them like the Spirit above the Waters. And since the common goal of artists and critics alike was Identity with Truth, it stood to Reason — the critic’s, anyhow — that Truth must be attained through Thought; and since thought was the specialty of thinkers there could be nothing as efficient as thought itself, damn the Torrigianos full speed ahead. Danto in particular conflated the Idea with Thought in general, and Thought in General with Philosophy, and Philosophy in General with his own. In Hegelian terms if not in Hegel’s words, he “identifie[d] absolute knowledge with Absolute Mind.”9

Danto and Greenberg wrote for The Nation, that hoary radical rag. Like many others they had allied themselves with that powerful strain in American Liberalism that empowers an intellectual elite to place itself above the Rabble by its cultural choices while maintaining the appearance of democratic solidarity by its political and social choices. Such efficiency, they thought, could only be achieved by the intermediary of an intellectual elite, which alone could theorize the future direction of Art.10 In this irresistible ascension up the Himalaya of Truth, the critic was Sir Edmund Hillary and the artist Sherpa What’s-his-Name, and their ascension was littered with the discarded debris of Art past.

No-one had done more for the Purification Theory of Art than Clement Greenberg, the critic who preceded Arthur Danto at The Nation or, more accurately, the critic Danto followed. It was Greenberg who, in the late ‘forties, had set in motion the idea that painting could only progress by efficiently discarding all means extraneous to painting itself. The measure of the progress of Art was its efficiency in tackling those meanings that were intrinsic to Art alone and those meanings, to Greenberg more even than to Fry, were meanings expressed through form: “Even at his most dogmatic, Fry usually has a hold of the truth somewhere.”11

As self-confident as he appeared, Greenberg, too, had his doubts. There’s a revealing, oft-quoted passage of his, it’s included in an article that was anthologized in 1961 as a reprint from 1953. In fact there are major unacknowledged changes in the 1961 version, which suggests that Greenberg was retrospectively rewriting his original statement to give the impression that his theorizing, like the Idea itself, was immanent in History and not subject to historical transformations of its own.12 The 1961 version is titled “The Plight of Culture,” as opposed to “The Plight of our Culture” in the original version. This suggests the author wanted us to believe that the plight in question was universal, a kind of Hegelian Idea of Cultural Production.

And the tone tone is considerably more pessimistic:

Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough. And this new sense of sin only contributes further to the enervation of leisure, for the rich as well as the poor.13

By 1961 that sense of efficiency as salvation from sin had started to permeate art criticism and art-making. Expressionism in American Art had given way to color-field abstraction, which would give way in turn to minimalism then to conceptual, each one declaring (at least according to the critics themselves) the eradication of the sensual in Art’s forced march toward the Ideal. Art was presented by its theorists as the most efficient way to illustrate some arcane principle or other. The fact that the formulas were Greenberg’s and eventually Danto’s or Krauss’, was no consolation — at least to Greenberg.

For others, artist or critic, it was their bread and butter. In a famous article, Krauss managed (or rather, failed) to reduce sculpture to a mathematical formula of a specific type, a variant of the Abelian Group, as if the purpose were to dispense the critic from apprehending Art through its sensual aspect. What’s purple and commutes?

Elsewhere, Krauss proposed a geometric construction as the true paradigm for artworks:

“Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves.”14

“Significant form” was now a contradiction in terms: only thought could be significant. Krauss, to paraphrase the late John Simon, dealt with the sensual like an exterminator with a cockroach. Hers was a bastardized Kantian theory, setting up a strict separation between the noumenal and the phenomenal: between those things that are of the Spirit because they dictate human behavior and natural processes, and those inert things that belong to the material world. For Hegel, Geist was that process that animated and elevated all elements of the sensible world; in the particular case of Art, the Spirit proceeded by means of the subjective sense of Beauty:

“Therefore whatever is beautiful is expressed as the sensual appearance of the Idea. For whatever exists as sensual and material [Objektive] does not maintain its self-sufficiency in regards to the Beautiful.”

„Das Schöne bestimmt sich dadurch als das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee. Denn das Sinnliche und Objektive überhaupt bewahrt in der Schönheit keine Selbständigkeit in sich.“ [Vorlesungen, p. 151.]

The material (Objektive) in Hegel, refers to the phenomena of the material world, those elements that have not been apprehended by consciousness and are therefore static — like that tree in the forest. Hegel is suggesting that anything can be made available to the mind by means of the Idea of Beauty. But as Arthur Danto argued, the task of Thought was not to liberate Truth from its sensual coil, but to destroy the multiplicity of meanings the mind had extracted from the material world. Danto assures us that such mundane extractions, as described by Wittgenstein, are an affront to “traditional philosophical demands for necessity and sufficiency.”15 Cry me a stream.

To mutilate Kant once more: nothing was to remain of Art but the Idea of Art itself:

“My own sense is that the history of Modernism is driven by philosophical theories regarding the nature of art, and negation plays a central role in this history since so much of it consists in refutations. In fact, in the West at least, the history of art has been the history of philosophical nihilations.”16

Danto would have recognized himself in this passage from Hegel’s Aesthetics:

“This liberation [of meaning from ‘the immediate sensuous shape’] can only take place in so far as the sensuous and natural is apprehended and envisaged in itself as negative, as what is to be, and has been, superseded.” [Knox, p. 347]

„Diese Befreiung kann nur insofern vor sich gehen, als das Sinnliche und Natürliche in sich selber als negativ, als das Aufzuhebende und Aufgehobene erfaßt und angeschaut wird.“ [Vorlesungen, p. 448.]

The critic, in fact, had already marked a passage on the facing page, which speaks of

“that spiritual abstraction of the supreme god, compared with whom the individual, the sensuous, and the phenomenal spheres are apprehended as non-divine, inappropriate, and therefore as something which must be negatived and superseded.” [Knox, p. 346.]

„…jener geistigen Abstraktion des obersten Gottes eingedenk, mit welchem verglichen das Einzelne, Sinnliche, Erscheinende als ungöttlich, unangemessen und deshalb als etwas erfaßt wird, das negativ gesetzt und aufgehoben werden müsse.“ [Vorlesungen p. 447.]

As so happens, the passage in question comes from that section of Hegel’s Aesthetics titled View of Purification and Penance or, more accurately, Anschauung von Reinigung und Buße, “Seeing Things from the Viewpoint of Purification and Penance.” This is the section in which Hegel tackles what he imagines to be the extreme asceticism of Indian Brahmanic culture — which tells us more about Danto’s intended role in the social world of art, and Krauss’, than a pile of dissertations. (There is a similar passage in Hegel’s early Lectures on the Philosophy of History, in which he presents the decadence of critical thought in Late Antiquity in similar terms.)

“Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas,” lamented Greenberg back in 1939.17 By 1961, as Greenberg suggested, High Art, the exclusive province of the intellectual elites, was threatening to turn as mechanically dry as the Kitsch that, according to Greenberg, was the province of the working stiffs. Beauty, to Hegel, had been nothing without its sensual side; but it was precisely this sensual aspect in all its multifarious, incoherent variety, that, as Greenberg sensed, was threatened by social forces — economic forces in particular — that Greenberg himself had helped to legitimize.18

Hegel had famously warned, “To make abstractions determinative of Reality is to destroy Reality.” (Abstraktionen in der Wirklichkeit geltend machen, heißt Wirklichkeit zerstören.)19 The comment comes in a discussion of Kant; and the expression geltend machen (“to validate,”) is a swipe at the Sage of Königsberg, meaning Immanuel Kant. It underscores Kant’s belief that it’s the Ideal that imposes its own eternal values by the intermediary of so-called “regulative ideas.”20 Contrariwise, according to Hegel, the Ideal is attained by the upward movement of Thought through History. Like Kant, Greenberg, Danto and Krauss were intent on imposing their own criteria of value on all art objects and the object of Art. Not at all incidentally, the words Gelt, geltend, like the word “value,” can refer simultaneously to moral values and economic worth.

The trick is to nihilate all value functions in favor of the single valuation that emanates from on high — from the critic, that is. For Danto and Krauss a urinal (or, for that matter, a Brillo box) may no longer be elevated to the realm of the Beautiful under the heading of Genuß, pleasure, because it’s pleasant to look at; nor for the practical efficiency of its design; nor for its quotient of Genuß again, meaning the satisfaction of wants or needs (“Gotta clean my oven.” “Gotta pee.” “This is fun to think about.”).

At the outset — back in 1939 — Greenberg had determined that “formal culture,” as he named it, was on the side of “the minority of the powerful — and therefore the cultivated.” On the other stood “the exploited and the poor —and therefore the ignorant.”21 Now, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the cultivated are no longer powerful because the powerful are no longer cultivated. In Art as everywhere, it’s the powerful and not the cultivated who call the shots. This did not prevent a critic like Danto from attempting to determine the direction artists were to take in order to confirm what would have been the next step in the progression of the Hegelian Spirit if the Spirit had at last come to a standstill by merging Truth with Thought — his own. Irony of ironies: the symbol of this ultimate standstill, the Spirit of the Critic hovering above with theory in hand, is Duchamp’s urinal itself:

“The End of Art/Post-History: Danto argued that because Bidlo creates perfect copies of modern masters, he demonstrates that art has reached a state where the physical object is no longer paramount; rather, it is the interpretation.”22

#75. Some people just don’t know how to tell a joke.

ENVOI

For Hegel as others, the negation of the negation has another aspect: the ironic. Not simply the return of the repressed: its insistence on popping up like a jack-in-the-box. Whenever the critic imposes abstractions on reality the artist imposes reality on abstractions. Reality bites.

Like a joke well told, Fountain unfolds and unfolds again in Thought. A hundred years later, we’re still chuckling. Perhaps we’re chuckling for different reasons than a hundred years ago, just as we don’t, as a rule, admire a Masaccio nowadays for its clever commentary on the Trinity. Nothing’s been transfigured. Everything’s been transformed.

On the last page of the last chapter of the last volume of his collected works, Clement Greenberg concludes:

“I say that if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness.”23

And why not choose both? The scandal of Duchamp, as far as the critics are concerned, is not that the shovel is transfigured into a work of art; it’s that the work of art remains a shovel for all that. Like Hegel said,

„Das Wahre ist der bacchantische Taumel.“

The True is the Bacchanalian frenzy. No reservations required.

WOID XXV-25

May 13, 2026

Roy Lichtenstein. Painting with Scattered Brushstrokes

Gagosian

Roy Lichtenstein’s art is the painterly equivalent of a location joke: you have to have been there.

That’s in two senses. First: unless you see the works in the so-called flesh you won’t get the joke, which depends on high alertness to a painter’s tricks, for instance on the ability to distinguish brushstrokes from a painting of brushstrokes:

The second sense is, that you better have done your studies with Clement Greenberg, le rusé doyen, the dean of ‘sixties formalism. Your appreciation of Lichtenstein hinges on your grasp of Greenberg’s criticism the way your appreciation of the clowns at the Moscow State Circus hinges on your appreciation of Marxist-Leninism. Lichtenstein follows Greenberg down the rabbit-hole of formalism: all brushstroke are about brushstrokes the way to Greenberg, all art is about art:

“The enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.”1

Or again:

“The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” [p. 85]

Or again:

“To achieve autonomy, painting has had above all to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture.” [p. 88]

Don’t try this in the classroom. They’ll get that there’s a joke, but they won’t get the joke. Looking at a slide of a painting of brushstrokes is to a painting of brushstrokes what brushstrokes are to… ah, just go.

Jasper Johns. Between the Clock and the Bed

Gagosian, New York

There’s a line of Amiri Baraka: “The whimpering pigment of a decadent economy, slashed into life.” Amiri Baraka once told me the line was directed at Larry Rivers; Jasper Johns will do.

Not Jasper Johns the artist. His reviewer. The slasher in question is Jason Farago, art critic at the New York Times, in a creepy review of the Johns show at Gagosian on Madison Avenue:

“The paintings that faced down death to find meaning in life.”

“Crosshatch abstractions whose fidgety lines trace the artist’s earthly path from anxiety to acceptance of mortality.”

“Johns is now 95. All men are mortal, Jasper Johns is a man…”1

Now why does this remind me of another Jason? Eric Berne, in Games People Play, pegs (if you’ll excuse the word) a sadist as someone who will do anything to avoid emotional involvement with his subject or his subjects or the objects of subjection:

“Coitus itself has little interest for him, and […] his real satisfaction is derived from the humiliating foreplay. This is something that he may not have cared to admit to himself. But it will now become clear to him that his complaint is: ‘After all this work, I have to have intercourse, yet!’”2

Substitute “Art” for “Coitus,” “engagement” for “intercourse,” and you’ve got the idea: “After all this work, I actually have to interact with a messy painting, full of ideas and contradictions, yet!” It’s something I’ve occasionally sensed from overwhelmed teachers in a freshman course; I’ve sensed it in myself at times. That’s what Freud resisted when he said the purpose of art was to allow the participant to engage with themselves and others, except in a playful and safe environment—Aesthetic BDSM.3 It’s when that line is crossed that I draw the line. It’s a line that Johns never came close to crossing. Paintings with Balls were not his thing. Except as play.

The show closes on March 14. It’s a pleasant show, and well worth the visit. After it closes the space will be taken over by Mike Bloomberg, another Friend of another Jason.

WOID XXV-17

February 21, 2026

Philip Guston. L’ironie de l’histoire

Musée Picasso, Paris

You’re a better man than I, Lawrence Alloway. A better art critic, for sure. Alloway taught for a few months at the School of Visual Arts before he got wise; I taught there for a decade or more. When I heard that David A. Ross had resigned from his chair at SVA following the release of emails to and from Jeffrey Epstein, I felt no satisfaction, certainly no surprise. I felt like throwing up.

Here’s what caught my eye, from Ross to Epstein:

“Teaching at SVA tonight - senior seminar, preparing these young artists for the real world that awaits them. How fucking ironic can you get!”1

Whatever smirking innuendoes lie behind this statement (and I detect a number), you can be sure that my idea of preparing young artists for the real world was not Ross’s, or SVA’s. Alloway must have sensed the same; in his letter of resignation he wrote,

“It did not seem that the School as a structure and I as an individual were especially suited to one another.”2

Apparently the structure of the organization was as abhorrent to Alloway’s egalitarian sentiments as it was to mine. The whole school in every facet was, and is, structured around favoritism and privilege, and with it the pleasures of domination.

And for myself, the annoyance of daily petty humiliations. Many people among the faculty and staff knew I was related to a Very Important person in the Art World, and the fact that I wasn’t trading my connections was taken as a form of arrogance on my part, an unbearable attempt to humiliate that must be brought to heel. My classroom had to be reached through the Library, and the Library opened at the same hour as my class started, so instead of setting up I had to wait for the Junior Assistant Librarian to turn up and let me in, assuming the Junior Assistant Librarian could be bothered to turn up. I gave up putting books on reserve after my requests were regularly ignored, or answered with lies. Whenever I dropped in on the Department office I’d be made to stand and wait while the secretary at the front desk deliberately, ostentatiously, ignored me, as if I was an artist who’d come to drop off my slides at a SoHo gallery instead of a teacher dropping off his grades. The School, in other terms, was a model for how the art world works: not by competence, not by talent, not even by hard work, but by coercion, connections and abuse of power. It was the privilege of a department chair, the privilege of Ross, to place “their” students in apprenticeships with important or renowned artists that no one had ever heard of; to pass around their students like so much art-world candy. Effectively, the students were indentured to friends of the department chair. Once or twice I spoke to students who were deeply disturbed by the arrangement. Many others, I’m sure, kept quiet for fear of ruining a career that would never be theirs to begin with. Epstein and SVA were a perfect fit.

Some day, someone will write a paper dating the moment when American artists and critics stopped mentioning Immanuel Kant—most likely it all ended with Donald Judd. Kant, from the nineteen-forties on, was brought in to provide an ethical justification for art-making—a self-sufficient ethics, no doubt, but an ethics all the same. Clement Greenberg, the ultimate art-critical power-broker of his time, styled himself a follower on Kant: pitting red against blue, or building a steel square, was a commitment to the rightness of the universe. The critic Max Kozloff went so far as to argue that representational art presented a “moral dilemma.” Representation did not meet Kant’s criterion that any single ethical commitment must be based on universally recognizable concepts, like colors or shapes.3

By the mid-seventies there wasn’t even a pretense of an ethic—not among the rulers of the universe anyway. Only raw power. The art world according to Epstein. It was about this time that Philip Guston wrote:

“What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue? I thought there must be some way I could do something about it.”4

He is what we were; he is, as we should wish to be. In Paris, the Musée Picasso has organized a show around Guston’s abrupt shift, around 1970, from the most abstract of abstractions, to the most brutal, elegant representational style by way of cartoons and caricatures—Guston’s Ku-Klux-Klan series is the most famous example, but the show ranges widely. Guston’s switch, the curators suggest, was not a one-off aberration in the evolution of A-capital-A-Art, but a return to the mainstream. Picasso’s resolutely representational, resolutely caricatural works are put forth as the logical prequel:

In addition, various high-art ancestors and literary references are brought up in accordance with the traditional evolutionary-teleological history of art, the kind of thinking that made Greenberg famous but which, the curators insists, was Guston’s thinking as well. At no point did Guston’s turn to caricature and representation mean an abandonment of traditional influence:

There is a lot more here than Picasso’s influence, and a lot more than the Ku-Klux-Klan paintings; a large section of the show is devoted to Guston’s caricatures of Richard Nixon:

The signage, unfortunately, shies away from the present-day implications of the work itself. It reminds me of the response—overly positive—that I’ve been getting in Paris to my Mamdani button: friendly, supportive, but not quite willing to face the implications. The signage quotes the New York Times headline for Hilton Kramer’s predictably nasty review of Guston’s Klan painting: “A Mandarin pretending to be a Stumblebum,” and translates stumblebum as “crétin.” That quote is directly followed by a comment of Robert Rosenberg:

“Guston is the first to have risked a fully developed career on the possibility of engaging his art in the political reality.”

In its context, the quote suggests that Rosenberg the Marxist existentialist joined with Kramer the right-wing curmudgeon, to condemn the show. The curators, I suspect, have projected their own love of the mandarinate onto Rosenberg—a misdirection the resolutely egalitarian Alloway would never have allowed himself.

Or projected onto Guston as well: the show concludes with a curious comparison of Guston, late in life, to Song Dynasty painters:

So much for politics. So much for Trump. Let’s go have an espresso on the terrace, mon ami. I’m almost looking forward to being home again.

WOID XXV-16

February 6, 2026

Jacques-Louis David

Musée du Louvre

Monsieur Charles Claude Flahaut de La Billarderie, comte d’Angiviller, was a very upset pussycat. As Director-general for Buildings, Art, Manufacturing and Gardens for Louis XVI of France, he’d worked hard and patiently to promote Jacques-Louis David as a painter of Virtue—none to appear so virtuous as the royal kind. And here was David going off on a tangent, not so much for his subject-matter as for the way the subject-matter was interpreted—or perhaps meant to be interpreted; or perhaps left open to interpretation by people who had no business to do so.1 Three weeks after the fall of the Bastille, d’Angiviller’s second-in-command wrote to the acting director of the Royal Academy of Painting, in reference to the arrangements for the Royal Salon of Painting and Sculpture at the Louvre:

Will you permit me to make the personal observation that it will perhaps be well to arrange the pictures so that the little ones will not be within reach of certain hands?2

Plus ça change. Keeping the wrong kind of information out of the reach of certain hands is a guiding principle of the teaching of Art History. It is also a guiding principle of a traditional French education. No wonder that the signage for Jacques-Louis David (at the Louvre, ended January 26, 2026) reads like the old French high-school textbooks, the Lagarde et Michard. The signage seems to take pride in that:

This show follows the golden rule of a traditional French education according to French Republican principles: concepts must be reduced to simplistic formulas in order to be smoothly regurgitated for the Baccalauréat. Opinions —especially political opinions—are best left to those who are qualified to hold them. Sartre the Marxist and Claudel the fascist are equally great because they are equally French: neither Left nor Right, but above. David is the painter of Revolution to the extent that he is above factions: the painter of the People as a whole. As Jules Michelet put it in the introduction to his deeply influential, deeply Republican History of the French Revolution,

“The humane and benevolent era of our revolution has for a protagonist the People themselves, the entire population, everyone. And the era of violence, the era of bloody acts, has for its protagonists only a tiny number of men.”

« L’ époque humaine et bienveillante de notre révolution a pour acteur le peuple même, le peuple entier, tout le monde. Et l’époque des violences, l’époque des actes sanguinaires, n’a pour acteurs qu’un nombre d’hommes minime. »

It requires quite a bit of civic-minded determination to place David among the good guys, the Sartres and the Claudels. The same day I went to visit the David show, the far-Right paraded through Paris bearing a portrait of Louis XVI. I doubt they would have approved of David who, as an elected representative of the People, voted to send Louis to the guillotine. But then, that was their point: that the Right-wing concept of France has no place for the kind of Universalism set forth in classrooms and museums. David had principles as much as Sartre or Claudel, whether one agrees with them or not. Or believed he had principles, which amounts to the same thing, witness his own defense after the fall of Robespierre (he barely escaped the guillotine himself):

“From now on, I swear—and I believe I have fulfilled this vow even in this unfortunate circumstance—I will no longer attach myself to men, but to principles alone.”

« Dorénavant, j’en fais le serment, et j’ai cru le remplir encore dans cette malheureuse circonstance, je ne m’attacherai plus aux hommes, mais seulement aux principes. »3

One rightfully regrets the inaccuracies and awkwardness of one’s own doctoral dissertation. My regret is, that I didn’t pay attention to David’s brilliant interventions in the field of cultural policy, which are amply documented in the records of the national assemblies. David had principles and acted on them: in his art, in his politics, in his grasp of cultural policies; they may have been the wrong principles by our lights; he may have changed these principles out of conviction or, as is far more likely, damped them out of fear and discouragement; but he was nothing like the “cynical lackey of the Bourgeoisie” denounced by red-baiters and red-baited alike, let alone the fool fantasized by the aptly named Jason Farago, in a New York Times article so full of flat out misreadings that its argument collapses like the first soufflé of a Jersey housewife.4 The Louvre show concludes with a particularly depressing painting of Eros and Psyche: Eros is shown as a teenage boy skipping out of bed with a flushed face and a smirk:

The late Robert Rosenblum thought that particular painting was an indication of David’s pragmatic realism. Likewise Philippe Bordes:

“David proceeded with a practical mind largely unhindered by ... practical concerns… He had no set principles to inculcate.”5

If there’s “realism” here, however, it’s the realism of an old man in exile: the palpable bitterness of lost illusions, a sarcastic return to Rococo: « Rejoignez, s'il se peut, l'aurore. »

The question of David’s aesthetic integrity was a major focus of critical discourse in the French Revolution, much as the issue of moral sincerity dominated the politics of the Jacobin faction; much as it has dominated discussions of the French Revolution for the past 125 years. To dismiss David’s integrity risks dismissing the motives of most, if not all, of the participants in the French Revolution as a whole: “the People themselves, the entire population, everyone.” In David’s case this dismissal inevitably leads to a willed ignorance of those motives, political, aesthetic and cultural, that consciously, conscientiously, determined his artistic production.

Willed ignorance is an operating principle at the New York Times. The ignorance of the present show at the Louvre is of a more nuanced kind, of course; all the same, the curators’ commitment to bypass or ignore the conscious principles that directed David’s paintings leads—inevitably—to unpardonable gaps in their presentation. As in weak dissertation there is no initial question to answer, no overwhelming problematic, not even the problematic that Bordes and Rosenblum desperately strive to keep at bay. The painting of Brutus, which forms the third of David’s revolutionary triptych along with the Horatii and Socrates, is, unconscionably, missing from this show. David considered it his most “philosophically thought,” though obviously not in the sense intended by your unctuous prof. de Philo. It’s a work full of self-doubts and false starts, and the misdated Stockholm sketch on view gives some indication:

Because there is no overarching theme the exhibition reduces itself to a series of set pieces, demonstrations of the curators’ cleverness: this show has more contrast-and-compare than an undergraduate course. David’s Marat is shown in three separate, virtually identical versions—what’s the point? On the other hand, there is a satisfying display around David’s Bélisaire that emphasizes David’s engagement with his rivals at the Royal Academy and, more satisfactorily, his willingness to pillage the painterly past in a more eclectic fashion than usually acknowledged, witness his borrowings from Guido Reni’s Silver Style:

D’Angiviller had very good reasons to request a less strident version of a painting commissioned to exalt the Virtues of the State and its representatives: to put the issue in simplistic terms: softness of coloring to convey Soft Power.

This is as far as the curators are willing to go without breaking through the self-imposed limits created by their own reliance on formal analysis (colors, shapes and so forth), and on the fantasy of the artist as a self-propelled genius detached from social issues. They themselves have very bad reasons to glide over questions concerning the relations among producers—even the producers of paintings.

However, the curators’ biggest failure is the exhibition’s best attraction: the extensive display of drawings of various levels of completion:

More than any other work on display, these drawings return us to the unresolved problem at the heart of this show. As I used to remind my students in my classes on the History of Drawing, Dessein, or Disegno (i.e., “Drawing”) has two meanings in French and Italian: “Drawing” in the technical sense, and “Design” in the sense of an intention—a declaration of principles if you will; aesthetic principles of course, narrative as well, and therefore, political. It’s no accident that the Brutus, the most “philosophical” of David’s paintings, has perhaps the largest number of David’s drawings that survive—assuming, as the curators do, that they are David’s to begin with. The Brutus was conceived and executed during a time of immense shifts in the social and political landscape, so it’s no surprise that the preparatory drawings show immense shifts in the narrative that David wished to present, bearing in mind that both David and his royal overseer, M. d’Angiviller, were deeply concerned that a painting commissioned by the King be “correctly” read by its intended popular audience—an audience whose loyalties shifted with dazzling speed, not unlike the American electorate today. The Salon of 1789 was postponed due to the “troubles,” which only made matters more confused, as David’s own politics shifted to catch up.

Unfortunately, we have reason to believe that a number of the drawings on display at the Louvre are not actually David’s, and this is particularly true of the preparatory drawings that reference the Brutus. As Perrin Stein notes in the 2022 catalogue for the exhibition of David’s drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when the contents of David’s studio were put up at auction after his death, a fair number of works not his own were slipped in, authenticated with a paraph, LD for “Louis David,” no matter their actual authorship.6

The difficulty lies in sorting out these drawings, a task one might imagine was the ideal one for the kind of fine-comb formalism on display at the Louvre, as it requires the curators to identify David’s personal style and to accept only those drawings in which the style aligns with the paraph, knowing that not all drawings with a paraph are his, but some may well be.

The task of identifying those drawings that are most likely David’s is fairly straightforward:

Conversely, there is a consistent discrepancy in styles when one examines those works signed with the paraph that were produced in connection with the Brutus:

This begs the questions, “why are there so many more drawings associated with the Brutus than with other works? Why do these drawings present wildly divergent narratives? Why is the style of these drawings divergent from David’s usual style?” David, it turns out, was not the solitary genius-above-it-all that the curators want us to fantasize. He certainly was not so to his former student and first biographer, Etienne-Jean Delécluze, who stresses the democratic principles of David’s studio, one of the first to include women as well as men. One of his students, the daughter of a guillotined nobleman, regularly attended with a thin red ribbon around her neck in memory of her father. In addition, Thomas Crow has suggested that the Brutus was not David’s alone, rather it relied on the input and cooperation of the best among his students.7 What we learn from a close analysis of the paintings of David conforms to what we learn from an analysis of his actions in the French Revolution: David did not stand merely for the Painting of Democracy, but for the Democracy of Painting.

Douze sur vingt. Peut mieux faire.

WOID XXV-15

January 25, 2026

Neither of us have recovered. Valerie is now a social worker, specializing in trauma recovery. And I’m an artist and a critic.

Freud would have called Valerie’s career choice a case of healthy sublimation: by helping to resolve the trauma of others she’s grown the skills to face her own. Freud would have called my own career a case of repetition compulsion and that’s not good. It seems as if I’m driven to repeat the event again and again, forcing my students and myself to look at what’s supposed to be important; as if, by looking where I’m told to look and telling others where to look, I could shift my guilt onto the Masterpiece. As if the Masterpiece, and not myself, enforced its will, and its will was Look at Me!

There’s a common French expression, « C’est quand même pas mal ! » : Anyhow, it’s not bad! It suggest a kind of grudging acceptance, a casual interest in things as they happen to be. Frank O’Hara, the poet and MoMA employee, had a genius for that kind of thing.

It is the historic task of the flâneur to flatten all things and make them equally accessible, the monkeys and the sparrows and the art. I’m thinking of the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, where the gift-shop offerings are on a par with the objects on display. I’m thinking of the new Rockefeller Wing at the Met, where objects that once were treated as if they’d been endowed with some some sort of auratic power, are now reduced to the banal role of aesthetically useful objects, neither better nor worse than the Virgin Marys in the Medieval Galleries, or the Victorian glassware in the American Wing: small gods of things.

And I’m thinking of MASP, the Museu de Arte São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, in São Paulo. MASP is said to have the Southern Hemisphere’s best collection of Northern Hemisphere Art. Fortunately, the artworks are interspersed with stuff that’s definitely sub-par by the standards of NH Art. Paintings and drawings are inserted into freestanding glass panes, with the labels on the back: it’s up to you to decide if any one work’s a masterpiece, after which you have to walk around to the other side to see if you got it right, for all you know you’re looking at the sparrow, not the monkey.

MASP has opened up a second building next to the original building designed by Lina Bo Bardi. Was Lina Bo Bardi related to Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, better known as Donatello? One would like to think so:

The new building’s initial exhibition is called Histories of Ecology. Most of it’s minor, in a sparrow kind of way. It feels as if it was produced by people who had more important things on their mind than getting in a museum or selling to a collector. Things like whether the Amazon’s going up in smoke, or whether economic exploitation’s hurting our health. And the aesthetics are predictable, like jailhouse art, which in a sense it is.

These are people who are trying to say something, and to say so with the hand they’re dealt; what’s “good” is good within the narrow parameters of the technique deployed: stuff like basket weaving, or Medieval Illumination.

As Comrade Stalin declared at the First All-Union Conference of Managers of Socialist Industry, “In the period of reconstruction technique decides everything.” He might as well have been addressing the annual meeting of the International Council on Museums.

What Stalin meant, was that the control and exploitation of the means of production (including aesthetic production) overruled the potentially radical purpose of production itself.1 Why, it’s as if the major purpose of a museum wasn’t to provide intellectual resources or practical techniques to visitors and artists alike, it was to teach who must be taught what must be taught. Look over there! The Monkey House!

« Je ne suis pas du sérail ». “I’m not on the inside track.” That must be what was meant when Deleuze and Guattari spoke of a “Minor Literature:” something like Yiddish, or Kafka, or Kafka’s relationship to literature, including Yiddish. Also, much of Kafka’s subject-matter.

Nowhere more than in Brazil, I think, have I seen this radical distinction made and conscientiously made: between the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic, between the Art of the São Paulo Biennial, say: distant, abstract, obsessed with universalism: production values; and the art of peoples: derivative, pluralist, playful. Production for its own sake. I’ll take the sparrows.

WOID XXV-07

October 26, 2027

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

It is
     a cheap game
to patronize the dead, unless their
     deaths be accountable
to your own understanding.
                                           Amiri Baraka, "The Politics of Rich Painters."

French art critics of the nineteenth century were a little bit obsessed with propriety, or what they called la bienséance. A statue of an orgiastic female was okay for a gentleman’s quarters — but in public?! Likewise, the slapdash brushwork of the Impressionists would be okay in a student sketch — but in a gallery?! Reporting on the Salon of 1850, a critic complained that a heroic statue of a man crushed by a bear violated all the rules of bienséance:

“What then will be the fate of this work, and where will it be placed, unless the bears of the Alps or Pyrenees also start erecting statuary in honor of their fellow bears who rid them of the humans ?”

« Aussi quelle sera la destinée de cet ouvrage, et où le placera-t-on, à moins que les ours des Alpes ou des Pyrénées ne se mettent aussi à ériger des statues honoraires à ceux de leurs semblables qui les débarrassent des hommes? »1

And they’re back. (The critics, not the bears.) Sean Scully, an Irish-American artist, is about to inaugurate a sculpture for the median at Broadway and 117th Street —actually one of seven sculptures by Scully to be shown. The sponsor is the Broadway Mall Association, a local beautification project. Scully's piece is called Stack Blues (in honor of Arthur Danto), meaning the philosopher-cum-art critic who taught across the street at Columbia and lived around the corner on Riverside Drive. Danto and Scully once formed a kind of mutual admiration society, but since Danto died ten years ago it’s hard to see how Danto could reciprocate beyond the grave.

Bienséance? In what way does this sculpture evoke, or reference, or suggest Arthur Danto? Or is it rather, because it doesn’t, that it does? Scully might as well have taken, say, an enlarged Brillo Box, and called that, too, “in honor of Arthur Danto.” Then Scully and his friends — including Arthur Danto — could sit around and argue that the content or the form of any individual artwork has nothing at all to do with its being Art, Art being not what’s said, or how what’s said is said, but what is said about it and who says it. Why, one could shoot someone on Broadway and call it Art, depending on the one, of course. MAGA-nimously, Scully and his sponsors have developed a curriculum for kids to accompany the sculpture so that kids, too, can learn to play at being narcissistic five-year-olds who think saying it loud enough will make it Art.2 Danto’s gone, of course, but his philosophy lives on among a certain self-lubricating elite still trying to squeeze the blood from that particular stone.

Thus David Carrier takes on the task of telling us that Barbara Westman was a major artist, really — the wife of Arthur Danto, said in passing:

“[Danto] alluded to the Hegelian idea, discussed by Karl Marx and reclaimed by Francis Fukuyama as the Cold War wound up, of the end of history as defined by class struggle. What we find in Westman’s art, I would propose, is a version of this post-historical world.”3

Westman’s art in other terms — vignettes of little doggies for The New Yorker—is at the cutting edge of historical consciousness because the cutting edge of historical consciousness consists in confirming that whatever is, is, as it should be. Carrier’s been carrying on like this for fifty years; he still hasn’t gone beyond the level of a first-term graduate student in Art History, self-assured that one has only to drop the names and pile on the syllogisms to sound just like Teacher. Or the level of a narcissistic five-year old (but I repeat myself) who always wins, because whatever happens, happens because they tell it to. Carrier after fifty years can’t tell the difference between Art History (the way things are supposed to have been) and Art Criticism, which brings out the contradictions in a work of art. With the End of History and the End of Art, contradiction is neither possible, nor to be tolerated. Carrier of course, who was a student of Arthur Danto, can hardly have invented any of this on his own, only one wishes he wouldn’t be so obvious. Crack ho’: it ain’t the old capital of Poland.

Walter Benjamin, a real critic, one of the greatest, in one of his most important works, describes the game:

“As is known, there once was a machine so built, that it could respond to any chess-player’s move with a countermove assuring it of victory. A puppet […] sat facing  the board. In fact a […] dwarf sat inside, a master at the game of chess who controlled the puppet’s hands. […] One might envision a similar object for Philosophy. The puppet always wins.”

„Bekanntlich soll es einen Automaten gegeben haben, der so konstruiert gewesen sei, daß er jeden Zug eines Schachspielers mit einem Gegenzuge erwidert habe, der ihm den Gewinn der Partie sicherte. Eine Puppe […] saß vor dem Brett […] In Wahrheit saß ein […] Zwerg darin, der ein Meister im Schachspiel war und die Hand der Puppe […] lenkte. Zu dieser Apparatur kann man sich ein Gegenstück in der Philosophie vorstellen. Gewinnen soll immer die Puppe.“4

The puppet wins. The bear’s supposed to lose. Perhaps we need to raise a subscription of our own:

Critic being mauled by an artist.

Consider it done.

WOID XXIV-08

Monday, June 17, 2024

“Only one who is the master of the labor of others will confuse labor power with any other form of agency for performing a task, because to him, steam, horse, water, or human muscle which turns his mill are viewed as equivalents, as ‘factors of production.’ For individuals who allocate their own labor (or a community which does the same), the difference between using labor power as against any other power is a difference upon which the entire ‘economy' turns.” Harry Braverman.1

“One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.” Hindi Noor, Palestinian Poet.2

I]

Artists make their own art, but they do not make it as they please, under conditions of their own choosing. Many, if not most, decide to be artists long before they decide to be makers of art; next they commit themselves to participate in the conditions they believe will make them artists in the eyes of the community. Then they head off to art school or New York, or stay home reading back issues of art magazines, and in no circumstance will anything be done, ever, to discourage them from the belief that there is a single art world and that “artist” is what we call those who choose to participate in it. Rather than choosing the conditions and the world in which they make art, they allow the conditions of their world to define them.

Harold Becker is the Fontenelle of the Art World. Fontenelle was a minor French writer who, at the turn of the eighteenth century, kickstarted the Enlightenment by suggesting to the public at large what scientists had known since Galileo: there’s more than one world out there.3 Becker does the same for Art. And, like Fontenelle, he has his limits:

“Artists produce what the distribution system can and will carry. It is not that nothing else can be produced. Other artists, willing to forgo the possibilities of support and exposure characteristic of a particular art world, do produce other kinds of work. But the system will ordinarily not distribute those works, and such artists will be failures, unknowns…”4

It’s a commonplace of the sociological tradition: social activities are defined by the rules that direct and legitimate them, “Ways of acting, thinking and feeling,” to quote one of the founders of modern Sociology, Émile Durkheim,

“which possess the remarkable property of existing outside the consciousness of the individual.”

« des manières d'agir, de penser et de sentir qui présentent cette remarquable propriété qu’elles existent en dehors des consciences individuelles. »5

Just as the proletariat, according to Dialectical Materialism, is doomed to follow a predictable trajectory in its actions; just as the individual consumer and producer, according to the rules of Neo-liberalism, must follow the iron laws of universal self-interest; so, too, the artist, according to Becker, is helpless before the call of social rules and values.

II]

The despairing years at the tail-end of World War I were a time not unlike ours for Germany: social institutions on the verge of collapse and radical realignment; a new world emerging, not yet seen or understood. On many points the causes were similar to our own: the erosion of the moral authority of the State and its apparatus; the increased militarization of society; the failures of war; the collapse of the Burgfrieden, the social compact between all sectors of society to put aside their differences like the occupants of a besieged castle. Institutions that had provided meaning and the unifying structure of social life (the State, the Ruler, the cultural institutions and intellectual networks) appeared to have forfeited their power and lost their purpose.

The emergence and subsequent collapse of these structures was a major concern of Max Weber, that other founding father of modern Sociology. Weber had tried in happier times to reconcile the sociologist’s concept of social rules and laws with another, nebulous concept he called Beruf, or “calling.” Capitalism itself, according to his earlier work, had become a calling at the beginning of the Modern Era. Making money had no longer been a means to an end, the means had become an end in themselves. The issue was no longer how you played the game, but why you played it.

And spent the rest of his life trying to work his way out of a corner. Because, without positing ab initio a call or driving interest distinct from the occupation defined by the institution itself, there is no way to explain the “laws of motion” of society, no valid explanation for whatever power drives these institutions and maintains them: no reason to play the game. In other terms, no ethics.

Institutions don’t have agency, only individuals do. Without accounting for the elements that drive individuals and provide their ethical interest there is no justifiable explanation for those institutions to exist that frame and organize human behavior, or even to survive. The very fact that Weber had needed to graft such a concepts as calling onto the institutions of bourgeois order is proof enough that those institutions themselves were grasping for self-justification.

It’s been argued since the eighteenth century that a democratic society, in order to survive, must be driven by interests beyond self-interest among the individuals that compose it. Like Carl Menger, the neo-liberal pioneer whom Weber explicitly confronted, one could argue that the only values driving social behavior are the greed and self-interest of isolated individuals; or, like the Marxists who attracted Weber but whom he ultimately grew to fear, one might argue that social behavior is driven by the divergent interests of distinct social classes, not necessarily economic interests, however. Weber distanced himself from the latter and rejected the former:

“The reduction to economic causes alone is never exhaustive in any sense in any type of cultural occurrence, not even in the ‘economic’ processes.”

„Die Reduktion auf ökonomische Ursachen allein ist auf keinem Gebiete der Kulturerscheinungen je in irgend einem Sinn erschöpfend, auch nicht auf demjenigen der »wirtschaftlichen« Vorgänge.“6

In a series of lectures in late 1917 and early 1919, Weber desperately tried to buttress the legitimacy of the German social organism, insisting that the institutions that upheld this organism — scholarship and politics in particular — were a value in their own right, independent of the prejudices or biases brought to them. (Weber’s lectures have recently been resuscitated by neo-liberal reactionaries.)7 According to Weber, politics and scholarship should be a Beruf, a calling, an end in and of itself, not a means. Starting from the premiss that the values that drive an institution are dependent on the activity of individuals, Weber comes full circle and insists that the only ethics worthy of the name are those that hinge on the blessing of the institutions themselves; this, oddly, includes the ethics of artistic production,

“whereas inner devotion to the task imposed externally and to this task alone can raise one to the heights and dignity of the cause which he professes to serve. It’s no different for artists.”

„…statt daß ihn die innere Hingabe an die Aufgabe und nur an sie auf die Höhe und zu der Würde der Sache emporhöbe, der er zu dienen vorgibt. Auch das ist beim Künstler nicht anders.“

Art, as Weber understood it, was not a calling, which could only exist in relation to an institution, as something external to the individual. Becker couldn’t have said it better. Conversely, Art, according to Weber, rested on

“‘Individualism’ and ‘experience.’ The two are closely connected: the prevailing view is, that the latter defines the former and belongs to it. People struggle to ‘experience’ because that is the appropriate lifestyle for Individualism.”

„die »Persönlichkeit« und das »Erleben«. Beide sind eng verbunden: die Vorstellung herrscht, das letztere mache die erstere aus und gehöre zu ihr. Man quält sich ab, zu »erleben«, — denn das gehört ja zur standesgemäßen Lebensführung einer Persönlichkeit.“8

Odd that Weber should drag artists into this discussion; more surprising still that two years later he would unleash a set of similar accusations against the “carnival of Revolution” with arguments that correspond point for point to those arguments raised earlier against artists:

“A ‘romanticization of what is intellectually interesting,’ while heading into the void, without any fact-based sense of responsibility. […] Politics are done with the head and not with other parts of the body or the soul. […] the sin against the holy spirit of one’s profession begins whenever this striving for power loses its objectivity and becomes a matter of purely personal self-intoxication, instead of being employed solely in the service of the ‘cause.’ […] With this problem of sanctifying the means by the end, the ethics of conviction seems destined to fail.”

„Eine ins Leere verlaufende “Romantik des intellektuell Interessanten,” ohne alles sachliche Verantwortungsgefühl. […] Politik wird mit dem Kopfe gemacht, nicht mit anderen Teilen des Körpers oder der Seele. […] Die Sünde gegen den heiligen Geist seines Berufs aber beginnt da, wo dieses Machtstreben unsachlich und ein Gegenstand rein persönlicher Selbstberauschung wird, anstatt ausschließlich in den Dienst der »Sache« zu treten. […] an diesem Problem der Heiligung der Mittel durch den Zweck, scheint nun auch die Gesinnungsethik überhaupt scheitern zu müssen.“9

Forty-six years later the Marxist philosopher Max Horkheimer remembered Weber’s 1919 lecture as a “stark disappointment” [eine krasse Enttäuschung]:

“It was all so precise, so scholarly and rigorous, so value-free, that we went home thoroughly saddened.”

„So präzise war alles, so wissenschaftlich strenge, so wertfrei, daß wir ganz traurig nach Hause gingen.“10

Faced with the collapse of a single regulative system, Weber was anxious to provide solutions for the reconstruction of a society that many had come to believe was beyond saving. As Horkheimer recalled, Weber readily acknowledged “the need for guidelines for action, based on a foundation of proper value judgments” [ „das Bedürfnis nach einer Richtschnur für das Handeln, nach einer Grundlage für die richtigen Werturteile “].11 To Horkheimer it seemed not simply wrong-headed but naive to imagine that the broken pieces could be reassembled just as before, and Weber was offering more of the same: a closing of ranks, a call to order. The world was to be remade in the exact image of the previous one, the image of our own.At a time — a time very much like ours — when new values, a new ethics, were desperately needed, Weber proposed a return to the old, discredited norms of “science” and “objectivity,” the shibboleths of liberalism to this day. The Kantian system of Instrumental Reason was to rule Society, a purely rational underpinning to all human activities. Against this stood self-involved Romanticism, focused on the “Personal” (Persönlichkeit) and the gratification of the ego; held to no responsibility but to live in the moment; committed to process over goals, means over ends, “Subjective Experience” (Erleben) over socially defined norms.

What rankled for Horkheimer was the unexpected attack on those of Weber’s friends and followers who were attempting to forge another ethics, other values. Throughout the years of war the Webers’ “Sunday salon” [Sonntagskreis] at Heidelberg had been a haven of sociability, welcoming followers and peers with divergent views. Those included the sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, as well as followers of the Symbolist poet and pacifist Stefan George. In the last years of the War a younger, radicalized set had joined, students and admirers determined to forge a new ethics for a new society: Ernst Toller, radical poet and politician; and Georg Lukács, now known as a preeminent Marxist theoretician.

It’s long been accepted that Weber’s disdain was directed at “the Bolsheviks:” Lenin or Trotsky might have been amused to find themselves branded as romantic dreamers. More recently it’s been suggested that Weber’s target was the “new prophets,” aesthetes and intellectuals in the mold of Stefan George and others.12 However, movements and groupings are not easily compartmentalized or even categorized, least of all in times of extreme social realignment. Weber’s wife Marianne, a thinker and activist of considerable sophistication and verbal elegance, defined the other camp:

“A group was organized in hopes of Weber's leadership and endorsement, calling among other things for the rulership of Eros on Earth and the overcoming of poverty.”

„Eine Gruppe organisiert sich, die auf Webers Führerschaft und Zustimmung zu einem Aufruf hofft, der unter anderem die Herrschaft des Eros in der Welt und Aufhebung der Armut fordert.“13

The closest designation for this set of beliefs would be Lebensphilosophie, a term used more or less interchangeably with neo-Romanticism or, occasionally, Vitalism. This last refers to the belief that Society will be changed by unleashing the creative forces within the individual psyche, through the power of “Eros the Builder of Cities.”14 Against the sociologist’s insistence that human behavior is grounded in socially-defined values, the Lebensphilosophers proposed a normative ethics grounded in personal behavior; anchored in the Self.

None of the younger minds embody better the conceptual fluidity of the times than Georg Lukács. Lukács’ own brand of Marxism would evolve after the War from his previous involvement with Lebensphilosophie. History and Class Consciousness, his major contribution to Marxist thought, is grounded in a belief that consciousness itself, and not external social authority, will ultimately determine the rise to power of the Proletariat, ousting a Bourgeois consciousness.15 These twin beliefs, that individual consciousness determines History and that consciousness itself is historically determined, point to Wilhelm Dilthey, the philosophical jack-of-all-trades who easily mixed such diverse disciplines as Sociology, Psychology, History, Philosophy and Cultural Studies to argue for the value of lived experience, Erlebnis.

Looking back after five decades, Lukács wrote of:

“My youthful impressions, which I derived from the work of Dilthey, Simmel and Max Weber. […] I am thinking, for example, of the fascinated impact of Dilthey's “Poetry and Experience,” a book that seemed to break new ground in many respects. This new realm appeared to us at the time as a mental world of grand syntheses, theoretically and historically. We overlooked how little this new method had really overcome positivism, how little its syntheses were factually founded.”

„…meine Jugendeindrücke, die ich von den Arbeiten Diltheys, Simmels und Max Webers erhielt. […] Ich denke etwa an die faszinierende Wirkung von Diltheys »Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung« (Leipzig 1905), ein Buch, das in vieler Hinsicht Neuland zu sein schien. Dieses Neuland erschien uns damals als eine Gedankenwelt großangelegter Synthesen, und zwar theoretisch ebenso wie historisch. Wir übersahen dabei, wie wenig diese neue Methode den Positivismus wirklich überwunden hatte, wie wenig ihre Synthesen sachlich fundiert waren.“ 16

There’s a certain unconscious irony in that last sentence. Forcing Dilthey’s system into an inductive, rationalist construct dominated by theoretical speculation is like fitting a round peg into a square hole; more so even for the telling suggestion that Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie was expected to provide a universally consistent system, the answer to the quest for “totality” that, we are told, so preoccupied Lukacs and friends in the ‘20s and ‘30s. The simple fact is, Dilthey was among the first of his generation to resuscitate the use of a Hegelian dialectic; the dialectical relationship to the Totality that Lukács and Marxist friends pretended to re-discover in the ‘twenties and thirties had been there all along. Horkheimer, himself no mean theorist , noted that even in 1919 the times for an all-inclusive system grasped by theory was long past:

“Philosophy itself, apart from restorative ontologies, became Epistemology, Methodology, Logic, the tracing of historical systems. With the abdication of Philosophy, which earlier had been motivated by the effort to reinforce or to displace Religion, necessarily rose the need for guidelines for action, a basis for correct value judgments...”

„Philosophie selbst wurde, von restaurativen Ontologien abgesehen, zur Epistemologie, Methodenlehre, Logik, historischer Nachzeichnung der Systeme. Mit der Resignation der Philosophie, die früher weitgehend durch das Bemühen motiviert war, die Religion zu stützen oder abzulösen, entstand notwendig das Bedürfnis nach einer Richtschnur...“17

Lukács would go on to believe he had defined such a system, when in fact the system of Western Marxism to which he himself contributed so much was a synthesis of Lebensphilosophie and Marxist “Science,” to the extent that one may effectuate the synthesis of the chalk and the cheese.18

III]

Still, at the time, Dilthey went further than anyone except Sigmund Freud toward affirming the claims of individual consciousness on the organization and structuring of perception and, implicitly, on the organization and reorganization of the social:

“Consciousness has shaken off the authoritative and now strives to gain useful knowledge through reflection and questioning.”

„Das Bewußtsein das Autoritative abgeschüttelt hat und durch den Standpunkt der Reflexion und des Zweifels zu gultigem Wissen zu gelangen strebt.“19

Dilthey takes up the expression das Autoritative, not in some abstract, ontological, Foucauldian sense, but rather to describe that authority that’s historically and socially conferred, awarding certain sectors of Society the right to speak, the exclusive claim to the competency to speak Truth in the name of “Science.” This is the authority thought to inhere in rationalist thought and its institutions, as handed down through the tradition of Enlightenment philosophizing:

“Theories of knowledge, either empiricist or Kantian, have until now explained experience and knowledge as merely belonging to the realm of a presentation of the facts as they stand. In the veins of the knowing subject imagined by Locke, Hume, and Kant runs no real blood, only the diluted lymph of reason as pure intellectual activity.”

„So hat die bisherige Erkenntnistheorie, die empiristische wie die Kants, die Erfahrung und die Erkenntnis aus einem dem bloßen vorstellen angehörigen Tatbestand erklärt. In den Adern des erkennenden Subjekts, das Locke, Hume und Kant konstruierten, rinnt nicht wirkliches Blut, sondern der verdünnte Saft von Vernunft als bloßer Denktätigkeit.“20

Zygmunt Bauman argues that Weber’s ostensible rejection of economic utilitarianism in favor of non-economic utilitarianism was little more than an attempt to preserve the utilitarian content of social relations while discarding the stigma of economic coercion.21 Weber, along with his rational, “scientifically”-minded contemporaries, had fallen back on the Kantian commonplace that pure sensory experience (Erleben) cannot resolve the problems of practical reason. This, even more so than the validity of his own insights, is what made Dilthey appealing: not his philosophizing itself but the assertion that knowledge and the production of knowledge was diminished by restriction to “mere intellectual activity.” Knowledge should be found

“Never in universally valid principles but always only in lived experience [Erfahrung] that emerges from the depth of one’s own mode of existence.”

„Nie in allgemeingültigen Begriffen, sondern immer nur in den lebendigen Erfahrungen, welche aus der Tiefe seines ganzen Wesens entspringen.“22

Human beings grasp themselves, not by looking within themselves, but by looking out from within. And the objects of perception are known, not in spite of their actualization in the senses, as Kant would have had it, but through the manner in which they present themselves (or not) to the observing subject.23 As used by Weber the expressions Erlebnis and Erleben were meant to denote a specific form of experience, and a political position as well. In those two words, likewise, and half a century later, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer saw the expression

“…of a protest against modern industrial society, which at the beginning of our century caused the words Erlebnis and Erleben to become watchwords with a near-religious ring. The rise of the youth movement against bourgeois education [Bildung] and its way of life was under this sign; the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson tended in this direction, along with a 'spiritual movement' like that around Stefan George; Last but not least, the seismographic subtlety with which Georg Simmel's philosophizing reacted to these processes, pointed to the same. Thus the Lebensphilosophie of our day follows on its romantic predecessors. This form of reaction against the mechanization of life in the mass experience of the present still foregrounds the word today; so self-evident that the implications of the concept remain entirely obscure.”

„der Vorklang eines Protestes gegen die moderne Industriegesellschaft, der im Anfang unseres Jahrhunderts die Worte Erlebnis und Erleben zu Losungsworten von fast religiösem Klang aufsteigen lieβ. Der Aufstand der Jugendbewegung gegen die bürgerliche Bildung und ihre Lebensformen stand unter diesem Zeichen, der Einfluβ Friedrich Nietzsches und Henri Bergsons wirkte in dieser Richtung, aber auch eine ‚geistige Bewegung‘ wie die um Stefan George und nichts zuletzt die seismographische Feinheit, mit der Georg Simmels Philosophieren auf diese Vorgänge reagierte, bezeugen das gleiche. So schlieβt die Lebensphilosophie unserer Tage an ihre romantischen Vorgänger an. Die Abwehr der Mechanisierung des Lebens im Massendasein der Gegenwart akzentuiert das Wort noch heute mit solcher Selbstverständlichkeit, daβ seine begrifflichen Implikationen ganz verhüllt bleiben.“24

Kant and his contemporaries had used the term Erfahrung to denote the conscious response to individual phenomena as objects of experience.25 Dilthey, in contrast, put forth the word Erlebnis to designate the unmediated awareness of phenomena in their pure, sensual immediacy. At the same time, according to Gadamer, das Erlebte [“that which is experienced”] was used “in the sense of a description of the residual content of what has been thus experienced.” [in dem Sinne grebraucht, daβ der bleibende Gehalt dessen, was da erlebt wird, dadurch bezeichnet wird].26 In this manner Dilthey contributed to a vast number of philosophical and social movements that aimed to root their practices in individual experience and, beyond that, to empower the subject through the understanding of human consciousness and by extension the unconscious and the pre-conscious. His influence on Freudian psychoanalysis was considerable, and on various forms of spiritualistic soul-search, artistic or psychoanalytic. Sartrean Existentialism is indebted to Dilthey by way of the idealizing Phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, the “restorative ontologies” denounced by Horkheimer. Each, of course, had it own interpretations and retoolings. Likewise, Gadamer put his finger on a set of specific activities—specific to the production and reception of Art—that distinguished the contribution of Lebensphilosophie in Art from other realms and disciplines:

“That which is ‘Erlebnis’ of this kind acquires an entire new state of being when expressed as art.”

„Was in dieser Weise ein ,Erlebnis‘ ist, gewinnt vollends einen neuen Seinsstand im Ausdruck der Kunst.“27

Dilthey’s approach to Art and Literature might best be described as a hermeneutics of sensation, projecting or extracting meaning from the givens of raw experience: colors, textures, forms, volumes, but also gestures, verbal expressions, etc.: a way of thinking not restricted to the realm of thought but including the realm of thought as well, as the process assigned a social context to these experiences, Erlebnis was socially mediated, the whole at play in a multifaceted dialectical relationship, the kind of relationship that, to Kant, was not conducive to the attainment of truth.

The truth-content of Art is not what is being said but how it’s being said and who is saying it for whom. So, for example, a series of re-presentations of American military violence or a scroll of bland bourgeois statements may be understood first and foremost in terms of the assumptions projected about its assumed audience and the social implications of its formal means.28 Artists do not think by means of pure sensations alone, they think through the categorization and contrasts of units of sensation and units of social interpretation. Their production proceed from the undifferentiated to the differentiated by a synthesis of formal and narrative elements.

Here, however, we are attempting something beyond a mere summary of Diltheyan aesthetics, implicitly applicable to all places and time. We want to find out to what degree Lebensphilosophie in its broadest sense was instrumentalized, and can be instrumentalized today, in a political cause. As Gadamer observes, to the Bourgeois tradition of passive contemplation the Schaffender, the one who fashions, opposes “possibilities of making and skill, and questioning of ‘technique’” [Möglichkeiten des Machens und Könnens und Fragen der ‚Technik‘].29

What concerns us here, is the truth-content of these elements at a particular point in time and not merely the fact that the artist proceeds in such-and-such a way. Lebensphilosophie was very much a part of the Weltanschaung of the first half of the twentieth century, to use another Diltheyan expression; and that would include the practices and thoughts of the artists themselves. Today, as then, at a time when “scientific utilitarianism” has penetrated all aspects of life, including Art, ours is a call to retrace the movement of aesthetic resistance in the twentieth century, from romantic anti-capitalism through what Michael Löwy calls the “politico-moral” mediation of Western Marxism.”30 No more posing a that person who first and foremost wishes to appear to be an artist. The point is no longer why one plays the game, but how one plays it.

The question then asked is, what are the possibilities of the forms of resistance to the administered world, then as now? How does one choose for oneself the conditions and the world in which art shall be made? How does one follow the footsteps of

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

those who were doing us some good,
who knew it was never enough but
hoped to improve a little by living.

?

WOID XXIV-06

Monday, May 27, 2024

The Jenny Holzer Message has all the empathy of a Pentagon briefing.

Jenny Holzer: Light Line. Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York. May 17through September 29, 2024. https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/jenny-holzer

The good news is, you can catch the gist of Jenny Holzer’s show at the Guggenheim New York without having to pay admission. The bad news: that’s the only subversive thing about it.

From the floor of the Rotunda you can admire Holzer’s signature scroll of trite messages flashing up the ramp in various patterns and colors: capitalist fortune cookies. Except, instead of scrolling through Twitter, Twitter does the scrolling for you.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s building has a way of showing up those artists who are incapable of engaging with it. Looking up from the Rotunda floor, you might be led to believe that Holzer’s met the challenge: the messages scrolling up the spiral seem to be fully integrated with the architecture itself. Save your illusions, and your admission fee, because once you’ve bought your ticket and moved up the spiral ramp, Holzer’s engagement’s not merely inappropriate, it’s inadequate, it’s out-and-out offensive.

For starters, there are empty gaps in the display modules — lots. That’s the kind of incompetence you expect from startup artists who don’t have a body of work sufficient to fill the space, and it spells career death, or should. What’s left is a series of “messages” slapped into the corner of gilded canvases or pieces of stone, slapped against the canvas like a scrolling slapped against a building, with no relation of concept to form:

Holzer’s one of those positivists (like Barbara Kruger, or Martha Rossler) who’d like you to believe that duplicating nasty messages constitutes a critique of nasty messages, which of course it’s not: Holzer, as her bio proudly informs us, was awarded the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award in 1996, and the US State Department’s International Medal of Arts in 2017.

And that alone would be reason to despise this show, except for something else: I used to work at the Guggenheim, it’s one of the very few places where I’d turn up an hour or two ahead of time, simply to bask in the near-mystical sense of joy that radiates from Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. And it’s not as if Holzer chooses to engage with this utopian pleasure: that I could understand and appreciate, even if I might not share it.

But as I said, it’s not that she doesn’t want to engage, it’s that she can’t. Her inability to exist in the same conceptual space is repeated without change. Throughout you get that creaky Reagan Era feeling, that somebody thinks that this is what everybody thinks. So good to be reminded of other times, our own included. Beware when you stare into the dream, for the dream might stare back at you.

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WOID XXIV-05

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

That’s not my style. Hearing of the death of Richard Serra I felt more like a Hemingway hero: “How many more fascists are we going to have to fight before it’s good to go to the Prado again?”

Not so far-fetched a comparison: that famous art-world black they all wear, Ros and the others, originated after World War II, when rich bored children of war profiteers decided to emulate the Camicie Nere, the Blackshirts, the Italian fascist militias.2 From the fascists they picked up, along with shirts and dresses, that same Serra-like attitude of seen-it-all superiority; from their parents the black market dealers the assurance that insider knowledge was their most valuable capital. As the Artforum critic Sydney Tillim put it, “Our seriousness is hardly commensurate with the actual know-nothingness of the scene,” adding that just because something is significant in art-world terms doesn’t mean it’s profound.3

Because there’s nothing in a Serra sculpture that isn’t immediately obvious to the casual observer: the raw, brutal machismo, the brooding textures, the threat implied and the very real threat of being flattened. People have been killed trying to move this stuff; that is unacceptable. Fortunately, with the rise of unions among art handlers, it will never be possible again.

It was a blackshirt—who else?—that announced yesterday that it’s time to “bring back Tilted Arc,” meaning the humongous sculpture that in 1981 was installed to bisect a plaza in Downtown Manhattan, and was removed after almost a decade of protests. Even Arthur Danto, who was not much given to appreciating the political content of art until late in his life, got the gist of the issue, the resistance to bullying:

“The right of people to participate in the decisions that affect their lives extends to art when it impinges on their lives as lived… What remains to be explored is what recourse we have over art that is imposed on us without our consent….”

Almost:

“How could the art not be resented? It had been imposed on the basis of almost purely visual considerations… on people for whom visual considerations were only part of the story.”4

Because, as Robert Pincus-Witten pointed out, the most significant aspect of Serra’s minimalism was the form of its politics: not the representation of a political position, but it’s imposition as a brute, physical, reality: “for the first time […] that process could somehow reveal political content.”5 The medium was the message and the message wasn’t pretty. Beautiful to some, sublime, you’d say; pretty, not.—in other words, fascistic.

Of course, visual considerations were only part of the story; they were never the main part to begin with. Brooding, bullying, threatening aren’t the effect of Serra’s sculptures, they’re what an Aristotelian would call their final cause. And who needs Tilted Arc today, when we’ve got the Police? The man was ahead of his time.

WOID XXIII-46

March 27, 2023

Pollini finished, stood up, and handed back the score, saying, “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re trying to say.”

WOID XXIII-45

March 24, 2024

My first piece of advice, whenever I lectured or taught about Chinese Art, was: “Try not to throw around the word exquisite. “Exquisite” is not an exclamation when dealing with traditional Chinese Art, it’s a forensic tool, and Wang Jiqian (C.C. Wang to you, Round-eyes) handled that tool like the master he was: as a collector, a connoisseur, a critic, a patron, and an artist. Which is to say that there were no set boundaries between his various approaches to the making of, the thinking about, art.  Wang a little while back sold a trove of early Chinese paintings to the Met; there are bright rumors that a number of those exquisites were his own forgeries. The mark of the true artist, is that they’re skilled enough in the critical aspect (knowing more than a mere critic or curator) to fool them both. “Great artists steal.” But as with the best of thrillers you don’t even realize it until you’ve tried to match your wits against theirs.

This has to come in handy at Sotheby’s auction house, where exquisite’s the word and it’s not so much about fooling others as allowing yourself to be fooled. There’s a small exhibit of C. C. Wang on the Third Floor—today’s the last day. Most of the visitors, though, especially Asian visitors, congregate in the adjacent galleries, over the display of ceramics and small objects up for auction. Ceramics and small objects are what Dickens’ Wemmick calls “portable property” and it’s hard to tell them apart from those you’ll find in a jewelry store on the eastern edge of Canal Street. The only exquisite about them is the provenance and the price tag. Meanwhile, the visitors congregate with "the same air of knowing something to everybody else's disadvantage” that Wemmick flaunted.

Meanwhile, Wang. And I kept coming back to this:

To match my feeble wits: the major challenge, in Chinese calligraphy, is balance. Same for most calligraphy, actually. The word “rhythm,” in Ancient Greek, refers to writing, not to music. Starting from there you can easily find the visual equivalents of syncopation, of suspended resolutions, etc. at once within each character, and within the composition as a whole.  “Drunk” writing, for instance, might suggest someone wildly thrusting to regain their [visual] balance. But the elements Wang uses here are so unusual they preserve the classical challenge and resolve it, but in a manner more than modern. The label describes this work as “cursive” which might be thought to reference any number of classical cursive styles; except Wang’s script does not look traditional at all, it’s a balance of classical cursive with plain old proletarian twentieth-century scribble, the kind of thing you’d make with a ball-point pen, and what’s amazing is how the two seem to flow into one another, as with the same brush.

To top it off: the barely observable, unproletarian splatters of gold powder throughout the piece:

Like Adorno says… never mind.

WOID XXIII-44

March 20, 2024

“ ‘In Art History the situation’s even more hopeless because the History of Art requires that we understand not merely what was painted in the past, not simply how, but why one painted as one did.’

Is this your ‘Barbie’ statement: what is art made for?”

Okay. Here’s a test. What’s the difference between these two recordings:

and:

?

Striking. The first tape is played forward and it’s, well, Bach. The second plays the same composition backwards, and it’s crap; movie music. In fact, it could be the sonic equivalent of the Barbie movie—not because the Barbie movie’s bad, necessarily, but because, like Bach played backwards, it doesn’t go anywhere. Wallpaper. Maybe that’s what Adolf Loos meant when he wrote:

“But whoever goes to the Ninth Symphony and then sits down after to design a pattern for wallpaper is either a confidence man of a degenerate.”

„Wer aber zur neunten synphonie geht und sich dann hinsitzt, um ein tapetenmuster zu zeichnen, ist entweder ein hochstapler oder ein degenerierter.“1

Many would consider Ruscha to be one of those two. To me he’s merely the logical outcome of the kind of Art practice taught in art schools: what’s the point?

Because what’s missing from the Backwards Bach is what’s missing from Ruscha. A touch of Music Theory, to explain:

The basis for most musical compositions is a type of grammar called Harmony. Harmony teaches how various single tones are superposed or strung out over time. According to some theoreticians, there is a second aspect to musical composition that Harmony cannot teach: the logic behind the progression from one cluster of tones to another, over time. There is nothing whatsoever missing from Backwards Bach—except Bach’s own reasons for stringing this particular series of tones in this particular order, the complex and compelling inner necessity for this progression.

[To be continued]

WOID XXIII-38

January 20, 2024

In every sign there sleeps that monster, stereotype.

En chaque signe dort ce monstre, un stéréotype. - Roland Barthes

Ed Ruscha. NOW THEN. The Museum of Modern Art, September 10, 2023 – January 13, 2024 [closed]. https://press.moma.org/exhibition/ed-ruscha-now-then/

Interesting artists are interesting in their own way; mediocre artists are all alike; not because their art looks the same but because they all get to be mediocre by following the same predictable path.

I wish I could say I taught many mediocrities-in-the-making at the School of Visual Arts. I wish I could say taught, but you can’t teach a future mediocrity anything, least of all at SVA, where mediocrity isn’t the by-product, it’s the school motto.

There’s no way to teach Art to mediocrities because there’s no way to make them understand that technique is not the equivalent of craft. Craft: you learn how things are supposed to be done, and then you do them, more or less well. Technique: you’ve grasped what craft is for, and every time you hit the bull’s eye. In Art History the situation’s even more hopeless because the History of Art requires that we understand not merely what was painted in the past, not simply how, but why one painted as one did. That’s why some people find Ed Ruscha comforting: the kind of people who congregate in high-school bathrooms and New York City boardrooms. His paintings have the emotional connection of a hundred-dollar bill. Ruscha is the class ZAM, the Zero-Affect Male, the one who has no why and who’s down with that. The occasional acts of rebellion have all the cringelike feel of a teenager putting out a lighted cigarette on the back of their hand, just to assure themselves that they feel something.

The word “trivial” comes from Trivia, the name of the initial set of disciplines in Medieval education; grammar, logic rhetoric: you have to learn the rules before you play the game. With Ruscha there’s nothing beyond the rules—not even rules, just class assignments. Over and over again he runs through the same basic exercises: organize a representation of a three-dimensional object along orthogonals; make letterforms look like what they say. In the hands of an artist like Keith Haring (the only artist ever to come out of the School of Visual Arts) these tasks become hilarious sendups of themselves. In the hands of Ruscha we get a dim, bored awareness of how tedious they are. There’s no cathexis; no emotional attachment. The reverse, in fact.

Ours is a time when art criticism and teaching Art converge: neither is about helping artists and students to move forward because there is no forward, the game’s been tossed. Critics and teachers aren’t paid to help students, artists, and would-be appreciators of art become better at what they do, they’re paid to help pretend they’re not wasting their time, cf. Jerry Saltz. The best you can hope for is that brief moment when the student or artist produces something you’d call promising; then you can point out where the promise lies—the artist rarely knows it themselves—and hope they pick up on it. There is such a moment in Ruscha, a single painting:

What Ruscha’s done here, is to take a vaguely authoritarian statement and neutralize it by painting over the words to create a kind of pattern of resistance. As Barthes put it,

Language, the performance of any system, is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist. Fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech… All that’s left, if I may say so, is to cheat through language; to cheat with language. It’s within language that language must be contested, corrupted.

« La langue, , comme performance de tout langage, n’est ni réactionnaire ni progressiste ; elle est tout simplement : fasciste ; car le fascisme, ce n’est pas d’empêcher de dire, c’est d’obliger à dire… Il ne reste, si je puis dire, qu'à tricher avec la langue ; qu'à tricher la langue. C'est à l'intérieur de la langue que la langue doit être combattue, dévoyée. »1

Here Ruscha at last turns against his own practice to explore his own self-directed repression, not merely that of others; not merely to enforce the craft, but to rub against the grain. Too little, too late.

Too bad.

WOID XXIII-37

January 14, 2024