Where are we going with this?

You shall know us by our noses!

I love Mira Schor's writing and I really enjoyed her recent essay, Reviewing the reviews of “Songs for Sabotage,” with some help from Leon Golub. Especially her honesty about inter-generational cattiness, or jealousy of the young.

But what really stuck with me was her mention of ‘Trite Tropes’ where she seems to be talking about a particular kind of painting. She describes it like this;

“In such paintings, figurative and narrative, many of which emerge from BFA and some MFA painting programs in the US, in direct contradistinction to what one feels is straining for individualism, for some reason everyone always seems to look alike, people even all having the same nose, from artist to artist.”

Later she describes seeing an image that has just such a nose.  This particular painting also has,

 “… a highly established faux naive outsider artist style of representation.”

 She describes how she and her colleagues always cull such art from slide juries. Interestingly, she indicates that this kind of art would have some value;

“… if markers of redeeming self-criticality and meta-stylistic content were present. “

On the one hand, I think I know what she means (Is it an Alex-Katz-style nose?). On the other, I’m quite attracted to this kind of painting. It may even be possible, I'm slightly ashamed to admit it,  that this is the kind of painting I do. I certainly don’t have any redeeming self-criticality or meta-stylistic content. Also, my mediocre drawing skills often result in a faux naïve outsider artist style of representation. But then I’m also not making any claims that my paintings have any value as such. Well, they have value to me, but not to anyone else, and certainly not in an Art Establishment context.

Product

“When Wallace Stevens said “Money is a kind of poetry,” he could have applied it to certain precincts of the art world, where it is a kind of criticism. Those who believe that the cream always rises to the top, and that success in the marketplace is a reliable measure of an artist’s ambition, tend to be white male critics.”

John Yau

All art history is a narrow, partisan, curated reading of a particular fraction of a particular cultural moment.

The biggest complaint of successful artists presently seems to be that there is too much ‘product’. It’s not just that there are more artists than ever before, but that they are, because of the internet, more visible than ever before.

It’s now impossible to talk about a zeitgeist, or to suggest that artists are predominantly interested in some particular formal issue such as abstraction, figuration, etc. This isn’t because we live in a post-modernist, post-historical time when lots of contradictory ideas, styles co-exist. It’s because it’s plain to see that there is a massive variety of different stuff happening at the same time. But, this has always been the case. It’s just harder to ignore with the internet. You can’t really make a case for a narrow art movement now. We can’t really say that there is a post-post-modernism because there was never really post-modernism or modernism. Not in the great, over-arching way that these movements are talked about. They were never the only game in town. They were never actually the Law. Or, we could say that there were lots of competing modernisms.