HELLO DR GOEBBELS, MY NEW FRIEND
Tue. June 1, 2004Categories: Abstract Dynamics
Well, that’s me, Nick Southall, Sean Loaf and Mark Leach, member of the council, the Pastel society (who wrote to the Times yesterday saying that ‘the majority of painters and craftsmen who have dedicated their lives to exploring their visual aesthetic would happily warm their hands over the dying embers of Britart’) told, then, isn’t it?
I have no wish to uh re-ignite the disussion of the merits of Emin et al (which was, to my mind, concluded satisfactorily over at Undercurrent). But Marcello’s argument – that anyone who isn’t especially upset about the destruction of art of any kind is in league with the Nazis and the KKK – in addition to exemplifying the slippery slope fallacy, takes hyperbole well beyond the point of slander. It presupposes the very point that needs to be established: namely, that what was destroyed has value (value, that is, over and above the material constitutents or what it meant to the individuals who made or owned it). Just because – through having satisfied certain institutional criteria – something is deemed to be ‘art’ doesn’t automatically mean it is sacred.
I certainly didn’t suggest that the fire was a good thing. I just implied that I wasn’t especially sad about certain of the ‘works’ going up in smoke.
Is this to be extended to all forms of culture?
If, God forbid :-), the masters of Robbie Williams’ entire back catalogue were destroyed, would I be required to shed a tear? Well, sorry, I wouldn’t.
One of the most irritating aspects of Emin’s appearance on David Frost on Sunday was her petulant demand for ‘respect’. She reported a conversation with a consoling Italian friend, who’d marvelled at how hard it must be to be to an artist in Britain. Julie Burchill doesn’t always talk rubbish, and one of the things she wrote that I’ve always remembered is her claim that Britain is actually a very good country in which to be a writer (and, by extension, an artist). Precisely because the public are so sceptical, hostile and contemptuous towards culture. Default, unearned respect for culture breeds a decadent cultural licentiousness in which any amount of pretentious nonsense is encouraged and propagated. Britain’s more brutalist ‘natural’ (or, better, cultural) selection means that cultural producers have to develop an inner strength, conviction and self-reliance in order to survive and prosper.
No producer should expect ‘respect’ as a right.
It’s worth adding that Emin herself said there were more important things to worry about (kids dying in Iraq etc) and the Chapmans’ ‘It’s only art’ has already become one of the most quoted statements of the year.
“Just because – through having satisfied certain institutional criteria – something is deemed to be ‘art’ doesn’t automatically mean it is sacred.”
Quite right: but this is, precisely, a “slippery slope” argument; i.e., just because something is accorded value doesn’t mean it’s considered “sacred”. A good deal of post-Romantic art might be (ok, reductively) described as looking for styles of value other than those exigent categories: the theological or the commercial (these values would have to do, e.g., with innovation, critique, expression, madness, rigour, style: all the good things about art, even if often delusional or perverted according to devotees of commerce and the sacred). The destruction of an art work means, precisely, that it will forever languish in the melancholic dreamland of the sacred and the expensive, as a fantasized and lost value (and even — perhaps especially — if you hate its memory, you’ll still be stuck between those poles). What’s gone is the opportunity to judge the work according to criteria other than the neurotic ones of its price or its “cultural” (i.e. sacred) value. What’s lost is: criticism. This is not to be regretted? Really?
“Default, unearned respect for culture breeds a decadent cultural licentiousness in which any amount of pretentious nonsense is encouraged and propagated. Britain’s more brutalist ‘natural’ (or, better, cultural) selection means that cultural producers have to develop an inner strength, conviction and self-reliance in order to survive and prosper.”
The terminology is becoming very interesting here: decadent, licentious, pretentious versus strong, self-reliant, convinced. Is this your (yes, Burchill’s, but more than tacitly approved) version of the beautiful and the sublime? It sure reads like that: luxury versus asceticism, sex versus self-possession, hubris versus modesty. You don’t need to dig out Kant and Burke to see that this sort of logic is shadowed by a perverse fantasy: that all that rigour (English/Prussian) might be ravishingly exploded in a conflagration in which the beautiful and the sublime would become indistinguishable, all our steady Northern European pluck would go to the dogs and we’d be flouncing and rutting like Borgias. In other words: why are you pretending to be afraid of fun? Which is actually the same question as above: do you really believe that experience (of the thing itself) is dispensable? Who’s the “conceptualist” here?
Can’t he see the plain fact? They’re THICK
Well, Mark, you know I’m with you on this. I don’t know whether you read what I’ve written about this, but put together with my comments in one of the boxes below, it looks like we’re thinking along very similar lines. Once again, I don’t particularly care what happens to Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin or Sarah Lucas’ work. It is not that important and even if you presuppose its intrinsic worth as “hallowed art”, as with the vast majority of conceptual art, it doesn’t really matter if it stays around anyway. the fact it happened should be enough (or too much, if you’re like me). I’m happy with my heretical stance and I’m sticking to it.
Dave, yeh, just checked yer stuff on WoS. Needless to say, I concur…
Brian, just been reading yer writing, followed technorati to yer (empty) blog and then the links to yer published stuff. Nice….
Take some of your points, but grieving the loss of criticism presupposes that the objects are worthy of attention/ criticism. To use Dave’s analogy, isn’t it like if the Oasis, Fat Les or Blur mastertapes got lost? I don’t particularly want to ‘criticise’ them – I never want to hear them again. What singificance they had lay in their popularity not in the objects themselves IMO. And we’ve got the videos, the photos, the press cuttings to prove that.
The point on UK versus Continent wasn’t so much abt the type of art produced but abt the best conditions for the production of art. More a Nietzschean than a Burkean point I should have thought: great things emerge from struggle against adverse conditions…
Mm, well, it was a shame MC had to close off debate — surely *that’s* the hallmark of Joseph G et al?
well, it was a shame MC had to close off debate —
Some things, it seems, don’t need to be discussed; they can just be pronounced upon. 🙂
It’s sad to see Marcello fall prey to Godwin’s law….
Dunno if I was unlinked specifically for my hasty quip in a TMFTML comment box or because I’ve failed to meet MC’s exacting standards of late but even if it’s the latter it’s disappointing that he’s become so priggish and censorial. Are we all going to follow suit and start trimming our blogrolls every time someone posts something that jokes or riffs about subjects we think can only be discussed in reverence? Life’s too short and who wants only to read stuff that carefully treads the party line for fear of getting the chop — or be read by a select bunch of gentle souls who’ll nod and say “how true”?
LOL!
That’s the second time I’ve been ceremoniously unlinked from the great Carlin blogroll —- not that I’d noticed till you mentioned it….
I’d better tread more carefully in future….
Course, there’s nothing remotely Stalinistic or Goebbels-like about removing reference to things of which you disapprove, is there?
Still, Marcello could never be accused of having a sense of humour, could he?
Note: despite the great man calling me a ‘dickhead’ and ‘a lazy commentator’, the links to NM from k-punk remain unmolested.
And I’m still looking forward to his posts on Morrissey etc….
funny to look back at his hit on M Moore now…
always more feeling, respectful than the rest…
bah!
Yes, respectful. I always thought that people who’ve just seen their life’s work destroyed should be entitled to a basic degree of respect and sympathy rather than ridiculed, laughed at or sneered at, whether you like the art they make or not. If you are so unconcerned about their art then you should concentrate on writing about things which do interest you. Because otherwise this just seems like more public school throwback sneering, and none of you has earned the right to do so.
How appropriate that the world-famous Pastel Group – do they have anything to do with that bunch of losers who go around taking hammers to Gunther Hagen’s sculptures, and how many of them have been snared by Operation Ore? – should cheer destruction in the letters page of Murdoch’s ABC1 scab sheet. They can fuck off to the BNP, if they’re not already members.
Never mind, Mark – if your house/flat ever burns down and everything in it is destroyed, we’ll post supercilious, pseudo-morally superior articles about how little it means to us. Then you’ll see how it feels.
Learn some common courtesy and then I might let you back on my blogroll. If not, then carry on sneering and pretending it makes you happy. Bye.
O good, at least you admitted you wouldn’t be participating in the discussion. Hence the resort to ad hominems, I expect.
Some worthwhile discussion has happened here; most notably with Robin Undercurrent and Hestia, who, although they vigorously opposed what I said, actually bothered to engage with it rather than blustering away at straw men.
I always thought that people who’ve just seen their life’s work destroyed should be entitled to a basic degree of respect and sympathy rather than ridiculed, laughed at or sneered at, whether you like the art they make or not.
Well, where do we get off the bus, here, kind readers? Their ‘life’s work’? Hardly. Some examples of their life’s work. Which, I shouldn’t need to point out, have been sold for handsome sums of money. I have the same amount of sympathy for the artists as I do for anyone who’s seen something they made years ago, and for which they were remunerated, destroyed. And if you’re asking me to have any sympathy for the owner of most of these works, Charles Saatchi, then I’m afraid that’s beyond me.
btw who is sneering? Some people are saying, as is their right even in your universe I imagine Marcello, that they do not regard the fire as a particularly great cultural loss and using it as an occasion to discuss what cultural value means, rather than pompously assuming that they already know what it is and that they must act as its protector.
What would Duchamp have thought about your censoriousness, censoring and ? Or the KLF?
If you are so unconcerned about their art then you should concentrate on writing about things which do interest you.
If you took the trouble to read the original post, you would see that part of my point was that I didn’t really want to talk about these artists since it accords them the attention that they crave. And no-one tells you what to write about Marcello – I’m not taking advice from you, thanks.
the letters page of Murdoch’s ABC1 scab sheet
ABC1? What do you read? The Morning Star? Sneering at Murdoch is so oldaren’t?
public school throwback sneering
Well, I certainly didn’t go to public school. Nor to Oxford University either, as it happens.
the world-famous Pastel Group
Don’t know anything about them. But they are cultural producers, probably of material, I suspect, that I’d hold in even less esteem than Emin’s tat. But are we to infer from yr comments that if the works of the Pastel Group went up in smoke, you wouldn’t be extending any sympathy to these ‘losers’? Some cultural producers are not worthy of respect, then?
Incidentally, how far does your respect for art go? Does it extend as far as Nazi-sympathizing art, for instance?
Never mind, Mark – if your house/flat ever burns down and everything in it is destroyed, we’ll post supercilious, pseudo-morally superior articles about how little it means to us. Then you’ll see how it feels.
But I wouldn’t expect it to mean anything to you or indeed to anyone who wasn’t close to me. I wouldn’t expect ppl to regard it as a great cultural loss! Do you really want to pursue this analogy Marcello? As I said above, the artists didn’t own what was in the warehouses; Saatchi did. If someone’s flat burns down, their everyday life becomes very difficult, to say the least. The artists aren’t in any way practically or economically disadvantaged by what they’ve lost. Which isn’t to say that they weren’t emotionally affected by what happened; just that the analogy is a poor one.
As for ‘pseudo-moral superiority’, well, pots and kettles I should have thought…
Learn some common courtesy and then I might let you back on my blogroll.
Thanks, Dad.
Marcello, I’m not going to learn any sleep over it, funnily enough. I think k-punk can cope without all the traffic it gets from Naked Maja.
“The artists aren’t in any way practically or economically disadvantaged by what they’ve lost.”
Just as a practical aside, Mark, this is not strictly true (but raises all sorts of issues to do with the various comparisons being made: e.g. with mastertapes, or indeed personal effects…). A good deal of an artist’s reputation (and thus his or her ability to keep making a living) depends on earlier work still being in circulation: available for retrospectives, group shows, or to join the permanent collection of a museum. Sure, the artist has made some money from the initial sale, but what happens next can directly, economically, affect a career, sometimes make or break it. All the artists, arguably, will suffer; the less well known, poorer, ones will definitely suffer, and not just emotionally.
Fair enough, Brian. But it doesn’t effect them in the same direct and immediate practical way that having all their personal property burned in a fire would. I still don’t find the analogy perfectly helpful.
Besides, and given your arguments above about etherealization, I shd have thought losing their work and having it removed from critical scrutiny would have enhanced their reputation. 🙂
In another sense, the analogy concedes too much. I’m happy with the fire being compared to a personal or economic loss of whatever magnitude. It’s the thought that it is a cultural loss that I resist.
affect, transference/countertransference in the blogos: now theres a topic…