Showing posts with label Advertising and Happy Talk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Advertising and Happy Talk. Show all posts
Sunday, December 15, 2024
Ali Bati, the ad that became a meme.
The original drawing was about progress as it gradually became more skillful from left to right.
art vs illustration, intent vs reception, reading images, and time, left to right, in the West. I always liked the meme. I saw it today used to describe the Biden administration and decided to look for the source. That's when I learned that the one move was to flip the drawing. A simple transformation, and brilliant.
Jokes are popular art. Duchamp was a joker. There are a few cases where Bati could sue, but he seems to take in it stride.
Friday, June 21, 2024
addendum at the top
Smartphones are a global phenomenon. But apparently the rise in youth anxiety is not. In some of the largest and most trusted surveys, it appears to be largely occurring in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “If you’re looking for something that’s special about the countries where youth unhappiness is rising, they’re mostly Western developed countries,” says John Helliwell, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the World Happiness Report. “And for the most part, they are countries that speak English.”
Even the Happiness Report is an Americanism.
repeats. Haidt is a promoter of "Positive Psychology". He teaches at a business school.
repeats. Click on the quote from Cobb at the link.
all explaining the first comment below. Ilaria Mazzocco's anxious forced expressions of happiness are like fingernails on a chalkboard.
How China’s EV Industry Got So Big Shift Key with Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins
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as a side note, the voices of of people on the podcast are unbearable.
The CCG launched a brutal assault on the AFP personnel aboard an AFP Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat (RHIB), aggressively ramming it and brandishing bladed and pointed weapons, explicitly threatening to harm AFP troops. pic.twitter.com/LuFgLE3WJj
— Armed Forces of the Philippines (@TeamAFP) June 19, 2024
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.
The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.
Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.
“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”
After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.
The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.
Powell: I’m disappointed to see Substack giving prime promotional real estate to Robert Reich. Reich is probably best characterized as the progressive Ben Shapiro. He sounds smart and persuasive to partisans, and they like to think he’s “destroyed” the views of people they don’t like, but his arguments are thin, almost always misleading, and people with a deep understanding of the issues he’s talking about, even those sympathetic to his positions, generally view him as an unserious thinker. Progressives can do a lot better.
Albrecht: I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I wonder to what extent it is reasonable to expect Substack to know the difference. They see who generates readers and subscribers. Can I really expect them to independently identify experts across fields?
P: Not in every case, no. But there are obviously cases where one really ought to know if someone purporting to be an expert in fact isn’t. “How could we have known RFK Jr. isn’t actually a well-regarded expert on vaccines?” But I don’t know how or where to draw that line. I was mainly expressing broader frustration at how many people don’t know that Reich is a charlatan.
This publication is a place for thoughtful discussion around writers’ work. Substack is also founded on the belief that writers and their work deserve respect.
We ask that writers keep conversations civil in the comments of this publication and other Substack spaces where we gather writers, such as events. That means respecting one other’s perspectives and life experiences in your conversations, and refraining from cruel or derogatory language. It is not a place for irrelevant rants or off-topic digressions.
As such we are disabling comments on this post. You can read more about our approach to the comments and community interactions in this publication here: https://on.substack.com/p/community-guidelines
These Community Guidelines only apply to spaces that we manage, like our company publications, events, and programs, and are completely separate and distinct from the Substack Content Guidelines, which outline what is and is not acceptable on the Substack platform as a whole as part of our hands-off approach to moderation that puts writers and readers in charge - https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderation.
Leighten Woodhouse is concerned: "Can someone at Substack explain why so many comments here were removed? I’m open to there being a good reason but on its face it looks a bit alarming."
Specialist writing for a general audience at best is writing for an audience as you would like to imagine it, while trying not to be esoteric, obscure, needlessly technical or consciously high-brow. Writing for profit can become writing for fans. It's amazing how much conversation on Substack revolves around either claims of censorship or bragging rights.
Artists are better than academics at negotiating the politics of popularity. Not that they don't mostly fail, but pedants fall hard. DeLong and Noah Smith are unbearable. Reich and Krugman are political figures and it's useless to pretend otherwise. But it's equally useless to pretend Substack isn't a publisher and that all the competition for hits is about impressing the techbro editors above. And it's interesting or not how much racial-rationalism tecbros approve. The moral indignation of Lorentzen and Taibbi are more related than one of them at least might want to admit.
Ganz writes a piece on right-wing nostalgia for left-wing authoritarianism.
"First off, Compact itself exists to peddle this sort of hybridization of Left and Right themes, which I have elsewhere called an “unholy alliance.” (As a quick aside, in a recent piece, Slavoj Zizek, who sadly is a contributor to Compact, used this very term in a recent essay, writing, “We live in an era of unholy alliances, a combination of ideological elements which violate the standard opposition of Left and Right.”)
As I point out in that piece, the attempt to find such a Left-Right synthesis is an old and dishonorable tradition."
You'd hope he'd have learned something by now—and this still makes me laugh. I reminded him that Sohrab Ahmari is a fan of Mike Davis.
...I devoured City of Quartz, and then I read everything else Davis had written up to that point, and I was left wanting more.
Ganz replied that he was too, which, after all was my point. I quoted T.J. Clark (see the link) and said as I always do that apocalyptic romance is where radicalism meets fascism, adding that if he read Davis as more than a passive writer of elegiac prose he would have at least when he was living in Bushwick spent some time at the end of a night in the back of a bodega with a last beer and a couple of tacos sitting with workers home from a late shift, or smoking a cigarette with a bakery worker on a break. But he's admitted that he has no social ties outside his scene.
Ganz writes for dollars communing to his followers. Journalists write on Substack as a way to get things out and make some extra cash. They bring their own readers. I'm not quibbling. Milanovic just posts like an academic blogger, without a paywall. But this is what Substack was made for. Found via a "thank you!" from a writer recommended by Lorentzen.
A European monarch once awarded me a medal for extraordinary service, an oil baron unknowingly gave me millions of dollars to do some focus groups, and a Pulitzer Prize winner convinced me to buy a trailer park.
Oddly, the thread that ties these random random facts of my life together is a weird junior high school I went to that mashed 6th, 7th, and 8th graders together, didn’t have formal subjects, and emphasized writing as a tool to understand the world.
I didn’t realize how much I missed that experience until I started sifting the sands of Substack, unearthing writing that dissolved the boundaries that I thought existed between me and the world.
My goal with my Substack is to help you feel more peaceful, more understood, and more human, by recommending my favorite Substack articles. I also hope that, perhaps once a year, something that I write will bring you bliss.
Pablum and happy talk, from and ex-congressional staffer now at the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Milanovic
Van Bavel’s key idea is as follows. In societies where non-market constraints are dominant (say, in feudal societies), liberating factor markets is a truly revolutionary change. Ability of peasants to own some land or to lease it, of workers to work for wages rather than to be subjected to various types of corvées, or of the merchants to borrow at a more or less competitive market rather than to depend on usurious rates, is liberating at an individual level (gives person much greater freedom), secures property, and unleashes the forces of economic growth. The pace of activity quickens, growth accelerates (true, historically, from close to zero to some small number like 0.5% per year) and even inequality, economic and above all social, decreases. This is the period so well recognized and analyzed by Adam Smith. Van Bavel, in a nod to Braudel, shows that very similar “essors” have existed in the pre-medieval Iraq (then the most developed part of the world), medieval Central and Northern Italy (Florence, Venice, Milan, Genoa..) and on the cusp between the late medieval Europe and early modern period in the Low Countries.
But the process, Bavel argues, contains the seeds of its destruction. Gradually factor markets cover more and more of the population: Bavel is excellent in providing numerical estimates on, for example, the percentage of wage-earners in Lombardy in the 14th century or showing that in Low Countries wage labor was, because of guilds, less prevalent in urban than in rural areas. One factor market, though, that of capital and finance, gradually begins to dominate. Private and public debt become most attractive investments, big fortunes are made in finance, and those who originally asked for the level playing field and removal of feudal-like constraints, now use their wealth to conquer the political power and impose a serrata, thus making the rules destined to keep them forever on the top. What started as an exercise in political and economic freedom begins to look like an exercise in cementing the acquired power, politically and economically. The economic essor is gone, the economy begins to stagnate and, as happened to Iraq, Northern Italy and Low Countries, is overtaken by the competitors.*
As this short sketch shows, Bavel’s theory has many links, or can be juxtaposed, to several contemporary views of economic history. Bavel is dismissive of a unilinear view that regards the ever widening role of factor markets, including the financial, as leading to ever higher incomes and greater political freedom. His view, although not fully cyclical (on which I will say a bit more at the very end of the review) is “endogenously curvilinear”: things which were good originally, when they hypertrophy, become a hindrance to further growth. It is thus a story of the rise and fall where, like in Greek tragedies, the very same factors that brought the protagonists grandeur, eventually hurl them into the abyss.
...It is not only the plausibility of the mechanism of decline that gives strength to Bavel’s thesis; it is also that he lists the manifestation of the decline, observable in all six cases. Financial investments yield much more than investments in the real sector, the economy begins to resemble a casino, the political power of the financiers becomes enormous. The richest among the financiers either directly or indirectly enter politics, they become patrons of arts, sponsors of sports and education, and we witness simultaneously (1) oligarchic politics, (2) slower growth and lower level of real investments, (3) higher inequality, (4) domination of finance and (5) artistic efflorescence. What the ancient writers describe as “decadence” clearly sets it, but, as Bavel is at pains to note, it is not caused by moral defects of the ruling class but by the type of economy that is being created. Extravagant bidding for assets whose quantity is fixed (land and art) is a further manifestation of such an economy: the bidding for fixed assets reflects lack of alternative profitable investments as well as the expectation that, as inequality increases, there would be some even crazier and richer investors who would pay even more for a work of art, thus enabling the realization of a capital gain.
I'm torn between nodding and saying no fucking shit, but it's a good description of the economic origins of apocalyptic romance. Materialism is the least romantic worldview imaginable, but that's why a passive romanticism attaches itself. And though it should be obvious, that includes Gerhard Richter.
I'm not immune, but I'm not immune to anything I've ever written about. Nothing human is alien to me. That's the point right? The last thing I said to Ganz is that I'm torn between art and politics. Art usually wins, but that makes me a bit cranky.
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I really hate Lorentzen. His world is petty and pathetic. This is just sad. But he's managed to remind me that I shouldn't have turned down the job with David Salle in 1986—I didn't want to move the the Hamptons and I'd decided to go back to school. Lorentzen is nostalgic for a decadence that I'm closer to than he can ever be. But I kept my distance at the time, and what's replaced it is worse. I have so many regrets. I missed my chance. I missed a lot of fun. Then again I'd never had had the patience. And Salle's work was never what he thought or pretended it was.
Saturday, December 24, 2022
humanprovince, ("politics, language and culture. the levant and central africa. political scientist by training, but please don't hold that against me.") adds:
1/ On their first day of work abroad, hundreds of Filipino domestic workers presented their new employer in Saudi Arabia and Hong Honk with a small pack of dried mango and a photo of their family. Guess what happened next.
International migrant workers are vulnerable to abuses by their employers. We implemented a randomized controlled trial of an intervention to reduce mistreatment of Filipino women working as domestic workers (DWs) by their household employ- ers in Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia. The intervention – encouraging DWs to show their employers a photo of their family while providing a small gift when starting employment – caused DWs to experience less mistreatment, have higher satisfaction with the employer, and be more likely to stay with the employer. DWs’ families in the Philippines also come to view international labor migration more positively, while they generally remain unaware of the intervention. An online experiment with potential employers in Hong Kong and the Middle East suggests that a mechanism behind the treatment effect is a reduction in the employer’s perceived social distance from the employee. A simple intervention can thus help to protect migrant workers without requiring public policy changes in the destination country.
Training the servants so their masters are less likely to beat them.
It's all there: class, race, colonialism. I could just post the names and affiliations like I did the last time.
Ekin Ok, Yi Qian, Brendan Strejcek, and Karl Aquino
University of British Columbia
We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy—more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism—amoral manipulation—and a form of narcissism that reflects a person’s belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person’s willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context.
Keywords: Dark Triad, unethical behavior, victim-signaling, victimization, virtue-signaling
"The cry that one is a victim of injustice, oppression, intolerance, or any of the myriad reasons why people believe they are prevented from getting what they want in life has echoed loudly through the ages. It remains so today..... "
People who more often signal their victimhood are more likely to lie, cheat, and engage in other unethical behaviors in order to get ahead, even at others’ expense.
The archetypical anti-Semitic description of Jews. Jilani of course used it as it was intended, against any and every other discontented subgroup that has faced or faces discrimination.
The link in the tweet—I replaced it with a link to the APA page—takes us to Gwern Branwen; and Cory Clark herself is another trip, publishing with proponents of "human bio-diversity". It's two hops from Bo Winegard to Noah Carl to Richard Lynn. It took me 3 minutes to find the route. Do it yourself. And of course every one of the authors of the paper studies human behavior in the service of marketing, as specialists in the condescending happy-talk of "positive psychology", from Seligman to Pinker, Haidt and Lukianoff, and the whole sorry lot. None of that is to say anything about the research itself. The results are unoriginal and obvious: people do what they need to to survive. Scars last for generations; trauma is passed down. The history of how that was accepted, denied, and accepted again is more than anything the story of the rise and decline of ideology and ideal form. Psychology dealt with honestly is not a field for optimists.
I thought I'd written something about Seligman before, but I think that was from my twitter days.
The above reminded me that Jilani is on the Board of Advisors of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, which includes the usual reasonable, acceptable, bigots, and at least one overt anti-Semite, though again of course, he defends Israel.
Jewish exceptionalism and the exceptionalist nature of Jewish civilization require an unconditional space for the continued evolution of their civilization. What’s good for Jewish civilization is good for humanity at large. Jewish civilization is an international treasure trove that must be protected.
Not all cultures are indeed equal. Some are abysmally inferior and regressive based on their comprehensive philosophy and fundamental principles—or lack thereof—that guide or fail to protect the inalienable rights of their citizens.
Given the voting patterns of Palestinians—towards Islamicism and terrorist organizations for the most part—that openly advocate and work for Israeli and Jewish destruction and annihilation, a strong argument can and ought to be made to strip Palestinians of their right to vote—period. The regional hostilities towards Israel in the Middle East are such that Israel must take those threats seriously. It must work for a coalition of forces to neutralize them.
But we've come to the point when the creatures of the culture of neoliberalism begin to examine the world that made them.
In this paper we address identity issues in relation to senior employees in the UK investment banking sector. Drawing on in-depth material, the study demonstrates their marginal concerns about identity issues or engagement in what is typically viewed as identity work. Instead they had what we refer to as an identity minimalism orientation and met potential challenges to identity with what we conceptualize as teflonic identity manoeuvring. In so doing they were able to deflect attention away from themselves, enabling them to circumvent identity concerns. These employees drew upon material resources, specifically money, to rationalize this disposition and social (in particular, dress codes) and discursive resources (around professionalism) to bolster and sustain this disposition.
Emerita Professor of Innovation and Organisation, Queen Mary School of Business and Management
repeats. The relation of corporate to academic life over time, and the Americanization of the world.
Advertising and Happy Talk, Liberals Make Nihilism Attractive, Pedants and Children, Race, Make it Idiot-Proof, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Israel/Palestine
The arguments are all in the manuscript. It's embarrassing to say this all the time but I do.
He's a commercial illustrator. The pitch is the "innovation". The market is producing the artist and the art.
The positivist definition of art is illustration. If fine art has devolved into design, it still performs the function of art: the following of sensibility, responding to experiences, perceptions. But to ad men, like philosophers, art is successful communication as seen in metrics, and is designed as computer games are in the service of “fun”. The MIT communication department model of creativity follows the enthusiasm of the designers of Assassin’s Creed, and Gears of War, blind not even to subtext but to direct meaning, a blindness matching the enthusiasts of the “formalism” of the films of Paul Sharits. For all the discussion of the delivery of content, the content itself is seen as meaningless. This is the world of ideas, the academia that claims to provide a foundation for capitalism and anti-capitalism, revolution, Wall St. and Madison Avenue.
I'm leaving in all the links: telegraphing the hard sell.
As of 6:48 pm on 3/10, the bidding is at $13,250,000
On 1 May 2007, Mike Winkelmann, aka the digital artist Beeple, posted a new work of art online. He did the same thing the next day and the next, and the next one after that, creating and posting a brand-new digital picture, or ‘everyday’ as he called it, every single day for 13-and-a-half years. Now those individual pieces have been brought together in EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, a unique work in the history of digital art.
Minted exclusively for Christie’s, the monumental digital collage will be offered as a single lot sale concurrently with First Open from 25 February to 11 March. Marking two industry firsts, Christie’s will be the first major auction house to offer a purely digital work with a unique NFT (Non-fungible token) — effectively a guarantee of its authenticity — and to accept cryptocurrency, in this case Ether, in addition to standard forms of payment for the singular lot.
‘Christie’s has never offered a new media artwork of this scale or importance before,’ says Noah Davis, specialist in Post-War & Contemporary Art at Christie’s in New York. ‘Acquiring Beeple’s work is a unique opportunity to own an entry in the blockchain itself created by one of the world’s leading digital artists.’...
His visionary and often irreverent digital pictures have propelled him to the top of the digital art world, winning him 1.8 million followers on Instagram and high-profile collaborations with global brands ranging from Louis Vuitton to Nike, as well as performing artists from Katy Perry to Childish Gambino.
In EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, the artist has stitched together recurring themes and colour schemes into an aesthetic whole. The individual pieces are organised in loose chronological order: zooming in reveals pictures by turn abstract, fantastical, grotesque or absurd, deeply personal or representative of current events. Recurring themes include society’s obsession with and fear of technology; the desire for and resentment of wealth; and America’s recent political turbulence.
‘Beeple is looking at his whole body of work as it’s presented on Instagram as a kind of Duchampian readymade’ — specialist Noah Davis
The notable differences between the early and later pictures reveal Beeple’s enormous evolution as an artist. At the project’s inception, ‘everydays’ were basic drawings. When Beeple started working in 3D, however, they took on abstract themes, colour, form and repetition. Over the past five years, they have became increasingly timely, reacting to current events.
‘I almost look at it now as though I’m a political cartoonist,’ Beeple explains. ‘Except instead of doing sketches, I’m using the most advanced 3D tools to make comments on current events, almost in real time.’
He's an idiot.
The seriousness of fine art is the connected to the seriousness of philosophy: an artistic and intellectual elite removed from the world through its connections to authority. People forget that fine art was also known as "non-commercial" art, money dealt with discreetly, and buying to flip looked down upon.
Playboys didn’t buy polo ponies, or football teams, to make money off them, and heiresses collected expensive dresses. The point is the game for the game’s sake, art for art’s sake.
I've said that all before. Rich people can afford to do some things things for love. This is the equivalent of real estate prices going through the roof while the rental income stays the same. It has no foundation, not even the foundation of self-respect still associated with good publishers and movie producers.
“The potential for it to disrupt the traditional art auction model is humongous,” said Noah Davis, the specialist in charge of the first NFT auction at Christie’s. Beyond the record-setting sale of Beeple’s “Everydays,” he said, NFTs’ “lack of objecthood” meant auction houses faced no costs required for storing, handling, cataloging, photographing and insuring a physical work of art, making a “really attractive opportunity” for auction houses.
History repeats, and now no one gets the joke. I have no problem with Klein or Manzoni.
The Florentine intermedios of the manneristic theater (similar to the English masks) abounded in such complicated allegories as seen in the Intermedio of 1585 and 1589 where the conclusion of Plato’s Republic appeared on the stage, including the Planets, the Harmony of the Spheres, the Three Goddesses of Fate, and even Necessity, holding the adamantine axis of the Universe (fig. 40). We happen to possess the diary of a nobleman who saw this play and stated that it was very beautiful but nobody could understand what it was all about.
Sunday, October 13, 2019
Neil McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left, 1830-1850,
Saint-Simon’s emphasis on overt didacticism underlines the transitional status of his ideas. While the disciples who took up the banner of industry following the philosopher’s death in 1825 were to cultivate a mystical religiosity where sentiment was given pride of place, Saint-Simon’s own attitude toward imagination and the arts remained qualified by an underlying commitment to reason. Positivist leanings provide a continual bedrock to his thought, surviving, and indeed justifying, the modifications in his practical outlook. In this respect, Saint-Simon displays epiStemological convictions that grow out of the rationalist tradition of Enlightenment philosophy. His promotion of a utilitarian aesthetic, too, has eighteenth-century antecedents, not only in the Revolution but also in ancien regime interest in the morally inspiring impact of art. Yet, in certain respects, Saint-Simon makes a break with the Enlightenment. His perception of contemporary medical theory, with its repudiation of the egalitarian connotations of sensationalism, prompted an acknowledgment of the inherent limitations of reason as a faculty found in developed form only among a small minority. It is in this context that sentiment, whose organic origins apparently guaranteed more universal appeal, acquires a pivotal role in the political equation and leads to the artist’s promotion in Saint-Simon’s later work. Such an appreciation of sentiment, while sharing some of the characteristics advanced in eighteenth-century texts, fundamentally deviates from this earlier tradition in its overall place within an explanation of aesthetic response and differs markedly from the essentially elitist conception of sensiibilité.
Saint-Simon’s attitude toward art is, moreover, unambiguously functional in tone. Beauty is a concept entirely foreign to his concerns; art achieves significance in his eyes only insofar as it can be justified on strictly utilitarian lines. Symptomatically, his aesthetic speculations remain on exclusively abstract plane, eschewing any reference to specific works of literature, painting, or sculpture. Nor did Saint-Simon make conspicuous attempts to acquaint himself with contemporary practice. While he had gone to elaborate lengths to cultivate leading scientists, even contracting a short-lived marriage in 1801 as a means of establishing a fashionable salon in his home near the Ecole de médecine, his familiarity with artists of the period remained slight—though the painter Ary Schefier briefly entered Saint-Simon’s circle in 1816, through friendship with his young collaborator Augustin Thierrlv. This isolation confirms the general indifference with which the artistic community responded to Saint-Simon’s promise of unprecedented social eminence, a promise all too apparently qualified by a highly instrumental understanding of culture as subservient to priorities determined through the superior insights of reason.
The rationalist ballast that holds Saint-Simon’s aesthetic in place was largely jettisoned by his disciples. As the following chapter will demonstrate, their cultivation of pronounced religious overtones had far-reaching implications not only for their interpretation of Saint-Simon’s philosophy of social organization but also for their understanding of art and of the artist’s status, which far surpassed anything their mentor had been willing to allow. In this respect, the movement cast aside much of the Enlightenment inheritance in Saint-Simon’s philosophy and forged an understanding of art social that moved beyond his utilitarian commitment to exert a far more potent appeal on the artistic community in the years after 1830.
And reposting the below from a year ago, because I've been writing about Athens and the Renaissance. Double-consciousness is the foundation of humanism and democracy. It's the foundation for art. Art is always the manifestation of double-consciousness, the acceptable form of release: the illusory world of play where self and other are joined. Du Bois was always a positivist of one sort of another, defending enlightenment model of the "rational, single self". Romantics and irrationalists respond by wanting the make the illusion a reality.
But positivism was always a form of romanticism.
17 … But now we have another problem.What is that?
What if we find out what makes each of us internally consistent? What if I find your proper name, that thing which describes exactly what you are?
Than I will always be honest, or predictable at least. And you will be able to interpret everything I say and never be wrong. And of course I’ll know your name as well.
No dishonesty, no subterfuge, no Freud, no art… Then we can all be logical positivists.
But it doesn’t matter. That dream’s irrelevant.
I want unification.
It’s an illusion.
I want the illusion.
Do you want the illusion or do you want the illusion to be real?
What’s the difference?
One means that you have an appreciation of the arts. The other means that you’re a fascist.
...and a new tag for Simon Blackburn. He deserves one at this point.
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After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
Arendt
But bragging is a common vice, and a more specific, and also more decisive, flaw in Eichmann's character was his almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow's point of view. Nowhere was this flaw more conspicuous than in his account of the Vienna episode. He and his men and the Jews' were all "pulling together," and whenever there were any difficulties the Jewish functionaries would come running to him "to unburden their hearts," to tell him "all their grief and sorrow," and to ask for his help.
File under Trolley Problems. A soldier explains what Oxbridge philosophers can't. It's a sign of how far we've fallen that it has to be explained at all.
A thousand years ago when I was about to begin my military career, a wise old retired Marine colonel, a veteran of the carnage at Tarawa, gave me some advice. Paraphrased here, he said
So you want to be a career soldier? Good for you. But remember that the longer you stay in uniform, the less you will really understand about the country you protect. Democracy is the antithesis of the military life; it’s chaotic, dishonest, disorganized, and at the same time glorious, exhilarating and free — which you are not.
After a while, if you stay in, you’ll be tempted to say, “Look, you civilians, we’ve got a better way. We’re better organized. We’re patriotic, and we know what it is to sacrifice. Be like us.” And you’ll be dead wrong, son. If you’re a career soldier, you may defend democracy, but you won’t understand it or be part of it. What’s more, you’ll always be a stranger to your own society. That’s the sacrifice you’ll be making.
Another recent repeat, an obvious one I missed. Baudelaire
To add to the military metaphors: Soldier of the judicial press (Bertin). The poets of strife. The litterateurs of the advance guard. This habitude of military metaphors denotes minds not military, but made for discipline, that is, for conformity, minds born domesticated, Belgian minds, which can think only in society.
Sunday, July 07, 2019
"To add to the military metaphors: Soldier of the judicial press (Bertin). The poets of strife. The litterateurs of the advance guard. This habitude of military metaphors denotes minds not military, but made for discipline, that is, for conformity, minds born domesticated, Belgian minds, which can think only in society."
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New tag for Advertising and Happy Talk
Unless and until I forget, every post with that tag is also tagged under Utopia and Intentional Communities. Yeah, it's obvious.
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Nochlin, "The Invention of the Avant-garde" first published in Art News in 1968, and the opening essay in The Politics of Vision
The first paragraph.
"Art changes only through strong convictions, convictions strong enough to change society at the same time." So proclaimed Theophile Thore, quarante-buitard critic, admirer of Theodore Rousseau, Millet, and Courbet, an art historian who discovered Vermeer and one of the spokesmen for a new, more democratic art, in 1855, in exile from Louis Napoleon's imperial France. Whether or not one agrees with Thore's assertion, it is certainly typical in its equation of revolutionary art and revolutionary politics of progressive thought in the visual arts at the middle of the nineteenth century.
...The very term "avant-garde" was first used figuratively to designate radical or advanced activity in both the artistic and social realms. It was in this sense that it was first employed by the French Utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon, in the third decade of the nineteenth century, when he designated artists, scientists, and industrialists as the elite leadership of the new social order:
It is we artists who will serve you as avant-garde [Saint-Simon has his artist proclaim, in an imaginary dialogue between the latter and a scientist] ... the power of the arts is in fact most immediate and most rapid: when we wish to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or on canvas.
...What a magnificent destiny for the arts is that of exercising a positive power over society, a true priestly function, and of marching forcefully in the van of all the intellectual faculties ... !'
My copy has "NO" scrawled above the first line. "The 'convictions' are that society has changed and that the artist is honest enough to admit it."
Nochlin: "Whether or not one agrees with Thore's assertion,..." She was a smart woman and a serious historian, but aside from some scribbling on margins, I've just ignored the history before the mid 20th century. I attacked the Pompiers and defended Baudelaire, but I ignored the earnest Socialists.
The direct line from from utopianism to Madison Ave, but I bypassed Saint-Simon.
Nochlin, from "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" 1971
The difficulties imposed by such demands on the woman artist continue to add to her already difficult enterprise even today. Compare, for example, the noted contemporary, Louise Nevelson, with her combination of utter, “unfeminine” dedication to her work and her conspicuously “feminine” false eyelashes; her admission that she got married at 17 despite her certainty that she couldn’t live without creating because “the world said you should get married.” Even in the case of these two outstanding artists—and whether we like The Horsefair or not, we still must admire Rosa Bonheur’s achievement—the voice of the feminine mystique with its potpourri of ambivalent narcissism and guilt, internalized, subtly dilutes and subverts that total inner confidence, that absolute certitude and self-determination, moral and esthetic, demanded by the highest and most innovative work in art.
Conclusion
We have tried to deal with one of the perennial questions used to challenge women’s demand for true, rather than token, equality, by examining the whole erroneous intellectual substructure upon which the question “Why have there been no great women artists?” is based; by questioning the validity of the formulation of so-called “problems” in general and the “problem” of women specifically; and then, by probing some of the limitations of the discipline of art history itself. Hopefully, by stressing the institutional—i.e. the public—rather than the individual, or private, pre-conditions for achievement or the lack of it in the arts, we have provided a paradigm for the investigation of other areas in the field. By examining in some detail a single instance of deprivation or disadvantage—the unavailability of nude models to women art students—we have suggested that it was indeed institutionally made impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men, no matter what the potency of their so-called talent, or genius. The existence of a tiny band of successful, if not great, women artists throughout history does nothing to gainsay this fact, any more than does the existence of a few superstars or token achievers among the members of any minority groups. And while great achievement is rare and difficult at best, it is still rarer and more difficult if, while you work, you must at the same time wrestle with inner demons of self-doubt and guilt and outer monsters of ridicule or patronizing encouragement, neither of which have any specific connection with the quality of the art work as such.
What is important is that women face up to the reality of their history and of their present situation, without making excuses or puffing mediocrity. Disadvantage may indeed be an excuse; it is not, however, an intellectual position. Rather, using as a vantage point their situation as underdogs in the realm of grandeur, and outsiders in that of ideology, women can reveal institutional and intellectual weaknesses in general, and, at the same time that they destroy false consciousness, take part in the creation of institutions in which clear thought—and true greatness—are challenges open to anyone, man or woman, courageous enough to take the necessary risk, the leap into the unknown.
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More history
Călinescu, Five Faces Of Modernity: Modernism Avant-Garde Decadence Kitsch Postmodernism, Duke,1987. A reprint of Faces of Modernity, Indiana, 1977, with an additional essay.
The word "avant-garde" (fore-guard) has an old history in French. As a term of warfare it dates back to the Middle Ages, and it developed a figurative meaning at least as early as the Renaissance. However, the metaphor of the avant-garde -- expressing a selfconsciously advanced position in politics, literature and art, religion, etc. -- was not employed with any consistency before the nineteenth century. Among other things, this fact accounts for the indelibly modern appearance of the label "avant-garde." Poggioli's earliest example of the cultural use of the term is from a little-known pamphlet published in 1845 by Gabriel Désiré Laverdant, a follower of Charles Fourier. I was convinced, with Donald Drew Egbert, that the cultural notion of the avant-garde had been introduced at least two decades earlier, in 1825, and that the utopian philosophy of Saint-Simon had been responsible for this specific application of the term. Actually, the avant-garde metaphor was applied to poetry almost three centuries earlier, as I found out looking up the word "avant-garde" in the recent and excellent Trésor de la langue française ( Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1974, vol. 3, pp. 1056-57). During the second half of the sixteenth century, in a period that anticipates certain themes of the later Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, the French humanist lawyer and historian Etienne Pasquier (1529-1615) wrote in his Recherches de la France:
A glorious war was then being waged against ignorance, a war in which, I would say, Scève, Bèze, and Pelletier constituted the avant-garde; or, if you prefer, they were the fore-runners of the other poets. After them, Pierre de Ronsard of Vendôme and Joachim du Bellay of Anjou, both gentlemen of noblest ancestry, joined the ranks. The two of them fought valiantly, and Ronsard in the first place, so that several others entered the battle under their banners.
...Although it is encountered in the language of warfare, the modern notion of “avant-garde has a lot more to do with the language, theory, and practice of a comparatively recent kind of warfare, the revolutionary civil war. In this sense, it is safe to say that the actual career of the term avant-garde was started in the after- math of the French Revolution, when it acquired undisputed political overtones. The first periodical to bear this specific word in its title was, to be sure, a military one, but it left little doubt as to its revolutionary political stance. I am referring to L’Avant-garde de I’armee des Pyrenees orientates, a journal that appeared in 1794 and whose watchword—engraved on the blade of an emblematic sword—was: “La liberte ou la mort.” This journal was committed to the defense of Jacobin ideas and was intended to reach, beyond military circles, a broader audience of “patriots.”We can therefore take the 1790s as a starting point for the subsequent career of the concept of avant-garde in radical political thought. In hindsight, considering the analogical potentialities of the military notion, it is not difficult to explain the appeal of the metaphor for various kinds of revolutionary, and therefore future-oriented, philosophies: their representatives certainly liked the idea of being, at least intellectually, closer to Utopia than the rest of mankind, which was to follow their paths.
It is, therefore, not by chance that the romantic use of avant-garde in a literary-artistic context was directly derived from the language of revolutionary politics. This occurred in 1825, when the term avant-garde was applied to the arts in a dialogue written by one of the closest friends and disciples of Saint-Simon, namely, Olinde Rodrigues. Rodrigues's dialogue, "L'Artiste, le savant et l'industriel," was published in a volume entitled Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles, which appeared in 1825, the year of Saint-Simon's death. Although generally attributed to Saint-Simon, it is known that this unsigned volume was, in fact, the result of a collaboration, which, beside the work of the master, included those of his disciples: Léon Halévy, Rodrigues, Duvergier, and Bailly. This occurrence of avant-garde was discussed at some length by Donald Drew Egbert but, curiously, the author -- who seems only to have consulted the 1825 edition of Opinions... -- attributes the use of the term avant-garde to Saint-Simon and does not mention the name of Rodrigues, who, even if inspired by Saint-Simon's socialism, actually wrote the dialogue between the artist, the scientist, and the industrialist.
Grant McCrackenis a research affiliate with the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT who has consulted widely in the corporate world, including the Coca-Cola Company, IKEA, Ford, Kraft, Kodak, and Kimberly Clark. He is a Futures of Entertainment Fellow and a member of the IBM Social Networking Advisory Board.
He is author of the forthcoming book Culturematicfrom Harvard Business Review Press. Previously, he authored the 2009 bookChief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation, the 2008 bookTransformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture,the 2006 bookFlock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace, the 2005 bookCulture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, and Brand Management, the 1997 bookPlenitude: Culture by Commotion, the 1996 bookBig Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self, the 1990 bookCulture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, and the 1988 bookThe Long Interview. For the Convergence Culture Consortium, he wrote "Assumption Hunters: A New Corporation in the Throes of Structural Change".
Grant has been the director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School, a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, and an adjunct professor at McGill University. He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago.[i]
The central thing to understand about all of this is that once again art as craft has been separated from meaning, while the statements of academics are granted the authority of truths. But this time the false dichotomy of aestheticized politics and politicized aesthetics, central to Modernism since Benjamin –a distinction would have made Baudelairehowl– has become a unified positivist theory of capitalism.If the study of communication is akin to botany, or since this is MIT, akin to physics, it makes sense this is where Chomsky's rationalist formalism reaches its nadir, in the same place where 'theory' is now the theory of advertising as taught in business schools. An outsider might notice that MIT linguistics is akin to Chicago economics, but technocracy knows no subtexts.
This is the crude positivism that allows the crossover from Marxism to marketing. The shallowness is the same, and the pedantry, as mode or form, becomes more important than the subject matter. It's easy to say that Analytical Marxism has the same relation to Marx as the debates of scholastic theologians had to the teachings of Jesus, but both exist at the end of a tradition, and traditions can be full or empty, thick or thin, can function as part of a debate in the wider world, or decay into arguments among specialists and pedants. This is something else: a scholastic philosophy of market practice, a high theory of the practice of the low, the theology of confidence tricksterism, not as trade school in comic theater but within the scholastic tradition of the search for truth. In the logic of modern philosophy, and theory, Episteme undermines and supplants Techne and then replaces it with an enlightened Praxis. That's been bad enough. In America, following Tocqueville's description of the focus on the practical, every craft must have its own theology, so even Cornell University now offers degrees in "Hospitality Science", while not yet at least going beyond offering an MFA in creative writing. Some programs now offer PhDs.
I've linked to it recently, but my history with McCracken begins here. I should probably reuse some of the writing from 2006.
I've been coy about it if that's the best word but all the footnoted posts recently, different fonts etc., have been cut and pasted from my continuing disaster. [also here] It's spinning out of control but I'm enjoying the ride.
What we're gonna talk about today is culture, which is a kind of dark matter for the commercial world, not so much for the creative world, but it's exactly that thing, that interface between the creative community, the cultural creatives as we now talk about them. And the world of commerce and the world of business and the world of some part of marketing doesn't really get the cultural proposition... The world has just got steadily more more complicated right? It changes almost almost as you look at... Joseph Schumpeter is one of the great kind of economists here to glimpse the fact that capitalism was a creative destructive force in the world... He had no idea what the world is going to look like. He was active about 80 years ago. We could you know bring him back to life and prop him up he would be astonished by just how destructive, how creative, capitalism has become.
The same is true of Alvin Toffler right? This is the guy who talked about Future Shock, the sheer force of the world the speed of the world how difficult that is how new that is as a structural feature of our world, and I think he too would look at the speed at which we're moving now and go oh my god. Clayton Christensen of course has this has blessed us with this notion of disruption, given us this idea that disruption is built into the playbook of capitalism. So capitalism is now eating itself in some sense, right? The takeaway here for this little section is the sudden, the difficult truth that capitalism is complicated and turbulent... And the good news here is that the people in this room can help a corporation live in a world like this.
So strategy is struggle, right? Strategy was the the traditional way with which the corporations said OK what's out there? And how do we make ready for what's out there.... Peter Schwartz, this is the guy who was at Shell, and created the Global Business Network and his notion is that organizations exist in a state of perpetual surprise... You just wake up one day and you go oh my god my business model just got ripped out from under me what now? This is our own Michael Rayner. He was the co-author for the Disruption book written by Clayton Christensen. And he works here in Toronto I think at DeLoitte. But he wrote a book The Strategy Paradox in which he said strategy is dead. It doesn't work. We can't use it the way we used to. That's how difficult the world has become. And this of course is Nassim Talib, the guy who talked about black swans. And for me black swans is another language for disruptions right stuff can happen a Black swan is something out there on the horizon that you can't anticipate you can think as hard as you want about the future but you can't anticipate this black swan until it's upon you until it's sweeps into the marketplace, rips your business model out from under you.
There are other examples both more extreme than Frampton’s, and less. Paul Sharits’ T,O,U,C,H,N,G restages Duchamp’s demispheres and Anemic Cinema, as desperation. The flickering image of a man with his tongue sticking out between the blades of a pair of scissors is such an obvious image of castration that it renders anything else secondary. Add to that the voice repeating the word “destroy-destroy-destroy-destroy…” –the auditory equivalent of a flicker– and you get an art of symptom described by the artist and appreciative critics as “structuralism”.
I wish to abandon imitation and illusion and enter directly into the higher drama of: celluloid two dimensional strips; individual rectangular frames; the nature of sprockets and emulsion; projector operations; the three dimensional reflective screen surface; the retinal screen; optic nerve and individual psycho-physical subjectivities of consciousness. In this cinematic drama, light is energy rather than a tool for the representation of non-filmic objects; light as energy is released to create its own objects, shapes and textures. Given the fact of retinal inertia and the flickering shutter mechanism of film projection, one may generate virtual forms. create actual motion (rather than illustrate it), build actual color- space (rather than picture it). and be involved in actual time (immediate presence).[i]
This is the denial of representation in the presence of representation in its most blunt form. It’s not the elision and denial of Eliot or James; it’s exhibitionismand denial, more absurd than the earnest description of Mapplethorpe photographs, if only because Mapplethorpe himself didn’t write them. T,O,U,C,H,N,G, likeso much 20thcentury art –Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, like all philosophy is the theological literature of rationalism – is about the desire and refusal of contact, wanting and refusing to be touched. It didn’t shock me or offend me the first time I saw it. I saw the antecedents. I’d never go out of my way to argue that it was ‘bad’. But I was shocked to hear the film described as formal and not pathology and ritual.
…Paul went to the piano and he sat down at the piano and he had a wine glass and he was out of his mind and he beat the wine glass on the piano and then he beat his hands on the glass until he was just bleeding and numb and dizzy. He started to get up and I happened to be at his elbow and I said “Whoa, whoa, Paul, wait, whoa wait a minute,” because he was gushing blood everywhere, and I said, “Is anyone a doctor here? Is anyone a doctor?” And the place was completely packed shoulder to shoulder at this party, so one of the people near by was a doctor. Paul was just in a daze and I said, “Look at this—is this life-threatening?” And he said, “No, it’s not life-threatening, it’s O.K.,” and I said “Paul, go for it, just hold your hands up and walk around.” And Paul went around bleeding out of his hands with his hands held in front of him, almost like Frankenstein and created a swath of horror in front of him. It was a very startling moment, and there were other episodes that people will happily relate to you, in which Paul wrecks a car or climbs up on top of a roof and drops off and breaks his this or that. Paul went through a series of things where he acted out and finally what I began to notice about these things is that Paul would never hurt anybody else. He may have once or twice actually done something that was importune, but only secondarily, and it was mainly something that hurt Paul somehow, and always in a very flamboyant situation. He liked to live dangerously. Paul liked life. He seemed like he needed this kind of way of doing things. He really did.
He lived on a special plane somehow that normal people can’t touch.[ii]
Sharits behavior is less unnerving than the equally pathological response of his friend and fellow avant-gardist Tony Conrad. This is the hip, underground, American Modernist version of the American straight-world, Time-Life–CBS view of Warhol as a celebrant of style. But glamour is vanity. Warhol's Jackies and Marilyns, Disastersand Electric Chairs, his films with his Superstarswere all equally memento mori. He watched people who were out of control and let them be, as Callie Angell put it, out of a Catholic understanding of free will, while Conrad is a voyeur blind to his own desires. The American has got to destroy. It is his destiny.
“Paul, go for it, just hold your hands up and walk around.” A medical professional would call it enabling.
But Hawthorne and Lawrence, and Tarantino, Spielberg and Pynchon, novelists and filmmakers, are not ‘artists’, and Frampton and Sharits are. Their work is shown only in the context of the contemporary art world as defined by Arthur Danto, which American philosophy is optimistic.
It’s telling that Fried makes an exception for film, which he refers as “the movies”, ignoring the avant-garde entirely.
It is the overcoming of theatre that modernist sensibility finds most exalting and that it experiences as the hallmark of high art in our time. There is, however, one art that, by its very nature, escapes theatre entirely—the movies.* This helps explain why movies in general, including frankly appalling ones, are acceptable to modernist sensibility whereas all but the most successful painting, sculpture, music, and poetry is not. Because cinema escapes theatre— automatically, as it were—it provides a welcome and absorbing refuge to sensibilities at war with theatre and theatricality. At the same time, the automatic, guaranteed character of the refuge—more accurately, the fact that what is provided is a refuge from theatre and not a triumph over it, absorption not conviction—means that the cinema, even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art.
*Exactly how the movies escape theatre is a beautiful question, and there is no doubt but that a phenomenology of the cinema that concentrated on the similarities and differences between it and the theatre—eg., that in the movies the actors are mot physically present, the film itself is projected away from us, the screen is mot experienced as a kind of object existing, so to speak, in a specific physical relation to us, etc. –would be extremely rewarding. Cavell, again, has called attention, in conversation, to the sort of remembering that goes into giving an account of a movie, and more generally to the nature of the difficulties that are involved in giving such an account.[iii]
The footnote is taken from the essay as published in Artforumand later in Battcock's anthology. Reprinted in 1998, beautifulis replaced with difficult, rewarding has been stripped on its modifier, and the last sentence with the reference to Cavell and memory has been removed.[iv]
The last paragraph
This essay will be read as an attack on certain artists (and critics) and as a defense of others. And of course it is true that the desire to distinguish between what is to me the authentic art of our time and other work, which, whatever the dedication, passion, and intelligence of its creators, seems to me to share certain characteristics associated here with the concepts of literalism and theatre,' has largely motivated what I have written. In these last sentences, how ever, I want to call attention to the utter pervasiveness—the virtual universality—of the sensibility or mode of being that I have characterized as corrupted or perverted by theatre. We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace.
The final sentence almost makes me laugh… Sharits’ “immediate presence”.
In 2004 MIT press published Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s. Chronophobia: the fear of time. The author calls it a neologism, but it isn’t. It’s also at the core to the author’s own writing. Pamela M Lee, now at Yale has the title “historian and theorist of contemporary art”. She’s a historian of the present. Forgetting the Art World, came out in 2012, 48 years after Danto named it. Her most recent book is The Glen Park Library: A Fairy Tale of Disruption, “How Silicon Valley, the dark net, and digital culture have affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth.”
Art historian Pamela Lee reads this event as a fairy tale of disruption rather than an isolated episode in the history of the dark net, Silicon Valley, and the relationship between public libraries and digital culture. Lee argues that the notion of “disruptive” technology in contemporary culture has radically affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth. Against the backdrop of her account of Ulbricht and his exploits, Lee provides original readings of five women artists—Gretchen Bender, Cecile B. Evans, Josephine Pryde, Carissa Rodriguez, and Martine Syms—who weigh in, either explicitly or inadvertently, on the nature of contemporary media and technology. Written as a work of experimental art criticism, The Glen Park Library is both a homage to the Bay Area and an excoriation of the ethos of Silicon Valley. As with all fairy tales, the book's ultimate subjects are much greater, however, and Lee casts a critical eye on collisions between privacy and publicity, knowledge and information, and the past and future that are enabled by the technocratic worldview.
The foreword is written by a curator at MoMA. Again it’s the aestheticization of politics, and the aesthetic shared by philosophy and luxury commodities, but also now an almost explicit combination of (ersatz) moralism and technocratic decadence. No longer even sincere hypocrisy or earnest contradiction, it’s a blank obliviousness, the innocence of the children of the conflicted and hypocritical who’ve never had to even pretend to face real politics.
Chronophobia isn’t wrong about the 60s any more than the curators of the Duchamp exhibition were wrong to mention David Lynch. But they ignored Hitchcock, and so does Lee. There’s plenty of discussion here of “nuclear apocalypse and entertainment”; there’s an interesting chapter on Tinguely and Homage to New York, but no mention of Kubrick and Strangelove. There’s discussion of the Jonathan Edwards and Fried’s earnest academic moralism –hard to ignore since Fried begins and ends with him– but none of the deeper because visceral Puritanism in the work of Judd or Andre.
Lee ignores Hitchcock, but So does Barbara Rose. Lee has a chapter on Bridget Riley and on Op art, describing an art not of communication but effect. The connections by now should be clear.
To what extent do we see this painting? In what lies its retinal appeal? To what extent do we not so much see it but feel it, experience the picture less as an abstraction than as a woozy sense of gravity visited on the body—a body endlessly subjected to the vagaries of time? Stand a little longer, look a little harder, and then what happens? In time, the surface begins to flicker, like a stroboscope; or wave, like a lenticular screen. Look longer still, and surprising colors—psychedelic phantoms—emanate from between the lines. Spangles of gold, pink, and green burst and flash, lining the eyelids, rattling the skull. The eye is enervated while the body feels something else: nausea, perhaps, or even a blinding headache.
…Op’s virtual fetish of visuality occasions a reading of the body under the conditions of a shifting technological culture and, more to the point, how the time of that body speaks to the repressive consequences of a burgeoning technocracy. The body, I want to argue, is the blind spot to Op’s obsession with the technological; and it is its temporality that gives the lie to this. The body performs what Op’s supporters insistently failed to see. More often than not, this body is a specifically gendered body, feminized and thus deemed impotent.
Lee, following the logic of the academic culture that made her, she’s now an editor at October, both condescends to Riley and defends her: critics’ description of passivity and impotence is merely the dismissing of the female. We’re back to another version of the art of the index, an art that can be read as an art of ideas, of intention, whether admitted or not. Somehow or other, art has to have a program, a “project” and a core of optimism.
This notion is critical to the deepening suspicion, even paranoia, about Op. Nevertheless, Op was considered user-friendly stuff in spite of the aggression attributed to it, its eye-hurting glare, virtually hypnotic powers, and nausea-inducing effects. As Barbara Rose put it cynically: “Op is absolutely gratifying in this respect because you know that you have gotten the message once nausea or vertigo set in.”
The title of Rose’s review is “Beyond Vertigo: Optical Art At The Modern”. Lee makes one reference to Hitchcock elsewhere, mentioning him in his connection Saul Bass—“the graphic designer best known for his title sequences to Alfred Hitchcock”, but no mention of their most famous collaboration. I dealt with this more than 30 years ago, linking Duchamp to Hitchcock to mechanically ‘optical’ abstraction:
Vertigo is an early precedent here as it is to all later artistic use of psychedelic imagery, images of the subconscious, Op-Art patterning or illustrations of drug-induced states. Pynchon uses similar terms, central to the American romance –what it has become– and its relations with the physical world and the psychosis of modern life. These are images of the loss of the self, unable to define its surroundings, to distinguish itself from them, and thus being relegated to passive observation.
My language is stilted but it makes the point. The illustration –graphic stimulus– of immediate sensorial effect is experience without effort, passive. Much of the art of the 1960s describes that experience, because much of popular visual culture manifests it. Lee quotes a newspaper editorial responding to the show.
And what is the point of this, someone will ask? Well the point is this, that art is the expression of the age. The pressures and upheavals of our time have the same effect on our observers: Now you see it, now you don’t. Now the facts are clear, now the facts are muddled grey. The distortion of old values, and the crowding of new cultures, presents a peculiar aspect to the eye. It is painful.
Who is to tell what are the facts in Viet Nam, for instance? The government of one day is not the government of the next; the actions of our own officials there are deliberately distorted, and friend slips into foe and back again. The alliances with Europe are not what they seem, and the image of the Communist world clashes with reality. . . . It is all painful.
Lee adds, “One might forgive the authorless editorial its tired clichés about art (‘art is the expression of the age’)" .
And what else is it?
And what else is she? Lee is roughly my age. After undergraduate years at Yale she went to The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, at the time a hotbed of artistic and political radicalism, where academic theory met luxury commodities. We have mutual acquaintances if not friends: people who are now curators at major US Museums and the people who told me I couldn’t be a leftist because I worked with my hands, who condescended to me even as I built their projects, since they designed their art and were proudly manually incompetent. They dealt as she does with ideas and concepts, the idea of art and the of idea of politics, neither of which are synonyms for the things themselves; the aestheticization of politics is the politics of design. Immateriality is clean by definition. The curatorial and critical studies program at the ISP has been rebranded. and students are now “Helena Rubinstein Fellows”, fitting culture of vanguardism and culture of “disruption”of Madison avenue.
The weakness of Chronophobia becomes clear once you realize she needs to take “Art and Objecthood” seriously as anything more than a relic, her belief that it must be more than a product of its age, because it was written by an academic, about fine art.
This book takes the oblique view of technology and art in the 1960s and it does so with a concept introduced at the outset: the matter of time. Time and technology, I want to argue, are twinned phenomena in that decade; and works of art provide special insight into this relationship as much as they model that relationship in turn. Time, we shall see, plays no small role in the richly diverse practices that constitute sixties art making. From performance to painting to sculpture to “new media,” time becomes both a thematic and structural fixture, an obsession, for critics, artists, and audiences of that moment. It will come to signal something about technological change.
The “richly diverse practices that constitute sixties art making” includes The Rolling Stones, Pierrot le Fou, The Armies of the Night, The Flintstones, Albert Ayler, and Woodstock. That list is a joke because any list would be. Lee refers to Slaughterhouse Five and an article by Pynchon from 1984 but as with her discussion of CP Snow’s Two Cultures, she focuses on things that are now seen by most people as relics. And Snow is a relic too
Snow’s position was critical in articulating the historical confluence of arts and sciences from the sixties forward: the lecture anticipated, in numerous ways, what would later be described as the phenomenon of interdisciplinarity within academia.
This is the academia of “modernist projects”, of Weber and von Neumann, of post war rationalism and the capitalism of the golden age, the technophilia of Daston and Galison, and MIT, the home now of “The Futures of Entertainment”
The Futures of Entertainment is an annual event which explores the current state and future of media properties, brands, and audiences and the way these groups interact and intersect with one another. By combining a mix of leading media studies scholars and cutting-edge media and marketing practitioners from a diverse range of locations and sectors--in conjunction with fans, activists, journalists, analysts, and other voices--in lengthy discussion, this two-day conference explores how the media industries are evolving, how storytelling is changing and the shifting dynamics in how people relate to media properties and brands.
The tagline for these events is that they are “at the intersection of industry and academia”.
The positivist definition of art is illustration. If fine art has devolved into design, it still performs the function of art: the following of sensibility, responding to experiences, perceptions. But to ad men, like philosophers, art is successful communication as seen in metrics, and is designed as computer games are in the service of “fun”. The MIT communication department model of creativity follows the enthusiasm of the designers of Assassin’s Creed, and Gears of War, blind not even to subtext but to direct meaning, a blindness matching the enthusiasts of the “formalism” of the films of Paul Sharits. For all the discussion of the delivery of content, the content itself is seen as meaningless. This is the world of ideas, the academia that claims to provide a foundation for capitalism and anti-capitalism, revolution, Wall St. and Madison Avenue. But for all the empty pretension of the technocratic intellectual elite, most of life, one way or another, is craft.
I remember once, long ago, I used to not do commercials and said I didn’t believe in them. And then they said, “Ken Loach has done quite a few of them.” So I phoned up Ken and he said, “If you don’t take money out of those capitalist pockets, then someone else will, and you’ve got mouths to feed. Do it!”[v]
Mike Leigh, just like the biggest Hollywood directors, production designers and cinematographers, makes commercials. The money flows like water. You can have a lot of fun spending three million dollars for a 30 second spot.But as with cathedral ceilings, it’s not the dogma that matters, but what you do with it.As I tried to explain to one of the leaders of the MIT symposia, an anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago, the interesting thing about ads now is that they’ve become almost independent of their function: a good spot can by no more than a 30 second movie with a name at the end; the actual “ad” is 2 seconds, now associated with the 28 second comedy that preceded it. Or it’s tiny film with "product placement". The definition of art hasn’t changed, because people haven’t changed. And the men and women, the craftspeople, some with hand tools and paint who get their hands dirty, and some with electronics, who together make the ads that the intellectuals of Madison avenue dream up, laugh. And if the ads are remembered they’ll be remembered as cathedral ceilings are, by people who have no interest in Jesus Christ or Alka Seltzer.Beyond that of course, all comparisons fall apart. Ads are art, but they’re disposable, what jingles are to pop songs. But to the academics who study and serve Madison Avenue, corporate communication is art in the service of a cause. Instead of Church censors’ stamp of approval, or Diderot’s defense of Greuze’ moralism, or the bromides ofsocialist realism, or theart of the “Modern Project”, we get a new brand of philosophic art, the vanguardism of the marketplace.
[i] Paul Sharits, "Notes on Films/1966-1968”, Film Culture 47(Summer 1969) p.13.
[ii] Tony Conrad, “On Paul Sharits: An Excerpt from ‘I Was a Flawed Modernist’”, The Brooklyn Rail, April 1 2017,
[iv] Jonathan T. D. Neil, “’Structural Film,’ as Technique of History”, 2004 unpublished http://jonathantdneil.com/pdfs/StructuralFilmAsTechniqueOfHistory.pdf
