Announcing representation of Garrett Bradley

Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce exclusive worldwide representation of American artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley. Bradley works across narrative, documentary and experimental modes of filmmaking to address themes such as race, class, familial relationships, social justice and cultural histories in the United States. Adopting archival material alongside newly shot footage, Bradley’s films exist simultaneously in the past, present and future, not only disrupting our perception of time, but also breaking down our preconceived ideas about objectivity, perspective and truth-telling. These narratives unfold naturally in both feature-length and short form, rather than being forced into a singular definition or perspective, and consequently reveal the characters’ multifaceted individual and collective stories.

Kings of Leon Will Be the First Band to Release an Album as an NFT

The band’s revolutionary tokens will unlock special perks like limited-edition vinyl and front row seats to future concerts

The band is actually dropping three types of tokens as part of a series called “NFT Yourself,” people involved in the project tells Rolling Stone. One type is a special album package, while a second type offers live show perks like front-row seats for life, and a third type is just for exclusive audiovisual art. All three types of tokens offer art designed by the band’s longtime creative partner Night After Night; the smart contracts and intelligence within the tokens were developed by YellowHeart, a company that wants to use blockchain technology to bring value back to music and better direct-to-fan relationships.

How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6 million

The video by digital artist Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, was authenticated by blockchain, which serves as a digital signature to certify who owns it and that it is the original work.

It’s a new type of digital asset - known as a non-fungible token (NFT) - that has exploded in popularity during the pandemic as enthusiasts and investors scramble to spend enormous sums of money on items that only exist online.

Blockchain technology allows the items to be publicly authenticated as one-of-a-kind, unlike traditional online objects which can be endlessly reproduced.

“You can go in the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa and you can have it there, but it doesn’t have any value because it doesn’t have the provenance or the history of the work,” said Rodriguez-Fraile, who said he first bought Beeple’s piece because of his knowledge of the U.S.-based artist’s work.

Rodriguez-Fraile is as bad as Felix Salmon. (two links) 

Pop music is a commodity: it's the music of commodity culture. "Punk was the revenge of pop music against the pretensions of theatrical art rock. It was made as a commodity that stated itself as such: a spike and glitter covered hand grenade, a 3 minute hate, the recorded sound of angry teenagers pressed on vinyl disks and sold back to them."

Video Art/Gallery Film: Fine art vs film; it still applies. The gallery shows are adjuncts to the "art". And museums are becoming theaters. 

If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse?  Scroll down to May 16th

1934: "Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only “art”—not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well—but also, besides architecture, cartooning and “commercial design,” the only visual art entirely alive." etc.

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Beeple, at Christie's 

All of this of course is going here (and here) at some point.
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And updated again. also new tag for Gombrich
Updating from earlier in the year. More on performance.

Michael Fried was right to say that the focus on objects qua objects, as things which displace air or water, which change in our perceptions as we move around them brings us to the point of theater. 

…I want to make a claim that I cannot hope to prove or substantiate but that I believe nevertheless to be true: viz., that theatre and theatricality are at war today, not simply with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture), but with art as such - and to the extent that the different arts can be described as modernist, with modernist sensibility as such. This claim can be broken down into three propositions or theses: 

1. The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre…. …
2. Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre. …

3. The concepts of quality and value-and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself-are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theatre. 

The first paragraph of Mendelson’s review 

Christopher Butler’s survey of post-war literature, music and painting maintains a judicious critical distance from its subject. Readers who wish a more direct report from the front lines of the avant-garde should consult a new anthology, Collective Consciousness: Art Performances in the Seventies, edited by Jean Dupuy. This documents the work of almost two hundred avant-gardists from Europe and America who displayed their most advanced work at a gallery in New York and wrote explanatory statements for inclusion in the book. Despite the large number of participants, the level of inspiration and accomplishment is remarkably uniform. One artist, no better and no worse than the rest, supplied a colour film of a naked man scrabbling about in a forest. Another showed a videotape of himself bowing solemnly to the camera. A third tacked up a scrap of paper that read, ‘Look in the mirror as I fuck you up the ass, the pain on your face is my freedom, your tears are the drops of my manhood,’ and waited for angry women to tear it down. The established justification for this sort of thing is the thought it supposedly provokes in the audience. But the most thought-provoking sentence in the book was not written by any of the participating artists. It is the matter-of-fact statement printed in large type on the copyright page: ‘Publication of this book was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC, a federal agency.’ 

Mendelson’s essay was published in 1981. The “NEA Four” case like the Mapplethorpe trial was in 1990. The Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen was banned by the BBC in 1977. If it were considered art not entertainment, people would have been debating why it was denied government funding, not after the fact as with Mapplethorpe, but for help making the album.

But “performance art” was more than shock.  Remember Panofsky’s description of the Florentine intermedio, “where the conclusion of Plato’s Republic appeared on the stage”. Performance art in the 16th century and the 20^th developed for the same reasons: the need to reconcile idealism, eternal, deathless, with growing worldliness, economic and intellectual, and engagement with life as experienced, in time. It was a way for artists raised on idealism to come to terms with relativism, using what they knew to practice a formalist including intellectually formalist scholasticism in abstract forms of narrative. Fried was right to say that it was “the negation of art“, as he defined it. Theater is the death of art only for those who associate art with philosophy, and “truth”. Avant-garde performance was a conflicted hybrid, an abstract theater against theater, against fiction, against storytelling. And the names in Dupuy’s volume include groups and people active in New York theater until today, Mabou Mines, founded by Joanne Akalaitis, and David Warrilow, later known for work with Beckett, dancers and choreographers associated with the Judson Dance Theater, as well as Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta Clark, and Richard Serra. It’s the scene where Kathryn Bigelow, director of  The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, got her start. And she’s in the book. Acconci’s early performance work, and plenty of works that follow it, partake –I won’t say indulge– in a sort of monastic physical theater, in Acconci’s case implicitly if not explicitly Catholic.  It’s easy to see him as the eccentric monk, Fra Vito, living in a hut in Brooklyn under the Manhattan bridge, with his books and his ideas, supported by the generosity of lords. And that’s in fact pretty much how he lived.  He used to tell a story of coming back from Europe and trudging up the stairs to his loft, and realizing something felt wrong.  He left his bags at the door and took the subway to Manhattan and went to the Strand. He came back with bags full of books and then he unlocked the door to his home. He didn’t come off as pretentious; it was told as a true story with a sincere irony. And in the last decade of his life his was supported by a gallerist and patron who married well, the son in law of the financier and fugitive Marc Rich. 

In Belgrade in 1974 Marina Abramovic put on a performance that consisted of six hours of her own complete physical passivity. She’d put 72 items on a table, including a feather boa and a pair of scissors, olive oil, a bullet and a gun. At some point the gallerist had to wrestle the loaded gun away from someone and throw him out of the gallery, By the end she was mostly naked, and bleeding, and when she became herself again, after the six hours were up, everybody still there “ran away” she says, unable to face the return of a person out of what had been a body.[i]  Was the performance ‘art’?  Of course. When Abramovic and her partner Ulay stood naked facing each other on opposite sides of a narrow doorway forcing people passing through to turn sideways, it was comic art, watching people choose which one of them to face. But in the context of ‘art’ as opposed to theater, this becomes an ascetic art, a mortification of the flesh, ironically though it’s not referred to, often in the context of luxury boutiques. Chris Burden was shot, crucified, nailed to the roof of a car; he crawled through broken glass in his underwear with his hands tide behind his back.  He lay on a triangular platform near the ceiling in the corner of a gallery for the 22 days, the duration of the show, not coming down, not eating. He did to himself in fact what Mel Gibson has done, as far as we know, only in fiction. It’s got nothing to do with what now is called liberalism, and that’s the point. It’s not moralizing, and its not simply narcissism because it takes too much effort, to make and to watch. 

As I’ve said, for art, meaning ‘fine art’ the environment was as always aristocratic, anti-bourgeois, the leftist aspects tagged on. But again as happened before, the aristocratic art of intellectuals and free-thinkers is transformed into the art of academics, scholastics and pedants. And this is where Mendelson, and Tom Wolfe, and critics of “post-modern” tenured radicalism in their various ways touch on a point. Few people noticed that the creator of the project from which the recent satirical film The Square gets its name is referred to as an “artist and sociologist”. The Square won the Palme d’Or, showing just how much the art world has expanded that people get the jokes. The joke, cheap or not, is on academia as well.

The ‘performance theater of truth’ is the end of the line for Modernism, and it was inevitable. Fried was wrong only to argue against it. Performance art was a focus on performer as body, as person, as individual. The performances were basic, sometimes violent, polymorphous, infantile, sometimes explicitly even dogmatically prosaic, this last connected with Yvonne Rainer and the Judson Dance Theater, art made out of the discovery of time: time measured as a person or thing moving from point A to point B. It was in a sense children’s time, experience in the present, experience as phenomenology, not yet the fully narrative form that moves from beginning to end, with the knowledge that ‘end’ for us is death. This in Rainer’s pronouncements is near to the pseudoscientific art of events. Puritan simplicity in dance later became Puritan moralism. Rainer joined the faculty of the Whitney ISP in the early 70s at the same time she began moving away from choreography. Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” became in Rainer’s words a “loadstone”.[ii] The greatest compliment you can give a Gordian knot is to pull it tighter, and Film About A Woman Who… from 1974, is a testament to stifled rage. But if you look at the film of Rainer dancing her most famous piece, the solo Trio A, from 1966,  filmed in 1978 you see a series of plain gestures performed, compellingly, by a woman who in spite of her own ideology is still a dancer, a craftsperson, a master of a form.  We’re back to the separation of art and intent –Trio A, is a beautiful description of simplicity but it is the opposite of artless– and we’re back again with an argumentfor an impersonal, technocratic, anti-humanist formalism, that can only be understood and sensed as through rich description as human desire. And this is also where Duchamp returns to the scene: Duchamp the phobic celebrant of the 19^th century literary forms, narrative and anti-narrative; Duchamp, and Warhol, not Puritan but Catholic moral conservatives.  

Gombrich, from Art and Illusion

For the Egyptian, the newly  discovered eternity of art may well have held out a promise that its power to arrest and to preserve in lucid images might be used to conquer this evanescence. Perhaps it was not only as the maker of “substitute heads” and other dwellings for the “ka” that the Egyptian sculptor could lay claim to the famous appellation of “one who keeps alive.” His images weave a spell to enforce eternity. Not our idea of eternity, to be sure, which stretches backward and forward in an infinite extension, but rather the ancient conception of recurrent time that a later tradition embodied in the famous “hieroglyph” of the serpent biting its own tail. Clearly an “impressionist” art could never have served this outlook. Only the complete embodiment of the typical in its most lasting and changeless form could assure the magic Validity of these pictographs for the “watcher” who could here see both his past and his eternal future removed from the flux of time.

There could be no more poignant contrast to this confidence in the spells of art than a passage from Plato's older contemporary Euripides that also deals with tomb sculpture. When Alcestis is going to die, her grieving husband Admetus speaks of the work he will commission for his solace:

And represented by the skillful hands
Of craftsmen, on the bed thy body shall
Be laid; whereon I shall fall in embrace
And clasp my hands around it, call thy name,
And fancy in my arms my darling wife
To hold, holding her not; perhaps, I grant,
Illusory delight, yet my soul's burden
Thus shall I lighten...

What Admetus seeks is not a spell, not even assurance, only a dream for those who are awake; in other words, precisely that state of mind to which Plato, the stern seeker after truth, objected.

Plato, we know, looked back with nostalgia at the immobile schemata of Egyptian art.[iii]

Gombrich published Art and Illusion in 1960, when no one in the “artworld” to use the phrase coined by Arthur Danto in 1964, was about to put on a play by Euripides.  Gombrich opposed ‘historicism’, but Panofsky was right, and Billy Wilder was right, and I'm sure both got the irony of Alcestis to which Gombrich seems to have been oblivious. Alcestis after all is dying to serve her husband’s vanity. 

I talked above about the Renaissance, Raphael and Michelangelo and physical form “simultaneously static and full of motion,” a complexity unmatched since Athens.  I described a Stendhal moment, as a moment of neurological overload, when an artwork “pulls you into a world of illusion… while showing its hand as fakery.” The Parthenon marbles are simultaneously both dynamic/naturalistic and hieratic, describing this world as it exists and as idealized; they can appear for a moment at least as something out of a deathless world. The seduction worked by craft makes you want to imagine a utopia, the land of eternal life, and then just as quickly shuts the door, because the craft, in the same moment shows itself as unmistakably a trick.  The stone is always stone; our minds are primed to do the work to create the waking dream. Drugs render the mind passive. Art makes the active mind render itself  drunk, and then snaps it back out of the dream. The greatest art does this with a sense of generosity, where the audience is reminded to laugh or smile at themselves.  The story of Alcestis as told by Euripides leaves us with the same question as Plato’s Euthyphro–“is all that is just pious?”– without ever asking the question itself.  The play builds irony on irony, and the only resolution, the formal resolution required of a plot, resolves nothing.  No character in the play is above mockery –even Alcestis–  except Death. Unlike Plato, there’s not a trace of pedantry. Euripides in the end is only a craftsman not a would-be king. But again the irony is beyond Gombrich, whose  positivism defined assumptionas the unsupportable opinions of others, and for whom everything I’ve written here, which he would call historicism would be anathema. 

But his description of the relation of Athenian to Egyptian art is apt. Gombrich’s discussion begins with Riegl, haptic and optic.

...Riegl’s main argument is that ancient art was always concerned with the rendering of individual objects rather than with the infinite world as such. Egyptian art shows this attitude in its extreme form, for here vision is only allowed a very subsidiary part; things are rendered as they appear to the sense of touch, the more “objective" sense which reports on the permanent shape of things irrespective of the shifting viewpoint. Here, too is the reason why Egyptians shunned the rendering of the third dimension, because recession and foreshortening would have introduced a subjective element. An advance toward the third dimension, which grants the eye its share in the perception of modeling, was made in Greece.

The subjective element: multiple viewpoints, perspectivism, objects and figures no longer as ideas or ‘truths’ but as things to be experienced. Experience by definition is incomplete.  Panofsky quotes Cassirer 

Perception does not know the concept of infinity; from the very outset it is confined within certain spatial limits imposed by our faculty of perception. And in connection with perceptual space we can no more speak of homogeneity than of infinity. The ultimate basis of the homogeneity of geometric space is that all its elements, the "points" which are joined in it, are mere determinations of position, possessing no independent content of their own outside of this relation, this position which they occupy in relation to each other. Their reality is exhausted in their reciprocal relation: it is a purely functional and not a substantial reality. Because fundamentally these points are devoid of all content, because they have become mere expressions of ideal relations, they can raise no question of a diversity in content. Their homogeneity signifies nothing other than this similarity of structure, grounded in their common logical function, their common ideal purpose and meaning. Hence homogeneous space is never given space, but space produced by construction; and indeed the geometrical concept of homogeneity can be expressed by the postulate that from every point in space it must be possible to draw similar figures in all directions and magnitudes.1 Nowhere in the space of immediate perception can this postulate be fulfilled. Here there is no strict homogeneity of position and direction; each place has its own mode and its own value. Visual space and tactile space are both anisotropic and unhomogeneous in contrast to the metric space of Euclidean geometry: "the main directions of organization -before-behind, above-below, right-left- are dissimilar in both physiological spaces." [Ernst Mach]

We’re returned to the fact of subjectivity. And we’re back to Broch. “It is an almost mystical process, the setting of ethical values: Arising from the irrational, transforming the irrational to the rational, yet nonetheless it is the irrational that radiates from within the resulting form.” The love of math is not a mathematical function; it’s a function of  the human. But we’re also back to talking about people celebrating an authoritarianism they’re not a part of, imagining complex realities as ideas.  Plato’s romance with Egypt tells us more about Plato than Egypt. 

And we’re talking also about official art. We have no idea about the doggerel of ancient Egypt, the trash talk and street comedy. But even the work we have is more varied than Plato, and Gombrich, make it to be. See the naturalism in this portrait of an official from 2500 BCE. Nonetheless, a thousand years forward, the art of Athens –in word and material– matches the complexity of both official and civic culture, recording both life lived and the desire for more. Humanist art and culture, and as always I’m using the original sense of  the word, are marked by self-awareness, a lie that calls itself a lie, a high art that includes the low, that both celebrates and mocks authority and art itself, the irony that Gombrich recognizes in Euripides’, “a dream for those who are awake” but also the irony he misses. 

By this logic there is a sense of progress in the arts, as there is in politics, if we take ironic self-awareness to be a value; not that is or could ever be a cure –the fantasy that that reason triumphs over unreason– but awareness of the ongoing game we play with ourselves and others, between desire and delusion, and the need (also a desire) for disinterested observation. But art is formal; it’s the game played using Eliot’s “objective correlatives’, tricks and tools to make us feel an emotion or a sense where we otherwise would not. Beyond that the greatest art is always the product of a time that mixes change and continuity, when formal systems and the social world they’re made to represent are briefly in sync, and before the forms become rote or stale from repetition. The greatest art is born of tension but not panic. The Renaissance was both the beginning of the end of monarchy and the beginning of the rise of the middle class, and the period of the height of two opposed forms: fresco and easel painting. Gombrich from his essay "Evolution in the Arts", on Titian’s Averoldi Polyptych

From the very year of this momentous competition in Rome, [between Raphael and Sebastino del Piombo, a protégé of Michelangelo], …which was muted by Raphael's death in 1520, another incident can be documented which illustrates even more sharply the emergence of the new function of the altar painting as a work of art in its own right. It involved the greatest of the Venetian masters, Titian, and one of his principal patrons, Duke Alfonso d‘Este of Ferrara. Titian had been commissioned to paint an altar painting for the High Altar of the Church of St Nazaro and St Celso in the North Italian city of Brescia. it is still in that church. Titian painted in the centre the risen Christ, and on the wings above, in half-length figures, the Annunciation, with the Angel on one side and the Virgin on the other. Below he painted the donor, the papal Legate Bishop Altobello Averoldo who is seen kneeling in prayer under the protection of the two saints to whom the Church is dedicated. One is St Celso, the soldier saint who points to the hope of salvation embodied in the risen Christ. On the wing opposite we see St Sebastian, a saint whose intercession was thought to be particularly powerful against the omnipresent perils of the plague.

Some nine years earlier Titian had also included St Sebastian in an altar painting specifically dedicated as a prayer against the plague. It shows St Mark, the patron saint of Venice, flanked by the two medical saints, Cosmas and Damian, holding  medicine boxes, St Roch who points to the wound which is his emblem, and St. Sebastian having suffered martyrdom tied to a tree as a target for the arrows of his torturers. It goes without saying that here the arrows sticking in the body of the young man is indeed an attribute, a pictographic sign as in Giotto’s picture of Stephen. Nor need I enlarge on the contrast between the way the martyrdom is visualized in the Brescia altar-piece.  The Change from symbolic rendering to dramatic evocation was not lost on the Venetians. In fact the master’s new version and new vision of the event caused an equally dramatic reaction. My final story starts with a letter of December 1520 from Venice to Ferrara addressed to Duke Alfonso by the duke’s agent, one Tebaldi.

 The agent had been to Titian’s studio where he had seen the St Sebastian on an easel. He tells his master that all visitors praised it as the best thing Titian had ever done. And to give the duke an idea, he appended a description which is worth quoting in full, for we don’t have many such opportunities of hearing what a sixteenth-century layman thought of a particular work of art:

The aforementioned figure is attached to a column with one arm up and the other down and the whole body twists, in such a way that one can see the whole scene before one‘s eye, for his is shown to suffer in all parts of his person from an arrow which has lodged in the middle of the body. I have no judgement in these matters because I am not a connoisseur of art, but looking at all the features and muscles of the figure It seems to me that it resembles most closely to a real body created by Nature, which only lacks the life.

Nor did Tebaldi hide from us or the duke what conclusions he drew from this display of mastery. He reports that he waited till the crowd had left and then told the painter to send this painting not to Brescia but to the duke, because, as he candidly and significantly put it, ‘that painting was thrown away if he gave it to the priest and to Brescia’. The original function, the purpose for which it was demanded and painted, to stand on an altar, was irrelevant in the eyes of the duke’s agent. The days of the collector had arrived. It was simply too good for a liturgical role and should be treasured simply as a work of art. 

The agent reinforced his plea with a strong economic argument. Titian had been promised 200 ducats for the whole altar, but the duke would pay 60 for the Sebastian alone.

Titian replied that to yield to this request would be an act of robbery, though there are indications that he was not altogether disinclined to commit this act. In the end it was the duke who got cold feet, for he found it diplomatically inadvisable to offend a powerful bishop and legate of the Pope. The painting was left to serve its original function.[iv]

Gombrich continues, saying less of interest, since he refers to art only as art,  and to a new narrative form without asking why this should occur or the differences in how they describe the world. And though Tibaldi’s request is a statement of change, the change itself is evident much earlier, in works where the religious imagery seems like secondary addition to experiments in perspective. The difference is less a transformation into what Gombrich calls “Art with a capital A” than a change from rationalist geometrical formalism, following the scholastics, to empiricism and phenomenology, the world not as idea but experience.   And Titian’s narrative is the far from the Florentine model of the Renaissance: it’s proto-Baroque. Nothing in Titian is like stone come to life; the effect is not like Raphael of a moment of balance between material and dream, but the documenting of substance, in substance –of flesh, in paint– and of the eye’s perception.  When Panofsky writes that Titian, “like Henry James’ Linda Pallant, ‘knew the value of intervals’”[v] he’s describing Titian’s focus on the space between objects and people, and implicitly between viewer and canvas.  The connecting line isn’t a formal cue, an arrow or the edge of a table or the stripes on a piece of fabric; space is crossed often only by a line of sight. As in the theater, actors’ success or failure isn’t measured in inches or millimeters to match the perfect ratio of  the sides of a triangle, but in faces and gestures directed at each other. And Titian makes sure the space isn’t so cluttered that things get in the way. The sense of time as the our eyes move observing others’ eyes, the fleeting sense of intimacy is beyond anything in Florence.  It’s an an art that doesn’t even try to give us an illusion of perfection, except perhaps as a ‘perfect’ description of its lack.

I’ll return to Titian later, and to Mannerism and the Baroque, in detail,  but my point now at the end of this digression is to make clear the distinction between pre-Humanist art, Egypt, pre-Columbian or European, and the anti-Humanism in the work of those who look back to it. On the left: a section of a relief, Egyptian (400-200 BC). Below: The exterior of a Late Mayan (670-750 AD) chocolate-drinking cup known as The Princeton Vase.  The stylized impersonality of these works is not Mannerist. It does not efface the personal; it’s not concerned with it, and that’s something else entirely. They’re examples of a purely public art, made nonetheless by individual craftsmen. This is why if enough works are available we name their anonymous makers: Greek vase painters- The Persephone Painter, Acheloos Painter, Amasis Painter; 1300 years later- The Master of Rimini, Master of the Magdalen, Master of the Codex of Saint George. Until recently artists from 13th to 15th century Europe were known collectively as “The Primitives”. Modern individualism produces fantasies of public form. Nietzsche’s superman is as skewed an idea as any fantasy of the noble savage. The same holds for the universalism of Pollock and Coltrane. Plato’s snobbery of course could not exist except as the product of a republican culture it’s rebelling against. “Primitives and “barbarians” are not “reactionary”, a word describing the rebellion of individualism against itself. Their cultures follow a normative not reactive ethos.  Egyptian art isn’t decadent; the designs aren’t over-determined, both words used to describe indulgence opposing or aping a strict order.  I inserted Gombrich’s description above because it fits so well with one of the most important artists of the transitional, formalist, anti-narrative, anti-humanist, hieratic art of the late 60s and early 70s.  I’d intended to segue from his comments to what appears below, but I realized I needed to make clear again the distinction between the rigorous formality of past cultures, as collectives, and the hypertrophied individualism of the modern era.

Robert Wilson is the creator of the greatest of the intermedios of the late 20^th century. His theater is called a "theater of images", and it's part of a history of abstract non-representational art made in the context of representational: the formalism of Eliot going back through James, through the decadence of Huysmans and the aestheticism of Pater. As I’ve said, this isn’t modernism of an abstract ideal, but of repressed or elided desire and memory. 

The best writer on Wilson was Jill Johnston. The title of the article is Family Spectacles. 

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[i]Emma Brockes, “Performance Artist Marina Abramović: I was Ready to Die”, The Guardian,  May 12 2014 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/12/marina-abramovic-ready-to-die-serpentine-gallery-512-hours   https://vimeo.com/71952791

[ii]Robert Storr, “Narcissism and Pleasure: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer” The Paris Review, Nov 17 2017 https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/17/narcissism-pleasure-interview-yvonne-rainer/

[iii]E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, Princeton University Press, 1960 (1989)  p. 125

[iv]  Gombrich, “Evolution in the Arts: The Altar Painting, its Ancestry and Progeny”, in Evolution and Its Influence: The Herbert Spencer Lectures 1986 , ed. Alan Grafen, Oxford, 1989

[v]Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic. NYU 1969. P. 171

Leiter: A Dance Dialog between L.A. Paul and Marcel Proust

L.A. Paul, again.
The "discovery" of experience, again.
Drift.

Derrida was a fop but he was right: trying to come to terms with of an ideal of description without prescription.  He read Proust. And now academic philosophers are reading descriptive literature, and not sci-fi. etc. etc.

Memphis Jookin
I posted a video in 2010. It's interesting to see changes over time

Lil Buck’s very few numbers on Saturday ended with his most celebrated number, “The Dying Swan.” It’s said that Anna Pavlova, the most legendary exponent of the ballet version of this solo, never did it the same way twice; I’d guess from the few times I’ve seen Lil Buck that the same may well be true of him. He always ends, on the floor, wrapping his bent legs like hooks around his shoulders, but this time he gazed out at the audience while so doing, perhaps as if aware that this feat was part of his own legend and that he was trapped by it. Earlier, he reared up hugely and opened his body out to the air with a more amazingly throwaway speed than I have seen from him before; he spun around the stage on his knees; and inevitably his feet took him across the stage in gliding variants on the moonwalk.

If there was one feat on Saturday I hope I never forget, however, it occurred in an earlier solo, in which, with his torso angled toward the audience, he moved his shoulders in seeming orbit around his head as if they were a loose loop, an amoeba anchored only by his neck. I noticed too that he is achieving a new mastery of slow motion; he delivered some phrases as if showing us frame-by-frame breakdowns of running or gesturing.

These and other features were physically astounding. But, though there’s no doubt he shows the mind and musicality of an artist, his movement on Saturday never felt like sustained poetry; and his “Swan” has become — perhaps has always been — a collage of wow effects. Although Lil Buck comes from the world of jookin, I’ve seen, in Memphis, other jookin performers less physically accomplished but more entrancing in rhythmic continuity and witty invention. Most of his music, a collaboration with the violinist Yoon Kwon, was poorly chosen. Before his “Swan,” Ms. Kwon gave us a chunk from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” over a taped rock version of the familiar orchestration; and too much of the event felt like a synthetic assortment of clichés, lollipops and razzle-dazzle.

The famous/forgotten SNL video doesn't stay up very long. This is another one.
Toni Basil and The Lockers.


Basil's pretension got in the way. Break dancing was always loaded with irony and humor. At it's best, like the best hip-hop, it wasn't "pop". Camp humor is the self-depracating humor of insecurity, as opposed to the playful arrogance, and generosity, of confidence.

"I’ve seen, in Memphis, other jookin performers less physically accomplished but more entrancing in rhythmic continuity and witty invention." Macaulay doesn't slum. He's not a snob.

Brilliant pop stars are in a situation always verging on tragedy. Fame and genius become mixed. And there's the genius of Barnum and the genius of performance. Barnum was a stage manager not the lion jumping through hoops; Prince became both. And unlike most pop stars he was a brilliant musician. 

Bowie's performance as persona was more interesting than what became Prince's pop theatrics, but Bowie was more actor than musician. Dirty Mind came out as Bowie was fading into celebrity, but Dirty Mind wasn't pop. And when Prince became pop, it was with all the seriousness that Bowie gave up on. 

See also Marie Lloyd and Thérésa.

rewriting, page by page.
continued from here

We did final work on this number into the wee small hours of a Saturday night, and more than forty-eight takes were recorded. Everything that could have gone wrong did during the shooting of this number: an arc light went out; there was a noise in the camera; one of us missed a step in the dance, where Fred was supposed to catch me in the final spins; and once, right at the end of a perfect take, his toupee flipped off! I kept on dancing even though my feet really hurt. During a break, I went to the sidelines and took my shoes off; they were filled with blood. I had danced my feet raw. Hermes saw what had happened and offered to stop the shooting. I refused. I wanted to get the thing done. Finally, we got a good take in the can, and George said we could go home - at 4:00 a.m.

Ginger Rodgers’ feet covered in blood, and Matisse’s mud and flies

That is what normal people never understand. They want to enjoy the artist’s products – as one might enjoy the milk of a cow – but they can’t put up with the inconvenience, the mud and the flies.

Astaire and Matisse both struggled to make to make things look easy, but if you don’t see the struggle you miss the point. There’s no confusion of art and life, no delusions of utopia; the art, visibly as artifice, brings out in us a heightened desire for the impossible without denying its impossibility. Picasso did something else, but not for very long. He represents in 20th century painting something similar to what Michelangelo represents in the 16th, but in no way equal in importance. He manifests a contradiction in form, and manages to stabilize it and somehow to present it as a unity. It’s an illusion but a compelling one. Michelangelo is the equal of Shakespeare in the creation of a similar but far more powerful illusion: he’s the first to record, to describe and present, the modern imagination, the confusions of Hamlet.

The drawing by Raphael is an object lesson, literally, in the principles and poetics of the High Renaissance: simultaneously static and full of motion, a perfect but lightly held balance of action and reflection, observation, representation, and free craft; rigor seemingly without tension, or tension seemingly without its affect. The figures fly off the page, yet they're anchored as solidly in place as they would be seated and face forward in a Byzantine mosaic. Michelangelo did something even more compressed, since he put the tension seen among the figures on a page within single figures and single blocks of stone. The torqued muscles in a torso of a Michelangelo sculpture manifest a tension, equal parts unity and schism, unmatched in western art. And in writing that I’m not saying anything new or even debated. I first made the comments about the Raphael while standing in front of it at the Metropolitan Museum, to an old acquaintance and a man he’d introduced me to, a well-dressed Swiss. My friend smiled. His companion shrugged and said, “of course”. The only audience for whom any of this is new is the audience of pedants who write and read only for intent, who read text without for subtext, who are interested in the ideas of Rawls and G.A. Cohen without noticing the culture they’re a part of.

As with Gerome and Manet, but again at a much higher level, it’s not a question of technical facility but of its use. Gian Lorenzo Bernini is the greatest technical sculptor in the history of the west, or of the world. Few people think of him as a better artist than Michelangelo. Bernini indulged his skill; it was easy for him to take things for granted and he did. But he didn’t fetishize technique so much that he wasn’t in awe of Poussin, whose technical skills by comparison were limited. The Baroque was considered decadent precisely for the discord between easy artifice and rough integrity, but the period was focused less on the balance of ideal and worldly order as in the Renaissance, or on the more extreme dichotomy of otherworldliness and corruption -the panicked pretense of Counter Reformation Mannerism- than on a worldly sophistication as such: the narrativizing of ideal order. The Baroque is the culture of monarchy and aristocracy at the beginning of the age of theater, the age of the bourgeoisie.

By the beginning of the 20th century we’re far from all of this. It had been hundreds of years since fine art, the art of luxury, had played such a central role in the cultures of the day, or in our understanding of it. By the 19th century the bourgeoisie had many other -cheaper and more appropriate- ways to represent its interests and its preoccupations than mimicking the manners of the old regime. By 1914 nearly everyone admits the aristocracy is dying. It’s only if you want to see progress and advancement in everything that the next big thing becomes an improvement by default, as a car with a top speed of 60 miles an hour is better than one that goes no more than 20. Argue for progress in taste and we’re back again to intention and the imperatives of philosophy.

Picasso as a Modernist, in the 1920s, was a Mannerist. What Lichtenstein learned from him was that he had to find a way to deal with crap, to make something of value from what he had around him, and for him as it had been for Picasso, value meant ideal form.

Lichtenstein needed for personal reasons to find a way to return idealism to the romance comics he himself saw as fascist. He had to rescue the ideal from the banal. He had no interest in the mundane or every-day. The thought that something could be mundane and profound wasn’t idealist enough, and idealism was a moral imperative.

Antagonistic critics say that Pop Art does not transform its model. Does it?

Transformation is a strange word to use. It implies that art transforms…. I think my work is different from comic strips—but I wouldn’t call it transformation; I don’t think that whatever is meant by it is important to art. What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I’m using the word; the comics have shapes, but there has been no effort to make them intensely unified.

Comic books are structured as films are, as visual narrative; the unity is a unity over time. But to Lichtenstein they’re simply indexical, non-art. By his logic to see comic books as art would be an error. The question is whether we see that designation as Broch does, as Eliot and James do, as the following and articulation of a sensibility -even couched in the language of a moral imperative- or whether we choose to see those imperatives as philosophers do, as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried do, as representing a truth not about one person’s metaphysics –a relation to the world- but about the world itself.

Artists as artists can never allow themselves to forget that their models of utopia are inseparable from their chosen craft. Painters use paint, writers use words, singers, actors, and dancers, use their bodies. Their search for order is through artifice and whatever perfection they reach is perfection in artifice. There’s no art more ironic than a Fra Angelico. Without irony there’s only pedantry, and the sincere delusions of pedantry are much more dangerous than the ironic delusions of art. Most vocations are predicated on optimism. Art and historical writing are the only fields where you can spend your entire career articulating failure and tragedy with the only optimism being your ability to describe them well.

Lichtenstein’s paintings have a mix of innocence and irony that Picasso rarely matched. What was half-empty for Picasso the European was half-full for Lichtenstein, the American who wanted to make paintings, not films, not novels or comic books, and who had to find a way to make it work, while Picasso could rest on his laurels, or pose like a bohemian. Greenberg traveled a similar route from observer to pusher of kitsch but here he is in 1957: “I suspect that posterity will find a lot more that is truly ridiculous in Picasso’s recent art than we can” Lichtenstein needed be able to make -and at his best he succeeded in making- an art that gave full credit both to high irony and American optimism. He bypassed the tragedy, like Astaire and Matisse, but with more effort and a stranger result. Warhol couldn’t escape it: he had to face optimism and its opposite, and he found a way, resulting in the most profoundly terrifying paintings since Picasso’s in 1906.

The ideal of Modernism was that it was a sort of return to the Renaissance, but the Renaissance was a loosening of rules, while Modernism was a closing down. Gursky’s nihilism begins in Seurat. To see Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as the high-point of 20th century painting is to imagine a century beginning with the Carracci and Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas and fading into mannerism. The idealism of Modernism is always the idealism of a church, or the equally strict, fearful, ironic mockery of the same church.

By the late 1920s Picasso was caught up almost entirely in a sort of formalist meta-painting, trying to make art in the grand tradition with no grand beliefs and with representation in any real sense off limits. His imagery is the equivalent of Pop, mostly without irony, or without enough of it that anyone to notice. His Crucifixion from 1930 is frankly silly. Aside from refusing to face the emotional stakes required for his art to carry any weight as representation, as exposing/presenting his own perceptions and anxieties, Picasso along with everyone else in the fine arts also faced the problem of the new technologies, mass media, and mass violence, of the century itself. Picasso the figurative artist was outflanked by photography and film, and by his own arrogance and fear. He took himself much too seriously—Clark makes the mistake of taking him at his word in 1950s about what he was thinking in the 1920s—when humor and irony that would have saved his later work from the failure it became. The Studio, from 1927-8, is a brilliant exception to the rule, but looking at it now it’s clear what kind of exception it is: it’s pure Pop. And given this, the careless little sketch, The Dream and Lie of Franco is much more interesting than Guernica, much more articulate, angry, funny, and personal, less burdened by purpose, by intention, those things that are now so important to Clark. 

The odd man out here is Matisse, who reached neither Picasso’s heights nor lows. His great ugly paintings were never as graceless as the best Picasso. To stand with an open mind in front of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at MoMA in New York the question still comes up of how something so broken can function, can be an order and not an absence of order. I imagine it as the tastes of an Ortolan in reverse order: first you get the bones and shit. It manages to be the worst of the most vulgar pornographic early Cezanne, and his best. Matisse never reached that level of dissonance, and Picasso never reached it when he tried, more that he was able briefly to manage it when it wouldn’t go away.

Picasso’s best works were anti-formalist; Matisse knew he had to make formalism rich enough to be more. His works come closer to what I’ve called design—his closest imitators were designers—if only because he fit the model of an ideal Renaissance art that Modernists claimed for themselves, in his case a cross between Andrea della Robbia and Fred Astaire. "Why not a brothel, Matisse?" "Because nobody asked me, Picasso.” Blasphemy was common in Modernism; casual blasphemy was common mostly among the unserious. Matisse’s response to Picasso’s glib, ersatz communism carried the weight of a commitment that Picasso lacked, not a commitment to revolution or dreams of utopia but to the social itself, to the world around him, including the world of other people. There’s a way in which Eliot’s wry comments on James fit Matisse as well, because there’s always a mimetic power to his work. Figures and plants are never simply an excuse; there’s always a sympathy, even if it’s a physical rather than psychological or intellectual sympathy. There’s still in Matisse the warmth of other’s bodies.

Starting from the question: If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? This project proposes a transformation of the art museum via the lens of dance. 

For two days only, in collaboration with dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz, around 90 dancers and choreographers will take over the gallery spaces and the iconic Turbine Hall. 

See key works by Charmatz and his collaborators, get involved in a debate about what a dance museum could be and join in as contemporary dancers turn the Turbine Hall into a dance floor for everyone. 

As Tate Modern becomes Musée de la danse temporarily, the project conjures a vision of how art might be presented and encountered differently in the future museum.

Remembering and relearning Yvonne Rainer's Trio A

It began as one man performing what I recognized as bits of Trio A, but then he stopped and gave a lecture monologue about the piece and its history and how dance is notated, handed down, and not, and that he was trying to remember bits he'd lost. He asked advice from a friend in the audience and from someone else who it became clear later was a plant. After dancing together with the third dancer for a few minutes, consulting back and forth, the first dancer left (his friend had drifted back into the audience) and the one remaining switched the topic from Ranier to Trisha Brown. The first dancer was British and it was unclear what relation he had to Rainer. The third was American and she was a former member or perhaps still working with Trisha Brown's company.

It was all very nicely done.

A former Balanchine dancer.

More confirmation of the obvious: art museums not as art museums but as theaters.

Mark Graber does not understand freedom of speech.

I do not think I have a First Amendment right to post on a public website either “I fantasize about beating the world chess champion” or “I fantasize about murdering the world chess champion.” Doing so may be highly therapeutic, but with apologies to a significant percentage of my family, the Constitution provides no special protection to therapy. The First Amendment protects discourse about public affairs, defined broadly but not capaciously. A very high percentage of what takes place on the internet is not discourse and has little or nothing to do with public affairs.

Abstract painting is speech. Music is speech. Dance is speech.

Repeats, again and again. The top image is an image of religious activity; the bottom image is of secular activity.

Technocratic reason divides language into "serious" and "unserious",  by which definition the works of Plato are serious and the works of Aristophanes are not.

"Democracies have freedom of speech not because governments grant it but because the government is not granted the power to take it away."

idiots.

memories.

Regarding discussion of culture and the history of the avant-garde, and anti-historical snobbery: this made me smile. Alastair Macaulay's language is a bit over the top but that's a minor quibble.
The Fine Arts section of the Times has been shrinking over the past decade and the Entertainment section has doubled. A little empiricism goes a long way, and Cunningham was a great fan of Astaire.

VAIL, Colo. — On Sunday evening, after a perfect August day in the Rockies, hummingbirds hovered above the stream that runs beside the path to the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater here. The performance was, after Saturday’s, the second of two International Evenings of Dance organized and introduced by Damian Woetzel, the artistic director of the Vail International Dance Festival. The dancers (some of them European and Asian) had come from all over North and South America.

These evenings (most, not all, of the music was taped) covered a wide span of dance: Brazilian capoeira; Argentine tango; American modern dance from a span of eight decades; and ballet from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Almost anybody would have learned something about dance’s range from watching. Each proved it was not just international caliber — worthy of performance in any of the leading dance capitals — but it also has international significance, with new partnerships and debuts that would please the hearts of fans thousands of miles away. If you watched both evenings, you often saw the same dancers tackling completely different repertory: tonight the Black Swan, tomorrow “Who Cares?”

My particular interest was to see Gabriel Missé, the Argentine tango dancer who so electrified me when he appeared in a single performance in November at Symphony Space in New York. He alone was worth the trip to Vail; his dancing makes me want to apply for the job of dance critic at The Buenos Aires Gazette. A reader advised me last year that Buenos Aires possesses other dancers as remarkable as Mr. Missé; if so, I’m hungry to see them all.

As was the case last year, Mr. Missé partnered the chinny but smoldering and intensely glamorous Natalia Hills; it’s good to see that she is now wearing eyelashes far less colossal, and on Sunday her one-shoulder glittering purple dress, slit to the hip, was a sensation in itself. She and he combine gorgeously. No acrobatic lifts (no lifts at all, if I remember rightly), no high kicks; just two bodies scarcely sundered while dancing in unbroken streams of changing ideas to the music. To watch Ms. Hills twisting rapidly in Mr. Missé’s arms or slowly extending a leg to slide it down the outside of his leg is to feel, again and again, the sensuous and sensual delight of the tango at its truest. ...

Reading or at least reading through Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses. It amazes me that a cultural historian can write from her own tastes without any awareness that that's what they are. Would anyone who wrote a paper describing political machinations and the role of ideology in the world of classical music be taken seriously if s/he claimed that preference for Bach over Vivaldi had no basis in the work itself? Would mockery of that article imply a belief that politics and ideology are nonexistent?

Greenberg had a good eye, and empirically, for a brief period of time, a good sense of what was most compelling in the fine arts. As to the underlying reasons he was wrong from the start. He sensed what and thought he knew why. Caroline Jones has a sense and an argument about the why, in the sense that ideology plays a role, but she follows her preferences regarding art itself as if they didn't matter. She argues that the move towards abstraction in painting was not inevitable, which is absurd. How could figurative hand crafting compete with popular and mechanical media, not only in popularity but in moral authority and force? Is Chaplin no rival to Matisse? She views things in terms of personal ideology rather than impersonal forces but that means as well that she can't imagine Mondrian's appreciation of Pollock as anything but politics. Does that apply to Mondrian's love of Disney's animation as well?

To understand Greenberg you have to understood what he got right as well as what he got wrong. He may have attacked O'Keeffe for her fixation on "hygiene and scatology" but he barely dealt with Duchamp. Why not attack him in the same way? Jones defends O'Keeffe as ideology not as art and in doing so is unable to describe either. O'Keeffe's work is poeticized and flabby. She's not taken very seriously beyond her cult, and she doesn't deserve to be. But to make things more complex, and more interesting, the 'source'  of Duchamp's Fountain may have been a woman. [later refuted]

Law/Justice/Wisdom
Judgment, discernment, discrimination. sophistication The ability to perceive and to communicate nuance, to describe what has not been named -categorized- previously. It is not creation but observation and description.

This is the root of what Kant might call genius. Genius is wisdom. It is non-cumulative. As a capacity/ability it can be learned but not taught. The record of past acts of wisdom is only that.
Technocrats are experts: craftsmen within the limits of their own knowledge. An honest technocrat is self-deprecating (Politics requires a vulgar definition of the world.) Fascism is politics without irony.
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Interesting reading the Times. Television critics are sharper more quick witted than most of the book or film critics. They don't take their jobs as seriously. The old line was that the best newspaper writing was in the Sports pages. Sports are trivial. Olberman started at ESPN. Jon Stewart was a stand up comic. Frank Rich is a theater critic. Observation begins with an ironic awareness of the self. Stand-up is ethnography, not sociology. David Graeber on the beginnings of sociology as the study of modern man by himself as disembodied, denatured.  Self-ethnography makes people nervous. Nervousness/comedy. Edmund Leach is a model of ironic awareness compared to this generation of academic dimwits. Marshall and Bernie Sahlins.
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Idiot Henry Farrell on determinism in Marx. If Ayn Rand rewrote Anna Karenina replicating the novel in her own words it would have the same meaning as Tolstoy. The 20th century was the first century where ideas preceded craft. The culmination of moderism in ideology. In language it's always a mistake to follow. "In the manner of..." Science is predicated on it. Marx was a writer.
Beethoven the first composer to fail by overreaching, but there's less arrogance in Wagner's bombast than in Wen Ho Lee's shy clockmaker smile. The face of a bombmaker.
Intellectual over-determination and moral under-determination (moral passivity.)
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Zhang Yimou's Hero. Remember A Touch of Zen. An epic that felt independent of Hollywood. Wirework has a theatrical beauty that Hollywood would never have developed on its own. It's too mannered, too recognizably fake.

You can call culture a market of ideas, except that the market as such is only one example of the capacity for invention.
Remember the Irish-Bulgarian bartender on whether or not Manhattanites will take over the neighborhood. "I hope not. I like the diversity." Interestingly with the changes in the country over the last generation the standard issue Americans aren't as offensive as the ones who take themselves seriously.

Again[?]
Sincerity reverses ends and means.
Saying "I love you" will not get you laid. Saying it well, might. A gesture is only distinctive if it is seen that way by others. The sincerity of the American singer-songwriter or indie filmmaker is based on a misunderstanding, and the "insincerity" of Hollywood is a misnomer. Moral seriousness and high purpose are best left for others to discover.
Kelly was more serious than Astaire, Ozu more serious that Mizoguchi.

Two things amused me recently in the NYRB: Toni Bentley on Balanchine and- not available online- Gabriele Annan's review of Richard Wollheim's Germs: A Memoir of Childhood, which could be subtitled, "The Heterosexual Faggot." The book sounds intimate, grand, and silly. And Bentley's encomium to her Master is what one would expect from a bottom. At the same time it's hilarious when worshipful servants accuse others of vulgarity. Not that she's wrong, but it's funny.

A few years ago when I was in Spain for a couple of months I walked through a street festival in a small town and spent a few minutes watching a flamenco performance. First the school children in groups, then adolescents, and finally a duet between two adults. The man was obviously gay, his theatricality slightly off, the gestures too gently mannered, unconvincing, though it would be unnecessarily cruel to say inappropriate. The woman, however, as if to compensate, was wonderfully masculine; worshipping an ideal of maleness that she found necessary, or desirable, to embody in herself.

Esthetics as Ethics.
Astaire v. Kelly: A study in classical rhetoric and communication.
The one a performer of popular dance, brought to perfection on its own terms and thus to a level of art.
The other a trained artist working in a popular medium, engaged in a process of esthetic 'elevation.'
The first interested in issues of formal value, non formal issues being taken as given, the second in intellectual value under the assumption that givens are such are no longer applicable.
The former 'conservative'
the latter 'liberal.'
The one restrained/ The other free.
The one Early, the other Late.

"Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person."

I could argue with much of what Scott Martens says here. For one thing I have no fear of Islam at all. As I've said more than once, Islam is the only religion at this point for which I have any respect, because it is the only modern religion that still exists as an 'order' of language. When religion becomes a hobby it becomes meaningless.

As I wrote in an email to Riverbend a while ago, Islam is becoming the new Judaism in that it's returning to us a sort of scholastic rigor born of religious debate. But this happens only as Islamic thought becomes secularized, as Germanic culture was transformed by Jewish assimilation.

The quote from Marx is lovely. Legal argument is the only form of reasoning in secular society which is acknowleged to allow, indeed to demand, a sense both of absurdity and of formal intellectual rigor. Again and again I return to the notion of 'imperfect justice' not as the product of a philosophy but its manifestation.
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I used to work with a sheetrock taper who had a few phrases he used to mumble or yell on occasion apropos of nothing, while we were on the job. We'd be working in silence and suddenly I'd hear a shout: "I see!! said the blind man!" followed often, as if roared from a pulpit by: "Members...of the Jury." And a chorus of women would reply in song: Yeeeeeaaaaaahhs!!!

Say 'Amen,' somebody.