Someone could write a book. The relation of Florence to Venice, to modernity.  Titian admitted he couldn't compete with Florentine facility; he had to do something else. But Picasso's best painting is an anti-formalist clusterfuck that works. Panofsky said he didn't use color plates in his book on Titian because they would only be an insult. The plates “were made from the best available originals and are all in black and white, not in spite but because of the fact that Titian was the greatest ‘colorist’ who ever lived.” And he doubted the attribution  of The Flaying of Marsyas.  Picasso said "when I don't have red, I use blue."

All repeats, but I'd never put the images side by side.

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.

research

Picasso in 1923

I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the purse that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be, even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration. 

Among the several sins that I have been accused of, none is more false than that I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by deeds and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing. 

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know how to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything. 

The idea of research has often made painting go astray, and made the artist lose himself in mental lucubrations. Perhaps this has been the principal fault of modern art. The spirit of research has poisoned those who have not fully understood all the positive and conclusive elements in modern art and has made them attempt to paint the invisible and, therefore, the unpaintable. 

They speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting. I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.
Velazquez left us his idea of the people of his epoch. Undoubtedly they were different from the way he painted them, but we cannot conceive a Philip IV in any other way than the one Velazquez painted. Rubens also made a portrait of the same king and in Rubens' portrait he seems to be quite another person. We believe in the one painted by Velazquez, for he convinces us by his right of might. 

From the painters of the origins, the primitives, whose work is obviously different from nature, down to those artists who, like David, Ingres and even Bouguereau, believed in painting nature as it is, art has always been art and not nature. And from the point of view of art there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies. That those lies are necessary to our mental selves is beyond any doubt, as it is through them that we form our aesthetic view of life.

and 1927

It was just at this period that we were passionately preoccupied with exactitude. One can only paint out of a view of reality, which we tried through dogged hard work (how we applied ourselves to this side of things!) to analyze in pictorial terms. ... How anxious we were lest something slip through our clutches (Que de scrupules de laisser échapper quelque chose). ...

Moreover. this feeling for exactitude is one I have always held onto in my researches. There is no painting or drawing of mine that does not respond exactly to a view of the world. One day I'd like to show drawings done in my synthesizing mode (dessins à forme synthétique) next to ones of the same subject done in a classical manner. People will my concern for exactitude. They'll even see that the [synthetic] drawings are more exact

"The philosophical role of illness – and how it can teach us to live reflectively"

Serious illness is a great calamity. It is unwelcome, violent, frightening and painful. If it is life threatening, it requires the ill person and their loved ones to confront death. Illness causes pain, anxiety, incapacitation; it limits what the ill person can do. It can cut a life short, stop plans in their tracks, and detach people from life, suspending the previous flow of everyday activity. In short, illness is almost always unwelcome but must be endured, as it is also unavoidable. We “each owe nature a death”, as Freud put it.

The link, in the original,  now an obscure reference, is to a BBC biography.
The author, (on the right side of the page)

Havi Carel
Professor of Philosophy, University of Bristol
Disclosure statement
Havi Carel receives funding from the Wellcome Trust (Senior Investigator Award 103340).

Investigators are researchers.

My current research explores the phenomenology of illness. I am interested in augmenting the naturalistic approach to illness with a phenomenological perspective. I believe that as embodied persons we experience illness primarily as a disruption of lived body rather than as a dysfunction of biological body. But medicine has traditionally focused on returning the biological body to normal functioning, and has therefore worked from within a problem-focused, deficit perspective that ignores the lived body. A phenomenological approach can provide a framework for incorporating the experience of illness into the medical naturalistic account, by providing a rich description of the altered relationship of the ill person to her world.

Belles lettres as research. Anglo-American philosophy is now claim-jumping experimental psychology on one side and literature on the other.

Rules of submitting to Granta: "Please do not submit book manuscripts, academic essays or reviews."
No fucking footnotes. "Experience" and literature. Follow the links.

The research model of art, and politics. Follow the motherfucking links. Learn something.

"Continental and Anglo-American philosophy are collapsing in on themselves and on each other"
continuing

Picasso Sculpture, at MoMA

From haptic to optic.

Picasso's greatest works were tactile. Most of the greatest modern paintings, paintings in the beginning of the age of photography, had moved to the haptic, one thing photography could not do. Impressionism is physical, but so is Courbet.
Picasso's sculptures don't go downhill as quickly as his paintings do. Optical painting in the modern period is in a mode of deep irony: surrealism to pop. And what is Ingres?

More work to do.

Avant-Garde of what?
Picasso the bourgeois. T.J. Clark, likewise.

That care in Picasso's case was often mixed with Bohemian insolence and destructiveness does not alter the point. For who has not grown use to the paradox that in so many of the artists who seem to us now to have spoken most deeply of (maybe even for) bourgeois society—Flaubert, George Eliot, Simmel, Manet, Marx, Menzel, Baudelaire, Ibsen, Henry James—care seems indistinguishable from distaste? Bohemia was never as withering on the subject of bourgeois illusions as the great masters of the novel. The Communist Manifesto, we see in retrospect, is as much under the spell of Adam Smith and Balzac as looking for a way to set their world on fire. It is the great poem of capitalism's potential. And who are the heroines of the new order if not those who stare its horrible decencies most fully in the face: Olympia, Madame Bovary, Hedda Gabler, Kate Croy, The Daughters of the Vicar, Woman with a Hat? Maybe belonging and not-belonging, or respectability and disreputableness, just are -were- what is meant by bourgeois identity: they seem to be (again, in retrospect) what marks off this strange way of being-with-others-in-the-world from others before and since. 

"...care seems indistinguishable from distaste", and the reverse.

"Because the interior is the truth of space—for Bohemia, those last believers in the nineteenth century."

Art is made by loving something so much you see it honestly or hating something so much you see it in its complexity.
---
update. Something I remembered.
Arendt, The Human Condition

What the public realm considers irrelevant can have such an extraordinary and infectious charm that a whole people may adopt it as their way of life, without for that reason changing its essentially private character. Modern enchantment with "small things," though preached by early twentieth-century poetry in almost all European tongues, has found its classical presentation in the petit bonheur of the French people. Since the decay of their once great and glorious public realm, the French have become masters in the art of being happy among "small things," within the space of their own four walls, between chest and bed, table and chair, dog and cat and flowerpot, extending to these things a care and tenderness which, in a world where rapid industrialization constantly kills off the things of yesterday to produce today's objects, may even appear to be the world's last, purely humane corner. This enlargement of the private, the enchantment, as it were, of a whole people, does not make it public, does not constitute a public realm, but, on the contrary, means only that the public realm has almost completely receded, so that greatness has given way to charm every- where; for while the public realm may be great, it cannot be charming precisely because it is unable to harbor the irrelevant.

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.

The contradictions of Tim Clark

Lecture II

Cubism, these paintings convince me, is a style directed to a present understood primarily in relation to a past: it is a modest. decent, and touching appraisal of one moment in history, as opposed to a whirling glimpse into a world-historicai present-becoming-future. It is commemorative. Its true power derives not from its modernity. that is, if we mean by this a reaching toward an otherness ahead of time, but from its profound belonging to a modernity that was passing away: the lonq modernity of the nineteenth century. ...

Cubism's world has the following structure. It wishes to state again, this time definitively, that the world is substantial through and through, with space only real -only felt- to the extent that it is constrained and solidified. Physical reality is something the mind or imagination can only reach out to incompletely, for objects resist our categories; and painting can speak to this ultimate non-humanness of things very well; but only by giving their otherness a certain architecture, a certain rectilinear -indeed "cubic"- constructedness. And this constructedness is only real if it is not far away, and smaller than us, or maybe just the same size. ...

Roger Fry says of Picasso in 1921, looking back to the line of work from 1908 to I916 —he says it a little regretfully— that "the obstinate fact remains that the limit of depth into the picture space is soon reached, that these pictures rarely suggest much more backwards and forwards play of planes than a high relief in sculpture. The immense resource [that painting has] of suggesting real distance and, perhaps even more important, circumambience of space seems to be almost cut off, or at most reduced, in its power to persuade the imagination." Well, yes: because the imagination should not be so persuaded; because the space of modernity is only falsely circumambient: it does not surround us like a circle—the great shape at the bottom of Still Lift in front of a Window could be understood as a parody of any such claim— it faces us like a piece of wainscoting. We lean on it like a table. We strum the strings of its guitar. We take off in our paper Montgolfier—Picasso actually made paper cutout versions of his  Young Girl's toys before reproducing them in paint—for a voyage around its four walls. And this proximity, this tactility, this coziness, is the condition of endless mad inventiveness about its particular states. Because the interior is the truth of space—for Bohemia, those last believers in the nineteenth century.

see the tags. more later.

As long as I'm at at…
More for Austin, Searle, etc.

Clark: "-Portrait of a Young Girl, is collage epitomized, for all that the stick-ons are illusions in oil-"

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief...

Art is use and reference.
And Searle now has his own tag

A repeat for the third time (click the link for the argument) and the book.
I doubt I'll like it.  Clark loses his way moving into the 20th century; he begins less to read works than read into them, arguing for what he wants to see more than from the material. He's brilliant on cubism, but Picasso fades after WWI and very often so does Clark.

Art Market Monitor

Shane Ferro has post on Artinfo recapitulating the New York Times’s debate on the art market before migrating to an earlier exchange of views that started here on Art Market Monitor. She quotes Felix Salmon taking me to task for missing that “ prices are quantitatively completely bonkers.”
Ferro adds:

This question — whether paying wild sums for contemporary art signifies a healthy market or not — is where the real debate is.

I can see why the very large sums of money being paid for works of art is startling and unsettling. But I don’t actually think the nominal figure is indicative of whether the market is healthy. A person buying an airplane for their own use at $30 million is no more or less bonkers than buying a work of art for $30m. The plane may seem more substantial but if it costs a lot to maintain, isn’t used often and the same function could be served by . There is no way for economics to measure the value of that purchase to the person.

My comments at Artinfo

Maneker thinks spending 30 million on an artwork is like sending 30 million on a private jet. With a mind like his I wonder if he was working at Bear Stearns. 

A $30 million jet, as a luxury item -Warren Buffett's “indefensible”- fitted (let's just say) for 8 people with private bedrooms, a movie theater and rec. room, can be refitted for commercial use as a non-luxury item. A $30 million bauble that cost $300,000 to make is priced based on the desire of a small number of people, a very limited fan base. The question is: how long can it last? 

Maneker is happy to stipulate that the price has no relation to long term cultural importance. "The art market isn’t a measure of art historical value or worth." But the bet in speculating on art is that other people in the long run will agree. If they don't you end up losing money, or your kids do. Nahmad is given credit for a great sense of timing, in unloading first Marie Laurencin[!!] and now late Picasso. I doubt he paid that much to pick them up. What's the rule? If someone's selling you should ask why. 

Felix Salmon agrees with Gopnik: "The market for art is unlike any other, because it’s built on some notion of true, underlying value."

The market for fine art built on "a notion", and claims of seriousness of purpose. But Gerome, Bouguereau and Winterhalter were vewy, vewy seweous pepew. The stars of the Salon were every bit as serious as the Refusés. I witnessed a somewhat faded art star reminded gently of this fact. He didn't respond. 

I don't care about the money, I'm only interested in art. So for me the question is Hirst or Tarantino? Who's the biggest badass white boy on the block? 

One year Damien Hirst has a show entitled "No Sense of Absolute Corruption" The next year contradicts himself by covering a skull in diamonds guaranteed not to be blood diamonds. They should have been guaranteed blood diamonds, with certificates of authenticity and the names of dead children engraved on each facet. And all Tarantino did was make a movie with a psychotic Nazi as the hero. "Wait for the cream." Das ist die ewige Kunst.

---
I'll add one more comment. I have no argument with anything lcgarllery wrote, but it deserves expansion. He's describing a small, elite market populated by self-interested parties who share also a common enthusiasm for art as such, if specifically the kind of art that can be bought and resold for profit.  The 19th and 20th century avant-gardes saw themselves as separating themselves from the past, and from common opinion, but there was the same sense that the makers and audience for the new work were part of the same group.  That's both a market model and a social model, and it can work.
But it's a problem now that the "avant-garde" and "respectable" art communities have collapsed into one another. There no tension between starving artists and rich patrons when starving artists are happily currying favor. The result of this is not that new art necessarily is banal, though much of it is, but all of it is weaker.

The model for fine art now is high style and haute couture, as fashion or outré anti-fashion. That's less an attack on the art than on claims to importance. Art objects made today have nowhere near the importance of objects made 400 years ago, because objects themselves are less important. Art journals are closer now to Vogue than to the New York Review of Books or LRB, but there's still the pretense.  Jim Hoberman as a film critic is a critic of visual art. The art he reviews has a market model, and one on a much larger scale than the market for fine art, which means that he doesn't hang out much with Hollywood producers. His social world is the world of the audience for art and for some degree also its makers. The funders are elsewhere. Meanwhile art critics who are not openly style critics become parodies. The most important intellectual defender of Gerhard Richter is a Marxist only the art world could produce: who writes catalogue essays for boutiques in 57th St.

Kipling put the problem well. "Every one knows every one else far too well for business purposes."

I have no brief against  Koons. If I want to bemoan the state of the world, it's all there. He makes art out of it. But he's not Bernini.  To talk seriously about Koons you have to talk about Warhol, and to talk seriously about Warhol you have to talk about Hitchcock.  To talk seriously about Gursky you have to talk about Zhang Yimou's opening of the Beijing Olympics. To talk about visual art today you have to be able to talk about Cronenberg's Cosmopolis. Will anything by Matthew Barney outlast "Terminator II"?  I doubt it, and I doubt it should.

There's good art in the galleries these days, but most of it isn't made in the US. The Chinese boom reminds me of NY in the 80s, when Larry Gagosian posed for Robert Longo: the dark poetry of capitalism. But Bladerunner came out in 1982, and it will outlast most if not all of the art of that decade. I think recent Chinese work is better too, but I am not going to get my investment advice from Vogue or Elle Decor.  A writer for the Economist cited the failure of a Sherrie Levine to crack a million at auction as a sign of trouble. The fact that she chose Levine's work as a model of anything shows how little she understands either art or markets.  There's more than one bubble operating here.

see previous

A repeat, but appropriate.


Reading Steinberg's "The Philosophical Brothel."

Still surprised by the filters used by modern/modernist intellectuals to interpret the preoccupations of themselves and their compatriots. As with Eliot, the theme is not "form" but a fear of the power of representation and of what will be represented if representation is allowed its full weight. And it is allowed that weight here as in Eliot's poetry. That's the greatness and the terror. The painting first and foremost is if not a castration scene then a description of the terror that the act or worse may be in the offing, with the painter/viewer as the victim. Talk of form and formalism was an absurd cover, as absurd as any talk of "advancement" in the arts; and even those who eschew formalist arguments to this day argue from pretensions of progress.

The importance of Les Demoiselles D'Avignon is less that it marks the beginning of Cubism than that it marks the high point. The work after it slides downhill -first gradually, later quickly- away from representation towards formalism, the "meaning" of ideas, and the logic of intention.
---

...the three central figures address the observer with unsparing directness. Neither active nor passive, they are simply alerted, responding to an alerting attentiveness on our side.

5 lines later

The Picture is a tidal wave of female aggression, one either experiences the Demoiselles as an onslaught, or shuts it off.

It's less that all these terms are mutually exclusive than that Steinberg is still coming to terms with them.



The sharpest melon slice in the history of art.
---
[Below, published a couple of days later 1/29/10, and forgotten. It makes more sense to join them.]

More, because I'm still reading, and it's apropos: the intellectual's unawareness, méconnaissance, of sexuality, their own and others. He spends a lot of time arguing that the central figure in the painting is in an ambiguous position: upright signaling recumbence. And he worries that he may be wrong.


Recumbency, passivity and objecthood. Posing, presentation and gender roles. Googling the phrase "her arms framing her face" got 8 hits. "Her arms frame her face" got 547. And on... The aggression was new, recumbence and mockery, in 1906.

Also of course, earlier, recumbence and boredom, Manet, and for Picasso, Duchamp.

When I wrote this I'd forgotten that by 2004 Kimmelman had changed his tune.

---

Richard Avedon in the NY Times. Michael Kimmelman 1994

Has there been an exhibition that generated more noise before it opened than the Richard Avedon show that is now at the Whitney Museum of American Art? Not this season, anyway.

First came the collective groan after David A. Ross, newly installed as the museum's director, proposed it as one of the largest retrospectives ever contemplated at the Whitney. Those who knew that Mr. Ross had enjoyed successes with two previous Avedon exhibitions at museums he headed, in Berkeley, Calif., and Boston, weren't surprised. But more than a few people were taken aback that his first move at an institution dogged by charges of trendiness was a gigantic display of the work of a master of fashion photography and celebrity portraiture. Since then, despite being scaled back, the show has caused an alarming buzz around the museum, like an approaching V-1.

...Ms. Livingston seems to have gone out of her way to comply with Mr. Avedon's desire that he be taken seriously as an artist, and not thought of as a fashion photographer: out of 200 photographs in the retrospective, 10 are fashion shots. If you expect Dovima and the elephants at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris, forget it. Forget Sunny Harnett leaning over the roulette wheel at the casino at Le Touquet. I don't know whether the closer analogy is a Picasso retrospective without Cubism or a Woody Allen one without the comedies, but in either case, the disservice is to Mr. Avedon.

Because his fashion photographs are great, and the rest rarely are, despite their technical brilliance. The asylum inmates and celebrities made to look like them, the drifters from the American West and American muck-a-mucks in South Vietnam, the passengers on the Third Avenue El and revelers at the Brandenburg Gate are here in numbers that only expose Mr. Avedon's limitations. If all portraits are on some level self-portraits, as he likes to say, that may explain why Henry Miller, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Groucho Marx resemble one another in his photographs. But it doesn't make their portraits compelling....

If Mr. Avedon reminds me of any artist, it is Giovanni Boldini,... 

Roberta Smith in 2009

Five years after Richard Avedon’s death at 81 the International Center of Photography is setting the record straight. Avedon was indeed a great artist, and his fashion photographs are his greatest work.

This may not be quite the way Avedon wanted it. His own pursuit of greatness often involved playing down the half-century of fashion magazine work he did for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue as little more than a day job and emphasizing his portraiture, which he produced voluminously. At least that’s how it seemed with his last big New York retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1994; that 50-year survey included, shockingly, fewer than a dozen examples of the fashion work.

Holland Cotter 2012

If you were reasonably sentient in the 1960s and early ’70s, as some of us were some of the time, you’ll remember how far beyond strange those years were. And all of their surrealness comes back in this knockout show of Richard Avedon’s colossal photomurals at Gagosian.

See also: Alexander McQueen, and the fading of the distinction between art and style.

A repeat from 2009




Picasso, Mandolin and Guitar, 1924. Oil with sand on canvas, 55 3/8 x 78 7/8 inches. Guggenheim Museum, NY.

The painting has always annoyed me; predicting the future a la Jules Verne, but instead of a submarine we get a surprisingly accurate portrait of the artist as an old man, 40 years ahead. And I've never been a fan of Arcimboldo.
It was part of the template for cartoons from the late 50's and early 60's, Warner Bros. and Disney—cubist and surrealist design motifs—through many others, including Dufy and Ludwig Bemelmans. Look at the window and the door on the right: the flat shadows and light. In the flatness of a reproduction it's easier to see. None of this makes it any better, any less contrived or over-determined.
Actually I've always hated this fucking painting. It's Pop without irony.
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When I first posted this I sent a note to an old family friend (who has a professional interest in such things). I never posted his reply.

Just came from Clark's first lecture, which, indeed, was on your painting. In the question period afterwards, someone said, I see a skull in the painting. Clark likened as how, yes, some people have said that (I don't know whether actually have written about it), but he himself isn't interested in it. Too bad, I say, because it is a dimension of the painting (a perspective on it) that is there and should be taken in as we consider it. Picasso was, above all, a metamorphic, a polymorphic painter.

I'm still amazed no one sees the eyes in the sockets, or recognizes the face.

Art Market Maneker: Freeports Concentrate Art Creating Massive $10bn Risk
(from FT)

The problem lies in the fact that many collectors mainly purchase art for investment purposes, using free ports in order not to declare where works are kept, as well as a way of avoiding taxes and duties.

The majority of the world’s art that is not on display, either in museums or private residences, is stored in a small number of tax-free ports across the globe, mainly in Switzerland.

Until recently, this was a world shrouded in secrecy, and insurers had no idea of the true value of the art treasures they were insuring, according to Adam Prideaux, a leading broker with Blackwall Green, a specialist art insurer.

Clients used to receive worldwide cover that allowed them to keep works in their house or in storage without the need to specify details.

Recent changes to Swiss customs laws mean that art stored at the country’s free ports must now be declared and descriptions, values and country of origin provided. Specific declarations are also now required by insurers. It is these changes that made insurers pay attention: in trying to collate all this information, they started to realise the level of risk involved, and have been prompted to scrutinise cover more closely.

Each of the main ports is thought to house an average of $10bn of art, a staggering figure. “It’s a huge value of art; it goes into hundreds of billions of dollars [worldwide],” Prideaux says. “But they really don’t know. The pressure they’re under – they’ve got to find out what’s there.”

Despite high-security warehousing, there is just too much value and too few insurers. They simply would not have enough funds to pay out in the event of a catastrophe. This has led insurers to think the unthinkable – and to start preparing to protect themselves against the worst possible scenario. What if an aircraft crashed into one of the free port warehouses adjacent to an airport? Insurers could not cover the loss if a single warehouse containing, say, a Rembrandt, a Titian and a couple of Picassos were destroyed. Picasso’s “Child with a Dove”, for example, is on the market and it is thought it will fetch about £50m.

Like Eliot on Henry James, or what he wasn't. Leo Stein in 1913

Both [Picasso] & Gertrude are using their intellects, which they ain't got, to do what would need the finest critical tact, which they ain't got neither, and they are in my belief turning out the most go'almighty rubbish that is to be found.

He was right, except that in Picasso's case "Analytical" Cubism is still brilliant fakery. It's bullshit made physically compelling, full of sound and fury.
The Steins Collect At the Met.

It becomes clear how much the breakthrough work from 1906 was a response to Matisse, and to a competitor. Picasso didn't originate the blocky roughness that became Cubism; he appropriated it.

They've borrowed a Rubens and pulled another out of storage.
Gallery 629 - Rubens and Van Dyck. A great room. The best of Hollywood.
Delacroix to Manet: "Look at Rubens, draw inspiration from Rubens, copy Rubens. Rubens was God!"
I laugh in that room.

They have a loaner del Sarto next to the two in their collection.
Gallery 608
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And I forgot to mention the Rembrandt, on loan from Kenwood House, London. "It's nice too." Allan Sherman

Kimmelman's case against sculpture .

BERLIN — Sometimes on a whim I stop into the Bode Museum here to commune with a tiny clay sculpture of John the Baptist.

It’s in a corner of a nearly always empty room, a bone-white bust, pretty and as androgynous as mid-1970s Berlin-addled David Bowie. The saint’s upturned eyes glow in the hard light through tall windows. Attributed to the 15th-century Luccan artist Matteo Civitali, the sculpture is all exquisite ecstasy and languor.

...Is it me, or do we seem to have a problem with sculpture today? I don’t mean contemporary sculpture, whose fashionable stars (see Koons, Murakami et alia) pander to our appetite for spectacle and whatever’s new. I don’t mean ancient or even non-Western sculpture, either. I mean traditional European sculpture — celebrities like Bernini and Rodin aside — and American sculpture, too: the enormous universe of stuff we come across in churches and parks, at memorials and in museums like the Bode. The stuff Barnett Newman, the Abstract Expressionist painter, notoriously derided as objects we bump into when backing up to look at a painting.

His first examples are minor theatricalized works, melodramatic and near kitsch: almost contemporary.

...In an age of special effects, we may also simply no longer know how to feel awe at the sight of sculptured faces by the German genius Tilman Riemenschneider or before a bronze statue by Donatello. We can’t see past the raw materiality and subject matter. Never mind that Donatello may have been the greatest creative genius until Picasso; he long ago got lapped in the public’s imagination by Madame Tussaud, who has given way to “Avatar” in 3-D and Alexander McQueen’s trippy costumed mannequins.

McQueen/Riemenschneider
The people who lined up at the Met are fond enough of melodrama, but what they see in McQueen is both the indulgence and the attempt to rise above it. People are looking for order where they can recognize it. Kimmelman's tastes are both less extreme and more earnest than those of McQueen's audience, but they aren't much different. His preferred choice of works, with exceptions, are defined by just those elements that opponents of sculpture claim as defining all of it.

Also the language regarding Donatello and Picasso is absurd.

For an earlier discussion of sensibilities in common (and McQueen) go here, or click on the tags below.

Ken Johnson review of the Lee Ufan exibition at the Guggenheim: A Fine Line: Style or Philosophy?

...A much published philosopher as well as an artist who divides his time between Japan and Paris, Mr. Lee has enjoyed considerable recognition in Europe and in the Far East. Last year the Lee Ufan Museum, a building designed by Tadao Ando, opened on the island of Naoshima, Japan.

But Mr. Lee’s reputation has not extended to the United States. This exhibition, his first in a North American museum, gives a sense of why. His art is impeccably elegant, but in its always near-perfect composure, it teeters between art and décor.

Soren Melikian in the IHT: When Catalog Descriptions Dictate Value

LONDON— An entirely new approach is determining buyers’ decisions at auction. Abstract considerations such as the artist’s name or the previous owners’ celebrity are now the prevalent criteria, while visual achievement becomes almost irrelevant. At this week’s sales of Impressionist and modern art, this had a dramatic impact on prices.

Christie’s experts, vividly aware of the changing attitudes in the constituency they cater to, cleverly pressed all the right buttons in their catalog presentation.

The estate of Ernst Beyeler, one of the most influential 20th-century art dealers, had consigned 41 works of art ranging from Impressionism to post-World War II avant-garde movements. The proceeds of the sale were to benefit the Beyeler Foundation set up by Mr. Beyeler in his hometown, Basel. The museum, erected in Riehen, needed the cash to finance its exhibitions program and its acquisitions fund.

Christie’s made sure that the Beyeler theme, spun in reverential tones, was widely dealt with in the media. Potential buyers were made to feel that acquiring a Beyeler picture amounted to securing a badge of cultural honor.

It worked brilliantly right from lot one, a 17th-century Spanish trestle table that Mr. Beyeler used as a desk in his office until his death in 2010. The printed estimate for the table was £8,000 to £12,000, or $12,000 to $18,000 plus the sale charge. It ended up at £289,500 — setting a world auction record for banal Spanish provincial furniture.

This kind of fetishism sent many of the 41 pieces of Beyeler memorabilia to levels that bore little relationship to the art.

...Picasso’s “Couple, Le Baiser” dated Nov. 28, 1969, so sloppily dashed off that it seemed hopeless, realized £6.53 million, courtesy of a lone telephone bidder.

...The corollary of the almost exclusive attention now accorded to abstract considerations is that the most beautiful pictures often fetch comparatively modest prices. Cézanne's “La rivière,” a pure masterpiece of 1881, made only £2.5 million.

Not "an entirely "new approach" but it's gotten worse. Monets are worth more than Cezannes because they're prettier, not more important. Markets are based on greed and desire for what others desire. Scarcity means "insufficient for the demand": outside of necessities the application becomes fluid. That a Bernini modello sells for a fifth of the auction price of a Giacometti is both predictable and absurd (so therefore not).

I was talking to video editing tech yesterday about the new Final Cut X and he said what Apple has been dumbing down their product line because they make more money in the mass market than the market for professionals. Towers now have slower processors than IMacs and with the new changes in Final Cut professionals are talking about going back to Avid.


Craft is a social activity. Craftsmen take pride in their abilities, defined as something other than acquiring wealth, because their audience respects them for their skills and at their best for their refusal to pander. The integrity of craftsmen relates to the integrity of those who respond to them. Structural integrity is "the state of being whole, the condition of being unified, unimpaired, or sound in construction." But this isn't absolute, since absolute integrity would mean indifference, so the result is a divided consciousness, integral but looking outward. And the relation of craftsmen to their craft and to their audience becomes the model for lawyers' relation to their clients and the bar, and by extension again of individuals to one another: loyal to themselves but responsive to others. Laws are formal in the sense that democracy is formal, and structural integrity becomes a form of moral integrity. The rule of law is the acceptance by individuals of their being bound by social process and through that to each other.

John Quiggin: You say you want a revolution

As promised in my previous post, I’m setting up a separate thread for discussion of my premise that a socialist revolution is neither feasible nor desirable. ...

Update: I’ve updated to link to the earlier post remove an unjustifiably snarky reference to aristocratic sentiment and to include a para from the previous post, on situations where revolutions are likely to turn out well.

the offending paragraph:

At a deeper level, the appeal of revolution has a substantial residue of aristocratic sentiment. In the course of the last 200 years, and even allowing for the defeats of the past 20 years or so, the achievements of the Left have been impressive, starting with universal suffrage and secret ballots, going on the creation of the welfare state, continuing with progress towards equality without regard to race, gender and sexuality, preserving the environment from the disastrous impact of industrialism and so on. Yet most of this progress has been achieved in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion, through long agitation, boring committee reports and so on. Gains that are ground out in this way, with two steps forward and one step back, are not noble enough for an aristocratic sensibility: far better to fail gloriously.

The logic of bourgeois liberalism, and liberal intellectualism specifically, results in the monetizing of all social relations. Desire is simplified in the interest of clarity and the interest of self-interest: Apple, no matter how successful, is doing what it "needs to" or "should" do. Methodological and ideological individualism are born twins, one of the reasons that modern art, as modern craft, even in its most radical (leftist) moments, is shaded by the sentiments of equally anti-bourgeois aristocratic conservatives. But as technocrats have become the new aristocrats aristocratic art has divided into the decadence of luxury and the decadence of technocratic scholasticism. It's left for the majority as bourgeois, as even the working class define themselves now, to argue for craft, for sociability and for "the social" against technocrats, philosophers, and the defenders of the false aristocracy of economic oligarchy.

More old/new. Still working. [PDF] [and here It's changed a lot in the years since] 

Yves Saint Laurent was three when he pointed out to his aunt that her shoes and dress didn’t match. His statement can be designated a truth in the terms of the system in which he had already, and precociously, educated himself. But systems are always changing and are always in the process of becoming. Society is always changing and representational systems ossify into formal systems that outlast their role as representation. Forms are still used even as they become brittle. And as I described in Manet and Picasso, and now with Duchamp, this is the crisis that defines modern art, which is no more or less than the art of a culture in crisis. Sometimes forms are taken up in new ways, as in Duchamp’s literary objects. Sergei Eisenstein’s favorite author was Dickens. With film the 19th century tradition moved onto a different track, so in art school we studied Vertov. Man with a Movie Camera was adopted as an example of the fine art—non-narrative—avant-garde, by which definition Eisenstein in inverse relation to his actual importance, was a maker of popular film.

Eliot’s poetry as is memorial, describing a desire to hold on to what one loves even after it’s dead. But he found a strange way to bring the dead to life. He used modern forms to describe an anti-modern philosophy and he ended up leaving behind one of the greatest descriptions that we have of the interior life of a modern conservative. If G.A. Cohen had the clarity of Eliot, he could have written a great novel about the dream and failure of communism in the west. And he would have been able to give communism a better defense than he did. What he lacked was an ability to articulate his own tragedy. He and his work will end in obscurity because both will be useless to history.

The abolitionist John Brown was a political vanguardist, avant-garde and outlier, and a more directly moral man than Lincoln. But the fact that Brown was right, simply and straightforwardly, in his absolute condemnation of slavery and slaveholders doesn’t make him a more important man. Lincoln’s moderation, his political and rhetorical expertise, even considered as partially corrupt, make him the more complex figure, precisely because Lincoln could communicate with those for whom Brown would have no patience. Lincoln was more representative of the complexities of the white, and majority, American imagination.

Brown’s politics was the fanaticism of the slaveholder’s brother, not the anger of the slave. Frederick Douglass thought the raid on Harper’s Ferry was much too dangerous. The genius of Lincoln stems from his relationships, belonging to the dominant party—moderate only in its own terms—of white America, and to the dominant language of American culture. That’s not a defense of Lincoln over Brown, or of corrupt moderation over radical action; both played their part. But any complex defense of either of them, including the possibility that Brown’s last raid was not foolhardy but a suicide mission, with the intent of driving the nation towards a final civil war, would have to be among other things, a defense of their self-awareness and of their political art. Both are important in the sense that Demoiselles d’Avignon is important: as useful to our understanding of history. But we return to them not to find answers but to ask questions that are still relevant to us, about emotions and moral responsibility, about our relations to each other.

My discussion to Harper’s Ferry and suicide missions is not the same as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s claim that the attacks on New York in 2001 were a work of art, let alone a great one. The attack was no more than spectacular stunt that killed thousands of people and led nowhere. It was in a very real way anti-political: a “fuck you”, “epater le bourgeois!” and it’s precisely the old avant-garde assumption that such violence is or ever could be an artistic gesture that allowed Stockhausen to say something so stupid. Taking Brown’s last acts seriously, as political strategy, the clear parallel is to Hamas, who are neither romantic idealists nor nihilists, but are committed as most experts agree to very specific and limited political goals. Hamas. like John Brown, and unlike al Qaeda are engaged.

The image of Palestinians in the western imagination is a perfect contemporary example of change in normative language. Over 30 years Palestinians have moved from absence to presence in our culture, while little about their own experience has changed at all. And any sociological analysis of that change in our perceptions would have to cover the entire political spectrum. Culture functions through relations of distance and proximity. Palestinian absence in the west was physical. But for Israel where they’ve always been physically present the most universal parallel is simple enough: the presence and absence of women. The original shock and continuing ambiguity of Manet’s Olympia has to do with the full presence of the central figure. She’s looking directly at us, without being very interested. The boredom itself was once shocking. But Manet made art out of the indifference of a naked whore the same way Duchamp made art out of a urinal, by moving something that was always in the world, from the background of our experience to the foreground. The change for Palestinians has been slow but simple moral logic has played no bigger a role from 1947 to 2010 than it did in 1860. The new Palestinian presence has allowed us to engage them and their experience for the first time. The Palestinian problem, modeled on the Jewish, Negro, or Woman, problems, has become the Israeli-Palestinian problem. But acknowledgement is no more than that. There is no way to work outside of time, to shorten the process of assimilation by imagining as philosophers do, an oxymoronic aperspectival view. All we can do is demonstrate the uselessness of arrogant presumption and the rhetoric of truth, and argue for replacing them, not with a fallacious truth of rhetoric, but the truth of process.

original intent: ‘Show us yer arse!’

A few months ago Chris Bertram posted Rodchenko's famous shot of Lili Brik. "Such energetic, dynamic composition in the picture, and such optimism and vigour in the woman depicted."

A commenter added: "Always interesting to see what one reads into an image. “Optimism and vigour”… or maybe she’s yelling ‘Show us yer arse!’ Which is a different kind of optimism and vigour, I’ll grant."

I posted this in 2003:

Here is an image of Picasso's famous "Guernica" from 1937.

Last year I made a similar painting, on a similar theme. I'm reproducing it below. It's called "Dresden."

The intentional fallacy applies to authors and readers, of books or countries. Israel and the Soviet Union were founded as invention, and as intention.
Chris Bertram, Zionists, and Nino Scalia, all see what they want to in themselves, in their relation to the object of their gaze, and in the object itself. They share the fantasy that they have transcended history, or that they will. The authors of the Constitution were not so optimistic and that's why it's lasted, and why it will last longer than the government it was written to define. The Rodchenko photograph will last too.

note taking
Same post discussed on this page a few days later

"Which is why I keep returning to the distinction between the “design” model of MIT and the observational model of The Wire."
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I think a good definition of art is a text, in the broadest sense of the term, where the various subtexts seem as crafted or even more crafted than the simple material; the implications so varied and yet so articulated that they seem like the result of decisions. That's the argument for the notion of what's now called the intentional fallacy and it's proven in the fact of how and why we still examine the art of the past even though we don't share any of the ideologies that it was made to illustrate. When illustrative function is gone what's left is manifestation, and not of what we call ideas but of the conflicts between them.

At some point that became explicitly the goal of what was no longer the art of flattery -for princes and patrons- but an independent art of description, as it had perhaps been earlier or was still elsewhere in pre-commercial economies. But as Panofsky said, if commercial art can end up as a whore, independent "noncommercial" art in a commercial economy can end up an old maid. Which is why all I'm talking about is one form or another of commercial art.

John McCreery, you're describing examples of advertising, an art of flattery, that has in your opinion has produced an actual art. But it is not so because of its function but on top of it. Read my comments on McCracken. Or begin here. It's funnier. More vulgar than Maki but not unrelated.
McCrcken sees advertising function as art, and 'content' manipulation as art. If official portraits made to glorify kings can be art there's no reason modern advertising can't be also, but the intent to glorify, or sell, is not the measure of success.

The paradox of anthropology applies to studying salesmen too. You've never understand sales unless you do it for a living. But if you get caught up in it, you won't either.
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"Creatives" I hate that term.
Do you know how much time goes into every jingle you hear? Every new sneaker design? Ads are made to be disposable. I sat on the beach with an oscar-winning production designer watching him draw out plans for a 4 million dollar 30 second spot; scratching out patterns on the sand with a stick. It's a day job and they all make their money that way. And I don't even like his movies much: the things he'd prefer to be doing. By your logic the fact that you work really hard and you're a loyal servant of the king makes you a great artist. Both are irrelevant.

"But I don’t want to leave Maki as nothing more than a labeled node in a network analysis diagram."

And that's why you want to celebrate "creatives" because otherwise your life is flat. In an academic culture where subjectivity is seen as secondary, apart and merely personal, what's left that's human deserves unconditional love. But subjectivity is constitutive, it's part and partial of consciousness, and the petty seductions you celebrate as poetry are just your way to rationalize your sense of the true superiority of reason; until Doktor Immanuel Rath gets floored by Lola. Rath is not the poet, his tragedy is the subject of a poem.

The people who shoot ads are in LA, and they laugh at the intellectuals on Madison Ave who come up with the ideas. They're the stagehands who know what's going to happen from the moment Rath walks into the theater. They understand how culture works, and what people are. The intellectuals don't. But I'd like to say that's because the intellectuals are not what they claim, but only schoolmen, and an intellectual is something more.
An intellectual is someone who understands the distinction between Rath and von Sternberg
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“Seth, I did not say that advertising is art. I explicitly rejected as nonsense your claim that all that copywriters care about is content.”

I agreed as much as copywriters are craftsmen. But I don’t pay that much attention to scriptwriters either. Maybe there’s a literary craft in Japanese advertising that functions as the equivalent to the visual and theatrical craft in western advertising. That would be a very interesting topic. It would also involve close reading and connoisseurship rather than labeled nodes and network analyses. I’m curious.

This is all still contra the MIT model of intellectual economic vanguardism and intellectual “designers” and designed intellectualism. You seem pulled in both directions.
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Purity of art has nothing to do with it.
McCracken has no interest in form. His interest is content. Rather than a justice on the Supreme Court who believes in the doctrine of original intent vis-a-vis the Constitution (a doctrine that's not taken very seriously by serious thinkers) he's an author who believes in it regarding his own writing. And strangely at that point the doctrine is accepted. In other words we can't know the past but the futrure will know us. When a well known philosophy professor says History is Bunk (scroll down) no one bats an eye, because to him we are the future.

We communicate in form, in media. Content does not transfer. You may imagine that human communication consists of things like me telling you "one plus one equals two" but it doesn't. Outside very limited areas it consists of things like someone saying "Trust me." What's communicated in that? Trust? No. Trustworthyness? No. And on and on. McCracken is Dr. Immanuel Rath as techno futurist. The 20th century saw enough of those criminal buffoons. I called him a Stalinist for a reason. The illustration of ideas does not communicate those ideas to anyone who does not share them.

We communicate in art, in all the rhetoric we use above and around the words we use when we say: "Trust me." Use your "labeled nodes and network analyses" but you're the one who's ignoring structure not me. You and Dr. Alex Rosenberg, and Dr. McCracken and Dr. Rath. The last of them at least realized his mistake. But you can ignore him if you want. After all, he's only a fictional character in the movies.
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I understand that you're defensive about the way you've chosen to live your life, and that you don't pay attention to the details of criticism. Graphing is easy, interpretation is hard.

I have the same arguments with defenders of late Picasso. Describing in their own words how good the work is they describe nothing more than their own tastes. I respond by describing it in the context of the culture of 1955-72 with all else that happened and reply that late Picasso seems unimportant. Doing the same for the work of 1904-1920 the result is different. We'll see how it plays out.

You would call all this unsupported assertion. By comparison your only substantive assertion is that people you know care about their work, and the "form" of their work. I accept that. But still that says no more than that some people care about the form of late Picasso. And nothing is learned about the work your friends enjoy, or late Picasso.