The Emperor's New Clothes

[Cynth]

I don't know anything about business claptrap but with regard to Modern Poetry, 4:33 and Modern Art I am reminded of Louis Armstrongs famous remark about Jazz,

“Man, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know.”

Well, see, this statement disturbs me.

If I go to a museum and see something like this:

Robert Rauschenberg
White Painting
1951
collection of the artist

I really don't have much to say about it. I don't say it is bad nor do I say it is good. I don't know what he is getting at. I don't find it repellent, nor do I find it interesting although it seems sort of pleasantly calming. So I feel that the most intelligent response would be to ask what it is since I assume that knowing something more might enable me to respond in some way. If knowing more has nothing to do with it, then that is saying to me that I am inherently incapable of any sort of engagement in any postmodern, or whatever the right term is, art (painting, music, literature, whatever). Which is probably quite true but is, nevertheless, somewhat disturbing. I suppose this painting is actually modern, not postmodern but I think my problem can still be discerned.

[Wombat]

Absolutely right. It's fun to do if you are Derrida—i.e., if you have his skill, his wit and his extraordinary erudition—but since almost nobody has any two of these, it's hopeless trying to copy it. Many who try appear to be funny only because their earnestness brings to light associations that really are funny—if they knew what I was laughing at they'd be appalled.

What's most distressing is that for the past forty years or so, the face of deconstruction in english has scrunched up in fury like a baby just about to wail.

Derrida was having Fun. Paul DeMann less so, but ALL the north american adoptees of their ideas are in a constant fury--about colonialism, sexism, feminism, thisism and thatism. Or their opposites--deconstruction is just as useful for attacking either side.

But it's NO FUN. They don't get that it's all a joke, and they're well on the way to being consumed by rage.

It really is appalling behaviour, and what's worse is that entire faculties have been infiltrated by their nonsense-heaving adherents.

Two incidents brought home to me how damaging this is this academic year.

On the first occasion I was videoconferencing to campuses all over the south of New South Wales on the topic of meaning. One student who was close to finishing an English major said to me, 'You talk as though communication is commonplace but surely meaning is indefinitely deferred.' My reply was 'Imagine you are crossing a road absent mindedly and I see a car speeding up on your right and shout, 'Watch out to your right.' How long do you think you have to defer meaning on this occasion?' To my relief, the other students laughed. But she persisted, 'So for the purposes of this course, we are to regard meaning as determinate.' I replied 'Disregarding clear respects in which it isn't like vagueness and ambiguity, for 99% of your life you should regard meaning as more or less determinate except when people are talking nonsense.' A tactful tutor stepped in and said 'You're learning the commonsense theory of meaning which postmodernism critiques, you really ought to know that is being critiqued before you learn that critique.' I agreed, but pointed out that you should bring to the critique an equally critical attitude and ask yourself how often you can afford the luxury of abandoning commonsense notions of sense, reference and communicative speech acts.

On the second occasion, a student was sent to me from another subject to discuss dichotomies suggested by the notion of genetic engineering. (I'm the guy in the faculty who teaches this stuff.) After we chatted for a while quite pleasantly about genetic engineering, I asked her precisely what question she was trying to answer. She hummed and hawed and never really came up with anything at all focussed. I concluded that her task was the academic equivalent of 'jam on this Dm7 chord for the next ten minutes.' I really don't get it. What's the point of aggressively declining to teach or learn analytical and critical skills?

[s1m0n]

What's the point of aggressively declining to teach or learn analytical and critical skills?

Because once you eliminate both, all contests come down to a matter of who's louder.

As the advice to new lawyers goes: "If you're strong on the facts and weak on the law, pound on the facts. If you're weak on the facts and strong in the law, pound on the law. And if you're weak on the facts and weak on the law, pound on the table."

Deconstruction is the tactic for those who are weak on analysis and weak on critical thinking. It's pounding on tables, and insisting that all utterance is nothing but a pounded table.

[Guest]

Modern poetry (If it has no meter, no rhyme scheme, no alliteration, in short: no discipline, isn’t it just…..prose?)

<br>
E.E. Cummings is the cat's pajamas!

[ErikT]

Deconstruction is the tactic for those who are weak on analysis and weak on critical thinking. It's pounding on tables, and insisting that all utterance is nothing but a pounded table.

I've known a lot of quiet decon guys, though.

[Walden]

I've known a lot of quiet decon guys, though.

Never trust a quiet deacon.

[CHCBrown]

We have a saying where I come from:

“I tried to pull a guy’s leg and it came off in my hand”

The intent of the OP was to have a little fun. I understand that one cannot dismiss modern art, music and literature simply because they do not conform to older models. I understand also that there is work of real value done in all these fields.

One begins to get the feeling, however, that a significant motivation in modern (excuse me, post-modern) expression is nothing more than to distinguish itself from what came before.

What is more disturbing to me is the how much of modern expression era seems to be, not the result of discipline, hard work, and an attempt to interact with the audience but simply adolescent eruption, stream of consciousness, intellectual masturbation, if you will. Or, on the other hand, and to continue the sexual metaphor, an incestuous activity on the part of specialists, creating what only they and their limited circle understand.

It is interesting to note how much time is spent explaining modern expression.

Nobody has to tell me why I am moved by Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, I simply am swept up in it. The arrogance and futility expressed in Ozymandias need no explanation. When D’Artangnan and the Comte de Rocheforte cross swords, I can hear the clash of steel and feel the blade thrust home.

When I look at “White Painting” however, all I see is a blank canvas (but then docent explains the artists’ intent). When I listen to an arrhythmic, atonal musical “composition,” I just get a headache (but I am rescued by the liner notes which explain to me why I should be enthralled!).

Old is not good just because it is old, but neither is new good just because it’s new.

[s1m0n]

Nobody has to tell me why I am moved by Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, I simply am swept up in it. ... When I listen to an arrhythmic, atonal musical “composition,” I just get a headache (but I am rescued by the liner notes which explain to me why I should be enthralled!).

Where do you stand on Stravinsky? Are you moved by The Rite of Spring?

Because comtemporary audiences felt about that the way you do about atonal music. Worse, in fact--they rioted in the theatre.

How about the impressionists? Is Monet great art? How about Cezanne? Do you want to guess what contemporary audiences thought about them?

Yeah, they thought their kids could paint like that.

[Wombat]

What's the point of aggressively declining to teach or learn analytical and critical skills?

Because once you eliminate both, all contests come down to a matter of who's louder.

As the advice to new lawyers goes: "If you're strong on the facts and weak on the law, pound on the facts. If you're weak on the facts and strong in the law, pound on the law. And if you're weak on the facts and weak on the law, pound on the table."

Deconstruction is the tactic for those who are weak on analysis and weak on critical thinking. It's pounding on tables, and insisting that all utterance is nothing but a pounded table.

I suppose you're right. But the odd thing is that this doesn't impact much on me at all, which is why I asked the question. I suppose a lot of students are deconstructing like crazy in their English, Cultural studies and Sociology classes. But when they come to hear me talk about bioethics and environmental ethics and I discuss overpopulation and the new biotechnologies in unapologetically commonsense language, nobody has ever told me that I ought to take more notice of Derrida. Not once, ever. Some have troubles writing critical essays, but we have some stock advice that sees most of them through to a decent standard.

I can only imagine that when they leave the English lecture theatre, they must check the attitudes they just learned at the door and just get on with their lives as though postmodernism were something you just have to learn to pass English. To be sure, a lot of my students are science students, but a lot aren't.

I still wonder what these people will do when the fashion changes. They won't be trained for anything else, and if they are bitter now, how much worse will it be when they are waiting around for retirement playing the role of exhibit A to the next generation of young scholars who've gone back to talking sense. Perhaps the bitterness is a result of their seeing in advance what might well be in store for them.

If you've acquired subtle critical skills, you might never be fashionable, but you can adapt to whatever the winds of change throw at you. Academic life would be pointless and unbearable for me without them.

[CHCBrown]

As I believe I mentioned in a previous post, I did not say that valuable work hasn’t been done in the modern era. What I will say now is that too much dross is being accepted uncritically because the definition of art has been extended to include almost any spasm of the imagination.

Somehow we have traveled from Monet to Andres Serrano dashing a crucifix in a jar of urine (or the artist portrayed above presenting a blank canvas).

From the Firebird Suite we have descended to the cacophonous clashing of instruments overlaid by apparently random shrieks and groans I heard recently but, unfortunately, failed to note the “artist’s” name (pity, too, as I’ll be humming that tune all day).

We have broadened the spectrum so wide that smearing one’s body with chocolate syrup can be accepted as “performance art” without blinking.

[GaryKelly]

Jerome Witkin, a professor of art at Syracuse University, said (of the piece above and another very similar) "very, very beautiful. They are so positive and affirmative and tense, the energy is so compact and controlled, it's just incredible. This piece is so graceful, so delicate, I can't get most of my students to fill a page like this."

Witkin compared the work with that of Willem de Kooning. When they were shown to Kooning, his wife, Elaine, who was an excellent artist in her own right, had this to say, "We felt they had a kind of flair and decisiveness and originality. . . The drawings do not have a random quality. They are not accidental. They have the same kind of rhythm and verve one sometimes observes in the little dance steps [of] elephants . . ."(13)

After learning that the art that he had praised had been done by an elephant, Jerome Witkin wasn't disappointed or embarrassed. He said, "I'm even more impressed. Our egos as human beings have prevented us for too long from watching for the possibility of artistic expression in other beings."


"Art for art's sake, Money for God's sake" - 10CC

[SteveShaw]

I have my own criteria for art that I've arrived at without reference to any source. I really ought to read more. Anyhow, they are as follows, and I apologise for the word "recipient:"

(1) Great art can only be produced by a few people.
(2) The ability to produce great art requires the acquisition of skills to an exceptionally high level.
(3) Production of great art not only requires inspiration but also blood, sweat and tears, but:
(4) the signs of that hard labour will not be apparent to the recipient, though the sense of struggle may be apparent if that is what the artist intended to convey.
(5) The work must readily engender interaction between the art and the recipient - therefore it must be able to communicate and not set out to confuse or bamboozle or mystify. For me, silent music and white walls fall down for this reason. But the work must not tell all - the interaction between the work and the recipient is the only thing that gives life to art.
(6) Great art works on many levels. A small child can look at a Turner and love the colours. A professor of music may be able to point to layers in a late Beethoven sonata that I have never uncovered even though I've heard it countless times. Or vice versa...
(7) Great art is free of ego. I can't bear the naked ego of Wagner's music-dramas, and Tracey Emin's bed is Tracey Emin's ego.

There - a load of old bilge but I'm standing by to be developed!

Steve

[CHCBrown]

Steve,

An elegant summation.


Thanks for sharing it.

[JS]

If you don't like or get Rauschenberg (or Pollock, or...), there's Edward Hopper or Fairfield Porter or any number of contemporary figurative painters whose work might please your eye. If experimental fiction is too convoluted, well, there's a line of terse, realistic writers running from Hemingway through Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. (Not to mention John Updike standing off to the side, chuckling.) If John Ashbery's poems seem like an in-group sort of thing, then there's always ...

On the one hand, life's short, work's long--if we go, in our limited open time, to art that speaks to us immediately, that deals in what we already recognize and value, no blame there. On the other, spending some time with work that requires some re-thinking, a different way of seeing or of organizing language can have a liberating effect, after the initial frustration. I don't know that I'd want to exclude that possiblility for fear that I might be fooled.

[dubhlinn]

Imagine being all booted and suited, dolled up to the nines, sitting alongside your equally well garbed lady in a concert hall and 4' 33" begins..ha!
The first thirty seconds will pass before you begin to wonder "Am I being conned here?"..you begin to feel uncomfortable, start to itch, want to move.You dare not turn around for fear of looking foolish and god forbid that you should make eye contact with somebody else who is feeling the same sense of strangeness.You really want to steal a peek at your watch but any such movement will be noticed by the people on either side of you and you will look impatient or even worse, unappreciative.
Two mins have passed and you are feeling very hot under the collar and that loud noise you can hear is your heart beating faster and faster.Two minutes ..and it feels like a week.
Somebody behind you coughs, it sounds like a shotgun blast beside your ear and now you feeel like somebody is pouring a sack of sand down your throat.In a reflex action you move your leg, it brushes off the knee of the guy beside you. Now you are really getting jumpy...Don't look at him..let it pass.
You are trying not to look up at the stage because everybody knows that there is nothing to see up there.

Finally, just as you are about to collapse from the stress of it all it's over..a thunderous round of applause breaks out, people cheer and shout. Noise never sounded so welcome before. Beautiful meaningless noise, you are alive again and bursting with happiness now that your ordeal is over. Rejoice.

The great Art in 4' 33" is in how Cage forces us to face up to and try to deal with our fear of silence in a crowded room. The majority of people cannot deal with sitting still and remaining silent in the close proximity of others.
Cages genius is that he captures us and forces us to be silent and still. In our attempt to deal with this we must face up to our fear and discomfort.
This is Art that lives, breathes and shakes us by the throat until we are weak and begging for release.

Absolute genius.

Slan,
D.