Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Killing Art

If your name were Fine you would naturally be drawn to the world of fine art. If you were an academic scholar named Gary Alan Fine, a professor at Northwestern University, you would be drawn to study the Masters of Fine Arts programs in Chicago.

To guide us through Fine’s new book, Talking Art, we have a Harvard graduate student named Charlie Tyson.

If you had been holding out hope for the world of fine art, Tyson’s essay about Fine’s book will disabuse you of your illusion. In a slightly better world Tyson would have open his essay with a line from Italian poetry:

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.

You immediately recognize it as the slogan that welcomes you to Dante’s Inferno. In English, it reads: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Fine arts programs supposedly prepare some students to be artists. They prepare others to teach in universities or even to curate and criticize art. In itself, this is harmless. In reality, when translated into work, it descends into pure idiocy:

The book treats us to the spectacle of a distinguished, gray-headed scholar — Fine himself, of course — watching as a young artist commands her audience to spit Jell-O into her pantyhose. "I like to question the socially constructed notions of our sense of sex," she declares. Our hapless sociologist-hero scribbles notes as a male art student screens hard-core pornography as part of his "practice." Another artist-in-waiting reflects: "For me the vagina is the solution."

Will any serious and sentient adult consider this to be art. Does it not more closely indulge the infantilism of today's coddled children? Art students are initiated into a cult where people speak a foreign language, one filled with passwords that make no coherent sense.

The book’s main interest for those of us in academia, however, may lie elsewhere. The appeal of ethnography, by turns prurient and educative, comes from the privileged access it grants to an alien way of life. But the spectacle of a cohort of students trained to speak in a rarefied lexicon, vying for their professors’ approval, instructed to compete for a tiny number of unstable jobs while courting hostility from the larger world, will not strike anyone on a university campus as unfamiliar. The M.F.A. is graduate school in a funhouse mirror.

If you think that art has something to do with knowing how to draw, you would be seriously out of date:

the academic institutions that serve as gatekeepers for the art world praise the conceptual, the alienating, and the abstract while disparaging craftsmanship as "merely" pretty and "merely" illustrative — and a sure sign of political quietism.

It gets worse. Students do not study art history and they are taught to disparage anything that appears to contain the least smidgeon of beauty. Tyson continues:

In the programs that Fine surveys, students take no classes on technique, and most take no art history. One senior faculty member likens a course on drawing to learning Latin. Another scoffs at the "preciousness" of Northern European Renaissance painting. "I’m sure we could all make beautiful Monet paintings or Picasso paintings if we wanted to," one student says brazenly, "but that’s not what we want to do."

The M.F.A. programs identify beauty with commercialism and with naïve illustration devoid of ideas. Art that aims for beauty, Fine writes, echoing the assumptions of his interview subjects, creates a "merchandising aesthetic. … An emphasis on the beautiful suggests an absence of critical content." Yet there is a contradiction here, as Fine acknowledges: If beauty is commercial, then why do elite collectors, in step with art-world conventions, clamor after "ugly" art?

One notes, with chagrin and dismay, that collectors have drunk deeply of this swill. It’s not just about making non-art. It’s about adopting the right pose, looking the part. If your work cannot speak for itself, you can at least put on a beret and look like a starving artist. But you must also master the art of bullshit.

The M.F.A. trains artists to talk about their work with slickness and flair, in conformity with the lexicon of the art world. The premise of M.F.A. education, Fine says, is "helping students not only to be artists, but also to look the part." Making art is not enough; aspiring artists must be able to articulate and defend the political and conceptual interventions their work performs. Learning to "look the part" entails firm, sometimes punitive, lessons in self-presentation. This instruction takes place at the program’s central ritual: the critique.

It gets worse. Art students are supposedly being taught how to think. And yet, nothing about the process leads Tyson to believe that they have the least notion of what it means to think:

In today’s M.F.A. programs, Fine concludes, "learning to think takes priority over learning to make." But do M.F.A. students learn to think well? Art schools require students to justify and explain their art in highly theoretical terms, but give them no adequate instruction in philosophy, literature, or any other discursive field that prizes subtle distinctions or analytical clarity. M.F.A. candidates are assigned books by Fredric Jameson, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and other prophets bellowing down from the cliffs of high theory.

But the students seldom do more than skim the reading, Fine reports, so as to reserve the bulk of their time for work in the studio. Seminar discussions of these complicated theoretical texts — led, typically, by professional artists, not art historians, literary theorists, or philosophers — do little to explicate the ideas. Students are encouraged to invoke theory, Fine suggests, as a way of claiming authority. The actual texts often remain unread….

We can, and should, argue about the merits of the various theorists in the art-school canon, and about how much theory artists need in the first place. The problem is that this education in theory, supposedly central, is superficial: The thinkers are too often reduced to slogans or catchwords. (Scholars in the humanities are not immune to this kind of posturing, but judging from Fine’s account, it seems rarer there.) That we get artist statements quoted here that begin, "I question modernity, while constantly interrogating Cartesian duality …" — blind lumbering in the dark plains of philosophy — results not from student incompetence but from misplaced expectations.

To say that this education in high theory is superficial is overly generous. It is pure gibberish. Students have no idea what they are reading, and yet they learn to mouth the proper phrases. The point, Tyson correctly notes, is to affirm membership in a cult.

The student is asked to discard the values of the larger society and prove his loyalty to a subculture. He learns to speak, haltingly at first, a language of authority, redolent with Latinate abstractions. The dim professional prospects in the field are worried over, regretted. The advised solution is to double down, to win approval from the elders, to specialize and reposition until the work becomes bloodless trivia. The self-fashioning that the subculture requires for success inside the cloister opens a gash between the student and the world he has left behind; the glances he jealously casts outward seem to confirm a mutual disdain.

As we have noted, there is a market for this silliness. Thus, try as we might, we cannot dismiss it entirely. And yet, the marketplace has been so thoroughly corrupted. The result has been that the mania over multiculturalism and rage to be radically French has produced a subculture dedicated to nothing other than to killing art.

12 comments:

Dr. Irredeemable Dreg said...

Channeling the World's Most Interesting Man...

I don't always do art, but when I do, I prefer Silly String and Betty Page ephemera. Stay edgy, my friends.

whitney said...

That sounds remarkably similar to the philosophy world described in the Avital Ronell abuse case.
We are living in a post truth world but truth exist and it will reassert itself. It always does

Dan Patterson said...

"...affirm membership in a cult." Brother you've said a mouthful!
What was once a site of study, learning, intellectual growth, and universal knowledge has become a tailor's shop for the emperor's new clothes. What hooey comes from those ivy covered halls, and what tripe is produced by their graduates; it seems to outsiders the fine arts are no more than finger-painting for adult children trying to avoid adult responsibilities. "See what I made mommy!". Bah. Nothing NOTHING good will come of the pursuit of pride and the fine arts scene is proof.
Very good summary and thank you for posting it.

Anonymous said...

I've offered previously my view that this is an intentional, aggressive destruction of (our former) culture...
and can be traced to the German Frankfurt School and its "March through the Institutions".

The destructive system has been in place at least since the Armory show in NYC of 1913. Duchamp had a primary role in "the game". Look up Willi Munzenberg for quotes and ideas from an F. School member.

A society without beauty. What joy.

"One senior faculty member likens a course on drawing to learning Latin."

I neither learned, nor read,nor speak Latin. I do,however, recognize it is a powerful tool for thinking, of which modern academia is willfully ignorant.

Ask a modern academic about the Trivium and Quadrivium. Prepare for blank stares.

- shoe

Tom Hendrix said...

This is a nice companion piece to Tom Wolfe’s “The Painted Word” (1975)

Stuart Schneiderman said...

Thanks for recalling Wolfe... amazing to think that the book is over 40 years old.

Sam L. said...

"Yet there is a contradiction here, as Fine acknowledges: If beauty is commercial, then why do elite collectors, in step with art-world conventions, clamor after "ugly" art?"
Colleges and liberals are leftists, who ADORE ugliness because it's "real" and "raw".

I do not go to art exhibits, but I wonder, are there "artists" who do "Philip Glass" paintings (unpainted canvases, in the spirit of Glass' 4' 12")?

sestamibi said...

Some things never change. More recently, in "Back to Blood" (2013), Wolfe had a scene at the Miami Art Basel in which a performance artist pulled out a string of sausages from her vagina that she had previously placed there, all while chanting "defucked, defucked".

And to show that life really imitates art (or is it the other way around?), the following actually DID occur at the Miami Art Basel three years ago:

https://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/visual-arts/art-basel/article48069515.html

Note in particular graf 4 of the story.

Sam L. said...

It would appear that the "arts" crowd has "issues". Good thing that was an X-acto knife (with a short blade), and not a largish kitchen knife. An 8" or 10" knife could have killed her.

David Foster said...

"Art schools require students to justify and explain their art in highly theoretical terms, but give them no adequate instruction in philosophy, literature, or any other discursive field that prizes subtle distinctions or analytical clarity. M.F.A. candidates are assigned books by Fredric Jameson, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and other prophets bellowing down from the cliffs of high theory."

I think I've previously cited a thought from Andre Maurois: People who are intelligent, but not in any way creative, tend to eagerly latch on to intellectual systems developed by others and to apply them rigidly.

Probably has a lot to do with what's happening in the academic art field.

Also, the higher-education establishment is pursuing a growth-at-any-price model, which implies attracting a lot of students who may not have the talent to do serious art.

autothreads said...

The emperor is parading around the academy with his schvantz out while everyone talks of his fine haberdashery.

Anonymous said...

Modern Art Was (is) a CIA Weapon:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html