Comments on Ethan Ham: Complexification

MoMA did a "high and low" show a number of years a...

2008-02-06T11:09:00.000-05:00

MoMA did a "high and low" show a number of years ago...really great, actually. Worth looking at the catalogue.

Hmm... see, I think at first blush it's more insul...

2008-02-04T14:26:00.000-05:00

Hmm... see, I think at first blush it's more insulting to be told that you're not doing Contemporary Art, because it either suggests that what you're doing is not art, or that it's art somehow frozen in time... that it's beholden to the nineteenth century or the 1930s, even though you just did it now.

This sort of reminds me of the term "Old Testament", and the unconscious prejudice I often encounter among well-meaning non-Jews who imagine that Judaism is a snapshot of ancient Israelite religion... that it's what came "before" Christianity. Essentially, the Jews are frozen in time while Christianity has moved forward... all that stuff with the Mishnah and the Gemara and the Pirke Avot is just more of the same, or not really relevant.

Similarly, even accepting that "Contemporary Art" is a misnomer, your discussion with the Wikipedia editors seems to imply that movements in commercial or popular art do not change anything fundamental -- that those are still old masterly or modernist aesthetics at work, preserved and fossilized, even if their creators think they are doing something new.

Maybe high and low aren't the right terms -- maybe we should use "gallery" and "street"? But in any event, I would rather be told I am doing 21st century commercial, popular, street, or even trash art, than be told I am not doing 21st century art at all.

What you say makes sense, but I think it is unfort...

2008-02-04T09:19:00.000-05:00

What you say makes sense, but I think it is unfortunate to start tossing around the terms "high" & "low" art... they are a bit obnoxious as terms and I think people who find themselves defined as doing "low art" would not appreciate the label (whereas they probably wouldn't mind being described as not doing Contemporary Art).

Yeah, it doesn't look like you made that much head...

2008-02-04T06:07:00.000-05:00

Yeah, it doesn't look like you made that much headway on Wikipedia. :-) The article bluntly states that Contemporary Art is art produced either since WWII, or at the present time... which clearly includes landscape still lifes bought down at the local Art Mart.

In addition, the proposal you were tentatively advancing instead -- that CA consists of art from the *movements* since WWII
-- seems to me also problematic. What constitutes a movement? The definition is actually circular, because what you really mean is a contemporary art movement. In fantasy illustration, from the 1960s on, Boris Vallejo and Rowena attracted hordes of admirers drawing mighty-thewed warriors and bikini'd swordmaidens. Clearly by any reasonable definition this is, all lowercase, a post-WWII movement in art. But equally clearly it's not what you mean.

Is it really too late to advocate for some other umbrella term which would make clear what we're really talking about, in a way that could be communicated to laypeople -- like the wikipedia editors? I'm not saying one could change it by fiat, but perhaps one could talk about some alternative, with the goal that ultimately museums and syllabi would start using some non-absurd term....

I am drawn back to the term "high", as in Contemporary High Art, which seems to me sort of honest. What we're really talking about here is power relations. A given movement, or body of work, wouldn't necessarily need to be conceptual or intentional, for instance, to gain a foothold in the museums and courses that actually define what you mean by Contemporary Art. There could be an anti-conceptual reaction movement that could make headway, for instance. But the real litmus test is that it captures the attention of the concentrations of social and financial capital represented by universities, museums, arts columns in the NYT, and so on.

Contemporary High Art would be a non-absurd term, because in looking at the watercolors from the Art Mart, you'd be asking the question "is this High Art?", ie "does it hold a position on the heights of the economic pyramid which organizes power relations in our culture?" And that, stripped of pretense, is what the questions that a curator deciding whether or not to hang it in a museum ("is it important? relevant? significant? part of the tradition of the avant garde?") really come down to.

Wikipedia editors and other hoi polloi would immediately understand that Contemporary High Art does not refer to comic book covers -- unless and until those comic book covers happen to be embraced by the organizations of the intelligensia, academia, museums, etc.

We'd still argue about what was "High", in other words, but then we'd actually be recapitulating the real discussion which takes place in the process of canonization and cultural valorization... while the term "CA" has us, as you did on wikipedia, arguing about what is "Contemporary", and forced therefore to take linguistically absurd positions.