What makes a critic?

This is a perennial debate and one that I have tried to clip comments on and keep track of. I have to say this latest exchange (between the Guardian's Johnathon Jones and Minnesota Orchestra's Sam Bergman) is kinda disappointing. Perhaps it's because it happens in blogs, where so much is truncated or overly general to start with. (How's that for general?) But perhaps it's because neither of them appears to be advancing an especially interesting argument.

Jones seems to think that trusting his gut and being loud is enough. Bergman is content to point out that it may not be in this polyphonic age. But neither of them seems to get at the reason there might be criticism in the first place - because art and music and theater and cinema and all manner of cultural production are things to talk about. The most interesting things in such conversations are often said by those who are deeply knowledgeable of the history and traditions of the area, invested in maintaining a high level of quality (or in attaining one), and thoughtful and attentive about the specific work under discussion. That doesn't discount the possibility that a newcomer to the conversation might have something insightful to say, or that someone from outside its usual boundaries mightn't have something to offer. I think those things happen all the time (that's why I talk to anybody who wants to talk about art). But those are unusual events that depend on an individual's sensitivity and eloquence, whereas knowledge, investment, and attentiveness are skills that can be sharpened.

I am interested in circulating one idea of Jones - in his blog posting he writes:

The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticism is; if nothing is properly criticised [sic], mediocrity triumphs.

This is an interesting notion. One that hints at a 'proper' way to criticize art that could be beneficial to artists (it wouldn't be construed as mere opinion) as well as audiences (who suddenly have a responsible role in making art better by criticizing it).

For a few years, I've taught graduate seminars in criticism. Every time I teach a studio class, I stress to my students that its' not enough to make your own art - you must contribute to the discussion of others (that, to me is how art is made out of mere images and objects...but talking about them as if they were important). I would be interested in anyone else's thoughts on what constitutes "proper" criticism...

..One more silly thing on 'Moby Dick'

I have been meaning to do this for a while. In Microsoft Word, there's a tremedously silly feature called 'AutoSummarize' that condenses long texts into shorter versions. It can be set to highlight key points or spit out summaries of various lengths. It's a hoot.

I put in Chapter 42 of Melville's Moby Dick and told it I wanted a summary that was 5% of the original text. Here's what it gave me:

What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.

Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Goney! never! Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe.

Yipes. If you jack it up to 10%, you get the sentence "It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me", which is also in the first paragraph.

Word Clouds

I saw a mention of Wordle online some place and really liked the image it made of Moby Dick. I used chapter 42 - the Whiteness of the Whale - because I'm familiar with it. Here's a screen shot (the program's sharing capacities are pretty cruddy). You might want to play with it. I suggest having a heap of words ready...say a letter you've written or something like that. Be sure to mess with all the options in the menu...
enjoy!

Lincoln - on video

This one came from artist Shawn Beeks - more Lincoln leads welcome any time...

Findings 2 - Looking at Lincoln

Here's a little more from the Lincoln picture file...

More Lincoln in the afterlife... D. T. Weist, In Memory of Abraham Lincoln: The Reward of the Just, 1865

Avenging Lincoln from The Simpsons...

It's show time...

Recent Research - Looking at Lincoln

Lately, I've been thinking about the Civil War for a bit of writing I have to do. Thus, I've been thinking of Lincoln. What with the bicentennial of is birth this year, I'm obviously not alone. Here are some of the images I've turned up in the routine process of looking for things I go through as I start doing research...I though others might be amused...

One of my favorite images of Lincoln is this print of the Apotheosis of Lincoln. I'm gathering similar images and will post them shortly...

I came across this one looking for "Lincoln Vampire" on Google...I think of it as the Lincolnator

From an episode of Star Trek (The Savage Curtain) in which Lincoln visits the Enterprise...well an alien disguised as Lincoln...who's trying to enlist Kirk and Spock's help in a battle on his home world with Ghengis Kahn and others...oh never mind...

LA Artist Trek Kelly gives a new spin on proclaiming emancipation.

Frank Wu imagines a Lunar Lincoln...who's also a zombie.

That's how the story goes

Just a pointer today; I wanted to call out about Jessica Helfand's post about narrative on Design Observer. I am looking at my students' projects on narrative and I doubt I was convincing to them as I tried to argue that its return to contemporary art is one of the most important aspects of the art of our time. Wish I'd seen this first.

Oh, and it makes me feel vindicated about asking my students to give the 'elevator pitch' for their thesis papers...

A digression on zombies (still not about life)

Up front - let me totally clear about this - I like zombies as much as the next guy. I've always been more of an aliens-person, it's true, but zombies are okay.

So don't take my following comments on Adam Cohen's New York Times Op-Ed Mr. Darcy Woos Elizabeth Bennet While Zombies Attack as some kind of anti-zombie rant. I've got no problem with the undead.

It's not even Seth Grahame-Smith's riff on Jane Austen that has me out looking for brains. It's thinking about the book as a cultural phenomenon and how it relates to the use of others' words images and ideas.

But first, about mash ups. When Cohen calls Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a mash up, some kind lexicographer's alarm goes off in my head. To me that's like saying gin and tonic is a mash up. What does the New York Times know from mash ups anyway? A lot it turns out. They've used the phrase more than 3000 times (Wired.com has on 1080 uses since 2006...which sounds awfully light...but they're good, as in when they talked to DJ Spooky in 2007). When I think mash up, I think about two or more things fused into a new whole in such a way that the component parts are still distinguishable. Somehow, the at of combining these parts has something to say about each part - it helps us see it in a new light or understand it better.

At first, I don't think of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that way - mostly because it's a specific work plus a genre of other works. So It's not like a gin and tonic, it's more like chicken nuggets with teryaki sauce...something is added to the chicken nugget to give it a general flavor. That could be anything, the distinction to me seems to reside in whether it's two individual things which bring their histories and contexts to the strange union that is a mash up, or whether it's partly made of specific and general ingredients...

...and I'm not sure what's the case with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. What's really interesting to me is how it has proliferated through a variety of conversations. When I used to teach art criticism, I had my students read a whole year of an art magazine to see what outlets covered what artists first. When we looked over a year, we could chart the trickledown of an artist from elite publications with smaller circulations to more mass-market outlets. Ideas would shift and blur as they moved through the discourse... it's kind of cool to watch.

But Pride and Prejudice and Zombies seems to be everywhere all at once. It's an exciting shift in how things work - appearing suddenly in a lot places at one time, the book seems to have achieved the kind of viral velocity that people love to imagine happening but which seldom really occurs.

Of course, to me the great fun of this is that all of this involves telling an old story through another kind of story. What it's about is storytelling and how a story is affected by bringing it into another genre. It's not about life, it's about how stories work. But more on that in our next post.

Me, I'd be okay if it were aliens. But zombies will do. Like I said, nothing against zombies.

Not About Life, Pt. 1

Inspired largely by Judith Schaechter's excellent post on her 'Late Breaking Noose' blog, I wanted to talk a write a little about others' images and ideas and how these things fit into my work lately.

But where Judith's observations were prompted by thoughts on authenticity, I'm more interested in looking at the related ideas of authorship and authority. The art world, as always a reflection of the world around it, has been comically obsessed with authenticity for years (if one more person tells me they're trying to "keep it real" I will not be held responsible for my actions). In 2005, TheoryLab convened a reading group on the subject. But what's the relationship between one image and another similar image made by another person for another purpose? Or between an image we all know and another that tries to glom on to the status of the original?

To address these questions, I want to bring in some things I was thinking about when Jane Irish asked me to come to the ICA to be part of a night of discussion and demonstrations about the Dirt on Delight show.

Jane was at my studio talking about the program and offhandedly remarked that we both use others' writing in our work. Perhaps because this is so central to me, I stopped thinking about it. Perhaps it was because there are wildly different degrees of legibility about what we do it hadn't occurred to me that we had this in common. At the time, I was reading Hillel Schwartz's odd and wonderful book, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, and a light clicked on.

Schwartz's (to me entirely reasonable) theory is that we live in a world that is dominated by duplicates, and it is through repetition that meaning is made. The unique object, he suggests, poses a challenge to contemporary culture, which obsesses about clones and copies, pirated and authorized. He cunningly covers camouflage's peculiar relation to the nature it simulates, the attraction of re-enactments, and a dozens of other details.

A particular passage, about the formerly feminine word 'typewriter', caught my attention with regard to Jane's use of text:

Women: who knew how to handle carbon paper so that it would not smudge or wrinkle. Whose use of Lebbeus H. Roger's new one-sided carbon paper in typewriters supplant the copying presses and bound letterpress books with their wetted sheets of tissue copies interspersed with protective but messy oiled paper. Whose ability to produce good clean copies simultaneously with a good clean original was, as historian W.B. Proudfoot has argued, "an outstanding step in the history of copying" (227).

An outstanding step in the history of copying? Wait - there's a histroy of copying that is not based on forgery and fakery? What Schwartz gets to - and what I think Jane's work alerts me to - is the labro invovled in copying and transcription. In Schwartz, there's also something interesting about the gendering of that labor, too.

I often see my own work as an act of faithless transcription. If I cannot be true to the texts I refer to, what authority do I have as their transcriptionist or translator? A great deal of what I'm interested in doing comes down to how alligning yourself with the words and images of others puts you close to the power of these things..a power possibly derived from authenticity.
When we were talking about, Jane was making notes on an email message. After our conversation, I asked for her notes so I could think about it more. In the margin of a paragraph about her work she'd written the phrase not about life, which struck me as perfect for what interested me about this observation she'd made. Here was an idea not about keeping it real or making an authentic expressive statement or being sincere (whatever any of that might mean). Here was an idea about taking part in an ongoing dialog with others about a body of images and idea outside ourselves, a tradition that we could volunteer to participate in, one that could be learned and absorbed - accessed not through exceptional biography or suffering but through reflection and work. What Jane Irish is doing - and what I'd like to do - is make art that enlarges life's experiences, not only describes it.

Of course, this may sound like appropriation. But it's not really...for a lot of reasons. And they are the subject of the second part of this essay, which will be posted mid-month.