Contemporary Art And Being



(image via treehugger)

Another perspective out of Art Bassel, in which the obnoxious art bubble seems just about over and good taste once again prevails n the side of the Old Masters. It's about time. Even the fabled Chinese contemporary art bubble fall down -- go pop. Ironically, the sobriquet "Pop" art describes not just the manner of the artist's style, but also the financial consequences (Averted Gaze). We know how chic and cool are those absurd Contemporary Art pieces, priced with "irrational exuberance," large-canvassed, colored garishly, calculated to tickle the fancy pf the hedge-fund fuckers and their ilk.

And when did we start taking our cue on aesthetics from Hedge Fund assholes? Aren't they hedge funders precisely because they are temperamentally incapable of higher aestheticism? They generally see the world in terms of business opportunity. To the diminished aesthetic sense of the hedge funder wit is art, and that classical nonsense is too pretentious because its secrets take too much brainpower to solve. Better to have a nice, untaxing Warhol over the mantle place at the summer home.

How can we appreciate that light, frozen wit when we supply something similar every day without vast sums of Russian oil monies behind us? Since when did Wit become Art? Was it Andy Warhol who first blurred the line? When did the surface supplant the substance; when did style overtake meaning? A witty statement -- i.e. a diamond-encrusted skull, old x-ray stills -- ought not rationally to be worth millions. This post, by the way, is not to denigrate all art in what might be called the post-modernist tradition -- or anti-tradition, if you will -- by way of a lazy conservative critique relying on a nostalgic view (rather than an objective aesthetic valuation) of art. The "That-Art-Is-Bad-because-it-was-draw'd-after-Picasso" school of thought is an intellectual cousin to Rudolph Giuliani's laughably conservative -- and brain-dead -- critique of "Piss Christ," meanwhile offering an exhibit with the Kindergarten-ish "Cow Parade" as an example of true art. Conservatives -- and hedge funders -- are congenitally allergic of High Art and artistic thought or conversation. If Caravaggio were alive, he would disdain the conservatives that champion his works on the grounds of "Tradition." Tradition is neither an artistic judgement nor an intellectual idea; Tradition is a mood, a nostalgia, a feeling as subjective as the work of contemporary art that conservatives themselves disdain. Off the top of our head, The Corsair can name a bunch of magnificent artists who wear the robes of contemporary art with distinction, like Basquiat, digital artist Mark Napier, Saul Steinberg, Kehinde Wiley, .

We like a lot of contemporary artists, the real ones, not the "Jean-Frauds." It is the exorbitant valuation of some of the more fraudulent practitioners of art that we assault here, the "Art Stunts," not the aforementioned contemporary artists that continue to advance the cause of what is truly Art. In a democratic regime, all things being equal, it is embarrassing to come out with a judgement of one artist over another. Resist that urge. All Art is NOT Art; Warhol's Campbell soup cans, while clever, are not equal to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Art is philosophically aristocratic -- even the act implies leisure and taste -- not democratic. That, and the lack of artistic education in this country leads to such a farce as a presumably educated mayor of a large city proposing an "artistic exhibition" of fucking cows.

The outrageous valuation of contemporary art by democratic capitalism and what that says about the Old Masters' (that they are aesthetically inferior) is what has always driven The Corsair to distraction! What were these people thinking, valuing Hirst over Titian and Caravaggio? And they did! But in the fullness of time, this blog has always known that, with patience, those "Art Stunts" would sink in value compared to most of the more sophisticated works of the Old Masters who, by contrast, spent great portions of their lives on a razor-thin variety of static Eternal Themes -- Eros, Death, the Mystery of the Self, What is God? By contrast, contemporary art -- rendered with varying degrees of talent --- seeks to capture elusive psychological moods. Can you believe that there was actually a time recently when Damien Hirst's shitty little compositions designed to hit the G-spot of Russian oligarchs and tacky Saudi Princes were worth more than a Raphael? Or a Poussin? We won't even entertain the thought of a comparison to Rembrandt.

Rembrandt's work never sold for anything remotely close to the sums commanded by Hirst's formaldehyded livestock.

No longer. That which irradiated and inflamed the passions of our Empire have died down. The cool, corrective winds of Reality are upon us at present. Art, which, always and everywhere, anticipates the coming intellectual atmosphere was a bit tardy on this. From TheDailyBeast:

"Art is not selling like it used to. Auction houses have had a rough second half of the year—mostly in the sale of contemporary work — and galleries have been forced to lay off staff and make unprecedented staff budget cuts. Still, there are sections of the market that are holding steady.

"These are not the areas one might think—the glossy contemporary art that is still selling at booze-soaked events like last weekend’s Art Basel is dwindling, while obscure works by Old Masters (i.e. all European painters from about 1400-early 1800 that you may never have heard of) continue to appreciate in value. In this treacherous time, conservative works are retaining their original prices, while avant-garde pieces can’t move stock. The more modern the art is, it is being discounted, if sold at all."

What does this do to Peter Brant's vast collection of Contemporary Art? More here, by James Wilentz.