[Auto Crucifix - James W. Bailey]
Keith Martin-Smith worked for Integral Institute from July 2006 until August 2007, when he left to pursue his own work. His collection of 12 short stories the Mysterious Divination of Tea Leaves, and Other Tales, a collection of “Integral” fiction, has been published by O-Books and is available through Amazon. Keith currently lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he teaches Kung Fu and Qi Gong, and works as a freelance writer. You can learn more about him and his work at www.keithmartinsmith.com. See also "Art, Postmodern Criticism, and the Emerging Integral Movement".On the surface, his approach seems useful and relevant to working artists, which is always the bottom line for art theory. But is it? Any opinions out there?
Read the whole article.On the Future of Art
and Art CriticismBeyond Post-Modernism in the 21st Century
The death of postmodernism
and the birth of the Integral movement
in art and art criticismKeith Martin-SmithIntroduction
Art struggles in our postmodern world, where genius has been pronounced dead and mediocrity and irony congratulate one another on their empty existence. A trip to a modern museum of art leaves most of us scratching our heads in confusion. Cutting-edge art and literature have lost their power over our collective imaginations because they can no longer speak for us in any meaningful way. Avante-garde art and literature have sadly been relegated to PhD's and ever-narrowing groups of intellectuals who “get it”, never bothering to ask if it's worthy of being gotten in the first place. Art has become an inside joke about an inside joke that fewer and fewer people are interested in hearing.The postmodern movement is nearly dead, strangled to death on its own smug irony. In its place comes something that once again believes art can be grand, inspirational, magnificent, emergent, and capable of speaking to most people, not just the hyper-educated elite. A new movement that believes the artist need not be an angry social outcast or critic, or indifferent raconteur, but once again a revolutionary. This has been and still is the birthright of every great artist.The entire edifice of postmodern art has rotted itself so completely from the inside out that it has nearly crumbled to dust. Let us turn the page, discover what postmodern art achieved and where it has utterly failed, and learn what we can build on its foundation. Standards of judgment, not based in an absolute, and not fixed, must nevertheless be used to once again pass judgment on art. “High” art, “Low” art, “good” and “bad” must once again be brought into the lexicon of art criticism, but without repeating the mistakes of the past that marginalized important voices outside of the mainstream.The question “what is art” is both more simple and more complex than it might seem at first glance. Marshall McLuhan, philosopher of media theory, said in the heyday of 60's Pop Art, “Art is whatever you can get away with.”[1] Is it? His observation raises some interesting questions: How does one go about judging a work of art as “good”, “bad”, or “better than” something else? What standards are used? Is something shocking, like a New York City artist who recently put vials filled with her menstrual fluids on display, art? Or is such a display really something else? For those that defend such displays as art, what exactly do they see that the rest of us are missing?
Art criticism and the fine arts in general have fallen on strange times, which is why so many of us end up going through museums of modern art with either a roll of our eyes or a confused expression on our faces. Poetry and literature have not fared much better, and the reasons lay in the adoption of a particular kind of postmodern approach to criticism, “deconstructive postmodernism”. Art and its critics, many of whom probably are not even familiar with postmodernism as a movement, have nevertheless been under the influence of deconstructive postmodern philosophy since the days of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, an ordinary white porcelain urinal, signed by Duchamp, put on display in 1917 as “serious artwork”. Its display caused a sensation and critics, the public, and other artists argued strenuously about the work, coming only to the conclusion that it was hugely controversial. But Duchamp was clearly onto something, for in 2004 five-hundred leaders in the art world voted it “the most influential work of modern art”,[2] beating out Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Guernica. How is it that a signed toilet is viewed with such reverence, and without a knowing wink? Is a signed toilet really art? If so, to whom, and for what reasons? What about a photograph of a crucifix sitting in urine [Serrano's Piss Christ] or menstrual fluids in beakers nailed to a wall — are these art?
"Fountain", Duchamp "Piss Christ", Serrano
Here are three of his assertions about the nature of art - they may seem out of context here, rather than embedded in the article, but I like the basic ideas he is trying to convey.
Figure 1.0He then goes on to outline some kind of integral model, but here is where I am in agreement, as mentioned in a previous post today that offers Heidegger's view on art:
REALISM
Aesthetic Beauty is…Figure 1.1
- Absolute and fixed
- Real, & outside the artist
- Independent of culture
- Independent of human view
Modernism
Aesthetic Beauty is…Figure 1.2:
- Absolute but subjective
- Real, & inside the artist
- Dependant on culture
- Shaped by human view
Postmodernism
Aesthetic Beauty is…
- Arbitrary and non-fixed
- A construction of the artist
- Created by culture
- Determined by human view
Anyway, go read the article and let me know what you think.Four things must be considered when evaluating artwork:
- the artist him or herself and what they think the work is (prevents critic projection)
- the cultural view of the artwork — aboriginal art in Brazil versus Serrano in NYC
- the artwork itself
- the viewer's response
If you look at any one of these things alone, it is impossible to determine with much accuracy what's going on in the artwork. Ken Wilber, for instance, is quite brilliant and complex-of-thought, yet as far as I know has little talent with a paintbrush (sorry, Ken). So if he draws a stick figure he says is “integral”, #'s 2, 3 and 4 would all dictate that the work actually lacked complexity and skill of execution — and therefore isn't art — even though the man himself maintains that it is.
Several good posts on art! Not sure that I can add much. I'm only an art lover and not an art historian. But it's interesting about post-modernism and how influential it is, whether we realize it or not. I wonder if it has played a role in how collectors view their own purchases? Post-modernism might say you could collect anything you happen to like, regardless of its value or "status" in the art world, and you could consider yourself an "art collector." But it seems that idea would have been laughable maybe a century ago, before post-modernism really took hold. Aesthetic beauty was defined in other ways than how we define it now.
ReplyDeleteI know I certainly take this approach for granted. Anyway, lots to chew on! Thanks.