Artist lecture: Paola Antonelli 4/21/10

Notes from artist lecture featuring Paola Antonelli, an Italian woman curator at the Modern Museum of Art in New York:

*Being a designer and curator can be the same thing.

*The design method can be applied to pretty much anything.

*She couldn’t have been this curator had she not had been taught in architecture.

*Two years of economics; hated it and moved to architecture. Just wanted to be free; not necessarily to become an architect. The path found it self. Keeping her mind open and following the things she liked to do.

*The right direction for her was to become a writer.

*In Italy writers aren’t trained in journalism; they are trained in whatever writing they wish to do, like fiction.

*Worked for Domus magazine that was formed in 1929. Was a housewives magazine. Was at Domus for four years.

*Started coming to America for the Aspen conferences.

*Had landed a teaching position at UCLA and kept traveling between Milan and California. Ended up seeing an ad for a job position at the MoMa in a magazine and got the job. Her job was already set up for her.

*First exhibition she did in ’95 at the MoMa dealt with idea of reality. Wanted to celebrate objects that were made of innovative materials or from old materials in an innovative way.

*Her shows are really relaxed; you can sit down and rest. She tries to make them a much sexier place than any other exhibition around it.

*Her first exhibition you could touch most of the objects. Replicas of objects: one far away and one you could touch.

*Every exhibition is an opportunity to drop into another world.

Thursday entry (for 4/8/10): Survey of highbrows and lowbrows.

Passage from Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life

Tepper, Steven J., and Bill Ivey. Engaging art : the next great transformation of America’s cultural life. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Page 322:

"Although the SPPA survey was not designed to learn what sorts of appeals are likely to motivate greater arts participation, nevertheless it can be used to get a better understanding of the many different kinds of people whoa re good candidates for greater arts participation. This study's primary findings can be summarized in five points.

*Some highbrows, called here highbrow univores, have nearly exclusive tastes for the fine arts, thus fitting the classical stereotype of the highbrow arts patron.

*Many arts participants, called here highbrow omnivores, have a primary orientation to the fine arts but also like a wide range of popular culture offerings. This finding has been substantiated by a large number of recent studies using data from the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and eight European countries (Peterson 2005).

*Looking across all the data collected in the SPPA survey for 2002 on the four tasts groups distinguished as highbrow or lowbrow and univores or omnivores, the level of omnivorousness in tastes is now more important in predicting participation in the arts than is the brow level of taste. This is to say, liking a wide range of types of music is a better predictor of arts participation than is knowing that a person chooses classical music or opera as their favorite kind of music.

*This study's data, as well as that of others, suggest that the more often people go to arts events, the more often they engage in popular culture and civic activities as well. This contradicts the assumption of those arts marketers who see themselves in a zero-sum competition with popular culture and other arts venues. In consequence, it seems that more is to be gained by attracting people to participate in arts events through cross-promotion with other arts and popular culture activities than from fostering competition with them.

*A goodly number of Lowbrows, here called targets, contrary to enduring stereotypes of lowbrows (Bloom 1987; Johnson 2002; Kristol 1978; Levine 1988), say they like fine art music. They are numerous, omnivorous in their tastes, and younger on average than highbrows. What is more, over a quarter already report attending classical music concerts, and over half report hearing or seeing classical music via records, radio, or television. There is not direct information in the survey to test the assertion, but based on the findings of Brown (2002), Walker (2003), and Walker and Scott-Melnky (2002), this study hypothesizes that highbrows are more likely to subscribe to season tickets and annual memberships whereas targets are more likely to buy tickets on an event-by-event basis."

Monday entry (for 4/5/10): Artist of Interest: Liz McGrath

Biography from McGrath's official website:

	Los Angeles-born artist Elizabeth McGrath has always had an eye for the strange beauty in the grotesqueries of life; this appreciation is nowhere more evident than in her work. Inspired by the relationship between the natural world and the detritus of consumer culture, she brings forth a new cavalcade of creatures from the darker corners of the streets, the city, the imagination. It is this melancholy interaction between man-made status symbols and suffering specimens of nature that make up her intricate body of work.

McGrath's official website.

Interview with McGrath conducted by Juxtapoz magazine.

The following images were found on McGrath's official website.

Schwein Haben, resin, foam, wood, 2008

Muerte & Little Loco, mixed media, tattoos by Morgan Slade, 2008

Mala & Rhea, wood, resin, cloth, tar, 1999

Lion, resin, foam, mixed media, 2008

Thursday entry (for 4/1/10): Aesthetics in the Eye of the Beholder

Passages from Defining Art, Creating the Canon

Crowther, Paul. Defining Art, Creating the Canon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Page 68:

“Kant observes: ‘We can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is beautiful, and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this presentation within myself, and not the [respect] in which I depend on the object’s existence.’

Kant’s point here, is that our pleasure in beauty (which he also describes as a mode of ‘pure aesthetic judgment’) is a function of how the object appears to the senses. What kind of thing the object is; its relevance for our practical interests; indeed, whether the object is real or not; are questions which have no necessary bearing on our enjoyment of its mere appearance. Through its rootedness in the immediate sensible particular our pleasure can be characterized as disinterested.

Disinterestedness is, on these terms, a logical characteristic which separates pure aesthetic judgments from those of the agreeable and the good. Pure aesthetic judgments are, in logical terms, indifferent to the real existence of the object.

It is, however, important to be clear about the scope and significance of this claim. In respect of it, Kant has been very badly served by subsequent tradition. As we have already seen in Chapter 1, formalists such as Monroe Beardsley and Clive Bell (and others who I have no previously mentioned, such as Edmund Bullough and Harold Osborne) have, in effect, interpreted the disinterested aspect of aesthetic judgment, as though it were in essence psychological – a kind of detached attitude or mental stance wherein one purges oneself of all considerations deriving from ‘real existence’. Many critics of disinterestedness such as George Dickie, Richard Shusterman, and manifold Marxist and feminists theoreticians, have interpreted it in similar terms.

This has led some of them to the view that there simply ‘aint no such thing’ or, indeed (in the case of Marxists), that the very idea of a detached ‘disinterested’ standpoint, is itself ideologically ‘interested’ to the highest degree.

Now there are elements in Kant – such as his additional characterization of the pure aesthetic judgment as ‘contemplative’ – which lend some weight to this interpretative tradition. These, however, pale into insignificance alongside Kant’s – wholly valid – logic of negation. The key logical significance of the pure aesthetic judgment lies in what it does not presuppose in order to be enjoyed.

To take a pleasure in the way things appear to the sense is just that. We may find that our being in a position to experience such pleasure has required a certain path through life; it may also be that lots of factual knowledge and practical considerations impinge upon our pleasure. However, such factors are not logical preconditions of our enjoying beauty: there are contingent elements. We do not have to take account of them in appreciating formal qualities for their own sake.

On these terms, then, the aesthetic experience of beauty is autonomous in logical terms. This is its definitive trait. However, such experiences occur under historically specific circumstances which means that their significance is mediated. By virtue of both the context in which it occurs and the kind of objects which bear it, beauty can be ethically and politically neutral or rendered negative or positive."

Monday entry (for 3/29/10): Artist of Interest: Nick Walker

Biography from Walker's official website:

In 1992 I began to combine stencils with my freehand work which allowed me to juxtapose almost photographic imagery with the rawness which evolved from conventional graffiti styles.

Stencils introduce an impact element to my work. The appeal of stencils is that they allow me to take an image from anywhere - dissect any part of life - and recreate it on any surface.

I try to add an element of humor or irony to some paintings to add a little light relief to the walls. Painting is a form of escapism for me and if my work allows the spectator to do the same thing, then I've achieved more than I set out to do.

Walker's official website.

Interview with Walker conducted by Juxtapoz magazine.

Walker's last solo exhibition was held at the Black Rat Press Gallery in London, England in April 2008.

The following images were found on Juxtapoz.com. Titles and medium of artworks were not available.

Thursday entry (for 3/25/10): Entertainment and Art continued

Passages from Beyond Price

Hutter, Michael, and David Throsby. Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Page 41, essay by Richard Shusterman

“We often speak of the entertainment value of novels, plays, music, and other works of art. But cultural critics just as often contrast art to entertainment, viewing the former as culturally far superior in value. Is entertainment value an important part of art’s value or merely a subordinate, inessential means to conveying that value? Is it perhaps even an unwanted distraction from true artistic value?...Although the precise nature of aesthetic value is unclear and hotly contested, it is generally conceived as an intrinsic rather than an instrumental value. Entertainment, however, seems to imply instrumentality – a means of distracting, amusing, or refreshing oneself, or a way of enjoyably passing one’s time. So besides examining the concept of entertainment, I will also analyze the crucial but problematic notion of intrinsic value. This analysis will enable me to argue that intrinsic value can be reasonably construed in a way that allows a contextual contrast with instrumental value without presuming a radical dichotomy between them that would deny intrinsic value to things that clearly have instrumental value. Being instrumentally effective would not then automatically preclude entertainment value from being also an intrinsic value of art and aesthetic experience and would allow it to be considered a possible constituent of aesthetic value.

One prominent aspect of aesthetic value is its experiential quality. Such value does not lend itself to quantitative calculation or discursive proof but is realized or made evident in direct experience. It is in the experience of an appreciating subject that this value comes to life and is demonstrated; that is why aesthetic value is often described as being subjective in some sense, even when it is argued that such judgments also exhibit some objectivity of consensus and criteria of evaluation. In this sense of experiential value, it does not really make sense to speak of appreciating the aesthetic value of an artwork by merely having read or heard about it but without ever having experienced it, either in its original form or in an adequate reproducing. In the same way, entertainment value needs to be appreciated in direct and personal experience of the artwork enjoyed.

There are also other values that play an important role in evaluation of art, especially whenever we go beyond the specific aesthetic domain to consider the wider field of culture. We sometimes praise (or condemn) an artwork in terms of its social value – its effects in promoting social harmony or social progress. We also speak of the political value of art in similar terms. In the debates over the value of popular art, for example, there are arguments affirming its social and political value in terms of democratic expression, just as there are vehement allegations of its noxious social and political effects in terms of lowering of cultural standards and promotion of an unthinkingly conformist, mass mentality (Shusterman 1992, Ch. 7). Moreover, there are economic valuations of art that relate to sales and profit figures, and those that relate to issues of symbolic capital and status that are more difficult to quantify. To understand or appreciate such values it does not seem necessary to base one’s evaluation on vivid, direct experience of the artwork itself; one can instead concentrate on the work’s effects and relationships in the social, political, or economic fields in which it is situated.

These dimensions of valuing art most aestheticians regard as clearly extrinsic to genuine aesthetic value. But there are two other ways of valuing art that seem closer to the core notion of intrinsic aesthetic value but can still be distinguished form it: art-historical value and artistic value. The first relates to the contribution an artwork or genre has made to art history and cultural history. An artwork that no longer provides rewarding aesthetic experience to many people can still be widely hailed as artistically valuable because it earlier achieved classic status and thus forms an integral, inseparable part of an influential tradition that we still greatly value. The now unappealing classic thus remains highly valued for the still appealing tradition of works that it helped inspire. This value seems clearly relational – a function of the work’s place of role with respect to other works…

To have artistic, as distinguished from art-historical, value, an artwork need not be historically influential; it could simply demonstrate valuable qualities of technique in a given artistic genre. This sense of value hearkens back to the old general meaning of art as a specific skill or craft. A work might be aesthetically disappointing and fail to produce rewarding experience but still have the redeeming value of demonstrating some technical skill in the artistic medium. It is at least artistically valuable to that extent. One can imagine an aesthetically dismal portrait that nonetheless showed technical skill in drawing, or a note-perfect but unexpressive and uninspiring performance of a difficult musical work. If the technical skill demonstrated is innovative or impressive enough to be influential, then such artistic value could also constitute art-historical value. But even if we cannot speak of influence, artistic value seems clearly relational, since excellence of skill or technique make at least implicit reference to standards or paradigms of excellence that lie beyond the artwork itself. This, however, does not entail that artistic value is extrinsic rather than intrinsic, since the value is nonetheless embodied or expressed in the work itself rather than merely its external effects. As with aesthetic value, the proper appreciation of artistic value seems to require a direct experience of the work, though being told that a difficult musical performance was “note-perfect” may perhaps be enough for us to accord it some degree of artistic value without having heard it. Because of this common experiential anchorage (if not also for other reasons), artistic value and aesthetic value are more often run together than distinguished. “

Proof of Anderson Gallery student juried exhibition entry.