After the bubble

There have been several articles recently about why the financial crisis/recession/Even Greater Depression will be good for the art world (see here and here). These tend to take the same form: the art world has got bloated and decadent, and the recession will get rid of the dead wood and make it all strong and pure again.

As a somewhat extreme counterexample, take the Weimar Republic. It was also portrayed by conservative critics as bloated and decadent, what with its cabarets and jazz and modern painting and all. Then came the Great Depression, and people found out what getting rid of the dead wood and making everything strong and pure again really means.

Sure, there is a good case to be made that the recent art market has been a classic investment bubble. Clearly, regardless of the recent record prices for contemporary art, we haven’t been living through a golden age of art. How anyone ever thought the market value of an art work is in any way related to its (for want of a better term) aesthetic value is beyond me.

However, the idea doing the rounds seems to be that, if a strong art market equals lots of bad art, then a weak art market equals lots of good art. This is ludicrous.

There is no guarantee that tough times equal better art. Only breezy columnists with a deadline too close for considered thought would suggest so. Tough times guarantee tough times. The good artists went their own way when the art market went mad, and they’ll carry on going their own way now that it’s gone bad. It’ll just be harder.

A resolution

I don't usually do new year's resolutions, but this year I resolve to not go on about what sad-arse cunts the Barrs are.

I tend to buy books from Quilters in Lambton Quay. My advice is, if you're going to sell books to a second-hand dealer, either remove the name from the front page or rub out the nong underlining you've done on the wrong bits of the text, you fucking twits. We know you're stupid.

Okay, that's the last of it. Honestly, it is. Honest.

Aleatory art

So I've been thinking about artists' intentions and the illusory nature of the self, and then I read The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart. Now, this is one of those books that I've been meaning to read for 20 years or so. Friends have raved about it, and The Fall wrote a doozy of a song about it.

I quite enjoyed the book at the start, but then it paled. But first, some background.

There are several arguments for why neither the world nor the self exist. I'm not going to go into them now (though I do quite like this one). The Dice Man recognises this, and comes up with a method for allowing what he calls the minority selves to come into their own by giving over his free will to the dice.

The philosophers of art reckon artists' intentions are important. It's another complicated area I won't get into in any detail now. Basically, for example, an allegorical painting can't be allegorical unless it was intended to be allegorical. But if the artist's self is illusory, who or what is doing the intending?

There is a good tradition of randomness in art. Hans Arp ripped up pieces of paper and dropped them on to another piece of paper, then glued them where they fell. Tristan Tzara applied this idea to poetry and pulled words out of a hat (which was then ripped off by Billy Burroughs to become what he called the cut-up method). Duchamp did Three standard stoppages, where he dropped three metre-length strings from a metre's height and glued them where they lay, to use as measurements (ye gods, he did do some shit work, didn't he!?).

In each of these cases, randomness, rather than the artist, determines the work. Intentions don't come into it (well, directly at least).

So is the answer simply to randomly determine the form and content of art work?

I'm afraid the answer is no. This is the problem I had with the Dice Man. Replacing the dictatorship of an illusory self by the dictatorship of chance is no advance at all - you're still suffering under a dictatorship. A system based on randomness is still a system.

I'm not sure what the solution is.

Chucking in my job

Yesterday, I told my colleagues I’m chucking in my job to go to art school (at Massey no less). Yep, the start of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression is just the right time to give up your relatively safe public service job. The course starts at the end of Feb, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve had an amusing range of comments about it. The answer to ‘I hope you know what you’re doing’ is no, but that’s nothing new.

In other news, my brother got married the other day. This involved a cruise up the Whanganui River on the Wairua, which was built in 1904 and spent 30 years at the bottom of the river before being restored (which took another 18 years). Jo has put up some photos here.

Slacko

You may have noticed that I've been a bit slack on the old blog posting recently, and that what little I have done has been inconsequential. Well, the same could be said for painting. You need to do this every now and then (I do, anyway).

However, I've decided to stir things up next year. I will tell all once it's a done deal.

The Fallen

I've just acquired a copy of The Fallen by Dave Simpson, in which he tries to track down all 40-odd ex-members of the Fall. It starts with a couple of quotes:

There is variety in genius as there is talent and beauty. Some geniuses are innovators, some are deep thinkers and some are people of extraordinary skill; most are a volatile mixture of intellectual gifts and character traits. The intellectual gifts are an ability to see things from highly unusual angles, to overlook what is not essential, and to understand the true significance of the obvious. The character traits are persistence, obduracy, capacity for taking great pains, and indifference to ridicule.

A C Grayling, Professor of Philosophy, University of London, 2007

That's my fucking aim in life, to keep it going as long as I can.

Mark E Smith, 1979

Very funny

Someone just left a comment on an old post:

Just thougth you might like to see this One Sentence story that I just
approved about your friend:
http://www.onesentence.org/stories/2651/

What countries have medicare cards?

If you want to start painting...

...you could do worse than follow the advice of Hilaire Hiler:

A few days ago a friend of mine who is a journalist, and who has for some months been amusing himself by drawing and working in gouache and water-colour, came to me and asked what he should do to begin working in oils. He was without schooling of any artistic sort and professed his entire ignorance of even the fundamentals. He did not know what sort of brushes he would need and had an idea that quite a complicated equipment would be necessary. It was not easy to advise him, as I had no idea what sort or style of painting he wished to do. Neither had he. The advice given then, was the same I should give to anyone in a similar position. That is, start with an absolute minimum of equipment: three or four brushes of the sort to which he felt naturally attracted; a small bottle of bleached linseed oil; a little rectified turpentine, or some pure gasoline; a piece of metal, wood or glass to use as a palette, and five tubes of paint – Black, White, Middle Madder or Deep Cadmium Red, Lemon Cadmium and Cobalt Blue.

He might continue to work the rest of his life with no more outfit, or he may develop a style of working which will necessitate a much more elaborate equipment in every way, but by starting with the minimum and buying only what he feels absolutely necessary, he will be more likely to gain an appreciation and knowledge of each element than if he left his selection to the colourman, who might suggest a catalogue which would make any beginner dizzy with discouragement.

I started with a slight variation on this arrangement, and have added a couple more colours and some spray varnish since then. There is a lot to be said for trying to make do with what you have, and buying what you really need only as a last resort.

Incidentally, a few pages later in the chapter on glazing, Hiler talks about another friend:

The modern painter who uses glazes to the extreme possibility is my friend, Francis Picabia. I have seen some late paintings of his where as many as three or four glazes were superimposed in certain parts. Sometimes where forms of six different colours meet at a common point, a glaze was applied covering portions of all of them and thus giving rise to a very interesting if somewhat complicated gamme of combinations.

To explain: suppose that in a wheel with five spokes giving rise to as many divisions, each division was filled with a different colour. Let's say – red, green, yellow, blue and white. The surface adjoining the hub is glazed with rose madder to a distance about halfway to the circumference. This transparent coating of red at once gives rise to five new colours: over the red, to a dark red; over the yellow, to an orange; over the blue, to a violet; over the green, to a dark warm green, over the white, to a pink, etc. The possibilities of glazing may be, therefore, recognised at once as endless.

The beginning of Doctor Who

These are a couple of pages of concepts for a new show the BBC was developing in 1963. They're online at the BBC Archive.

More electronic communications

So John Hurrell wrote a review of a Peter Madden show. Madden left some comments, and I couldn't resist adding my own (relatively innocuous) one. No biggie.

However, I was a little surprised to get, rather than a response on John's blog, this in my inbox less than an hour later:

now you are being pathetic ..as well as abusive .
.now theirs a surprise...read through the comments and check context..and you might be able to ..
get your head out from up your ass
yours Peter madden

I sent a response of course, but never got a reply.