February 19, 2004
Question Two
Question Number Two. What famous painting would you wish out of existence?
This is a really tough question. I am inclined to want to delete scads of crap: Warhol, Koons, Newman, Schnabel, Kinkade (although he is so much in the realm of product rather than art that I probably would have to let him be handled by another branch of the Keilholtz Police – sort of an additional insult to him that the Keilholtz Art Police would consider him outside of their jurisdiction). However there is always a temptation to “get at the root” and try to stamp out the error in the bud, hence the Pre-Raphaelites wanting to get back to where art was pure and build from there.
If there is one constant in the arts it is that an idea comes about, gets explored to the point where everyone is a little sick of it, it is pushed around and expanded in order to breathe new life into it, until a new generation comes around and rejects the whole thing.
When we look at the glory of the beaux arts style of architecture, it seems incomprehensible that Gropius et al would have rejected it, but to understand their rejection we need to look at how tired it had become. In just about any American city one can find at least one stunningly ugly example of beaux arts building. In Berkeley one need only walk onto the University of California campus to see a whole assortment of grotesque, gray buildings, buildings that scream empty pomp and bluster and are completely without charm or beauty. Now, when we want to look for tired ideas, we need look no farther than the contemporary modernists (and their pomo offspring), so young architects are looking to the pre-Bauhaus for the pure and noble.
Being human, we see these changes and get all caught up in the spirit of the times and dualist thinking and come to some pretty laughable conclusions: idea X [as observed and lived in its late, degenerate form] is inherently bad and to recover beauty we must go back to idea pre-X and start all over. Artists certainly do this, but they always do it within a tradition that was passed to them through the dreaded idea X, so their rhetoric is tempered by the realities of craftsmanship. Thus Picasso may have started a revolution of sorts, but there is always something of Puvis de Chavannes lurking beneath the surface.
Critics tend to really fall into this trap, because they tend to either have never had the experience of craft (and many of them really don’t know how to take a deep look at the painting, or a good listen to a piece of music anyway) or they have fallen away from it. So they are the ones that tend towards foolish statements, blaming so-and-so for the state of such and such a genre. Often artists fall into these traps because they listen too much to critics (note that I am not arguing against any reading of arts criticism, rather believing anything that is contradicted by and irreconcilable with direct experience). In certain cases the artists were simply nodding, because they did not think about it long enough, or they were sick of trying to correct misconception, or that they found that the critical rhetoric boosted sales.
When artists start to blame the degeneracy of an idea on the idea itself, they often retreat to some mythical ideal, when all was pure and wonderful. For the Florentine Camerata this was the ancient Greeks (although their citing of the Greeks was nothing more than a vague notion of singing dramas – they had no idea what the Greeks were actually doing in music). The happy result was opera.
The result rarely looks anything like the sources being emulated (except by hacks who slavishly imitate older forms to make their pastiches), so the Pre-Raphaelites do not look like Giotto, Monteverdi does not make musical archaeology, and so forth.
When I think of trying to banish one painting from the collective memory, my first tendency is to fall into this trap and try to find where “art went off the rails.” I could pick Warhol, or more logically, Duchamp, or even Toulouse Lautrec. However, I cannot really say that Duchamp caused Warhol, or that the inevitable end of German Expressionism is the silliness that is Schnabel.
Since it is foolish to wish simply one Warhol out of existence, and not all of them, I will have to abandon this route.
OGIC thinks that perhaps some overexposed painting like Munch’s Scream that has been reproduced and commercialized to death should vanish. I disagree. Make the coffee mugs and T-shirts and clever cartoons vanish, not the painting. Here we have an example of a painting continuing to resonate with viewers, and I have no impulse to try to stop that.
All of this leads us to content. I suppose that if I were to wish a painting out of existence, it would have to be because the painting is patently blasphemous, nothing more than immoralizing agitprop, completely lacks artistic merit and serves as a rallying point for the Enemy. The painting that springs immediately to mind is the elephant dung painting that was in the news awhile back. Or perhaps the posters of ACT-UP.
There is the personal vendetta school: any painting that gets the attention of the public before one of mine is going to be something that I would want gone, even if it were a great painting. If I were in a group show and someone else’s work were attracting the attention of buyers, you can bet that that other person’s work would come into the crosshairs of my Imaginary Vaporizer. It is not a pretty thing to admit about yourself, but when it comes down to it, the arts are pretty competitive, and artists struggle for crumbs. I might admire a painter at the same time that I am thinking, “ugh, now I have to contend with THAT!”