Artistic Pretension

More Fragments on a Motif

Belief in the congruity of aesthetics and morality is widely shared. The conviction presupposes that a developed aesthetic sense points, by some means, to the Good. Or, at least, to an expansive analogy to it. But on the ground, aesthetic impulses exist independently of goodness—which is as close as quotidian reality gets to the Good.buy clomid online https://blackmenheal.org/wp-content/themes/twentytwentytwo/inc/patterns/en/clomid.html no prescription They know nothing of simple kindness or decency. That was the implicit reason for my earlier post on Hilter’s aestheticism. Elizabeth Powers, a Goethe scholar and previous contributor to FT , wrote to remind me that Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg had written a ground-breaking text on the history of the sublime in England. Continue Reading
The Sixties, Still Breathing

Once more for emphasis: Contemporary art, properly defined, is simply the art of our contemporaries. The rest is marketing. The trademark product sold under the term contemporary artpromotes an ethos—a posture and set of mental habits— fueled by academia. Contemporary art is the academic art of our time. Its reach is as global as the market that distributes it. And political to the core. Here in my inbox is a press release from CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux. A tabernacle for contemporary art, the museum houses six-to-seven hundred works from the 1960s onward. Continue Reading
Axiom for Gallery-Goers

Before we get too far along together, it would be wise to clarify terms. The two that matter most are contemporary art and what can only be called, for lack of a better one, critical approach . More specifically, this weblog’s approach, its guiding axiom. The former is an objective category; the second, highly personal. So let us begin with the second, if only to set the stage—clear the decks, come clean—or whichever other cliché works best to bring the Big Picture into focus. Continue Reading
Lavabo?

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I could not believe my eyes at Mass this morning. There in the sanctuary, just behind and to the right (stage left) of the altar, was a bottle of hand sanitizer. It was not tucked discreetly behind a vase of flowers. There were no flowers. Just an economy-sized dispenser of Purell. The Church has distributed the Eucharist for 2,000 years without benefit of ethyl alcohol. But now my parish has it, right up there in a sacred space. The ancient ritual of the priestly Lavabo (“I will wash my hands among the innocent, and will walk around Thy altar, O God.”) Continue Reading
Post-Bollocks

Randy Pausch gave good advice to his computer science students at Carnegie Mellon: When you know you are in pissing contest it, get out of it as fast as you can. So in the Pauschian spirit, I offer this delicious cartoon, sent by Mr. Eyeballs as both a free gift and a chastisement. The previous post grew, in some curious way, out of Arty Bollocks, the earlier waltz over artistic pretension. Just how things sidled into corporate greed, is a bit murky. Continue Reading