Monday, May 5, 2008

The Tedious and the Repellent

The New Criterion has a good article on the Shvarts "art" case. In this article, the author describes contemporary avant garde art as showing that "the unutterably tedious can cohabit seamlessly with the repellent." If that isn't an apt description of much pomo art, I don't know what is.

4 comments:

Todd Camplin said...

POMO artists are coming out of the Existential tradition. Artists are thinking that if they do something unexpected, then they are (just for a moment) breaking the deterministic universe. Under this assumption, you can see why POMO artists are so focused on shocking art work.

Troy Camplin said...

Excellent point. Of course, in a deterministic universe, all you're doing is what the universe determined you would do, and others are equally determined to be shocked by it. This is why we need to make it clear to artists that the universe has been proven to be not like that at all. This is one of the purposes of The Emerson Institute, which, btw, is now officially in existence. Just have to set up a website now.

Todd Camplin said...

How much you want to bet this writer does not frequent art gallery exhibitions and contemporary art museums. Sure, there are some artists that play with the edge of good taste, but all in all most new artists are conservative. Every year Yale has a summer program for artists. I just talked with a professor that said he own summits only conservative students to the Yale summer program. (Conservative = painters that do figurative and landscapish abstracts). It is rare than you think, that artists are creating shocking work. In the Senior Show Don’t Block, there are drawings of penises in color pencil; oddly, un-shocking, even to the parents of the students.

Troy Camplin said...

The author is specifically talking about avant garde art. By definition, to be conservative is to not be avant garde.