“The most deadening influence on art in our time is the belief that content matters more than style,” writes Jonathan Jones on a Guardian blog. Just look at the godfather of meaningful pop: Bob Dylan, continues Jones. The sometimes cantankerous folk-rock-pop star has spent his career evading categorization and characterization, and trying to emphasize that “Beauty is better than a big idea.”
Film Review
John Woo’s new epic, Red Cliff, may lack heart, but it succeeds as a thrilling war film.
Theater Review
Port Twilight or the History of Science makes its world premiere at the Undermain Theatre through December 12.
Theater Review
If you are going for a popcorn thriller, it’s easier to achieve mindless if you keep it meaningless. But this isn’t what Allison Moore does in Slasher, making its Southwest premier at the Kitchen Dog Theater.
Peter:
It may get both Jonathan and I fire-bombed, but I agree with his very politically incorrect view. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that I, or even I believe he, thinks that, conversely, style “matters more” than content; make note of his anti-all-or-nothing lead in, “Art doesn’t have to be about anything to be good.” For quite some time now though, it’s felt to me like it HAS been all or nothing, with many artists, or maybe it’s just most of the Art World, saying you’d better have something to say or your work is pointless.
However, I do see signs the pendulum is already swinging back. The current exhibition at DMA, Performance/Art offers several examples, but most clearly in the work of David Altmejd and Guillermo Kuitca, each of whom operates out of a personal vision but without trying to cram it down your throat. For instance, take Atlmejd, whose best known body of work employs larger-than-life werewolves. Tell me what that has to do with being gay, which he is, or what it might have to do with anything else the young Canadian sculptor might be about.
But here’s someone else’s answer to Jone’s main question, “If it really is reducible to an explicit message, is it actually art at all?” Carter Ratcliff’s answer is, “No, it’s propaganda.” In “What ‘Evidence’ Says About Art,” in the Issues & Commentary feature of the November, 2006 issue of Art in America, Ratcliff wrote, “The point of art, then, is to provide exemplary instances of interpretive difficulty –and pleasure. Because the effort to understand art is continuous with the ordinary, ongoing interpretations that connect us to the world, it has a sort of usefulness, if no clear utilitarian goal. In roundabout ways, art encourages us to be more alive to ourselves, to our world, and to our ways of being in the world. This roundaboutness is important. Much new work invites no questions, no drifty, speculative interpretation. Viewers are guided directly to a clear conclusion: environmental degradation is bad, patriarchy is bad, equality is good. I agree with those conclusions. But precisely because my agreement is so quick, so predictable, I disagree with the policy of presenting such works as works of art. They are works of propaganda, of political persuasion. Uninterested in telling us what to think, a work of art manages to keep the ball forever in our court.”
Before I started doing my own art, I spent about 30 years practicing an applied art, one that was all about the message. We called it advertising. Fine if you don’t really care to explore the age-old mystery of why we make art, and what you really want to do is sell something.
4 November 2009 at 11:18 am