Changing Nature to Suit Our Preferences (in which I self-identify as a human being)

Man's chief problem is pride. And one of the ways this manifests itself is in the human desire to gain control over nature itself. This has been the chief impulse in both science and art for a century or more.

In art, what philosopher Karsten Harries calls the "aesthetics of subjectivity" makes the artist himself the chief and sometimes only factor in the creation of art, a tendency that leads him away from representing the world as it is (the traditional role of art) toward portraying it as he would like it to be. The artist, impatient with having to settle for being a subcreator (Tolkien's term), tries to take on the role of the Creator Himself. But since he cannot actually create a new world, he is stuck with distorting the one we actually have. He can't make a human being so, he reconstructs real ones, resulting in faces with a mouth on the top, the eyes at the bottom, and the nose to the side--in word, deformity and ugliness.

Science approaches the world very differently, but the same nihilistic impulse is on display: The humble objective of gaining knowledge of a world that has a permanent and unchangeable order takes a back seat to various attempts at trying to subdue it to his own preferences. The Aristotelian objective of determining the causes of things is replaced with the instrumental aim of bending it to our will. Since the one thing that sets man apart from the rest of nature is that we can defy nature, we end up trying to change what we set out to understand. We start by distorting the environment and end up distorting human nature.

Part of the problem is that we take our ability to defy nature as license to redefine it. So now we no longer take our cues of what natural things are for from nature. A heart is for pumping blood; lungs are for putting oxygen in it; kidneys are for filtering it. But reproductive organs are ... not for reproduction. That an increasing number of people have come to think that the functions of reproductive organs can be seamlessly interchanged with those of digestive organs is a measure of just how alienated from nature we have become.

The most fundamental theme of modern thought is the denial of nature. Nature is irrelevant to the natural function of sex. We can now "self-identify" as male or female regardless of whether or not we are.

I just happened to be thinking about all this when I ran across this comment in a somewhat related and excellent post at the Federalist on ways in which nature matters even though we try to pretend it doesn't:

Even more so than the misogynistic Christian church or the anti-gay GOP, the chief enemy of egalitarianism is nature. Historic Christianity only makes it hard for women to be pastors, but nature makes it hard for women to be soldiers, firefighters, lumberjacks, and anything else that requires masculine levels of upper body strength. Republicans may pass laws letting bakers deny service for gay weddings, but nature imposes laws denying two pairs of ovaries the power to procreate. But the greatest way that nature breeds inequality is by filling us with the desire to love the children that have resulted from our breeding.

Read more here.

Fly Barf Art: Louisville Museum taken in by practical joke

If you ever end up having to puke in a museum, don't be surprised if the curator wants to put it on display.



The Speed Art Museum in Louisville is abuzz with talk of its new exhibition which includes two artists who are now undoubtedly high-fiving each other over what they convinced a reputable museum to accept as "art."

The intention of the exhibit, reports WFPL, a Louisville public radio station, was designed to examine some "big themes" in American Art and includes the work of five alleged "artists," selected by Lexington-based artist and curator Aaron Skolnik, a man who one would think should probably not quit his day job if the day job he apparently has wasn't the problem in the first place.

Here is Speed's interim chief curator Scott Erbes, explaining some of the "big themes" in the exhibit once it is hatched:

Aaron really wanted to give each work some space to breathe and to really encourage people to stop and look, rather than the habit even I get into, which is going from work to work to work when they’re lined up on a wall.

It is probably a good thing, it turns out, that the exhibits will not be so easily viewable given what the museum is going to disgorge upon the public:

John Knuth is one of the show's five artists. He's based in Los Angeles, and he uses an unusual tool to create his paintings – flies.  A video explaining Knuth's process is on display along with two paintings.  Knuth breeds the flies specifically for his project, feeds them a mixture of sugar water and pigment, and encloses them in a space that includes canvas. Their regurgitated pigmented water on canvas creates the work.

If I was a museum curator, I would probably want to give this man's work a little space too. Lots of it. I'm thinking of some of the larger landfills in the Jefferson County vicinity, for example.

Erbes, apparently unaware of the joke that has been perpetrated on him, waxes eloquent about the display of emetic art. It "sounds curious," he says:

"but he’s interested in the idea of the artists’ control over materials and giving up that control," says Erbes. "It also deals with ideas of our attempts to control other species and the idea that you really can’t do that entirely. He’s also talked about his work being almost metaphors for urban life in the 21st century, just chaos, things moving around, thousands of individuals each doing different things, and that’s playing into the work as well."

Fly barf philosophy, care of the art establishment. Someone might now want to put on an exhibit of some visual representation of the control over materials by museum curators and what happens when that control is given up.

And if fly barf art is not quite to the visitor's taste, he can avail himself of the art of Lexington-based Louis Zoellar Bickett (which he can take in without an airsickness bag ... or, maybe not). Bickett's final exhibit piece is his 1999 sculpture "Family Grave Dirt," a piece which, as it turns out, is already a part of Speed's collection. "Bickett collected dirt from the graves of family members and people of personal significance," reports WFPL, "into canning jars, which he tagged and lined up on a shelf."

The imaginative Erbes will now explain its significance:

We are all the sum of many parts, of many identities that shape each of us. With this work, you see his interest in taking an archivist’s approach to the creation of works of art. 

There are some of us, of course, who will consider the contents of Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans a little bit more appetizing.

I'm wondering: Could the act of hoodwinking a museum by luring it into accepting some completely preposterous piece purporting to be "art" itself be an example of performance art? Would it be accepted by a museum?

As of this printing,  Erbes and the Speed Museum are still unaware that they are victims of a hoax.

The decline of Derby art

Churchill Downs has unveiled the 2010 Kentucky Derby artwork, and we are, ... ahem, underwhelmed. Derby art has experienced a recognizable decline since the glory years of the Brereton Jones administration, when it went back to the mid-1800s and snagged a real artist by the name of Edward Troye, a Swiss emigre who painted many of the great thoroughbreds of the era.

After the classic art favored by the Jones administration, Derby art sunk into a Thomas Kinkade-like kitsch for several years, and then, during the Fletcher administration, it sunk to art deco. Now, 2010's Derby art has shifted again to include French artist Linda LeKimff, whose paintings are one part Matisse, one part Jean de Brunhoff (illustrator of Babar the Elephant), and one part Peter Max.

Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit. She's not that bad.

I don't know if Governors have anything to do with these decisions or whether Churchill Downs makes them. But it's not real clear why LeKimff is particularly fitted for the Derby job. Paris is great and all, but what's the connection with Kentucky? Troye lived here for 35 years and his paintings actually captured the atmosphere of the Bluegrass and its horse culture.

But perhaps we should be more appreciative of Ms. LeKimff: This may be the last Derby art that has something to do with horses. It may very well be that, after 2010, Derby art will begin focusing on a new symbol: slot machines.

Roman Polanski is a god, and other observations about whether artists should be expected to act like the rest of us

One wonders about the judgment of the critics of Roman Polanski, the famous cinematic auteur (I would say "movie director," but that would fail to capture the ambiance of the artistic genius of the man). They seem to think that he is somehow subject to the rules by which the rest of us--we mere mortals--must abide.

They forget that Roman Polanski is an artist.

Now this simple truth is being completely ignored by Polanski's critics, who fail to make a distinction between those of here on earth, and those, like Polanski, who inhabit the empyrean heights. He is guilty of raping a 13 year-old girl they say. But what is 'rape'? What is 'guilty'? What is 'a 13 year-old girl'?

These questions arise every time an artist is brought up on charges that concern some incident, usually involving the abuse of children. In recent times, we have endured the controversy surrounding another movie director (if I may use that somewhat mundane terminology): Woody Allen. Allen married one of his movie co-stars, Mia Farrow. He then began having an affair with one of Farrow's children. When the affair was discovered, Allen became incredulous that his behavior was being questioned.

Yes, those of us who dwell here in the sublunary world must be judged by these base standards of decency, but this was Woody Allen we were talking about. What were his critics thinking? Did they think they were dealing with a forklift driver? Did they think it was a controversy about a plumber? Did they think Allen was some plebian with a nine-to-five job who went bowling on Friday night?

You and I may have inhibitions about statutory rape and incest, but we're talking about an artist here.

Then there was Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe was a photographer. But not just any photographer, not just some guy who does family portraits who, if he broke statutory rape laws would be put away for the rest of his life. No, sir, he didn't just take pictures: he used the camera to compose. Had Rembrandt been a photographer, he would have ... well, maybe not. Rembrandt didn't paint child pornography. Mapplethorpe did.

But it wasn't child pornography. Yes, it included sexually provocative portrayals of children, and such portrayals are illegal in our world, but these are mortal judgments, inapplicable to such as Mapplethorpe.

Thankfully, Mappelthorpe is no longer composing--only because he is decomposing. He died in 1989. Of AIDS.

If being an artist was not enough to excuse what some base thinkers consider perversion, then his being gay should completely remove any grounds for blame. Being gay, as we all know, excuses all aberrant behavior. Just ask former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey--and former Congressman John Foley.

Which brings us to Polanski. Polanski too is a god, his deity fully evident from his filmography: "Rosemary's Baby," "Chinatown", "Tess," not to mention films such as "Le gros et le maigre," "Les plus belles escroqueries du monde," and "Le locataire." We don't know what these titles mean. Quite possibly, they may be translated "Freddie Krueger's Day Off," "National Lampoon's Paris Vacation," and "Porky's IV," but they are in French, and that is all that matters.

After Polanski's rape of a 13 year old girl in 1977 and his subsequent conviction in California on a lesser charge, he fled the country before sentencing, choosing instead the friendlier shores of Europe, where pedophilia among artists is apparently considered an amusing peccadillo.

Admittedly, the idea that artists should be allowed to ignore common standards of human decency has been questioned. In 1944, the writer George Orwell wrote an essay entitled, "Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali," in which he reviews the autobiography of the famous surrealist painter.

The book, he claims, was quite simply narcissistic, "a striptease act," said Orwell, "conducted in pink twilight." The book's only value, he said, was "as a record of fantasy, of the perversion of instinct that has been made possible by the machine age."

Orwell catalogs Dali's fond reminiscences of his childhood: kicking his infant sister; flinging a little boy off a bridge; humiliating a girl who loves him for five years, at which point he abandons her--as promised; asking his future wife to kill him after their first kiss. And speaking of his first wife, Orwell points out that, in the course of wooing her, Dali "rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of goat’s dung boiled up in fish glue."

Surely this must have set her heart aflutter.

Oh, and then there was the childhood feat of biting an ant-covered bat in half. Ozzie Osbourne, it seems, was not the original we took him to be.

Orwell notes two things that characterize Dali's paintings: sexual perversity and necrophilia. And then, he adds, in the high tones of the art critic, "there is a fairly well-marked excretory motif." Or, as the artistically primitive observer might say, he likes to paint poop--a tendency that apparently elicited some to ask whether he was coprophagic. It was a false charge, Dali asserted, "but it seems," says Orwell, "to be only at that point that his interest in excrement stops."

If you don't know what 'coprophagic' means, that is probably good. It is best left to the artists.

"Dali also boasts that he is not homosexual," Orwell writes, "but otherwise he seems to have as good an outfit of perversions as anyone could wish for."

Then Orwell goes all moralistic on us. Apparently blind to the aesthetic appeal of human feces, he condemns Dali altogether:

The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even—since some of Dali’s pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard—on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.

And then, after this little sermon, Orwell starts declaring victim status, complaining about the kind of condemnation that his own failure to appreciate the finer artistic points of human skulls, putrefying donkeys, and decomposing human corpses has elicited:

If you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don’t like rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is assumed that you lack the aesthetic sense.

And the problem is...?

But Orwell is only getting to his main question, in which he impertinently asks where artists get off thinking they should be treated differently than anyone else when it comes to ordinary human morality:

It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘Art’, and everything is O.K.

...In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.

Funny that Orwell mentions rape.

He argues that one has to make a distinction between good art and bad morals, and that sometimes the twain of the two meet, but that such a meeting ought not to confuse us about what we are presented with. Dali, he says, was an accomplished draughtsman whose artistic talent should be appreciated--and a vile human being who ought to be horsewhipped:

...[I]t should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

Demanding the recognition that artists are also citizens and human beings? But that would be like saying that we think Roman Polanski is a great filmmaker and at the same time that we think he should be locked up for raping a 13 year-old girl.

And we can't have that.

Subverting the Subversives

The June issue of the New Criterion has an excellent article by Roger Kimball called, "Why the Art World is Such a Disaster." He discusses "Wrestle," a new exhibition at Bard College to inaugurate the CCS Bard Hessel Museum, one of numerous such efforts over the last several decades that takes as its premise that the purpose of art is to shock and outrage rather than to create something beautiful.

The problem is that shock and outrage is, well, so yesterday. Kimball explains:

Don't get me wrong: it was plenty awful. Body parts, "explicit" images, and naughty language galore. The exhibition certainly merited the warning to parents at the entrance. But it wasn't worse than dozens of other exhibitions I've seen, you've seen, we've all seen.

He continues:

No, the thing to appreciate about "Wrestle," about the Hessel Museum and the collection of Marieluese Hessel, and about the visual arts at Bard generally is not how innovative, challenging, or unusual they are, but how pedestrian and , sad to say, conventional they are. True, there is a lot of ickiness on view at the Hessel Museum. But it is entirely predictable ickiness. It's outrage by-the-yard, avant-garde in bulk, smugness for the masses. And this brings me to what I believe is the real significance of institutions like the art museum at Bard, the Hessel collection that fills it, and the surrounding atmosphere of pseudo-avant-garde self-satisfaction. The "arts" at Bard are notable not because they are unusual but because they are so grindingly ordinary.

I think these people seriously think that we're all going to faint when we see this stuff for the umpteenth time in its most recent derivative incarnation. These people don't need to be met with cries of protest, they need to be met with a collective yawn. But such is the state, not only of our artists (if I may use that term loosely), but of our universities which apparently have nothing else better to do, now that they've given up on passing on Western culture, than to tear it down.

Although he doesn't mention Chesterton directly, Kimball recognizes what Chesterton spoke of in the introduction to Heretics, where he points out that heresy is essentially boring. Everyone is a heretic now. The subversives have taken over. It's time to subvert them. If you want to strike out on your own, if you want to be different, if you want to revolt, about the only thing to revolt into is orthodoxy.

Someone needs to tell these people the 60's are over. Yoohoo! Jerry Garcia is dead. So's Timothy Leary. Turn off, tune out, drop in. Or, perhaps preferably, go somewhere and don't bother people with your ludicrous attempts to bother people. It's getting very old.

Another modern art outrage

G. K. Chesterton once said that all art involves "drawing aline somewhere." Some art critics are wanting to draw the line somewhere this side ofa a new exhibition at the Chapter Art Centre in Cardiff, England, where, according to the Daily Mail, a new exhibition that features, well, nothing. Artist Simon Pope says visitors to the empty exhibit hall are to use the opportunity to remember exhibitions at another museum. "You are asked to summon up these remote spaces - through memory, body, speech and movement - so that they exist at two locations simultaneously, both here and there."

Hmmm.

Pope says the exhibition is to foster a greater awareness of psychosis by putting visitors in the frame of mind of someone suffering from "reduplicative paramnesia," a "rare delusional belief that a place or location has been duplicated, existing in more than one place simultaneously, or that it has been 'relocated' to another site."

This has not a few visitors accusing Pope of engaging in a practical joke. Maybe they should put stops on the checks they used to pay to enter the exhibit and ask the museum to "imagine" that the checks are good.

And museums wonder why it's so hard to find funding.