Jerry Saltz is a great writer. At times, he’s a decent thinker. But he imagines himself engaged in a titanic battle with art-flipping philistines debasing great art. Nevermind that most art from any era is mediocre and that all styles that are in vogue breed popular figures who don’t live up to the test of time. In Saltz’s melodrama, he’s all that stands between the vulgarians (who naturally all seek him out to bless their chosen mediocrities) and the unsuspecting collectors who lack Saltz’s superior eye. In today’s example, it’s Walter Robinson’s brilliantly-coined Zombie Formalism which only exists because of the market and the flippers.

After paragraphs of complaining that “Galleries everywhere are awash in these brand-name reductivist canvases, all more or less handsome, harmless, supposedly metacritical,” Saltz softens:

I’ll admit that I don’t hate all of this work. Frankly, I like some of it. The saddest part of this trend is that even better artists who paint this way are getting lost in the onslaught of copycat mediocrity and mechanical art. Going to galleries is becoming less like venturing into individual arks and more like going to chain stores where everything looks familiar. My guess is that, if and when money disappears from the art market again, the bottom will fall out of this genericism. Everyone will instantly stop making the sort of painting that was an answer to a question that no one remembers asking—and it will never be talked about again.

That last statement could apply to just about any genre. Eventually everyone stops painting in a style when the original provocation is no longer relevant. Buried within Saltz’s fairly commonplace screed (he’s not saying much here that Robinson didn’t say weeks ago) is another culprit:

Almost everyone who paints like this has come through art school. Thus the work harks back to the period these artists were taught to lionize, the supposedly purer days of the 1960s and 1970s, when their teachers’ views were being formed. Both teachers and students zero in on this one specific period; then only on one type of art of this period; then only on certain artists. It’s art-historical clear-­cutting, aesthetic monoculture with no aesthetic biodiversity. This is not painting but semantic painterbation—what an unctuous auction catalogue, in reference to one artist’s work, recently called “established postmodern praxis.”

That’s not a bad line of thinking. Certainly it is more interesting than the warmed-over complaints about art made for art fairs. And that observation reminds us again that Jerry Saltz actually does have something to say until he remembers that all modern ills stem from art sales and he’s right back attacking the auction houses and the market.

Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same? (Vulture)

NPR delves into some interesting social scientific research that’s been floating around about the role of peer influence on aesthetic values. In other words, do we value the best art because of its inherent qualities or do some works gain popularity through external forces?

Let’s put that more concretely: Is the Mona Lisa famous because it is the greatest expression of artistic genius or did the theft and publicity surrounding the search for the stolen painting at the turn of the 20th century have something to do with its worldwide stature?

Princeton’s Matthew Salganik tried to answer that with an experiment:

“To see the role of chance you need to see multiple realizations of the same process,” Salganik explains. “But we only get to see one outcome. So we see the world where the Mona Lisa is one of the most famous paintings, and it’s hard to imagine that something different could have happened.”

But Salganik is good at computers, so he came up with a plan.

He would create a series of identical worlds online filled with the same pieces of art, then get thousands of people to choose which they liked best.

If the same art rose to the top of every world, then he would know that success was driven by the inherent qualities of that work. If not, he could conclude, success was essentially random.

“We have the chance of really seeing — as much as we possibly can — parallel versions of history. So rather than trying to argue like that, we just said, ‘Let’s just create these parallel worlds and see what happens.’ “

So … what happened? As you can imagine, the results favored chance over inherent quality:

after this work, which one person in the field described as a seminal paper, Salganik went on to do similar studies with parallel worlds that suggest that quality does have at least a limited role. It is hard to make things of very poor quality succeed — though after you meet a basic standard of quality, what becomes a huge hit and what doesn’t is essentially a matter of chance.

Good Art Is Popular Because It’s Good. Right? (NPR)

There are many who won’t care for Roger Scruton’s aesthetic politics or for his politics, for that matter. But none can gainsay his skill as a writer. Herein, Scruton takes to what seems to be a new Forbes habit and asks about Clement Greenberg’s famous distinction between Avant-garde and kitsch. Scruton is not much of a modernist. Nonetheless, he charts an interesting arc away from representation and back again without encountering the dreaded kitsch.

Paradoxically, Scruton reminds us, that prepared the ground for kitsch in a new form:

There was, for Greenberg, no way back to the old figurative ways of painting. All the images had been deprived of their aura, and if you attempted, in the world of the 1930s, to paint a beautiful nude in the manner of Ingres, then the result would be kitsch. The only way forward was the way of the avant-garde, which either eschewed representation altogether, or presented figures that had been, as it were, discomposed and reassembled, like those faces of Picasso that look forwards and sideways at once, or those figures of de Kooning that seem to have been slapped on the canvas as a punishment, and then eaten alive by the paint.

For half a century or more Greenberg’s view was orthodoxy. To be a modern artist you had to turn your back on the literal image, since the very attempt to produce traditional art would turn oil-paint to candy-floss and emotion to kitsch. You must go forward with the avant-garde, and forward everybody went, to the point where nobody quite knew just where he was going, and art had ceased to be something to look at and become something to think about instead. Then, in a burst of inspiration, Andy Warhol began producing Brillo Boxes. These were not figurative paintings, since they were indistinguishable from the originals. But nor were they ‘avant-garde’, since they were neither abstract squiggles, nor demolitions of reality. They were just there, with no explanation, because that was what the artist had done.

After a while, with the emergence of pop art and advert-art, and a few more attempts at conceptual art, the way was once again open for kitsch.

A fine line between art and kitsch (Forbes)

Jerry Saltz has some thoughts about the Selfie:

Selfies come from all of us; they are a folk art that is already expanding the language and lexicon of photography. Selfies are a photography of modern life—not that academics or curators are paying much attention to them. They will, though: In a hundred years, the mass of selfies will be an incredible record of the fine details of everyday life. Imagine what we could see if we had millions of these from the streets of imperial Rome. […]

Although theorists like Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes saw melancholy and signs of death in every photograph, selfies aren’t for the ages. They’re like the cartoon dog who, when asked what time it is, always says, “Now! Now! Now!”

We might ask what art-historical and visual DNA form the selfie’s roots and structures. There are old photos of people holding cameras out to take their own pictures. (Often, people did this to knock off the last frame in a roll of film, so it could be rewound and sent to be processed.) Still, the genre remained unclear, nebulous, and uncodified. Looking back for trace elements, I discern strong selfie echoes in Van Gogh’s amazing self-portraits [4]—some of the same intensity, immediacy, and need to reveal something inner to the outside world in the most vivid way possible. Warhol, of course, comes to mind with his love of the present, performative persona and his wild Day-Glo color. But he took his own instant photos of other subjects, or had his subjects shoot themselves in a photo booth—both devices with far more objective lenses than a smartphone, as well as different formats and depths of field. Many will point to Cindy Sherman. But none of her pictures is taken in any selfie way. Moreover, her photographs show us the characters and selves that exist in her unbridled pictorial imagination. She’s not there.

Art at Arm’s Length: A History of the Selfie (Vulture/NYMag)

Sarah Kent writes in the Guardian about the experience of judging a prize for criticism which underscored the erosion of criticism as a vocation:

The experience was shocking not just because the quality of the writing was so high, but because of the frustration expressed by many of the applicants and the air of desperation that emanated from their submissions. […] Far from being disgruntled wingers, these are committed writers eager to make a difference, yet in each case, the stories they told paint a dismal picture of a profession in crisis.

Worse, Kent fears that the constraints on budgets and time, have softened critics up, made them easy prey for marketing and manipulation:

hostility has given way to admiration. Art is so fashionable that high profile exhibitions attract more punters than football matches. This is good news for museums desperately short of funds, but bad news for critics. Box office returns are of paramount importance, so to ensure a good press, galleries micro-manage media response. At press views, the curator will often take a hoard of hacks on a tour of the exhibition and tell them what to write – they traipse off to file obsequious reports scarcely having glanced at the show, and everyone is happy.

Why does this matter? Because adulation is as poisonous as neglect. The arts thrive in a climate of lively and informed debate; emerging artists need the endorsement of an intelligent response and successful artists, under pressure to churn out more of the same, need encouragement to risk failure by trying something new.

Art critics matter only if they engage (Guardian)

New York Times critic Holland Carter is not happy. In an essay that blames money, real estate, chauvinism and other things for the decline of art’s vibrancy, Cotter also addresses the critic’s loss of influence and relevance:

The narrowing of the market has been successful in attracting a wave of neophyte buyers who have made art shopping chic. It has also produced an epidemic of copycat collecting. To judge by the amounts of money piled up on a tiny handful of reputations, few of these collectors have the guts, or the eye or the interest, to venture far from blue-chip boilerplate. They let galleries, art advisers and the media do the choosing, and the media doesn’t particularly include art critics. What, after all, does thumbs up, thumbs down matter when winners are preselected before the critical votes are in? In this economy, it can appear that the critic’s job is to broadcast names and contribute to fame.

Conservative art can encourage conservative criticism. We’re seeing a revival — some would say a disinterment — of a describe-the-strokes style of writing popular in the formalist 1950s and again in the 1970s: basically, glorified advertising copy. Evaluative approaches that developed in the 1980s and 1990s, based on the assumption that art inevitably comments on the social and political realities that produce it, tend to be met with disparagement now, in part because they’re often couched in academic jargon, which has become yet another form of sales-speak.

There’s no question that we need — art needs — an influx of new commentators who don’t mistake attitude for ideas, who move easily between cultures and geographies. Regular gigs in mainstream print journalism have all but dried up, but the Internet offers ambitious options in a growing number of blogazines including Art F City (edited by Paddy Johnson) and Hyperallergic (edited by Hrag Vartanian), which combine criticism, reporting, political activism and gossip on an almost-24-hour news cycle.

It’s a shame Cotter he doesn’t follow through on his own thought. How should an art economy function? What structures would he propose to promote a diversity of styles, ideas and artistic practices? Can the new critical outlets he praises have a broader effect on what kind of art is made and which artists will be able to support themselves?

Even the art market knows that the money is not the best indicator of art that will have an impact, either immediate or lasting

Holland Cotter Looks at Money in Art (NYTimes)

Waldemar Januszczak was once the art critic for the Guardian and now fills that role at the Sunday Times. But he can’t keep out of his old paper. This missive was sent in response to a writer’s complaint about the art market being a cartel:

The real problem with the art world is not the money men scavenging in its wake – they’ve always been there – but the pirates who’ve taken over the ship. I am thinking of course of that awful art world species: the curator. When I started writing about art, there were no curators. Now they are everywhere. They go to the same biennales; speak the same meaningless art language; and control the art world from within by privileging their creativity ahead of the artist’s. For 5,000 years art survived perfectly well without curators. Now they are its gate keepers.

What we need is a revolution, akin to the impressionist revolution in 19th-century France. Just as the impressionists overthrew the salon and put artists back at the centre of the art world, so someone out there needs to overthrow the Tate empire. Come on Hackney. Rise up.

Why the art world needs to rise up against curators (Guardian)