Jackson Pollock's wife, abex painter Lee Krasner, observed a much less tight branding discipline. She didn't adopt a fixed signature style or gimmick and remained comparatively obscure.
The museum of the criminally insane in Heidelberg must refer to the Prinzhorn collection[*).
The late Austrian chute artist is Günter Brus (who returned to drawing in 1970). The corresponding art movement of Viennese Actionism was quite characteristic for the way performance and concept artists employ hi-brow merch as ersatz artworks for sale. Wiener Aktionismus got a dedicated museum, WAM[+), testament to the absorption of scandal by the cultural scene. Compare with the antics of scum rocker GG “Sleeping In My Piss” Allin, an unwashed romantic of sorts whose intense acts of self-destruction & obnoxiousness evaded the safe zone of “culture.” (I believe he was banned from the “Jazzkeller” music location of my home town Freiburg in SW Germ after a stage-shitting incident, possibly combined with sexual assault.)
I was going to say that one thing AI bots won't take over soon is live blood'n'gutz action, but then I recalled Vaucanson's mechanical duck whose crowning act of mimesis was in fact defecation.
Part of the reason the US art establishment gets away with it is that art is often said to be in the eye of the beholder. Not especially persuaded about senility escaping outside of the art world and being applicable to one-society-after-another, however, that's a long stretch but is a good exercise at least.
It's true that we're all fixated on the past now, but I don't think this is anything new, nor many of the fundamental problems we're facing right now. In fact, I believe the bankruptcy in our culture has more to do with the deleterious effects of power on how human beings interact. As corporations continue to run more things--unless some counter trend somehow emerges--you'll see more of this unraveling, and the negation of the individual.
Life now is very much like a 60s-70s sci-fi novel: literal Maoist-like millennials (no less than Norm Finkelstein also detected this in them and their peculiar culture) have been infiltrating countless corporations and social institutions and running amok--had you told me this was going to happen way back in the 1990s, I would have laughed, that it was impossible, yet perhaps I'd have at least accepted that the wealthy and powerful could be so nuts, and they are.
That's not to say what they hold out as progressivism and leftism is the real deal and part of the American left tradition, it is not and has more to do with parlor and "champagne" leftism, "limousine socialism." Yet, the bosses in the former USSR didn't look that different, and like Dante's false seers in Hades, they were all looking backwards, forever. Are we all doing that? No one is immune to decline. The left is firmly there globally and doesn't have a lot to say that relates to the average person almost anywhere, anywhere in a world ruled by bossism.
The first leftist was the Marquis de Sade, arguing for the vulnerable and calling for forgiveness--and he was an aristocrat, calling for reason. It doesn't matter when the call for humanity and sanity comes from. Few of them will come from the new aristocracy, bank on that. If we're going to move forward, that's going to mean being honest with ourselves about the true nature of revolutions as human catastrophes. I don't think that means rejecting the ideals, but it's the truth that all revolutions are "betrayed"--do tornadoes also betray us? Droughts that came during the Roman Empire and, with each one, increased the possibility that the Emperor would be assassinated? Revolutions are tragedies, and little else, the rest being a depressing misreading of history. This only about power, opportunities do present themselves within events, but don't think we have that much control in this. As a Cronenberg character once said, paraphrasing, "We only have enough free will to make things interesting." Some kind of focused agency, I believe, is fleeting.
Thanks! Alexander was great - what a breath of fresh air. Had never heard of him or his work. Must learn more.
Misc references and remarks:
Jackson Pollock's wife, abex painter Lee Krasner, observed a much less tight branding discipline. She didn't adopt a fixed signature style or gimmick and remained comparatively obscure.
The museum of the criminally insane in Heidelberg must refer to the Prinzhorn collection[*).
The late Austrian chute artist is Günter Brus (who returned to drawing in 1970). The corresponding art movement of Viennese Actionism was quite characteristic for the way performance and concept artists employ hi-brow merch as ersatz artworks for sale. Wiener Aktionismus got a dedicated museum, WAM[+), testament to the absorption of scandal by the cultural scene. Compare with the antics of scum rocker GG “Sleeping In My Piss” Allin, an unwashed romantic of sorts whose intense acts of self-destruction & obnoxiousness evaded the safe zone of “culture.” (I believe he was banned from the “Jazzkeller” music location of my home town Freiburg in SW Germ after a stage-shitting incident, possibly combined with sexual assault.)
I was going to say that one thing AI bots won't take over soon is live blood'n'gutz action, but then I recalled Vaucanson's mechanical duck whose crowning act of mimesis was in fact defecation.
Links
(*] https://www.sammlung-prinzhorn.de/
(+] https://wieneraktionismus.at/
I nearly saw GG Allin back in the early 90s. I knew people who did.
Plumbing retreat when
Part of the reason the US art establishment gets away with it is that art is often said to be in the eye of the beholder. Not especially persuaded about senility escaping outside of the art world and being applicable to one-society-after-another, however, that's a long stretch but is a good exercise at least.
It's true that we're all fixated on the past now, but I don't think this is anything new, nor many of the fundamental problems we're facing right now. In fact, I believe the bankruptcy in our culture has more to do with the deleterious effects of power on how human beings interact. As corporations continue to run more things--unless some counter trend somehow emerges--you'll see more of this unraveling, and the negation of the individual.
Life now is very much like a 60s-70s sci-fi novel: literal Maoist-like millennials (no less than Norm Finkelstein also detected this in them and their peculiar culture) have been infiltrating countless corporations and social institutions and running amok--had you told me this was going to happen way back in the 1990s, I would have laughed, that it was impossible, yet perhaps I'd have at least accepted that the wealthy and powerful could be so nuts, and they are.
That's not to say what they hold out as progressivism and leftism is the real deal and part of the American left tradition, it is not and has more to do with parlor and "champagne" leftism, "limousine socialism." Yet, the bosses in the former USSR didn't look that different, and like Dante's false seers in Hades, they were all looking backwards, forever. Are we all doing that? No one is immune to decline. The left is firmly there globally and doesn't have a lot to say that relates to the average person almost anywhere, anywhere in a world ruled by bossism.
The first leftist was the Marquis de Sade, arguing for the vulnerable and calling for forgiveness--and he was an aristocrat, calling for reason. It doesn't matter when the call for humanity and sanity comes from. Few of them will come from the new aristocracy, bank on that. If we're going to move forward, that's going to mean being honest with ourselves about the true nature of revolutions as human catastrophes. I don't think that means rejecting the ideals, but it's the truth that all revolutions are "betrayed"--do tornadoes also betray us? Droughts that came during the Roman Empire and, with each one, increased the possibility that the Emperor would be assassinated? Revolutions are tragedies, and little else, the rest being a depressing misreading of history. This only about power, opportunities do present themselves within events, but don't think we have that much control in this. As a Cronenberg character once said, paraphrasing, "We only have enough free will to make things interesting." Some kind of focused agency, I believe, is fleeting.