#264

264 24x27 Acrylic on composition board

Hilton Kramer and the New Criterion (from 1982)

From a journal entry, July 19, 1982

            Hilton Kramer has resigned as art critic for the NYT and announced the appearance of a new review: The "New Criterion."  In reading the publishers introduction, I detected a familiar tone. When I came to names from "Commentary" and the "National Review", the source was plain.

            There have been several articles and review on music in "Commentary" recently. They have taken a critical tack I've found odd and unsettling. Not criticism of individual works, but generic criticism. Attacks on jazz, on popular music, on the dilution of the teaching of "serious" (European concert) music in the curricula of American conservatories and schools of music. This seems to be a posse of writers and intellectuals, politically right wing, with an active agenda to correct modern culture, which they are sure has gone miserably astray. They are anti's: anticommunist, an­ti-populist, antidemocratic, anti-soviet, anti-liberal (who, by design or unconsciously, are the handmaidens of Marxism). They are authoritarian elitists.          

            The new thing here is this emphasis on controlling culture. The arts, literature, music, theater; all are seen through a kind of backwards Marxist lens, busily purveying hidden social programs. The real purpose of criticism, it seems, is to expose the hidden social agenda a which is the matrix and context of the work, then to demonstrate the political/economic wrong-headedness of that context. The work itself is but a means or foil for the serious business of promoting political and social orthodoxy. Art is taken seriously, the way Marxist criticism takes it seriously. Not for its own sake (whatever that may mean), not for the meaning or importance inherent in any particular work, but for the place a work occupies in the social-political matrix of which it is both example and creator-advocate. This new-conservative, neo-clas­sical-authoritarian criticism begins with its own dogmatic or­thodoxy, but an orthodoxy that is clear and formally articulated only on the political-social level. In other words, it's not about art, it's about politics. Art held up to political ideology.

            Their problem is, they can't deal with art. It's too slip­pery. Like a guerrilla army in the hills. So the New  Authoritarian eliminates the enemy by a master stroke; it transforms by magic thinking art, artists, and all their sup­porters, into pure ideological terms. For ideological battles the Authoritarian's rhetorical weapons are well honed.

            It's characteristic of the these guy to be more eager to attack the supporters of the arts than the artists or their work. They're realists. They know where the money is. And in the White House, having not the slightest idea what any of this is about, they  have no mere sympathizer, but a crusading general.

8/20/82

            An article in the Inquirer this week on the New Criterion. The Village Voice a critical piece. They're (NC) funded by some right wing founda­tion.

#263 Leaves on rushing water

18x14 acrylic on canvas board

Artists, Break Free from the Capitalist Market!

keep throwing these messages in a bottle out into the wake...I mean, how we artists need to free ourselves from the capitalist trap. I would think supposidly creative people would be more hyperattuned to this.. and dig the challenge... but most, even those who pretend to radical messages... just roll over and hope to be fucked by the gallery comodification investment model... like maybe they'll get knocked up and give birth to a zillion dollars. Kinda disgusting.

Compartmentalization... but what fucking kind of 'creativity' is that, that can't deal with the real world and how it uses our art?

The Human Heart Revealed #262

Ghost Flowers #261

16x12 Acrylic on canvas board

Hiroshima

Those of us who were born before 1945 or soon after, who were children in the late 40's, teens in the 50's... grew up deluged with images of nuclear bombs, the endless photos of hydrogen bomb tests in the pacific; we passed Nike anti-aircraft missiles on the Lake front in Chicago, we knew people who built shelters in their basements... all this, culminating in the most terrifying two weeks since humans came down from the trees--October, 1962.through those years, have no idea.

The nuclear arsenals are still there. The missile silos are still there. England, the U.S, Israel, Pakastan, France, China, Russia...North Korea... all armed with with the capacity to initiate a conflict that would be the end human life on the planet--or make it so terrible, that extinction and death would be a blessing.
Those years were a watershed in human consciousness--if you did not learn to disassociate, to build your life in the delusional shelter of the Great Hologram... as most people did, you became an alien in the world forever, an exile in a world run by madmen, you learned, over the years--for such knowledge is too much to absorb all at once--you understand that there is no longer any place in this world to call "home." After Hiroshima, it is always and forever, 3 minutes to midnight

This is the End, my friend... and maybe the beginning

I think there's reason to expect that these weeks of slaughter and destruction in Gaza--made visible for those who choose to see it through social media, is going to have broad ranging consequences in the future, its corrosive effect on the impenatrable solidarity of American Jews with Israel, just for starters. Which means a less certain stream of money to AIPAC, and, one can only hope, a loosening of Israel's stranglehold on U.S. representative and senators. But I'm thinking more along the lines of how watching the aftermath of the Iranian stolen elections--following if for week on Twitter--and then came the Arab Spring!  -- how this was yeast to the brew of social and political discontent essential to the Occupy movement. I don't see how it's going to be possible--not for those of us who have stayed close to the news coming out of Gaza outside the major media, who have followed the livefeeds, have obsessively shared photos and stories by Twitter and Alternet and FB--how it will be possilbe to return to 'life as usual' without being alert in every nerve and cell, waiting and searching for the time to come together that make is feel like we are addressing the horror we've witness, in ways that feel in some small degree proportionate to the provocation.

If people came to the Occupy encampments out of disillusion and rejection of the electoral political process and its institutions, this promises to have blasted a larger crater in any possibility of believing or living in the greater Machinery of world power. We see China and India, the rest of the Arab leaders, not simply indifferent, but complicit--realizing that what Israel is doing, they are fully prepared to do with their own troublemakers. No wonder Bashar al-Assad is still in power--after waging a years long war against his own peoples! That's how it works! That's how this whole fucking bloody machinry of power works! Held together by money and its institutions and the on-going privitazatiion of everything. What Israel is doing, what Assad is doing--that's what's in store for anyone who resists the Machine, who seeks to build more humane relationships on the other side of Nationalism and Capitalism and it's tools of patriarchy and racism and enforced inequality and the propagation of ignorance and the raising of servility and complicty with tyrany to the supreme virture!

This is the end, my friend... the beginning of the end. Oh, let it be so. Let it be so.