The Fredösphere

The internet is a wonderful thing.  I see the notice that Roger Kimball has put down his toga and taken up the quill.  His new book Rape of the Masters is out, and two minutes later I've visited the web page of my local library and requested they get a copy.  The very soul of convenience.

Here's a juicy bit from the sneak preview.  (Warning:  we're talking about post-modern art here, so of course we have to talk dirty.)

One of the most insidious expressions of this process of de bas en haut involves a travesty of traditional aesthetic judgment. One thinks, for example, of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of the sadomasochistic demimonde and those cheerleaders who pretended to admire them for their formal excellence: the exquisite triangulation of the bullwhip being reminiscent of the composition of certain classical nudes, etc., etc. Or consider the London-based artists Gilbert and George. When they exhibited The Naked Shit Pictures—huge photo-montages of themselves naked with bits of excrement floating about—one critic invoked the Isenheim altarpiece as a precedent, while another spoke of the artists’ “self-sacrifice for a higher cause, which is purposely moral and indeed Christian.” You can almost hear these critics sneer: “You want aesthetic appreciation? We’ll give you aesthetic appreciation—of garbage.” In part, this is a strategy of what I have elsewhere called “the trivialization of outrage.” The vocabulary of aesthetic delectation is reforged into a demonic parody of itself. The moral is that art is no more immune to perversion than any other realm of human endeavor.

This is Kimball's great theme and he's playing it especially well.  I can't wait to read the whole thing.

In the preview Kimball refers approvingly to The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe's attack on the small group -- the "mere hamlet" -- of people world wide who serve as the gate keepers into the world of the visual arts.  It's a great book but, as Kimball mentions, it is marred by Wolfe's distrust of all modern art.  For him, the paint dried up forever sometime around 1880.  This is a terrible blind spot and makes it easy to dismiss Wolfe's entire argument.  Sadly, Kimball and other New Criterion writers must continually correct the assumption that they too are stuck in the 19th century.

There's more to the story of Wolfe and the New Criterion.  Years ago, in The Painted Word, Wolfe quotes a review from the New York Times:

Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory.  And  given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial--the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.

and then he reacts:

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well - how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along.  Not `seeing is believing', you ninny, but `believing is seeing', for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.

Wolfe attacking a art critic who wants Theory instead of art:  typical Wolfe, and typical Kimball also (but Kimball the more refined and informed of the two, of course.)  But let's see, just who was that author of the NYT article?  Some guy by the name of ... give me a minute while I look it up ... by the name of:  Hilton Kramer.  Saaaaaaay, didn't he go on to co-found The New Criterion?  Whaaaaaaats goooooooing oooooooon????

Well, Google just isn't giving me a direct answer.  As best as I can tell, Kramer is a complex figure.  He calls himself a liberal but most others call him conservative.  I suppose you could call him a neo-con, except without all the implied political views that goes with that word nowdays.  He's one of those from the older generation that found themselves left behind as their own fellow liberals drifted away.  No doubt there's more to the story; I wish someone would tell it.  Anyway, it's unfortunate Wolfe picked on Kramer, of all people.

(And for a recent installment of PoMo attention-getting stunts, read this hilarious self-parody.)