thx, lad...

LAD wrote:I ended up spending half my time reading French theorists and writing a thesis on Debord and the situationists.

ah, great! and me, I ended up citing culturcide's lp as my favorite of all times, it's globalization of the thieves

Just for uh I don’t know, fun, here’s a brief well-known statement from the aforementioned Sherrie Levine :

The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. And we note that the picture is but a space in which a variety of images, not of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. Similar to those eternal copyists Bouvard and Pechuchet, we indicate the profound ridiculousness that is precisely the truth of painting. We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. Succeeding the painter, plagiarist no longer bears within him passions, humors, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense encyclopedia from which he draws. The viewer is the tablet on which all quotations that make a painting are inscribed without any of them being lost. A painting's meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination. The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter.

She’s obviously indebted to the work of Roland Barthes and good ol’ Foucault – it all goes back to France I tell you.

Mayfair wrote:

Mr. Chimp wrote:"....hey, what's that? looks neat..."

-click-


The price will be a cool $10G for my masterpiece. I've captured a moment - and has my name on it. It truly is mine.

It is odd to me how much the idea of art as an unique object to be bought and sold permeates these kind of discussions especially when conceptual art on the whole seems left out by this practice of the gallery art world, probably mostly because it is that of concept and idea often with only byproducts that are actually things. Why is it so hard to think of art as ideas rather than objects? What is that not often seen as a valid medium like painting and sculpture?

I suppose that the phrase "starving artist" applies somewhere in here. (non-sardonic).

Mayfair wrote:It is odd to me how much the idea of art as an unique object to be bought and sold permeates these kind of discussions especially when conceptual art on the whole seems left out by this practice of the gallery art world, probably mostly because it is that of concept and idea often with only byproducts that are actually things. Why is it so hard to think of art as ideas rather than objects? What is that not often seen as a valid medium like painting and sculpture?

Well, you’ve answered your own question. Art and its reception is seldom if ever located outside of the institutional art world – (the “gallery art worldâ€

.Conceptual art
An art form in which the originating idea and the process by which it is presented take precedence over a tangible product. Conceptual works are sometimes produced in visible form, but they often exist only as descriptions of mental concepts or ideas. This trend developed in the late 1960s, in part as a way to avoid the commercialisation of art.

I do not think you have to define something by the industry made around it. Religion is a good example of that.

Mayfair wrote:

.Conceptual art
An art form in which the originating idea and the process by which it is presented take precedence over a tangible product. Conceptual works are sometimes produced in visible form, but they often exist only as descriptions of mental concepts or ideas. This trend developed in the late 1960s, in part as a way to avoid the commercialisation of art.

I do not think you have to define something by the industry made around it. Religion is a good example of that.

Perhaps not, but there’s no point asking questions about the social relevance of something (or say, the lack of recognition of said thing as you have asked) without looking into the structures and systems – or channels – by which something is recognized or not.

Yes, there are collectives, and squats, and graduate seminars, and listserv communities in which conceptual art as you have defined it occurs – but it’s very naïve in my opinion to try and talk meaningfully about any aspect of culture – art, religion, cuisine, fashion, whatever – without looking at how it comes to be, is recognized, becomes canonized, is accepted or dismissed in mainstream avenues of discourse, etc.

Only a pubescent anarchist with his head up his ass will suggest that we should dispense with institutions. They exist, we need them, but altering them requires a lot of thankless work. There’s no point pretending this isn’t so.

There’s a system in place that ensures a lot unimaginative, mass-produced culture continues to fill screens, airwaves, billboards, and so on and it’s one of the greatest self-perpetuating culture machines known to civilization -- global capitalism is our paradigm and we’re all inside it whether we choose to pretend otherwise or not. As Slajov Zizek says, ‘It’s the political-economy stupid!’

Anyway, I don’t really know if we are in disagreement about anything, I hadn’t really thought so.

Mayfair wrote:It is odd to me how much the idea of art as an unique object to be bought and sold permeates these kind of discussions especially when conceptual art on the whole seems left out by this practice of the gallery art world, probably mostly because it is that of concept and idea often with only byproducts that are actually things. Why is it so hard to think of art as ideas rather than objects? What is that not often seen as a valid medium like painting and sculpture?

I guess I should clarify why I asked the question. Over the coarse of this thread, people keep coming back to the idea of art as the object, even when we were clearly talking about it as idea or concept. The notion of it being worth something (monetarily) also came up (as in "...very funny that someone paid a lot of money for a shovel that could have been bought at ACE for about ten million dollars less" and "A lot of museums use this tactic to make money. Most of the reprints that you buy from a museum are based off of photos of their collection. These are the real moneymakers outside of admission costs. The museum may or may not own the piece, but they sell the rights to the photograph that they took of it." and "if Mr. Prince intends to sell these works I think he should and perhaps is required by law to obtain the permission" and "The price will be a cool $10G for my masterpiece. I've captured a moment - and has my name on it. It truly is mine"). I guess it struck me odd how the conversation seemed to end up along those lines that often.

My underlying point was that 'art' is a higher and much more full and complicated subject than the gallery/buy/sell world we call the 'art world'. Like with religion and it's importance outside of the church system, I thought we were getting to talking about the ideas, not the price tag. Talking about the price tag seems like both an uninteresting and limited discussion.

rubbish! so much rubbish! it all comes down to a very simple premise : fuck art. art itself is a great thing, sure. but ultimately it seems to end up as a novel idea that's gone horribly, horribly wrong.

art for the sake of art? yuck. art as a pissing contest, "look at me, my sensibilities far outweigh XYZ's! *my* art is valid, that other stuff is rubbish!", YUCK YUCK!

i can't even ponder this without throwing in what i think are the two most important factors to consider here, and i don't think they're getting enough attention.

#1 - can you take a picture of a chevy nova parked on a street without asking permission of the artists who created your subject matter? i.e. the engineer who designed the contours of the car's body? the person who generated and/or selected the colors available that model year? the urban planner who designed the road? the landscaper who designed the layout of the trees and flowers in the background? maybe some find it absurd, but inherent in most of the statements i'm reading here is a tacet denial of the fact that anyone and everyone is an artist if they decide they are. a creative tax accountant can consider himself an artist in his craft. can anyone deny him that? by photographing the car, you're no more ripping off the car's designer than you are ripping off the photographer who took the picture of the girl and put it on a billboard.

#2 - the debate i brought up a couple weeks ago, Pure Creativity vs Inescapable Synthesis. you're using a camera to take a photograph. that's not a remotely new idea. you're taking a photo to express something or make some kinda statement. that's not a remotely new idea. the person who took the photograph of the woman, that ended up on the billboard... that wasn't an act of pure creativity. the idea of taking a picture of a woman is not new. the idea of a billboard is not new. the idea of putting a photo of a woman on a billboard is not new. is that photographer somehow obligated to defer in his work to the person who invented the camera, took the first picture of a woman, or invented the billboard? because those are the most relevant artists in this system, in my opinion. where is the line drawn? can i take a picture of the same woman, and put it on a different billboard? it never ends. because it's all synthetic, it's all someone taking what came before them and building on it. find me the person whose art is purely creative in the first place, is not just their own angle on something that's already been done (and possibly done to death), and we'll all give them a big round of applause.

go ahead, take the photo of the photo, if that's the best you've got. and then send half of your profits to the guy/gal who took the photo you took a photo of, and send the other half to whoever first photographed a photograph. whatever you're doing, if you look at it from the right angle, it's already been done and you're kidding yourself thinking you've done something original. inescapably synthetic, i think.

And as for 'not defining something by the industry made around it', well, it is never possible to isolate religion, art, you-name-it from the way it travels and is received. Don’t make me throw down the Marshall Mcluhan gauntlet, dammit.

And whether I consciously take an oppositional stance to forces of commercialization or not, I am still in a kind of dialogue with them and my output is very influenced by my milieu. The great thing is people have and do make that conscious decision to take a different route. You being one, no doubt.

In a sense aesthetics are always already touched by politics, and a band like Fugazi would just not sound the way they do if they were singing about chicks and cars or baseball and prom nights or whatever.

But music is w/o doubt exceptional in terms of musicians being able to take oppositional stances in regard to broader cultural channels and still reach ‘an audience.’ Conceptual art almost by definition does not want an audience of spectators, it wants practitioners and participants. Hence, the happenings, etc.


I don’t know about you, but seeing a great band in a great venue with good sound is one of the best things in life. Seeing a great band in a huge concrete sports arena with knuckleheads everywhere and plastic beer cups all over the bleachers is less of a priority. Luckily all the bands I love best play smaller venues because the industry they are part of functions in that way and at that level.

The music is not really separable from its material context.

Sample and have a hit = get sued, usually rightly so.

Sample, not a hit = don't get sued, world keeps on turning.

Define 'hit' as you will. I believe this debate is actually entirely about money, and very simple for it. The aesthetics can be debated separately and at length, but away from me thanks. Is someone else losing money you are gaining? Then you probably owe it them.
Everything else keeps faculties in business and sociological brains taxed, rarely to much value or interest to the world at large.