Question: What do all works of art have in common? Answer: They are all products of a major cultural institution called “The Artworld”.
Question: Is this what makes them art? Answer: Yes.
The New Institutional Theory of Art is a different kind of theory about art. The theory is capable of explaining how it is that a urinal offered up by Marcel Duchamp, and a statue of Moses offered up by Michelangelo, are both works of art, and under precisely the same terms. Together with this, the theory can also explain why it is that Michelangelo’s work is magnificent, whereas Duchamp’s is “interesting”, at best. By focusing not on the works of art themselves, but rather upon the complex social-cultural context of their creation and presentation, the New Institutional Theory provides fresh, clear and powerful explanations of the very inner workings of Art, writ large. The artists, the public, the issues, the techniques, the bothers and the worries are all illuminated for the reader to gain true insight into the actual logic of Art. This book is intended for all readers, professionals and non-professionals alike.
The dance music thundered through a crowd of thousands of drunken fans, past the pavilions where skinny women in impossibly high heels gyrated around metal poles and into the streets filled with taxis that ferried partygoers to this free, whiskey-soaked concert in the park.
“Our parents don’t allow it, but we do it anyway,” said Zun Pwint Phyu, one of the dancers who endured hours of lascivious stares.
Myanmar is a country where owning a fax machine without a permit is illegal, where even spontaneous gatherings of more than five people are technically banned and where critics of the government are regularly locked away for decades in tiny prison cells.
Yet despite this repression, or perhaps partly because of it, young people here are pushing the limits of what the military government, let alone their parents, considers acceptable art and entertainment.
Art exhibitions, some featuring risky hidden political messages, open nearly every week in Yangon, Myanmar’s main city. Yangon has a festival of underground music, including punk bands, twice a year. Fans of the most popular musical genres, hip-hop and electronic dance music, wear low-slung baggy pants to regularly held concerts here. More…
It is 7AM, April 5, Palm Sunday in Salt Lake City, and the roads are empty. The Wasatch Mountains tower to the east, yielding no ground to the rising sun. In their shadow driving north on Interstate-15 I’ve set forth on a pilgrimage to a work of art. For thirty years I worshiped in the temple of the aesthetic. It’s never been tombs or trees or battlefields, or monuments or the homes of the stars that have answered to my search for the sacred in the wilderness of the secular. It’s been my taking it upon myself to stand as a pilgrim in the presence of an art object in which I know that we’re not alone in the universe.
Today the object of my journey is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, an earthwork belonging to an aesthetic movement known as land art, which the Prestel Dictionary of Art and Artists defines as “art which, rather than depicting nature, instead tries to awaken ecological, cultural or social consciousness of the environment through interventions or performances in the natural world itself.” In Nevada in 1969, Michael Heizer excavated a quarter of a million tons of sandstone to create Double Negative, a straight trench thirty feet wide, fifty feet long, and a third of a mile deep. Since 1972 he has been bulldozing his way across the Nevada desert to create City, a series of five massive installations promising to become the largest piece of art ever made. “I’m building this work for later,” Heizer has said. “I’m interested in making a work of art that will represent all civilization to this point.” Unsurprisingly, it remains unfinished. From 1973-77 Walter De Maria planted four hundred stainless steel posts in a grid one mile long and one kilometer wide in a mountain-rimmed valley in New Mexico: Lightning Field. Well beyond museum halls, scattered around the American West like versions of Stonehenge and Machu Pichu, these and other such works are difficult to reach, intended to be seen by pilgrims such as myself. More…
New York’s Museum of Modern Art announced today that it has acquired the @ symbol. This now means Twitter is technically art. MoMA’s chief design curator, Paola Antonelli credits computer engineer/ersatz modern artist Ray Tomlinson with “imbuing [the symbol] with new meaning and elevating it to defining symbol of the computer age.” More…
In Australia in 1971, a 30-year-old white Sydney schoolteacher named Geoff Bardon took a posting in the Aboriginal-relocation community of Papunya in the outback west of Alice Springs, teaching art to the children of the patchwork indigenous community. When he began to encourage them to paint the traditional patterns they habitually traced in the sand — instead of the westernized cowboy-and-Indian scenarios that were expected of them — he inadvertently triggered one of the most remarkable artistic events of the 20th century. The Western Desert Art Movement began as a sudden outpouring of traditional visual material by dirt-poor male Aboriginal elders in this unlikely remote location, and has basically continued unabated, while expanding into a successful multibillion-dollar niche of the international art market and a major source of economic support, cultural pride and political empowerment for the indigenous Australian people.
Less than two years after arriving in Papunya, having broken under the pressure of racist individuals and institutions that wanted to stick to helping the natives with the tried-and-true strategies of incremental genocide, a.k.a. assimilation (and Johnny-on-the-spot carpetbaggers eager to cheat the artists out of even the relative pittances their canvases fetched in those early days), Bardon fled the settlement in the middle of the night, and unwittingly committed himself into the hands of notorious psychiatrist Dr. Harry Bailey, whose MK-ULTRA-style “treatments” consisted of lengthy induced barbiturate comas spiked with massive electroshocks — sometimes on a daily basis and often unauthorized. Twenty-six people died while under his care, and many others — Bardon included — were left permanently disabled. Continual pressure from dissatisfied customers, activists (including Scientology!) and journalists finally got Bailey’s “deep-sleep therapy” clinic shut down, and Bailey killed himself in 1985 in the face of a government investigation. More…
How deep is Bruegel’s pessimism? I guess the question is inseparable from that of his relation to Christianity. (He was no fool: the question is insoluble.) And from the issue of comedy. How much was horror played for laughs? Does laughter take the edge off things?
Consider the Triumph of Death in Madrid. How common a subject was it in Bruegel’s time? And where does the title come from? Of course the basic idea stems from the world of late-medieval prints and wall painting—the last time I saw it, the painting resonated immediately with a Dance of Death I had seen a fortnight before in the parish church at La Ferté-Loupière. But was not Bruegel aware that in turning a Dance of Death into a panorama of Death’s final solution—a disciplined army carrying out a scorched earth policy—he was steering into a different, more dangerous world? This is Hell, certainly, but also Last Judg-ment—with now the dead coming out of their graves not to accept reward or punishment but simply to take revenge on the living. In a way that seems typical, Bruegel insists on the closeness of the story he is telling to that of Christian resurrection of the body. Twice he shows members of the skeleton crew busily digging up the coffins of their comrades, and right at the center of the painting, in the mid-background, is a skeleton stepping from his grave (next to a horrible, blood-red filigree cross: signs of Christian burial are swallowed in the general tide of malignancy). More…
Photography’s surprising impact on the Surrealists
From The Smart Set at Drexel University…
Surrealism isn’t surreal anymore. It doesn’t shock or jolt. It isn’t confusing or upsetting. If anything, the works of Surrealism have taken on a quaint charm. This would surely have annoyed its practitioners. The great theorist of Surrealism, André Breton, thought of himself as a revolutionary. He once wrote, “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.” Like most big talkers, he was wrong. Surrealism didn’t ruin anything or solve anything either.
Surrealism did its best, though, to shake things up. Looking out at the madness of modern life in the early 20th century, Surrealism said, “Bring it on.” The show currently on display at the International Center of Photography, “Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris,” makes that patently clear. Paris inspired the Surrealists. There was so much going on. The chaos of traffic and lights and humanity was constantly producing jarring images. Reality seemed to blur into a dream state and then back again. More…
When we walk into the denuded Guggenheim, finally wiggling past Lloyd Wright’s low-ceilinged, dark and deliberately claustrophobia-inducing entrance foyer, it takes us a few seconds to adjust to all the open space spiraling upwards and outwards around us. There’s a couple, good-looking college kids or twenty-somethings, hetero, going at it on the floor of the atrium, near the fountain. The crowd gives them wide berth. They writhe sinuously, mouth to mouth, kissing or pretending to kiss, rising onto their knees, palms flat on the other’s backs. Their hands slide down with exaggerated slowness until the palms rest flat on the floor, the first sign that there’s something artificial at work here, either in the lovers’ determined tantric exhibitionism, or the non-lovers, non-erotic erotics. Yet, as they slide once more into each other, until the black-haired girl is lying across the red-haired kid’s lap, and he doesn’t so much grab as guide her ass, with the palm again, deliberately flattened against the curve of thigh and cheek, until her legs curl into him, and her shirt rides up to reveal a naked back he will never touch, although it is the touch we are all waiting for, as, instead, she reaches up to cup his face in both hands and pull him down into a kiss, soundless this whole time, it is difficult to know how much of this is, in fact, performance, staging, whatever you want to call it, and what feelings or other unintentional stirrings we’re also witness to. More…
The New Institutional Theory of Art by David Graves is now available from the The Arts in Society imprint.
