Romantic Capitalism

The Romantic Manifesto
Ayn Rand
Signet (Penguin Group)
1975

Review by Rory A.A. Hinton

The Romantic Manifesto

de Kooning: "I don't think painters have particularly bright ideas."
de Antonio: "What do they have?"
de Kooning: "I guess they are talented at painting things."

Art criticism assumes a philosophy of art. And a philosophy of art assumes a philosophy. Every critic has one. Since people are the product of their philosophical premises, and since art critics are people (Barnett Newman's comments about "aesthetes" to the contrary), then art critics (and ipso facto the critical reviews that they write) are the product of their philosophical premises. Art and philosophy live within the same province, if not the same provenance.
     The Romantic Manifesto demonstrates this by accomplishing in 180 pages what philosophers in the modern period failed to do: create the philosophical basis for a rational aesthetics. Granted, 'rational' is a loaded term. But it is not as if Ayn Rand failed to define and defend what she meant by it. Introduction To Objectivist Epistemology alone provides a cognitive basis for her neo-Aristotelian rational philosophy, not to mention her extended apologia for it in Philosophy: Who Needs It. Who does? Everyone (art critics included).
     Read Rand's rationally redacted raison d'être: "In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is - i.e., he must know his own nature (including his means of knowledge) and the nature of the universe in which he acts ... he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy."
     This sentence from The Romantic Manifesto is an example of how Rand is able to distill her loaded work in philosophy into a sense bite for the purpose of promoting her aesthetic theory. She explains how philosophy provides a realistic view of the universe (metaphysics), a rational means to know that universe (epistemology), a reason to live in that universe (ethics), and a robust basis for selectively re-creating that universe (aesthetics). In fact, the chapter entitled "What Is Romanticism?" (which sets out Rand's definition of art and her criterion to determine its quality) can rightly be said to distill the book's distillation. This is the reason why I focus most of my review on it.
     The book also considerately presents a caveat lector to potential readers since Rand did not like to load unwanted words upon the unintended: "Those who feel that art is outside the province of reason," Rand writes, "would be well advised to leave this book alone: it is not for them." In other words: those whose postmodern tastes in art and its criticism are more Heideggerian than Aristotelian won't have much use for this book, nor for this review.
     Speaking of postmortem tastes, contemporary art publications are prone to publish art-speak jargon containing more vacuous adjectives than veritable nouns. ARTFORUM magazine is a case in point. Many of its articles over the past fifty years read like they were written by the art critic equivalent of "the jerky contortions of self-inducedly brainless bodies with empty eye sockets, who perform, in stinking basements, the immemorial rituals of staving off terror" (John Coplans' insightful remark that Warhol's 32 Campbell soup cans painting is "the greatest breakthrough in art since the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp half a century earlier" is a notable exception).
     Rand wrote those words about a certain class of artists in 1969 in the introduction to her Manifesto. Whether she was referring to the New York School artists (including the more-light-than-bright Willem de Kooning) is anyone's (educated) guess. If so, then that explains why there was apparently no conceptual love loss between her and Clement Greenberg, unlike the consentual love found between him and Helen Frankenthaler (his one-time lover), the "absolute doyenne" of post-painterly color field painting. After Frankenthaler saw the first Jackson Pollock exhibit at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950 she is reported to have said: "It was all there. I wanted to live in this land. I had to live there, and master the language." Dominique Francon she was not.
     With this postmortem reference in mind you can easily characterize these jargon-laced articles as what you would get if you contortedly used something like Pixmaven's The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator to create a "critical response to the art product" (or CRAP, for short). For example, I typed in '66666' into the generator and received the following sentence: "The iconicity of the Egyptian motifs visually and conceptually activates the essentially transitional quality." Compare this with the following randomly selected sentence written by Annette Michelson in her 1971 ARTFORUM review of Michael Snow's 1967 film Wavelength: "The film is the projection of a grand reduction; its 'plot' is the tracing of spatio-temporal données, its 'action' the movement of the camera as the movement of consciousness." Since Amy Taubin described Michelson's review as a "brilliant essay," I will leave it up to her to determine the essentially transitional quality of these two critically responsive sentences.
     (There is a point to this seemingly self-indulgent digression: art criticism is only as clear as the philosophy which generates it. It is therefore a sad conceptual commentary for Whitehead to correctly point out that all philosophy (of art or otherwise) is but footnotes to Plato (the great art negator), and not to Aristotle. Consider Aristotle's definition of truth: "To say of what is that it is, and to say of what is not that it is not, is true; whereas to say of what is that it is not, and to say of what is not that it is, is false." This footnote nicely serves as a philosophical metaphor for Rand's approach to art. When it comes to 85% of contemporary art criticism (and the actual art which is its sufficient condition), there is no accounting for Platonic waste).
     Rand did not waste words, let alone time. In this sense she shared Robert Rauschenberg's antipathy toward abstract expressionist artists: "I was never interested," Rauschenberg states, "in their pessimism or editorializing. You have to have time to feel sorry for yourself if you are going to be a good abstract expressionist. And I think I always considered that a waste." Time waits for no art critic. This is why Rand wastes no time in the chapter "What Is Romanticism?" to objectively define her subject matter: "Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments." Fourteen words is all it takes. That there is a measured economy to the words she chooses and uses is indicative of the moral ideal within which she writes (but more on the economy later).
     Rand argues that a person gains a knowledge of the perceivable world through conceptual abstractions. This knowledge is summarized by metaphysics (the study of "being qua being" to use Aristotelean jargon). The only way for a person to bring these summarized abstractions into perceptual awareness is through art. Art therefore serves a philosophical function. It does this by not only making a person's conceptual view of themselves physically explicit through the means of artistic media (painting, sculpture, literature, etc), but by also teaching a person how to stylize their conscious awareness of the world they perceive and conceive. "An artist does not fake reality," Rand writes, "he stylizes it. He selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically significant - and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence. His concepts are not divorced from the facts of reality - they are concepts which integrate the facts and his metaphysical evaluation of the facts."
     What makes Rand's aesthetics romantic? For her Romanticism is a category of art based on the fact that a person possesses the freedom to choose. Despite historically emotive connotations to the contrary, a 'romantic' aesthetics is a rational one: it has less to do with the familiarity of one's emotion and more to do with one's faculty of volition. An artist selectively re-creates through artistic media those aspects of physical reality that represent their sense of life. This re-creative process forces the artist to confirm "whether man possesses the faculty of volition - because one's conclusions and evaluations in regard to all the characteristics, requirements and actions of man depend on the answer." If you affirm that a person has the faculty to determine their own destiny, then you are a volitional romantic and will re-create accordingly. If not, then you are a non-volitional naturalist.
    To be a naturalistic artist is to be a person whose work reflects an "anti-value" orientation. Naturalism reflects the idea that a person's efforts to change their existential lot are futile since their fate is ultimately determined by forces beyond their conscious control: lets meet, think, and be weary, for tomorrow we lie. For Rand, to be a romantic artist, in turn, is to be a person whose work does not merely record or photograph, but rather creates and projects a concern not with things as they are, but with things as they might and ought to be (the romantic significance of photography was unfortunately lost on her - but fortunately for us we have found Evan Perry). To be a romantic artist is to philosophically glorify our existence and to psychologically desire a more interesting, because more noble, life. Art inspires nobility. This is its potential cash value.
     For example, on this reading the New York School of abstract expressionism is a naturalistic movement. It is based on a philosophy that is fatalistically emotive. Hence Rand's Rauschenbergean sentiment. This is especially true in the case of Pollock who is dismissed as a "pathologically abusive and self-destructive individual." The destructiveness that characterized his life came from somewhere. It was the product of his philosophical premises, and they were anything but romantic ("empty eye sockets" indeed).

Untitled 1930-1933
Basalt Head
Jackson Pollock

   












   
     You might disagree with Pollock's premises, but that does not mean that you must deny him artistic merit. You might dismiss Pollock's art as an example of work based on a style that is a "blurred, "mysterious" murk," only admired by a person "who is moved by the fog of his feelings and spends most of his time out of focus" (as Rand describes it), but that does not mean Pollock could not paint, nor sculpt for that matter (consider his recently disclosed Basalt Head "death mask"). There is, therefore, an important distinction to be made here between aesthetic matter and aesthetic merit. An artist can be dismissed as naturalistic, but that does not mean that they lack natural talent. It is the fact of the matter that matters. And when it comes to Rand's rational aesthetics, it is concepts over concretes that matter most.
     I am not concerned with applying Rand's rational aesthetics to particular artistic instances. Initial work has already been done in this area. What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory Of Ayn Rand is a good introductory attempt to critically apply Rand's rational aesthetics (duly interpreted) to artistic matter. Those interested can read Torres' and Kamhi's work and decide whether they are doing objective justice to contemporary art. Rather, I am concerned with briefly commenting upon a relatively uncharted but not unrelated area of Rand's aesthetics: its relation to the "moral ideal" of capitalism.

     Rumor has it that Andy Warhol (business artist extraordinaire) did not respect Rand's philosophy of art, and that Rand denounced him as a result. If this is more than mere rumor, then this reality should not distract us from the ideality that Warhol should have respected it, and that Rand should not have denounced him in turn. Whether this denunciation was the result of her personality getting the best of her principles is open to debate. (I am sure Nathaniel Branden would have something interesting to say about this issue). What ideally unites Ayn as an artistic philosopher and Andy as a philosophical artist is their common concern with capital. The artistic significance of this mutual concern has been strangely neglected. 

     What makes capitalism an "unknown" ideal for Rand relates directly to its moral function (a notion strangely neglected in modern economics). In her essay "What Is Capitalism?" (a nice economic companion piece to her essay "What Is Romanticism?") Rand writes: "The economic value of a man's work is determined, on a free market, by a single principle: by the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return. This is the moral meaning of the law of supply and demand." Romanticism and capitalism turn on the moral importance of volitional consent. What makes capitalism a "moral ideal" for Rand, rather than just an economic system, is the context it creates for the free creation and dissemination of products. It makes volition possible.

     We are mass producers and mass consumers en mass. The freedom that the moral ideal of capitalism creates provides the possibility for us to turn this reality into something noble. This is why Warhol matters, despite Randian commentary to the contrary. For example, while Stephen Hicks is right to claim that when Warhol smirkingly said "Art? - Oh, that's a man's name" Warhol was announcing the end of art, Hicks is wrong to link Warhol's remark with the idea that art itself had reached a dead end and had become nothing. Hicks thinks that Pop Art was nothing more than a reductio ad absurdum of modernism, and that Warhol was cynically clever enough to acknowledge it with a smirking whimper (while bringing home as much bacon as possible while there was still time - celebrity portraits as cash cow wallpaper).

     Art is always something. The question is not whether art ended with Warhol, but rather what conception of art ended. With a bang Warhol introduced a new conception of art, one that nicely fit into a capitalist context: good art is good business.  

Andy Silk-Screens Ayn 

   














        Hicks disparagingly asks: "When has art in the twentieth century said anything encouraging about human relations, about mankind's potential for dignity, and courage, about the sheer positive passion of being in the world?" I decidingly answer that Warhol did precisely that by making the artist's life an aesthetically repetitive product. This is an issue that artists and their critics need to confront now, especially those critics and dealers who are, as Hicks rightly says, "capable of recognizing the original artist's achievement and who have the entrepreneurial courage to promote that work." Not only is Warhol's work still worth promoting, but also a philosophy of art that provides the rational basis for the reason why. Rand's rational aesthetics does precisely that, and Warhol's art is as rational as it gets.
     The evidence seems to suggest that Warhol's use of the term 'man' was said in the same way that Rand used it when she made the distinction between 'men' and 'man' and claimed that she was less interested in the former and completely interested in the latter. She was interested in the concept of man, the "ideal man" as she puts it (Roark as role model). In this sense Rand is a conceptual artist who used literature to selectively re-create reality according to her metaphysical value-judgements. To therefore speak of 'Art' as a man's name is a way for Andy to make a conceptual claim about the artistic significance of a man's life. Wayne Koestenbaum notes an entry from one of Andy's notebooks from the late 1960s in which he entertained the idea of "GALLERY LIVE PEOPLE" - "an exhibition in which people were the art." Real people as ideal products. This is in line with what Rand meant when she wrote: "I am a Romantic in the sense that I present men as they ought to be. I am Realistic in the sense that I place them here and now and on this earth." 
     Great art, in short, embodies a tension between the real and the ideal. It is an instance of serious generosity. A great work of art is generous enough (realistic enough) to remind you that it is a masterful re-creation of the only reality we know of, but serious enough (romantic enough) to demand something of you. The demand is a volitional one: will you choose a noble life or a naturalistic one in light of the art that creatively confronts you (for the artist, the critic, and the consumer alike)? Romantic Realism presents the ideal without sacrificing the real.
     It is easy, within this interpretive context, to conceive of Andy's work as the worst form of naturalistic art imaginable (Hicks certainly does). All he accomplished was to remind us of our naturalistic surroundings, thereby fating us to our own consumptive compulsions. We are nothing but the product of our products. This interpretation is based upon a misconception. The misconception is to miss the conception behind Andy's work. His work conceptually clears away any and all naturalistic constraints by giving us the freedom to realize that all of us can be artistic in any way that we choose. That is the upshot of conceiving of commercial art as fine art. In fact, even this interpretation of Warhol's work is a product of the freedom that his work produces through his own selective re-creation of reality. Nobility is artistically open to anyone who acts upon the moral ideal which capitalism produces: "The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man's rational nature, that it protects man's survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice."
     What I am suggesting here is that the best philosophy of art for those engaged in the the best kind of art (business) is found within the pages of The Romantic Manifesto. The art world would be better served if art critics not only adopted this rational philosophy as the basis for their aesthetic work, but further investigated the systematic connections between art and its commerce. We do ourselves a disservice by leaving artistic analysis up to the irrationality of emotion (and the inevitable art-speak jargon that results). The best that can be said of publications like ARTFORUM, therefore, is they they are an excuse for words to sell a product (Thornton is right).
     Where does this leave the art critic? It turns the critic into an artist. Romantic art criticism is a volitional art form in its own right, especially when it rightly draws lines connecting the artist and the industrialist. To speak of the "art of the deal" (as Horowitz does) is to acknowledge the capitalist context that makes "bringing home the bacon" a Baconian concern (Koestenbaum's "commonism" over communism within the creative commons). Capitalism's monied deal is the only moral ideal because it provides the freedom for veritable volition to take place. By uniting capitalism and art together in the way that Warhol did, and the way that Rand wrote about, art criticism is best understood and practiced as a form of commodity PRomotion. Promoting art is dealing art. And dealing art is as commercially fine as it gets (consider Leo Castelli). Rand wore a $ broach. Warhol painted $ signs. Andy Silk-Screens Ayn? This too is a commercial for the moral ideal of Romantic Capitalism.
    

Sources

ARTFORUM International Magazine. New York, N.Y. September, 2012.
Ayn Rand. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Signet (Penguin Group), 1967.
Ayn Rand. Introduction To Objectivist Epistemology. Meridian (Penguin Group), 1979.
Ayn Rand. Philosophy: Who Needs It. Signet (Penguin Group), 1984.
Ayn Rand. The Romantic Manifesto. Signet (Penguin Group), 1975.
Emile de Antonio. Painters Painting. Arthouse Films, 1972.
Evan Perry. Re Figured. AGO Exhibition Catalogue, 2012.
Harry Binswanger (ed). The Ayn Rand Library Vol. IV - The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism From A To Z. Meridian (Penguin Group), 1988.
Louis Torres, Michelle Marder Kamhi. What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory Of Ayn Rand. Open Court, 2000.
Nathaniel Branden. My Years With Ayn Rand. Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999.
Noah Horowitz. Art Of The Deal: Contemporary Art In A Global Financial Market. Princeton University Press. 2011.
Peter Schjeldahl. "Leo The Lion." The New Yorker. June 07, 2010.
Ric Burns. Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film. PBS, 2006.
Robert Hughes. Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir. Vintage Books, 2006.
Robin Cembalest. "Jackson's Other Actions: Pollock's Sculptures Resurface," ARTnews, September 13, 2012.

Sarah Thornton. Seven Days In The Art World. W.W. Norton & Company, 2008.
Steven Hicks. "Why Art Became Ugly." The Atlas Society. September, 2004.
Wayne Koestenbaum. Andy Warhol. Viking (Penguin Group), 2001

The Death Of Hilton Kramer

Abstraction And Empathy
Wilhelm Worringer
Introduction by Hilton Kramer
Elephant Paperbacks
1997

Review by Rory A.A. Hinton

Abstraction And Empathy

I am less interested in Wilhelm Worringer's classic book Abstraction And Empathy and more concerned with Hilton Kramer's introduction to it. However, my indirect interest is not a direct commentary on Worringer's worth. Much has been written about his psychology of style in modern art since it was first written in his 1906 doctoral dissertation, the year before Pablo Picasso painted his El Greco inspired Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon. Kramer's brief introduction is a noteworthy part of that written history, and evidence enough of the book's importance. The turn to the subject in modern art cannot be understood without it.
     My interest centers around two concerns. First, Kramer's reading of this classic text is as classic as it is, and should therefore be read by anyone interested in an influential view on the psychological basis of abstraction in modern art. Second, Kramer's brief introduction presents us with a hermeneutic key for understanding much of his critical work written over a very productive twenty year period for the T.S. Eliot inspired literary journal The New Criterion: from articles like "The Eakins Retrospective" in 1982 to "Does Abstract Art Have A Future?" in 2002.
     This key is the sine qua non for appreciating why Kramer was one of the most notable defenders of modernism in art during the latter half of the twentieth century. It also provides the interpretive basis for his idea that Pop Art was primarily a cultural, and not an artistic, assault on the entire pictorial tradition of modern art (an idea that conveniently renders it unworthy of any sustained critical response by those committed to Eliot's "common pursuit of true judgement"). He did not deny that Pop Art was a movement of note. He just denied it artistic merit, let alone influential longevity (despite the "Conde Nast" brand of media success that "the Warhol phenomenon" found within the art world, as Kramer so brazenly describes it). Accordingly, Pop Art should be summarily dismissed as merely "the fallout of the 1960s counterculture," and should be understood as such by the artistic aristocracy. The double entendre of Kramer's 1987 obituary "The Death Of Andy Warhol," therefore, is pretty difficult to miss.
     One need only read Wayne Koentenbaum's Andy Warhol (let alone the recent scholarship upon which it is based) to experience serious pause when confronted with Kramer's hermeneutics of dismissal. Koentenbaum's smart biography contributes toward the convincing counterfactual claim that Kramer's Pop Art obit (written in response to the death of its chief representative on February 22, 1987) is a fallout of his own commitment to a conception of modern art that finds its basis in his reading of Abstraction And Empathy. And it is precisely this conception of modern art that Pop Art (especially in the work of Warhol) called into artistic question and left seriously wanting. I don't deny that Kramer's idea is noteworthy. I just deny it critical merit, at least as a criterion (old or new) used to dismiss Pop Art's aesthetic importance.
     What is Kramer's key? Answering this question requires a brief description of the raison d'être of Worringer's book. Worringer argues that the history of modern art is the history of artists working within a dynamic tension between two volitional tendencies: the will to empathy, and the will to abstraction. To be empathetic is to experience a settled confidence between the human species and the phenomena of the external world. Empathetic artists derive their sense of the beautiful from being able to personally identify with the objects of their artistic representation, thereby gaining a sense of personal identity in the process. They are realists: they have read their space, felt at home within it, and have naturally rendered it in their paintings. Renaissance art is realist in precisely this sense.
     In contrast, to be abstracted is to have experienced "the dread of space," to have felt alienated from it, and to have sought one's identifiable sense of the beautiful through less than realistic renderings (as exemplified by Egyptian, Byzantine, and Abstract Expressionist art). Worringer claims that the primal artistic impulse to abstract from perceptual reality is the result of the psychological need to achieve personal identity in the face of the subjective "confusion and obscurity of the world-picture." Worringer states: "The primal artistic impulse has nothing to do with the rendering of nature. It seeks after pure abstraction as the only possibility of repose ... It is the consummate expression, and the only expression of which man can conceive, of emancipation from all the contingency and temporality of the world-picture." Plato rears his mimetic head even here, in form(s) and in content: art is the existential process of producing an expressive product in response to the primal need to achieve identifiable certainty in an uncertain world.
     While empathy and abstraction are, in principle, mutually exclusive tendencies, the history of modern art demonstrates a prolonged tension between them. You cannot understand Cubism as a movement, for example, without knowing about this tension. In fact, Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon is a first rate example of a painting that embodies it. Picasso confronts his own alienation of spacial depth by abstracting from the empathetic tradition of natural representation. He accomplishes this by using two-dimensional means to express three-dimensional dread. Cubism as therapy.
     The significane of Jackson Pollock's Full Fathom Five (1947) can be expressed in similar fashion. Pollock painted it to satiate an artistic need that is "the deepest and ultimate essence of all aesthetic experience." According to Worringer, this is the need for self-alienation. And self-alienation, so the story goes, is a necessary stage on life's contingent way toward determining self identity. To describe this painting as the result of "creative accident" only serves to show the psychological impulse behind it (and in Pollock's case 'psychological' was cashed out in Jungian terms). It is also not without note that its name derives from the following line from Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes." Abstract Expressionism as therapy.
     The turn to the subject in modern art (from Picasso to Pollock), therefore, owes much to Worringer's psychology of style. It provides the basis for the claim that the difference between these two artists is only a difference in artistic degree, but not a difference in psychological kind: you abstract from scandalous space because it is something that cannot be empathetically faced.

Mildred's Tension

     Much of the content of the preceding five paragraphs owes its existence to Kramer's penchant for sympathetic commentary. His introduction alone is worth the price of the book. In fact, it was his reputation as a modern defender of conservative high culture that initially motivated me to read Abstraction And Empathy. My thinking was that if someone like Kramer thought Worringer was worthy of his critical attention (at least worthy enough to write an introduction), then I was willing to put forth the effort to understand why "[f]ew doctoral dissertations have come to occupy as important a place in the history of modernist art and criticism" as it does, and why it has such "enduring importance" as one of the "classic texts in the literature of modernism." 
     While reflecting upon how the relation between representation and abstraction relates to the question of whether abstract art has a future (especially in light of how the Minimalist movement determined its relative demise), Kramer writes the following in 2002: "As all of us know (but sometimes forget), abstract art - especially abstract painting - derives, aesthetically, from representational painting. Whatever the degree of purity abstraction can be said to attain, it cannot make claim to a virgin birth. If abstract painting could be said to have a genetic history, its DNA would instantly reveal its debt to ... the aesthetic vitality of representational painting." 
     According to Kramer's reading, empathy and abstraction are "the two fundamental aesthetic impulses known to human culture." Hence the enduring importance of Abstraction And Empathy (at least for Kramer). His reading of this classic text, and the central place of these two impulses in that reading, is the hermeneutic key behind the genetic history of his vitality and influence as an art critic. In particular, this key not only explains his reason for thinking why abstract painting was representationally derivative, but more importantly why Pop Art gets summerly dismissed as nothing but a cultural by-product. 
     How does Pop Art call this idea into artistic question and leave it seriously wanting? The logic behind Kramer's hermeneutics of dismissal is in the form of a disjunctive syllogism: art is either A or E (or both). If art is P (Pop Art, say), then it is neither Abstract nor Empathetic. Therefore, Pop Art is not art (despite its name). It must be something else ("the fallout of the 1960s counterculture," say). The issue here is not so much Kramer's logic, but the semantic framework that gives it sense. If you reject Kramer's inclusive premise ("art is either A or E"), then the most that can be said is that Pop Art is nothing but the artistic casualty of Kramer's critical commitment to Worringer's psychology of style. Kramer's premise can and should be rejected, along with the idea that it produces and the framework within which it functions.
     By rejecting the representational form and the psychological content of Kramer's modern framework, Pop Art replaces one hermeneutic key with another one. After Pop Art there are many-if-any keys (the more the merrier). You pay your money, you choose your key, and you open whatever door suits your artistic fancy. Kramer did not get Pop Art's aesthetic importance because he chose a key that assumes too much and delivers too little. It assumes too much by implicitly endorsing a subjectivist interpretation of modern art, despite postmodern critiques to the contrary (especially in the work of Martin Heidegger), and it delivers too little by not giving Pop Art the critical attention it rightly deserves (especially in the work of Andy Warhol). It lacks critical merit in precisely this sense. 
     Kramer disparaged that the most distinguishing characteristic of the prodigious outpouring of "commentary, homage, and celebrity-worship" found in the obituaries written in response to Warhol's death was "the way it confined itself to the terms which Warhol himself had set for the discussion of his life and work ... It was as if no language but Warhol's own - the language of hype - could be expected to have any meaning when it came to explaining just what it was that made him important." This disparaging refrain can be found in Kramer's further observation of the general tendency of the obituaries to "take refuge in [Warhol's] fame, in his personality, in his business affairs and his entourage, even in his wig, and leave the art more or less unexamined ... It turned out that almost no one could bring any conviction to the task of specifying what that achievement had consisted of."
     Warhol's achievement manifested itself in the very things in which Kramer finds fault. Arthur Danto correctly points out that one of Warhol's great artistic achievements was his creation of a "new kind of life for the artist to lead." To speak of his fame, his personality, his business affairs, his entourage, and even his wig, was the clearest instance of "specifying what [Warhol's] achievement had consisted of." By uniting art with a life stylishly led, Warhol overcame the historic tension between Worringer's volitional tendencies by simply ignoring them (with deep superficiality). Instead, he simply created a new criterion: art is what you can get away with. With this new criterion Warhol forced his friends and foes alike to use "the terms which Warhol himself had set for the discussion of his life and work." This is nothing new. The Philosophy Of Andy Warhol is as full of linguistic hype as Abstraction And Empathy. It all comes down to the brand of hype you use, and how much of it you can get away with. Like Pablo and Jack, Andy got away with much. 

     Warhol was not the only "cultural" casualty of Kramer's hype. Jean-Michel Basquiat was similarly dismissed. Kramer's inability to make modern sense of Basquiat's work forced him to focus his attention on the "liberal left-wing types" who "needed to make a bow in that direction (the disadvantaged, minorities, and so on)" as the culturally correct basis for why people took Basquiat so seriously. Since his work was neither abstract nor empathetic, how else could you understand why people liked Basquiat so much? Kramer's modern modus operandi is as clear as it is consistent: when in doubt, use the hermeneutics of dismissal and go cultural. In fact, Kramer's assessment of Basquiat's work is less than dismissive: "His contribution to art is so minuscule as to be practically nil." It might be practically nil (Kramer obviously had no use for him), but it certainly is not financially nil. Basquiat's Dos Cabezes (1982) sold for just over 7 million USD ($7,082,500.00) on November 10, 2010 at Christie's in New York. This is a gigantic price to pay for something so apparently minuscule. At least when it comes to the buying habits of the high culture that Kramer so desperately sought to create and promote, Andy and Jean-Michel had the last laugh.

Dos Cabezes (1982)
Jean-Michel Basquiat

   
















   
     The artistic aristocracy to which Kramer belonged is better served by interpreting Warhol as one of their own. It serves Kramer's cause to realize that his hyped dismissal of Warhol's significance for high culture makes his criterion not-so-new. If any criterion is new now, its the one that follows from the following argument: if you take care of artistic freedom by promoting the idea that democracy is for society but not for culture, then the market will determine the "common pursuit of true judgement" through the dynamic tension between two all consuming tendencies: the will to buy, and the will to sell. These tendencies are based on taste. Taste is context still, and the context continually changes.
     By conflating fine and commercial art Andy created a new basis for an independent high culture, one that understands (and ultimately rejects) the modern assumption upon which the distinction between fine art and commercial art was based. He creates a new independence by by-passing the psychological component as a motivational impulse behind modern art, and replaces it with a capitalist one. If Warhol is right that good art is good business, then it follows that beauty is in the hand of the objective consumer, and not in the eye of the subjective beholder. Capitalism is an artistic ideal because it is a moral one. 
     The question is not whether an independent high culture is possible after Warhol's work. The question is whether those who have long associated themselves with the old high culture are willing to adopt Warhol's work as a model for the new artistic aristocracy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This new high culture does not reject "commercial entertainment" as something beneath it (as Kramer maintained). It celebrates the "commercial" within "entertainment," uniting art with economics as the new conceptual basis for an independent high culture in the postmodern art world. 

Hilton Kramer

Hilton Kramer: March 25, 1928 - March 27, 2012.

Sources

Andy Warhol. The Philosophy Of Andy Warhol: From A To B And Back Again. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Hal Foster. "Andy Paperbag." London Review Of Books. March, 2002.
Hilton Kramer. "The Eakins Retrospective." The New Criterion. September, 1982.
Hilton Kramer. "The Death Of Andy Warhol." The New Criterion. May, 1987. 

Hilton Kramer. "Does Abstract Art Have A Future?" The New Criterion. December, 2002.

Hilton Kramer, Roger Kimball. Counterpoints. Ivan R. Dee, 2007.
Martin Heidegger. "The Origin Of The Work Of Art." Off The Beaten Track. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Susan Sontag. "Fascinating Fascism." New York Review Of Books. February 06, 1975.
Tamra Davis. Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child. Arthouse Films, 2010.
Tony Scherman, David Dalton. POP: The Genius Of Andy Warhol. Harper, 2009.
Wayne Koentenbaum. Andy Warhol. Weidenfeld, 2001.

Wilhelm Worringer. Abstraction And Empathy. Ivan R. Dee, 1997.

Unfair Warning

The Maze
William Kurelek
(1927-1977)
Gouache on board
91.00 by 121.00 cm
1953

Review by Rory A.A. Hinton

The Maze

See, a gun is real easy

In this desperate part of town
Turns you from hunted into hunter
You go and hunt somebody down
Somebody said "Fair Warning"
Lord, strike that poor boy down!
(Mean Street - Van Halen)

William Kurelek painted The Maze in 1953 while he was a psychiatric patient in England. The painting depicts "the inside of my skull" (as he describes it). It is a pictorial narrative of his troubled life up to that point, a story he told in order to be accepted by his doctors as an "interesting specimen." He was in obvious need of attentive acceptance.
     Thankfully, Kurelek received psychiatric attention then, and rightfully receives artistic acceptance now thirty-five years after his death in 1977. The Maze is a relentless example of the technical breadth and psychological depth of one of Canada's most celebrated artists. It pays those who pay attentive acceptance to it and the body of work that it represents. Scholarship still needs to come to terms with the historical context, the contemporary interest, and the future significance of Kurelek's artistic achievement.
     Speaking of pay, it is not without note that Kurelek's paintings are fetching high prices now. The lots that sold during the recent spring auctions of Canadian fine art at Heffel's in Vancouver, and Sotheby's and Joyner Waddington's in Toronto, are evidence enough of this positive market trend for serious Kurelek collectors. After Joyner Waddington's Vice-President and chief auctioneer Rob Cowley gave the audience fair warning on auction Lot 110 (Kurelek's 1976 painting After Church During Indian Summer - The Kavanagh Homestead, Bancroft), it sold for $177,000 CDN, well above the initial auction estimate of $60,000 - $80,000.

William Kurelek's The Maze

   















   
     One reason why Kurelek is selling is due to the press that he is getting among Canadian galleries. One such gallery is the Art Gallery of Hamilton (AGH). From January 28 to April 29, 2012 the AGH hosted the first major exhibition of Kurelek's work in a quarter of a century. The show comprised over eighty pieces drawn from each period of Kurelek's productive life. It was the largest exhibit of his work shown to date. To celebrate this event a recently created documentary film entitled William Kurelek's The Maze was shown on March 22, 2012 in conjunction with this exhibit. The film was originally made in 1969 by the American film maker Robert M. Young. It was a short documentary film on Kurelek lasting thirty minutes. It had limited exposure. Young eventually packed the film reels away and turned to other projects.
     Forty years later the original film was uncovered by Robert's two sons Nick and Zack Young. In order to honour and continue their father's work on the subject they turned the film into a full-length documentary feature, directed by documentary film maker David Brubin. The film rightly received riveting reviews.

A Riveting Film

   
     I was initially riveted by Kurelek's work through an unexpected source. In 1981 I purchased Van Halen's fourth studio recording Fair Warning. Apart from my youthful enthusiasm for the underrated ability of drummer Alex Van Halen, I bought this recording because of the art work on its cover. I had not seen anything like it. The only other time I had this kind of aesthetic reaction to an album cover was when I purchased Glenn Gould's 1981 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations (and as all Gould fanatics will attest, the album cover is as beautifully enigmatic as Glenn's own re-recording of his 1955 debut release with Columbia). It was not until quite later in my life that I made the following connection between Fair Warning and The Maze: close inspection of the former surprisingly demonstrates that sections of the latter are conveniently cropped and beautifully blocked together on the front cover of Fair Warning. I did some research and realized that these sections were, in fact, part of Kurelek's painting and consequently used to obvious commercial success.

Fair Warning

   















   
   
     After the screening of the film at the AGH there was a Q&A session hosted by producer Zack Young. On either side of Young sat Kurelek's sister Nancy, along with Kurelek's son Stephen. After the Q&A session was finished I waited in line to speak to Stephen Kurelek. When I finally got the chance to speak with him privately I told him my story of how I was initially riveted by Kurelek's work. After informing him that Fair Warning had sold over two million units since its release on April 29, 1981, I asked whether his family had received royalty payments for the use of sections from The Maze. He acknowledged that he knew about the Van Halen connection, but seemed quite upset about it. This was a harbinger of his answer to come. I was expecting to hear how the Kurelek family had put their fair royal share to good use. Not so. He answered my question with one word: "No."
     I was shocked by this unexpected response. He then told me the following story. According to him, Van Halen and their representatives did not give the Kurelek family fair warning that they were going to use Kurelek's art, let alone ask permission from them to do so. What they reportedly did was as brutal as the subject matter of Kurelek's painting. According to Stephen Kurelek, representatives from Van Halen went into the psychiatric hospital in England where The Maze was on display, discretely took pictures of it, and then used sections of these pictures to create the album cover. In disbelief over this disclosure I asked him whether the family had filed a lawsuit against the band and their representatives for copy-right infringement. He told me with an air of exhausted resignation (engendered by moral disgust), that his mother Jean (Kurelek's wife) was too old and tired at the time to engage in what would have been an expensively protracted lawsuit against Van Halen. She decided not to sue.
     This case of less than fair warning remains relatively unknown. When I have disclosed this story to dealers and collectors alike, it engenders the same level of shock I initially experienced when I first heard it. That his work is selling these days is not just because Kurelek is getting press, but also because of the kind of press he is getting. This story is a case in point. It should motivate those of us in the art world to continue creating a positive market for Kurelek's work. In so doing we are, at the very least, giving the art world more than fair warning about the importance of William Kurelek. It is one way we can honor and continue to promote his artistic genius. A painting like The Maze (along with the rest of his work) is an interesting specimen well worth our attentive appreciation. So is the person who painted it. 

The Art Of Wit

The Fran Lebowitz Reader
Fran Lebowitz
Vintage Books
1994

Review by Rory A.A. Hinton

The Blind Art Collector And Other Stories

Toni Morrison: "You seem to me almost always right."
Fran Lebowitz: "What do you mean 'seem'?"
Toni Morrison: "But also never fair."
Fran Lebowitz: "I am always right because I am never fair."

I eventually found The Fran Lebowitz Reader in the "Humor" section of a book conglomerate in Toronto. I initially (and reasonably) looked for it in the section that contained A Critic In Pall Mall, but to no avail. I use 'conglomerate' accurately, if not approvingly. I know who the CEO is of this conglomerate, and only CEOs of conglomerates get invited to the annual Bilderberg conference on a regular basis. I won't comment on how conglomerates are good for the contemporary reader - that solitary figure - except to say that the question "Who is John Galt?" is still worth asking.
     This book provides an artistic answer to this Promethean question, in marked contrast to what one would expect from a book classified as "Humor/Literature" (Dagny Taggart is not one to crack a joke, let alone get one). So, the person responsible for stocking the shelves at this conglomerate can be excused for thinking that Lebowitz is just another Jewish comic with a book to sell full of rehashed jokes from her long standing stand-up routine in the Catskills.
     The medium is the message, and the massage. Indeed, we have all enjoyed the societal effects of McLuhan's masterful inventory. But in this case Fran's message should not be bluntly conflated with the medium she so naturally embodies, especially by publishers who ought to know better. Shelvers and consumers alike who focus attention on "Humor" to the exclusion of "Literature" are the victims of a misplaced mistake (in this case by Vintage Books). A misplaced book, let alone a misclassified one, makes all the difference in the world. "Humorous Literature" worthy of the name should be classified as "Wit" (my kingdom for such a section).
     Humor differs from wit. Humor is "niceness" or "warmth" (as Lebowitz once put it to Toni Morrison). Wit, on the other hand, is as cold as an Oscar Wilde review. Wit assumes. Wit presumes. Wit judges. Wit is elitist. Wit makes a difference. Fran has wit. Therefore, Fran makes a difference (QED). To put it less logically: Fran Lebowitz is the Bill Hicks of contemporary literature, sans the crass.
     What is her message and what difference does she make? In the preface to The Fran Lebowitz Reader she writes: "If what is presently called art can be called art, and what is presently called history can be called history (indeed, if what is presently called the present can be called the present), then I urge the contemporary reader - that solitary figure - to accept these writings in the spirit in which they were originally intended and are once again offered: as art history. But art history with a difference: modern, pertinent, current, up-to-the-minute art history. Art history in the making."
     For the fashionably lazy among us who are firm believers in the adage "nothing succeeds like address," and whose only understanding of the outdoors "is what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab," allow me to sum up Fran's message in seven words, a comma, and a period: democracy for society, but not for culture. And for those who are energetic enough to have read this far, let me put it this way: the cumulative function of Fran's history, insofar as the art world is concerned, is to implicitly argue for the necessity and sufficiency of a natural aristocracy of artistic talent.
     There is such a thing as "getting carried away with democracy." Consider the following example. At the beginning of Public Speaking Fran states: "There is no more suitable and potent image for our time than the image of the blind art collector. I think that sums it up. If you were to write a history of the era you should call it The Blind Art Collector And Other Stories." In what does the blindness consist? It consists in not recognizing and promoting the artistic aristocracy. The cultural equivalent of river blindness is what you get when democracy enters into the artistic water supply.
     Fran uses 'aristocracy' accurately, if not approvingly. In art it all comes down to the luck of the draw: you are either a draftsman or you are not. That is luck. Some people are born with talent. Others are not. Not everyone can play the artistic game, especially not in New York (Fran's home town), because in New York "it's not whether you win or lose - it's how you lay the blame." Laying Fran's brand of blame might not be fair, but that does not mean that it is not right (or left, depending upon the target of Fran's wit). In turn, not everyone can and should write a book (among other artistic ventures): "When Toni Morrison said that you should write the book that you want to read, she did not mean everyone." The Fran Lebowitz Reader is indication enough that Morrison included artists of Fran's ilk.
     Interestingly enough, democracy provides the political infrastructure for the art world to both determine and promote its own aristocracy. Societal democracy makes the artistic aristocracy possible, while the artistic aristocracy brings taste to the masses: a win/win proposition. Fran is right to point out that artists were not the only casualties of AIDS. A large discernible audience was also lost. This was an audience who knew precisely why Suzanne Farrell was on stage and not some pirouetting equivalent of a prima donna wanna-be. Such a high level of artistic connoisseurship within the culture can only raise the barre of our democracy by determining, empowering, and promoting the aristocratic class. This is why someone like Betsey Johnson is so fashionably late (seventy years and happily counting), and why she matters so very much.

Fran and Betsey

   











     Fran is unfair. But that does not mean that she is wrong. She is right about the targets of her wit precisely because she is unfair (by definition). You cannot impose a democratic criterion of fairness upon an area of culture that is antithetical to democracy. If by democracy you mean "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," then to impose that on the art would be a category mistake. As Fran puts it: "'From each according to his ability, to each according according to his needs' is not a decision I care to leave to politicians, for I do not believe that an ability to remark humorously on the passing scene would carry much weight with one's comrades ... The common good is not my cup of tea - it is the uncommon good in which I am interested, and I do not deceive myself that such statements are much admired by the members of the farming collectives."
     The irony here is blatant, and to the point. Democracy is not a universal panacea. It has its place because it has its limits. If Fran's book contributes toward establishing those limits by separating the democratic sheep from the aristocratic goats then it will have served its purpose. And if the sheep are found among the goats, then they will be put in their place. Commenting on the notion of "life imitating art" Fran focuses her wit through the following thought experiment. If life imitates art, then imagine yourself as a piece of conceptual art. Fran goes on: "We positioned ourselves randomly on a hardwood floor and pretended to be cinder blocks. We affixed to our shirtfronts labels bearing words unrelated to one another in a linear sense. We were not understood and we were greatly admired. We found this to be not unfulfilling." Whether this applies to "The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living" is all a matter of taste.
     Fran rightly mocks the unjustifiable pretentiousness of conceptual art, but there is a conceptual method to her madness. Fran mocks the worst of it in order to promote it at its best. Obviously part of that promotion consists in the art of seeming contradiction. But she is in good company. She contradicts herself in Whitmanesque fashion. Speaking of which, she even dresses like him. This only adds to her charm.
     Who is John Galt? Galt is the artistic Atlas who upholds the aristocratic claim: democracy for society, but not for culture. To impose democratic standards onto the art world is to court societal disaster: Atlas might shrug and in so doing make the content, if not the structure, of a democratic society boringly banal.
     I have one complaint. If Fran was not so lazy, she would write and publish more articles and more books. Quality is better than quantity, but I am fashionably lazy and I want both. Wake up Fran, get to work, and write my opinions for me.
     Fran once described how she started writing for Interview Magazine in 1970. The day she applied for this position she went to the Decker Building (located at 33 Union Square West in Manhattan), took the elevator up to the sixth floor, and walked toward a door with a sign taped to it that read "Knock Loudly And Announce Yourself." Fran knocked on the door. Someone from behind the door asked "Who is it?" Fran answered:  "Valerie Solanis." Andy opened the door and let her in. He was no stranger to the art of wit.

Fran and Andy

Sources
Fran Lebowitz. The Fran Lebowitz Reader. Vintage Books, 1994.
Martin Scorsese. Public Speaking. HBO Documentary Films, 2010.
Oscar Wilde. A Critic In Pall Mall. Kessinger Publishing, 2007.
Walt Whitman. Song Of Myself. Dover Publications, 2001.

All That Is Left Is The Art

Andy Warhol
Arthur C. Danto
Yale University Press
2009

Review by Rory A.A. Hinton

Andy Warhol

"An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates "value" and becomes, ipso facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power. If the Third Reich had lasted until now, the young bloods of the Inner Party would not be interested in old fogeys like Albert Speer or Arno Breker, Hitler's monumental sculptor; they would be queuing up to have their portraits silkscreened by Andy Warhol." (Robert Hughes)

Christopher Hitchens was not the only person to have wondered how someone as erudite an art critic as Robert Hughes could get Andy Warhol "so wrong" (the same could be wondered about Hilton Kramer, but I digress). Those who have seen Hughes' documentary film The Mona Lisa Curse have wondered the same thing. The film comes off as an instance of art critical sour grapes as Hughes attempts to persuade his audience that the commercialisation of the art world does nothing but copy "our money driven, celebrity obsessed, entertainment culture." It makes art as decadent as what it uncritically mirrors.
     Nowhere is the fruit of Hughes' labor more evident than when he interviews contemporary art collector Alberto Mugrabi (whose family owns the largest private collection of Warhol's work in the world). Hughes asks him what he thinks of Warhol. Mugrabi replies: "I think Warhol is probably one of the most visionary artists of our time." To which Hughes replies: "I thought he was one of the stupidest people I have ever met in my life." Mugrabi is visibly shocked and asks why he thinks so. As deadpan as he is dismissive, Hughes states: "Because he had nothing to say."
     Andy Warhol had something to say because he had something to sell. What he sold, in word and in deed, was a deeply superficial idea: art is what you can get away with. This idea constitutes what David W. Galenson describes as a "conceptual revolution." Rightly so. Warhol was a conceptual artist. His revolution was not about the mere retinal vision of a man who decides to paint and hang thirty-two soup cans on a wall. Rather, his revolution was about the visionary idea of doing so and why it matters. Stephen Koch is correct to point out, therefore, that Warhol's art "always suggests something about life that can be formulated in philosophic terms."
     Arthur C. Danto understands Warhol's existential suggestion more than most philosophers who take an interest in contemporary art. His recent book Andy Warhol succeeds by making iconic sense of the ironic fact that newfangled art collectors like Mugrabi get Warhol, while old fogey art critics like Hughes do not. Fortunately for us, what people like Mugrabi get is concisely formulated in Danto's philosophic book. It rightly finds its place in a series published by Yale University Press on American icons (those individuals, events, objects, and cultural phenomena that have made a major impact on American culture). The reason Warhol is an icon is because his work not only reformulates the ancient question "What is art?", but also answers it in a way that is unique in the history of modern art. The implications of Warhol's answer extend beyond his own artistic milieu.
     Danto describes Andy's reformulation of this ancient question in the following way: "[G]iven two objects that look exactly alike, how is it possible for one of them to be a work of art and the other just an ordinary object?" Before Warhol, this possibility consisted in claiming that the work of art (like da Vinci's Mona Lisa) was different from an ordinary object (like a copy of da Vinci's Mona Lisa) because of its essence. A work of art was essentially beautiful in a way that an ordinary object was not. The Mona Lisa somehow possessed and expressed something that cannot be easily quantified: beauty. Art was about timeless aesthetics. After Warhol, art is about timely action.
     Warhol's deeply superficial idea was his answer to this ancient question. It directs our attention away from the notion of the timeless essence of objects, and more toward how we use them to get things done. In this way Andy solves the ancient problem of quantifying the essence of art by rejecting the assumption that generates it: there is such a thing as the necessary essence of an object apart from contingent human use. Rejecting this assumption implies that there is no meaningful distinction between a "work of art" and an "ordinary object." Ergo: there is no meaningful distinction between "fine" and "commercial" art.
     By making commercialism respectable in art (his Brillo Box sculpture is an obvious example here), Warhol "changed the concept of art itself," as Danto writes, "so that his work induced a transformation in art's philosophy so deep that it was no longer possible to think of art in the same way that it had been thought of even a few years before him." To speak of beauty after Warhol is to get away with something in a handy way. In rejecting the notion that art is primarily about objective beauty and subjective pleasure, Warhol widens the scope of art by connecting it with life: "[Warhol] invented, one might say, an entirely new kind of life for an artist to lead, involving music, style, sex, language, film, and drugs, as well as art." Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is in the hand of the doer.
     Andy's conceptual revolution in art made possible the formulation of its own purpose. His art is a tool for doing something which could not have been imagined prior to the development of a certain set of artistic descriptions which pop art produced. Danto helpfully points out that there are hints of this in the work of Warhol's fellow pop artist Jasper Johns. He sought entities that everyone recognised. He was interested in explaining and exploiting the relationship between these recognised entities and their respective representations: "A painted numeral just is a numeral, a painted letter just is a letter. A painted flag is a flag. That it is beautifully painted is neither here nor there." Johns turned reality into art by conflating the distinction between reality and its representation. To give Johns his due: we would not have Campbell Soup without Ballantine Ale.

Ballantine Ale (1960)

   

     A painted soup can just is a soup can (painted beautifully or not). There is nothing beneath, between, nor behind it. And what is true of the soup is true of the consumer. As Andy once put it in an interview that appeared in the November 1, 1966 issue of the East Village Other: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it." Warhol's mute medium is his root message. Given the astounding extent of his artistic output, he obviously had something to say.
     Clement Greenberg understood the challenge that pop art posed to abstract expressionism. Greenberg thought that the pop artist tries to make art just the way the cheapest art looks, but "with a difference and a twist." He states that "people like Lichtenstein and Warhol, they paint nice pictures. All the same its easy stuff. It is. Its minor. And the best of the pop artists don't succeed in being more than minor." Greenberg, like Hughes, is captivated by an idea of art that Warhol rejects. Beautiful painting is neither here nor there. It is not about decoration. It is about deconstruction. Indeed, Hughes thinks that Warhol's work did not have an influence on the "art of painting" (as he puts it), precisely because he thinks his painting is "dry and repetitious." Hughes is right, but for the wrong reason. Warhol's painting is dry and repetitious because life is dry and repetitious. Warhol is America's mirror.

     Critics are not the only people who don't get Warhol. Danto relates an interesting story about an admittedly drunk Willam de Kooning diatribe at a party in 1969. Allegedly de Kooning said to Warhol: “You're a killer of art, you're a killer of beauty, and you're even a killer of laughter. I can't bear your work.” There is an ironic twist to de Kooning’s observation. Andy did kill art, at least a certain conception of art. Andy did kill beauty, at least a certain conception of beauty. And as to whether Andy killed laughter, it is important to point out that it was the conspicuous lack of humor, the lack of laughter, in the work of the abstract expressionists that influenced Andy and the pop artists to reactively "paint nice pictures." Do It Yourself (Landscape) 1962 is a riot.
     At the beginning of Andy Warhol Danto writes: "My theory is that when there is a period of deep cultural change, it shows up first in art." This book is best read as an extended commentary on the truth of this claim, and how Warhol's conceptual revolution contributes toward it. However, Danto's commentary falls short by not extending it far enough. Danto claims that Warhol's post-1968 work lacks philosophical significance. This is incorrect. If art is what you can get away with, then Andy's later period is nothing but a variation on this theme: whether it is his decision in the 1970s to derivatively lampoon himself by mass producing his portraits for the rich and famous (and rightfully making a fortune doing so), or by making a cultural commentary on how art cuts through ethnocentric stereo-types by working so briefly, yet so successfully, with Jean-Michel Basquiat.
     Much can and should be said about this period of Andy's work. Wayne Koestenbaum puts it best when he describes the entirety of Warhol's artistic output as the "maximum redemption of lost material." Such redemption includes "the pleasure of repetition, the pleasure of making one thing and another, and not discarding either one of them." Warhol turns human banality into an art form by putting dry repetition back into human experience. Chogyam Trungpa would call that an instance of "cool boredom." Chairman of the bored indeed.

     Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on September 15, 2008. Just hours after the filing Alberto Mugrabi's father Jose was at Sotheby's headquarters in London for the most extravagant sale in its history. Reflecting upon the commercialisation of the art world at that crucial time in recent financial history, he said: "When the empires fall - Roman, Greek - all that is left is the art." It would not be lost on Jose Mugrabi to claim that when the empires fall all that is left is what you can get away with. It would be lost on Robert Hughes.

Sources

Arthur C. Danto. Andy Warhol. Yale University Press, 2009.

Christopher Hitchens. "Unsentimental Education." The Nation. September 07, 2006.

Chogyam Trungpa. The Essential Chogyam Trungpa. Shambhala, 1999.

David Hickey. Andy Warhol: "Giant" Size. Phaidon Press, 2006.

David W. Galenson. Conceptual Revolutions In Twentieth-Century Art. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Eric Konigsberg. "Is Anybody Buying Art These Days?" The New York Times. February 27, 2009.

Hilton Kramer. "The death of Andy Warhol." The New Criterion. May, 1987.
Kim Evans. Andy Warhol. ArtHaus - Art and Design Series, 2009.

Peter Rosen. Who Gets To Call It Art?: A Film About Henry Geldzahler. Arthouse Films, 2005.

Ric Burns. Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film. PBS, 2006.

Robert Hughes. The Mona Lisa Curse. Oxford Film & Television, Channel 4 Television Corporation, 2008.
Robert Hughes. The Shock Of The New. Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

Dance Me To The End Of Love

Drabinsky Gallery
114 Yorkville Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M5R 1B9
February 2011

Review by Rory A.A. Hinton

The Living Poet

The Drabinsky Gallery in Toronto hosted an art exhibit entitled "Drawn to Words: Visual Works from 40 Years" in the spring of 2007. It was the first public exhibition of the art of Leonard Cohen. 40 private drawings (from doodles on napkins to digital images initially drawn on a wooden Wacom tablet), made over the past 40 years for the soul amusement of Cohen and his friends, finally saw the public light of day five ago this coming May 2012.
     Friends and fans alike showed up at the gallery for the opening of the exhibit that spring, then located at 122 Scollard Street. As they emerged from their black stretch limos parked in front of the gallery the artist of the moment was conspicuous by his absence. Seemingly out of nowhere a lone figure was eventually spotted walking down Scollard Street toward Drabinsky Gallery. It was Cohen. Like the "kind and powerful" Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Cohen is a man who obviously likes to walk to his work. The New York Times said of him in 1973 that "you are sometimes rewarded with a poet's profound thoughts, sometimes with a pop star's put-on." Was Cohen playing the ironic trickster here, brashly courting public success by pretending to privately ignore it? Then again, maybe this very living poet was just being fashionably late.
     Four years later the gallery hosted another exhibit of Cohen's work in February 2011 called "Dance me to the end of love." It consisted of eight prints drawn from the original "Drawn to Words" exhibit. Cohen described these prints in the Upper Gallery as an instance of "transcendent decoration." This remark hints at his artistic hermeneutic, and indicates the reason why his work can, and should, be read as a concrete response to the abstract expressionist work of someone like Harold Town (whose work was retrospectively shown for the opening gala of Drabinsky Gallery in 1990).
     Pop art does not invite abstract analysis, nor does it necessarily require it. Cohen's own brand of decorative pop invites us to surface our attention upon objects that are ready-to-hand so we can confront the thingness of ready-made-things. "I have always loved things," Cohen once said, "just things in the world. I love trying to find the shape of things." If 'love' is another word for paying attention, then Cohen's exhibit clears the floor to dance us to the end of his own attentiveness: self-portraits, lost spectacles, a red guitar, and the seductive surface of the female form. His end becomes our beginning by reminding us that Richler was right: an artist is simply an attentive witness to her own time, his own place, and their own things.

Lost Spectables

Red Guitar

      When asked what Coca-Cola meant to him, Warhol answered: "pop". This "deeply superficial" remark (as funny as it is factual) unites both the form and the content of his art in one word. It serves as a concise example of how and why Warhol directed attention to the surface of things. To know all about Warhol requires a focused intimacy with the surface of his paintings, his sculptures, and his films. Beyond this surface there is nothing to know because there is no thing to know. The shape of things like pictures (moving or otherwise) show their surface depth.

     Cohen's door, guitar, dustpan, and wainscot flooring, brought together on a flat surface, are as transcendentally decorative as his less-than-still life. As one woman said of him, he is "complicated in a very grown-up way, [a way that] makes even Dylan seem childish." Cohen congratulated this woman for a book she had recently published while they enjoyed dinner together one evening. She was flattered, of course, until Cohen remarked: "Your book is more interesting than you are." Cohen is a deeply superficial tease. His brand of grown-up complexity manifests itself clearly in his fond fetish for the female form (a recurring theme in this exhibit).

Her Hand In Sand #2

     The print "Her Hand In Sand #2" succeeds in showing how the simple shape of seemingly handless arms can serve as a complex metaphor about whether this woman's left hand knows what her right hand is doing. And yet it simultaneously fails to combine colours in a way that might serve the metaphor better by reminding us of, say, "Nu aux jambas croisees" by Matisse.

     Despite Cohen's credulous colouring, he is nonetheless able to unite luscious form and linguistic content by literally drawing us to his words (shapes in their own right). Nowhere is this more evident than in Cohen's print "Dear Roshi". It is at once a birthday greeting, an ironic apology, a homage to feminine seduction, and a poetic descendant of the enlightened eroticism of "Red Thread" Zen:

sin like a madman

until you can't do anything else

no room for any more

(Ikkyu Sojun, 1394 - 1481)

     By 1994 Cohen seemingly had no more room for wine, women, and song. Drinking at least three bottles of wine before he went on stage during his concert tour that year took its toll. He heard the bell and knew it was for him. When the wine stopped flowing, and the women stopped coming, and the song stopped singing, he entered the Mt. Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles to live the life of a monk and study with his long time teacher and friend Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi. His seclusion lasted for five years.

     In 1996 Cohen was ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk and served as personal assistant to Sasaki Roshi (secretary, driver, and occasional drinking buddy). Like all good Zen men before him Cohen is absolutely devoted to his teacher. In speaking of his rigorous training while at Mt. Baldy (he once referred to Zen monks as "the Marines of the spiritual world"), he told a reporter at the time that you can only engage in training like this out of love. Picking up on the indirect reference to his teacher the reporter asked: "So, if it weren't for the Roshi you wouldn't be here?" Without missing a poetic beat Cohen said: "If it weren't for the Roshi, I wouldn't be." He then went on to say that one of the reasons he became a monk was because "Roshi wanted me to do so for tax purposes." Death and taxes. Love indeed.

Shambhala Sun

     Is it any wonder that the centerpiece of this exhibit is Cohen's love letter to his Roshi? Written in letters that are as shapely as its subject matter, Cohen mischievously informs his teacher that his love for the female form has indeed got the very best of this very useless monk (plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose):

Dear Roshi

   
















     He obviously had some room left for the women. Zen has its merits, and also its limits. It all depends upon the practitioner. Monks are the shit eaters of the world ("shit happens"), and by 1999 Cohen evidently lost his appetite. In a poem called "The Collapse Of Zen", this husky poet of the mourning after asks a series of rhetorical questions about sex and enlightenment that is clearly reminiscent of Sojun's brand of collapsible verse. Cohen's koan poses the following question in the opening stanza:

When I can wedge my face
into the place
and struggle with my breathing
as she brings her eager fingers down
     to separate herself,
to help me use my whole mouth
against her hungriness,
     her most private of hungers -
why should I want to be enlightened?

Then again, why not? If enlightenment is a woman named Rebecca De Mornay ...
     What does it mean to brashly court public success by pretending to privately ignore it? Ironically enough to succeed for Cohen is to fail. In the end nothing works. The wanderlust that has characterized his life taught him as much. In commenting on his many travels, and his inability to stick to something for the long haul, Cohen said: "I didn't see it or think about it at the time, but I'd get tired of something and then move on to something else, never terribly happy doing it, leaving one thing for the next because the thing I had didn't work, whether it was the woman or the poem or the city of whatever it was - it wasn't working, nothing worked. Until I understood that nothing works. But you know, that took me a lifetime to understand that nothing works and to accept that." Nothing works. It is and remains hopeless. This hopeless roamantic knows that gaining inner peace and harmony is not a victimless crime. It kills you. It makes you useless.

Still Looking

     There was a haunting sense of loss in this exhibit: lost pussy, lost spectacles, lost selflessness, even lost life (the name of this exhibit is the title of a song Cohen wrote in response to the Jewish Holocaust). To experience Cohen's work is to experience the loss that life brings, even lost royalties. And yet the experience of the exhibit, like the experience of his life up to this point, is a clear instance of the truth that art is indeed (and in word) what you can get away with. To be danced to the end of love by a dancer who has got away with much in his life, to be shown through his art that life is loss because it is suffering, does not bring a sense of hope, but rather hopeless resignation. Even hopeless resignation is hopeless. In the midst of the useless loss of this useless monk, there is an empty affirmation of inner peace and harmony here (even if there are no girls anymore). Within the beautiful harness of "Dance me to the end of love", it is difficult not to experience the meaning of his Zen Dharma name 'Jikan': it is difficult not to bow one's own head and be reduced to "ordinary silence."

In memory of Drabinsky Gallery: 1990 - 2011