One of the problematic conditions of art in the age of digital reproduction and nearly immediate access, is the loss of potency in the singular object, image, or gesture. The web’s innumerable blogs, databases, and online magazines, facilitate rapid browsing with such effectiveness that researching art can become a masturbatory and sportive warpath towards comprehensive knowledge. I use the word masturbatory both because browsing feels good — it offers a temporary sense of accomplishment, of erudition, and the pleasure of seeing lots of good art, whatever that means to you — and also because it is quixotic, in that omniscience when it comes to anything is impossible given the human lifespan.  The trope is that Diderot was supposedly the last man to know everything.  And, as Stephen Hawking would tell us, things got so wildly complex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that complete knowledge became unattainable.  Here is a passage from A Brief History of Time:

In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning?  However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialist.  Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task of philosophy is the analysis of language.”  What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant.”¹

As an aside, Sam Wagstaff, mentor, benefactor, and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, famously described his collecting as a game of ‘Idiot’s Delight’ (a term notable as the name of the only film in which Clark Gable sings, as well as an alternate name for the game of Solitaire, a game known for its low chance of winning).  Moreover, it is not just the web medium that challenges the specialness of the lone artwork, but the sheer volume of works that exist, each vying for slivers of our attention.  Traditional images and objects — paintings, photographs, and sculpture — are particularly challenged because of the volume of non-art images we see daily that are, sometimes, arguably, endowed with as much content as anything called art.  So, what are we missing out on, practically or existentially, by giving a painting eight seconds of our time in thumbnail, ninety-six dot per inch format, rather than thirty minutes of our time in solitude in a gallery, or over the course of a lifetime above our imaginary fireplace mantel?

For me, browsing through images (and texts) with great rapidity is defensible because I feel like I’m getting somewhere with my grasp on art, so that I can … I don’t know … change things?  Change what?  I guess I mean that there’s a dilemma that spans artmaking, criticism, and curating, which is: when do you know enough to do it most effectively?  When should you stop researching precedents, and get to work?  What if you curate a critical, thematic, intragenerational art show, not knowing that there are serious flaws in your selections because you missed out on one chapter or another in art history?

And most criticism I read seems banal, not because it isn’t supremely intelligent or insightful or true, but because the stakes are low.  Maybe we need to see a militarization of the critic:  You don’t like this work?  Destroy it.  But in order for that to be justifiable, there must be a dominant, presumably correct, methodology that the critic is advocating and protecting, and we don’t have that.

I’ve gone off track here, but the inspiration behind this post is a passage from a review in Paper Monument, of Song Dong’s recent show at MoMA, featuring hundreds of household items horded by the artist’s mother over several decades in (pre-Great Leap Forward) Communist China.

…in the installation, the same fundamental alchemy persists: In poverty, the object is so difficult to obtain that it acquires a value far above and beyond its utility; as utility diminishes, the object retains a powerful but undefined meaning. The term “sentimental value” does not seem adequate here. Even the Chinese phrase shebude-literally, unable to let go-suggests holding onto a possession that is personally valuable because of its association with a loved one. But the things Zhao held onto, and invested with a peculiar brand of value, were bits of twine, plastic food trays, empty tubes of toothpaste, and the like: objects universally agreed upon by an industrial, mass-market culture to be garbage and unlikely to retain the emotional imprint of any of her loved ones. More saddening is that, in many cases, Zhao’s possessions moved directly from acquisition to storage, bypassing the station of utility entirely.²

Maybe we need less art, maybe even a poverty or a simulated poverty, for the alchemy to return.  Someone explain if I have this all wrong.

One last comment regarding a parallel I sometimes see, between browing art, and playing videogames:  1up.com, a popular videogame website, once posed to its audience the question, “Why do you play videogames?”  And of the thousands of anonymous answers, the one that seemed most profound to me was, “Because its easier than real life.”

Went to Sotheby’s today as part of a performance piece I think I’m doing, and because they had macaroni and cheese soup at the cafe.  Saw the Important Russian Art show.  Observations and pictures to come.

1. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p 174 [↩]
2. Everything Must Go, Deborah Kuan, Paper Monument Journal of Contemporary Art, Issue 2 [↩]