Depending on sangria intake, I’ll respond to the following passage in more detail when The World Cup final is over (I’m at Lizzaran on Mercer Street), but it piqued my interest as an opportune causeway into a taboo topic that many art secularists (people whose devotion to art operates as sybaritic secular religion) are unwilling to confront.

via The Creativity Crisis – Newsweek – July 10, 2010 – by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.

The single slide Power Point presentation version of the article would point to the discrepancy between the Flynn Effect according to which IQ scores increase on average 10% each generation, and the concurrent decrease in CQ scores (not the Roman Coppola movie), since roughly 1990, scores which, in a word, “quantify creativity” (scoff, gasp!), but actually refer to the ability to creatively engage design questions like, “how can I make this already better?”

My concern relating to the article is the putative default mode of assuming art’s dominion over the positive idea of creativity; its linguistic status (divorced from crescere) and ontological connotations.  I feel that the Art Context as a common substance (Agamben) is an unconscious but highly active as glutton (creatophiliac, catastrophiliac, informavoric) that cannot be attributed to any particular arbiters or institutions, yet as a collective hallucination perpetuated by its antique reputation it is in almost every case righteously presumed to possess, by default, the most direct lineage to “creativity” over the galaxy of other disciplines and human behaviors.  And I think that presumption is a vain fallacy.

Nedko Lucas - Emotions Without Masks

Colleen Asper - Portrait of the Artist as President

LEGO Mindstrom mod by some kids

Nina Power: Do you think art has become indeterminate as well?

Sylvère Lotringer: Absolutely. This has little to do with individual works – whether good or bad – only with the dizzying change of scale, the massive production, circulation and consumption world-wide. The art market has expanded exponentially and has been losing its shape to achieve monstrous proportions. It is occupying all the space, wildly metastasizing in every possible direction. It is so bloated at the core that it doesn’t seem able anymore to digest all the data. It is on its way to surpass its function. The early 1980s orchestrated the return to painting, and gave the art market a chance to fasten its hold. But it didn’t stop there and it didn’t take long before art started outgrowing its own boundaries, opening itself up to the exchangeability of capital. First it absorbed photography, until then considered unworthy; then it move to architecture, fashion and design. Along the way, it has integrated ‘outsider art’, abolishing its own internal limit, and put together ubiquitous ‘installations’ liable to be pitched anywhere and provide a fast pedigree for ‘rogue nations’. Today it is difficult to imagine anything that could be excluded from art. Its field has expanded exponentially to include the entire society. Along the way, it has grabbed anything that could be used for its own purpose, recycling garbage, forging communities, investigating political issues and perfumes, tampering with biology, etc., simultaneously appearing and disappearing with an ambiguous promiscuity. Art has finally fulfilled the program of Dada with a vengeance, embedding art into life. The only thing left for art to do is ‘auto-dissolve.’ Most avant-gardes promised too much and never delivered. Their manifestos of ‘auto-dissolution’, on the contrary, revealed them at their most radical and paroxysmal moment. This moment has come to contemporary art, and it may even spare itself the trouble of publicizing its own exit. Forget art then. Unless it is capable of bringing us up to the next paradigmatic shift, as Andy Warhol once did, forgetting about its own name and past history. Artists themselves maybe have been showing the way by venturing so far astray from home. All it would take is to cut off the umbilical cord that still ties art to the market, or rather turn it into a rich rhizome. Some art groups are already working at it. Autonomists used to say, ‘The margins at the centre’. We haven’t yet given art a chance to grow autonomously.

from “Intelligence Agency” in Frieze, Issue 125, Sep 2009

Though it may be impossible for me to describe its mechanism to you,
at least I can say that I slowly forced myself to consider that
wretched life as a deliberate necessity. Never did I seek to make of
it something other than what it was, I did not try to adorn it, to
mask it, but, on the contrary, I wanted to affirm it in its exact
sordidness, and the most sordid signs became for me signs of grandeur.

And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become
mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a
certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its
asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from,
because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great
nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to
hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable
truths.

-Antonin Artaud in “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society”, 1947

Ours is the culture which burns heretics. The stake is one of the most characteristic emblems of this European culture. The reason is that all religious and social points of view have an inherent need to regard themselves as final and eternally valid, and all who deviate from them after having learned to know them must be regarded as traitors—not as misguided, but as traitors who consciously desire evil. Who desire to insult the state and mock God.

At the entrance to the culture which we call “our own” stand two heresy trials of spiritually gigantic format: The one in Athens and the other in Jerusalem, the trials of Socrates and Jesus, both convicted of blasphemy and threats to the State. These two great judicial murders stand as the gateway to our cultural epoch, and as omens of what would come to characterize it: the individual’s fight against the past. The battle between the individual and the mass. This conflict is the central thing, the very nerve in our culture.

- Jens Bjorneboje in “The Good Pupil”

Robet Musil was a writer plagued by low demand throughout his literary career, though The Wall Street Journal coronated The Man Without Qualities as one of the three best novels of the twentieth century (the others being Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time).¹  I was looking at a collection of some of his of short stories, essays, and briefer articles, Volume 72 of “The German Library In 100 Volumes”, and came across his essay Monuments (Die Denkmale), written in 1932, the thesis of which is the “conspicuous inconspicuousness” of monuments.  Here is just a passage from that essay, which, though it focuses on the fate of monuments, bears relevance to contemporary public art and exhibitions with “open air” components such as Documenta, or inSite San Diego/Tijuana.

Everything permanent loses its ability to impress.  Everything that forms the walls of our lives, so to speak the stage set of our consciousness, loses the ability to play a role in this consciousness.  After a few hours we no longer hear a constant, bothersome noise.  Pictures we hang on the wall are sucked up by the wall within a few days; it happens very seldom that one places oneself in front of them and looks at them.  Half-read books which one has shelved in the magnificent rows of books in one’s library will never be read to the end.  For sensitive people it is sufficient to buy a book whose beginning they like, but they will never thereafter pick it up again.  In this case the process is aggressive, but one can also pursue its inevitable course in the higher feelings, and there its is always aggressive, for example in family life.  The firm possession of marriage is distinguished countless times from inconstant desire by the sentence: Must I tell you every fifteen minutes that I love you?  How much greater must be those psychological disadvantages to which the permanent is exposed in phenomena of brass and marble!

If one is well-disposed towards monuments, one must inexorably draw the conclusion that they make claims on us which run against our nature, and satisfying them calls for special arrangements.  If one were to make warning signs for trucks as inconspicuous in color as monuments it would be a crime.  Locomotives, after all, whistle shrilly and not timidly, and even mailboxes are painted in attractive colors.  In a word, monuments today should do what we all have to do, make more of an effort!  Anybody can stand quietly by the side of the road and allow glances to be bestowed on him; these days we can demand more of monuments.  Once one has grasped this thought — which thanks to certain cultural currents is slowly making headway — one can realize how backward the art of monuments is compared with the contemporary development of advertising.

Articles which mention Die Denkmale:

The Monument Is Invisible, The Sign Visible – Werner Fenz – October  #102

Monument: antimonument – Jeremy Melvin – Architectural Review (Oct 2002)

Commemorative Monuments – Lisa Moran – presented at Dublin City Council 2007

1. http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2006_08_009654.php [↩]

Enwezor: Well I don’t think that art making was ever a capitalist endeavor. The marketing of art is a capitalist endeavor. But we must be very careful that we do not demonize the art market. The art world as such is a complex ecology. There are many different aspects playing a role in our ability to have access to the most challenging ideas that artists are putting forth. The art market is one of the entities that enables that, that supports artists so that they may make a living, to produce, and so on. The museums represent another one. There are many different mechanisms that enable art. My fear is that a collapse of the market might not simply just affect the ability of dealers to sell work, but that it might cause the erosion of resources that support experimental ideas that support younger artists. We’ve already seen that. Now there are very few philanthropic support networks dedicated to the arts, and this inevitably effects institutions. Institutions become more conservative. They become less daring. So the implications of this economic recession have the possibility of being very severe. I am very concerned for my students and their ability to have confidence that they will have a chance to present the public with their work. You know, we critique all of these biennals, but when they disappear, what replaces them? I can tell you that without these biennales, the shape of the contemporary art field will be very different from what it is today. We have the opportunity to see a greater number of artists than ever before. The recession affects the support for those networks in the same way it affects the support for the art market, in the same way it affects the support for the acquisition of works by museums. The endowment of curator postions is already affecting the support for research. Institutions have taken out moratoriums on programs which require research and travel. . . How do we gain an understanding of whatever this new art that is being made? How do we gain an understanding of this work? This is far more complex for me, in this sense. This is the concern I have.

-interview with portlandartnet.net April 24, 2009¹

1. http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2009/04/interview_with_4.html [↩]

Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden.

Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters.

-Rosa Luxemburg (1920).  Marx’s biographer, Franz Mehring, called Luxemburg the best brain after Marx.

Map of East Berlin circa 1977. Note the contrast in detail with West Berlin, toward the bottom. Click to enlarge.

On that note, there is an n+1 event tonight:

Nikil Saval, Adam Sternbergh, and Ben Adler discuss gentrification

Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen St.
New York, NY
(Lower East Side)

Tuesday, Jan. 5
7 PM –

Free!

On a contradictory note, Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, may have critics of neoliberalism foot-in-mouth with his corporate culture of “psychic income” (this Business Week article is being passed around the IDC mailing list like a torn page from Hustler among fifth graders at recess)

from The Guardian

Vilks (Guardian.co.uk)

24 May 2007, 5:54PM

I think Jonathan Jones is making a slight mistake concerning what is art or not. If Adria is participating as an artist chosen by Documenta he will by definition perform as an artist. It doesn’t mean that he is making good art, it can acutally be bad, but still it will be valued as art. Confirm by one of the strongest institutions in the world.

This way of adding outsiders into the artworld is not unusual. Greenpeace participated some years ago in the Santa Fe biennale and in the last Documenta 11, Okwui Enwezor was showing many documentary filmmakers and photographers.

The usual future for someone entering the artworld in this way is that it does not change anything. Greenpeace did not stop being the environmental movement, it just left the artworld with hardly any traces. So also for most documentary filmmakers. And we can be sure that this will also be the case of Adria. He will make a short visit in the artworld and then he will continue being the master chef in El Bulli. But still we have to admit that he has been confirmed as an artist, though, which I will predict, not as a very good artist. He has too strong an identity within gastronomy and will mainly be recognized as such an item.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2007/may/17/foodcanbeartisticbutitca

I didn’t have the good luck to mistakenly believe when I was young that Cézanne was a woman, as one artist friend of mine did. She grew up thinking that, like Marianne or Joanne, Cézanne was clearly female, as well as the greatest modern artist in the world. By the time my friend discovered her mistake, she had internalised the notion that she, too, might someday be the greatest modern artist in the world, since it would be only natural for one woman to follow another in that position.¹

1. Susan Hiller. O’Keefe As I See Her. Frieze Magazine, Issue 11, 1993. [↩]

What happens when an allusion goes unrecognized? A closer look at The Waste Land may help make this point. The body of Eliot’s poem is a vertiginous mélange of quotation, allusion, and “original” writing. When Eliot alludes to Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion” with the line “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” what of readers to whom the poem, never one of Spenser’s most popular, is unfamiliar? (Indeed, the Spenser is now known largely because of Eliot’s use of it.) Two responses are possible: grant the line to Eliot, or later discover the source and understand the line as plagiarism. Eliot evidenced no small anxiety about these matters; the notes he so carefully added to The Waste Land can be read as a symptom of modernism’s contamination anxiety. Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?¹

1. Jonatham Lethem. The Ecstasy of Influence, Harpers, http://www.harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html [↩]