How Art Became Ugly | Stephen Hicks at Eseade | 2019

Bueno okay I'm going to be speaking about the art world for the last 120 years now human beings have been doing art and enjoying arch for tens of thousands of years there's something that is deeply human about engagement with art but if you know art history the last century 100 years has been the most unusual Century in the world of Art and for most of us who love art or who are interested in are to have some engagement that's all of us right uh we encounter what is going on in the modern art world the postmodern art world and most of us initially are confused we are bewildered sometimes we are disgusted we don't understand we shake our heads and so one of the questions I'm going to ask today is why did the art World become so unusual over the course of the last 20 or sorry 100 years and there are reasons for it the behind the apparent nonsense there is sense right but it's uh it's not necessarily a sense that fits with your understanding of what is sensible and so forth now I'm a philosopher by training and by profession and one of the reasons why art has changed so dramatically is philosophical and I want to argue today that the most important reason why art made its major change 1890s 1900s the generation before the first world war was a series of revolutions that had occurred in the philosophical world and artists even if they're not philosophers by training are nonetheless very philosophical when we do art and when we experience art we are always asking ourselves what really matters and that's a value question and you have to go deep in yourself and all artists will talk about going deep in themselves who am I what do I want to express what do I want when I communicate with other people what do I want them to experience and if I want them to spend money a thousand dollars ten thousand dollars uh what is going to be so valuable to them that I can add value whatever that value is to their life and how do I know that I have succeeded and we know when we experience art art it affects us profoundly and we decorate our homes with art we spend money on Art we spend time and most of us at some point entertain some aspirations of being creative I will do poetry I will write a novel I would like to do scripts I would like to try painting so what is going on there and what has happened in the last century of the art world now there's a follow-up question that I want to address and that is one thing that has been characteristic of art history is the rapidity with which the art World changes different styles different motifs different genres and so if you take a course on the history of art particularly once you get into the last 1 000 years there are so many different movements and changes and dramatic breaks in style and one very interesting thing about the last century is how little has changed that it's the same sorts of themes the same territory that is being worked over and over and over again and we are four generations five generations into it to it why has the art world not moved on why is there not another new radical break to another movement and so forth it seems stuck and the reason I'm going to offer is that again philosophy is important that at the turn of the 20th century about 100 years ago there was a philosophical framework that was broadly adopted and it was a very skeptical cynical in some cases nihilistic understanding of the world and that was picked up by the artists and communicated and it required some fairly dramatic changes in how you do art if you have a very skeptical nihilistic value empty understanding of the world and not much has changed in terms of The Guiding philosophy of the Contemporary High art world so that's going to be my thesis and for the rest of the time I'm going to start working my way through that so art is very personal at the same time it is very Universal and it's one of the interesting things about art so if we read the story of Romeo and Juliet for example we all know this story and we get into the story and we start to care about Romeo we care about Juliet they are particular individuals and they matter to us but at the same time they are abstract types it's the young man and the young woman and it's love and that's a human Universal and in this case there's a family Dynamic the families hate each other and there are obstacles and that also is a universal and of course this one ends tragically and that's another Universal but because we care about Romeo and Julia as individuals it affects us both personally and universally it's not just a sad story about two individuals it is a sad story about two individuals but we also take it as saying something more generally important about the human condition and that's why every generation we go back to Romeo and Juliet and here we are 500 years later and we all know actually not quite 500 years later but we all know the Romeo and Juliet story so this it's a painting by Vermeer okay and in one sense this is a particular young woman and she's rather lovely and it's a lovely blue and gold and that's a beautiful contrast but there's also something that we respond to that combination we have this look in her eye as it turns out this young woman is probably vermeer's daughter and so for him she this particular young woman is very important and so he's trying to communicate something about that but why do we respond to this painting 400 years later we don't know vermeer's daughter and we don't care about her but this is a lovely young woman and there's something that is captured here and we value young femininity and she's taken some care to dress a certain way and of course the centerpiece the lovely earring so it's a particular young woman but it's also General femininity and we evaluate both so in ancient peace this is at the the Vatican and the scale of this is stupendous I don't know if you've seen it right in person larger right than life this is layaku one and at one level it's a particular story layakawan was a Trojan he was a priest and he got on the wrong side of the Gods and then the gods do what the gods do when people get on the wrong side of them they send punishment and so there's a particular story about atrogen priest and his sons and they are killed but then at the same time we respond to this piece two thousand years later even if we don't know it's a Trojan priest or the particular background it's a human being and we have various nasty forces of nature that are out there waiting to get us it's again a tragic a horrific death piece and we respond to it we feel his pain and so it's mankind against nature and nature is often hostile and trying to kill us and that is again a human Universal so it's a particular and it's a universal hey guys okay now these decisions right about what matters to us and art is unusual because it does have these broad philosophical messages but it captures them in particularized form it's not just a journalistic account but it's not an abstract philosophical statement it is a capture and so over the course of the history of art because of the power of art we have these very deep ongoing philosophical debates about art so if I'm an artist the biggest question I always have to answer is well what am I going to portray and one of the ongoing debates is am I open to the entire world and art should be about all of reality and trying to capture all of reality or is it the case that art should only be about portions of reality that some parts of the world are off limits and so for example we might say as this passage here from Exodus says Thou shalt not make thee any graven images now that's archaic English so let me translate it into modern englishes right you cannot make representations in art you cannot do figures and this is now a Divine commandment because the natural human impulse is to make representations and figures and to capture the way the world is if you are interested in religion you want to know about God or the gods and you want to find in your art because the gods are important how to capture the gods and the Supernatural and the Divine in your artworks and then this says no you shall not do it I know that then is to say that the most important part of reality if you are religious is not to be captured in art and at the same time from this religious perspective you might have the view that this natural world the physical world is not very important it's a lower world you're only here for a few years and then you die and your soul separates from your body and you go on to your eternal life and that is what you should be thinking of and focusing on but put those two together if you are not allowed to do representations and figures about the Supernatural and the divine and at the same time you're not supposed to be very interested in the lower physical world you should be only contemplating the physically the higher spiritual world then there's no room for art art is almost banished and this is a philosophical position and what is very interesting in our history is those religious Traditions that have taken this pronouncement seriously have not generated traditions in painting traditions in sculpture traditions in theater and so forth so that's a metaphysical debate what should artists be allowed to represent the entire world and engage with it or portions of it now what's the reason for this prohibition here and again there's a philosophical reason the argument is that the spiritual world that God cannot be represented because he is a purely spiritual being and the physical is low it's base it's in many cases disgusting so if you try to take something that is pure and high and beautiful the gods and capture them in physical form that is blasphemy that is a degradation and you shouldn't do that so again before we can be an artist we have to make some religious and philosophical decisions about what our subject matter is going to be now we're interested also not necessarily in the world out there and the gods or God who are also interested in ourselves well who are we what is it to be a human being and then we look at those Greek statutes and what we see is human beings are beautiful powerful erotic Noble dignified and when the Greeks are portraying the Gods and of course many gods they are portraying them in human form like the gods are just really awesome human beings and we get the sense that we as human beings are pretty special ourselves and if we work on ourselves we can become almost Godlike and how wonderful is that and that is a very powerful philosophical assessment about what it is to be a human being but at the same time we know there are many who will make the judgment about human beings that they are sinful that they are weak that they are hypocrites they're disgusting right they engage in all sorts of betrayals and they know what is good but they do not do what is good and so they should feel ashamed of themselves they should feel guilty and they should fall to their knees and press their faces into the dirt and ask for forgiveness now if you are an artist and you are going to portray what it is to be a human being you're going to go in very different directions right the Greek Direction versus the human beings are shameful and should cower and fall down and what about politics should we in our art say anybody can be represented we're interested in all human beings from all walks of life or since we know that art is so powerful is Art something that should be politically controlled and only artists who are doing representations perhaps of Kings or Aristocrats or generals who have accomplished something maybe Olympic athletes who are doing something very special but only aren't because if it's important is allowed to do special human beings and people who are not worthy those should not be the proper subject matter of Art so do we believe that art should be free and accessible to all human beings that we should be interested in the full range of Human Experience or is Art politically something that should be controlled and reserved for Those whom the political leadership considers to be important and then the subject matters what do we think about sex what do we think about race what do we think about power and Justice the whole range of values do we let artists Express anything they want or do we say some viewpoints are morally wrong and they should not be allowed to be expressed so the point of all of this is now we're raising questions about metaphysics and the nature of reality what it is to be a human being what are the important values should people be free or controlled should we be egalitarian or elitist and all of those philosophical questions have great bearing on how artists to be an artist you have to engage with those questions and that's part of the power of our it also explains why in art history art has gone through various cycles of Engagement and disengagement higher aspirations and lower aspirations depending on what the prevailing philosophy of the era has been now that said I want to jump to our era right and I want to bracket it by the year 1917 because it was about a century ago so it's the the mathematics is almost perfect right because we're 19 or 2019 now but three things happened in 1917 that are indicative of the time period and what has changed or not changed since 1917. so I want to give you the first one here's the first one all right I could do this as an art history test right down who's who's whose work is this so this is Marcel Duchamp this is a work called Fountain and it was exhibited in New York in 1917. New York had just recently become the new center of the art world sort of the interesting things we'll come back to this is that if you go to the 1400s it was Italy by the time you get to the 15 and 1600s it's moving to uh to uh Amsterdam and the low countries in Holland and then into the 1700s it's London and 1800s it's Paris and then by the time we get to the 1900s it's the United States New York Hollywood and so forth so this is a statement what's going on in New York in 1917. now Duchamp is an artist this is well you recognize what this is right yeah well not really well maybe but yes he went to a hardware store bought a urinal uh took it back he put this our mutt he just wrote that on there sent it in and of course the date 1917 and this is his statement about art now why this matters because if you go one century later we are now into the 2000s and there's a survey done of British and American artists over one thousand of them asking them to name the most important influential artist on their thinking and development as an artist now we would come up with all sorts of names right we might say Andy Warhol we might say Pablo Picasso and those guys came in second and third number one most important artist of the 20th century according to Leading 20th century artist was this guy Marcel Duchamp and that's interesting so what is going on with this such that not only is it part of the art world but it is judged by those inside the art world as the most important piece of art of the past Century and it is still with them foreign 1917 also in Michigan in Dearborn the brand new high-tech Ford Motor Company mass production Automobile Plant opened and it is of course a Marvel of modern engineering right the number of cars that can be produced the cost of those cars the quality of those cars and of course Ford is a household name so in 1917 there are those who are saying this is amazing awesome what the modern world is able to do Henry Ford is a hero of the business and Engineering world but the reaction in the art world was negative consistently negative still in France in England and in the United States so I've got one representative quotation here Alfred stieglitz speaking for the artistic Community uh in the early 20s every time I see a Ford car something in me revolts so he looks at that and he says that's disgusting that's repulsive I hate where the modern world is going so what's going on there right well we can say well this is a mass production facility and everything is broken down and here we have human beings but the machine is going along and the human beings have to keep up with the machine and the the new part comes along I have to do what the boss told me to do what the machine is making me do and so the modern world with its engineering and its business achievements and the entrepreneurship that is built into this is then seen not as a progressive Force but is something that is dehumanizing us it amounts to a threat an attack on what it is to be a human being and so a huge part of the artistic movement is then a reaction against industrialization against mechanization against businessmen like Henry Ford who can make a million dollars so that's also 1907. and then also 1917 the Russian Revolution it's a bit of a cliche of course artists have always been engaged with politics it's always there but one of the very interesting things about the last 100 years is how much politics is front and center in much of the art world so it's not just that art is about family life and religion and nature and human beings and sex and politics too right for much of the 20th century politics has come to be the most important aspect and for many artists and sub-movements within modernism and post-modernism it is explicitly and almost exclusively a political exercise and of course the portion of the political Spectrum you know I don't know how you divide the political Spectrum right or if you need multiple Spectra but the portions of the uh political spectrum that are most dominant within the art world for the last century is relatively narrow it's a small portion of the political spectrum that has been dominant so foreign let's ask why now I want to give you some quotations that was 1917 and what you might expect is the way art goes is that for 20 years 30 years maybe 40 years there's this new artistic movement new approach arises it dominates for a while but then people get bored they get tired they want something new and the artists themselves get bored and tired and say oh we've already seen that many times I want to do something new and fresh and original so by the time we get to the 1960s that's already then been 40 years or 50 years of a certain approach to Art and we see certain themes be starting to be repeated over and over again so let me give you a series of commentators This Is 50 years ago I'll start with one from the russian-born novelist iron Rand speaking about what has happened in the modern art World quote when modern artists declare that they don't know what they are doing or what makes them do it we should take them at their word and give them no further consideration now notice that that's 50 years ago and we have a perceptive person working inside the art and literature World saying okay we've listened we've given you your chance you're saying you don't know what you're doing and you've been doing it for 40 years let's stop listening to these artists anymore and go and do something different 50 years ago 40 years ago the Mexican poet the Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz today Modern Art is beginning to lose its powers of negation so modern art was about negation critique and so forth but it's losing its powers why well because we've just been hearing the same thing over and over again right for some years now its rejections have been ritual repetitions so positive ritual you're just going through the motion it's the same thing over and over again Rebellion has turned into procedure criticism into rhetoric Etc negation is no longer creative pause right there what an insult to artists to say that what you are doing is no longer creative it's like the worst possible insult you can give to an artist I'm not saying that we are living the end of art we are living the end of the idea of Modern Art so 40 years ago Modern Art was over according to octaviolets 30 years ago egyptian-born literary critic I have Hassan the postmodern period is driven repetitively by a vast will to un making affecting and dissolving the body cognition eroticism the psyche and the entire realm of discourse of the West so what he's saying 30 years ago okay modern artists are dissolving everything they're breaking everything down but now they've done everything everything has been broken down to emptiness 20 years ago art critics American art critic Donald cuspit quote in the art World such facile nihilism okay that's a nihilism emptiness no value so that's dominating the art world but it's facile and that's an English word that means kind of juvenile and empty uh such facile uh nihilism passes for critical profundity when in fact it is simply farce and farce is silly comedy right you know it's the three stooges and right silly stuff so 20 years ago perhaps the leading art critic is saying it's over it's done it's empty it's facile right and so forth and I'm starting to feel like an old man over 10 years ago when I started to write about art I wrote and this was my prediction right uh the world of post-modern art is a run-down Hall of Mirrors reflecting tiredly some Innovations introduced a century ago it is time to move on right unquote all right so the question then is if everybody recognizes that okay something happened negative critical nihilistic perhaps uh 100 years ago and we basically broke everything down and destroyed it and negated everything and by the time we get to the 1960s we recognize that this has happened and so it's time to move on and then the seven 1970s oh it's time to move on the 1980s it's time to move on and here we are almost 2020 and what are we saying it's the same thing over and over again and is it time to move on well okay why not why are we stuck now now I want to give this as the answer right and to argue realism that is to say the kind of art that was rejected by the mark the uh the modernists when they started to break everything apart when they started to go into abstract expressionism and you go to the gallery and you look at it you say what is it I don't know you try looking at it this way you look at it that way and you talk to someone who is supposed to be very smart about what's going on in art and they say some words right and you're an intelligent person and then 30 seconds later you have no idea what that person just told you and what it is supposed to mean so right why is that and that then is to say but notice what he is saying here this is uh the uh the guy who's the founding editor of the new Criterion much more conservative in their orientation than I am but nonetheless Hilton Kramer is a very perceptive art critic for the New York Times realism lacks a persuasive Theory so you want to paint nature you want to do sculptures of human beings realistically right we don't have a good theory about why we should do that and the argument goes on to lack that is to lack something crucial you have to have a good theory the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify now that's values individuals Theory realism that is to say the philosophy that grounds and makes possible realism has lost and there is no such thing as a good convincing Theory to support realism but what the moderns have and what the postmoderns have is theory and that theory has convinced the intelligent thinkers intellectuals critics and artists of their generation so even if we can recognize that it's the same thing over and over again we don't necessarily like it those of us who are not on the modernist and post-modernist side of the equipment we're defenseless in the intellectual battle and if you don't have a good intellectual game good theory good philosophy you will lose in the high art world so why does realism lack that theory and here again we need to go back in time now this is huge when you talk about art right poetry painting sculpture music literature musical theater right Opera there's a huge number of genres and what I'm going to do is uh cheat a little bit and just focus on one genre uh literature because what was going on in literature similar things were happening in poetry in music painting sculpture so I'm going to use literature as an example I'm also going to cheat a little bit and focus just on the United States and what was going on in American literature now in some sense this is not cheating because uh by the time we get to the 20th Century Paris is no longer the center of everything artistic instead the action has moved across the Atlantic and it is going to be the United States that is dominating and setting the trends in literature in movies in music and various other genres painting sculpture and so on so in order to achieve this is the the Norton anthology of American literature this book sells tens of thousands of copies every year if you go to a university in the United States or pretty much anywhere in the English-speaking world and you take a course on literature this is likely to be the book that you will read and what it will do is excerpt all of the major authors that if you are going to become an educated person you need to know something about these people so you have excerpts from all of the major American Authors so what I've done is that the editors who are all very well regarded professors of literature uh speak to who are the important authors that educated thoughtful people need to know about and what do they stand for and what do they mean in their work so quick mark so this is F Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby have you guys read that book or you've heard it okay movie version right and so on so the American Dream all right now it's a very optimistic portrayal of the world but F Scott Fitzgerald at the beginning of the 20th century American Author he believed it to be deceptive proposing the satisfaction of all desire as an attainable goal and identifying Desire with the material it can only lead to dissatisfaction hence the movement of all his work is toward disillusion now I've pulled this quotation out it's important I agree with it and I've highlighted in red the important Concepts deception dissatisfaction disillusion so we take all of Fitzgerald and reduce him to those three concepts Frost two rows diverge into yellow wood and I took the one less traveled do you know those lines okay we all learned those in high school as well well what is important about Frost beneath the home spun folksiness of the speaker's approach that is to say he's kind of a out in the country rural guy not a fancy New York City sophisticate is a vision characterized by bleakness okay I don't know if you know that concept that's empty gray brown everything dyeing seeing the world as composed of desert places reflecting a design to frighten and appall poems about Winter all right winter is a metaphor for death right are more common than poems about the other seasons and even in the spring and Autumn poems the speaker always remembers winter always thinking about death frightening and appalling T.S eliot's the Wasteland okay the poem was not affirmative well yes the desperate quest for regeneration in a kaleidoscopic landscape Kaleidoscope you know Kaleidoscope right so it's just right landscape of sexual disorder and spiritual desolation remains unfulfilled I should have also done unfulfilled in red as well so desperation disorder depression unfulfillment the world is a kaleidoscope Eugene O'Neill a great playwright often we go to literature for understanding of human characters good versus evil mixtures Heroes flaggers and so forth if however one looks for understanding of the characters in the sense of reasons provided for their behaviors why do people do what they do right that's what we want to know well one will be disappointed so by implication people do what they do and nobody has any understanding why at least according to O'Neill it's a mystery O'Neill's characters could neither help nor understand what they did the playwright presented their behavior as essentially inexplicable that's the philosophical move there simply as the inevitable Human Condition William Faulkner is about his favorite novel The Sound in the fury the sound in the fury tells a story of grief and loss it is in four sections each with a different narrator each supplying a different piece of the plot three of the narrators are brothers Benji the idiot Quentin the suicide and Jason the business failure each of them for different reasons Mourns the loss of their sister Carrie so the four important people here are an idiot a suicide a failure and a dead person Ernest Hemingway he brought more to his writing than disillusionment or cynicism I don't know that I just makes me chocolate all right disillusionment and cynicism that's not enough we need more right you brought an Ever Vivid sense of betrayal what is life about how to live with pain became his theme John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath he combined naturalisms with symbols techniques to depict his characters plights and it expressed simple but strong responses to their sufferings compassion outrage and admiration all right plates desperate circumstances that you find yourself in and you don't know how to solve your problems Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire the author of that famous playwrights mid-century we're less concerned over criticisms plays for their violence and their obsession with sexuality which was regarded by some critics as an almost morbid preoccupation with perversion murder rape drugs incest nymphomania we now know that the stroller voices were attacking Williams for his homosexuality which we must remember could not be publicly spoken of in this country until comparatively recently so you get past the homosexuality issue and this is the center of Tennessee Williams writing and this goes on I'll just highlight loneliness haunting people we're driven to extreme behavior and there's plight again so I take all of those the ones that I highlighted before and put them together this is the world the best American Writers that the smart literary critics say you need to read these people and if you want to be a significant artist yourself you need to enter into this world and this is your world and it's all negative empty desperation death pain cynicism there's not a hint of a suggestion of anything positive redeeming beautiful heroic and that is the philosophical framework within which the American artistic Community the dominant one of the 20th century has been operating now the question then is why right and why perhaps in the United States of all places right the place of the American dream right some of the richest people in the world the freest people in the world so much progress and opportunity that is going on but the artistic Community is totally rejecting it and looks at the world from a completely different framework what's going on well now we get all philosophical right and this is where my people the philosophers go to work because what happened then is artists are not necessarily philosophers but they are smart people they are sensitive people and they do think deeply they read original sources they talk with other artists and other intellectuals and they pick up on what is important and what resonates with them so if we scale out to the broader philosophical world what was the intellectual climate who are the giant names and in fact still the giant names in understanding where we are in the world and how we are to think about it well Friedrich Nietzsche everybody has to know something about Friedrich Nietzsche the most important philosopher on the 20th century his influence is everywhere it cuts across political boundary you find people from all parts of the political Spectrum influenced by Nietzsche it cuts across all religious influenced by Nietzsche he is the deepest most significant philosopher and he died in 1900 so in some sense the math is perfect but one of his famous phrases of course is God Is Dead now what he meant by that was not that there had been a God and God had you know died it's metaphorical right religion has died and religion had been part of human condition for basically forever but think about what religion does for people and did for people it gives them a sense that they were created that we are special and that there is a God who is looking out for us and telling us what we should do and there's ultimately Justice in the world because the bad people will get their punishment good people will get their rewards when you die you don't just get put in a box and rot in the Earth you go on you have survival but what happens then if you stop believing that religion is yanked away from you you go through a crisis of faith and you can't believe in God anymore and what nature is arguing is that's what has happened to us in the modern world because it's very hard for us to believe those old stories that we're told to mostly illiterate people in the desert two or three thousand years ago before anybody knew anything about science and how are we supposed to believe all of those stories come on but has happened very fast and we wrench out this very comforting story of the way the world works and what are we left with the sense that we're on our own there is no God looking after us we're not special and maybe when we die it is a cold empty grave and that's where we are culturally and nature says a big part of trying to understand the end of the 19th century is how do we wrap our minds around that so everybody reads Nietzsche we also read Darwin Darwin published in 1859 Origin of Species he did not say anything in that book about human beings but the implication is clear well if we did not come from a God and we are especially created and we have an immortal Soul where did we come from we came from animals and how do animals operate well animals operate by competition for scarce resources and they fight and it's brutal the winners win the losers lose and it is a brutal fight for survival and it's not nice people who survive it is the Predators we are born of this is not Darwin's phrase but nature read in tooth and Claw so the red of blood is on our Claws and our teeth because life is a predatory struggle among animals for survival now that's not what Darwin necessarily believe but that's the philosophical interpretation many people took from Darwin's views Karl Marx we don't believe that there are moral standards that come from God about equality and the lion lying down with the lamb and everybody getting along in heaven instead we are animals on Earth and it's about power and wealth and it's strong versus weak and the strong particularly under capitalism according to Marx exploit their weaker people and use that wealth to control politics and further Dominate and the whole Human Condition then is ugly exploitation and oppression Sigmund Freud yes Darwin is right we are born of evolutionary processes and like the other animals we have instincts that have been bred into us and if we are going to survive as animals animals need to be successful as predators and that means they need to be aggressive they like to hunt they like to kill they like to tear bodies apart and devour them and the animals that had those instincts the strongest the aggressive instincts particularly now think about males and how easy it is for them to fight and to like to dominate and humiliate right other human beings we are ourselves aggressive predators and we got to the top of the food chain not by again being nice but by letting those instincts Dominate and of course we have to kill and eat but we also have to have sex and reproduce and so those who have the strongest sex drive and combining that sex drive with aggressiveness those are the ones that survive so those of us who are here now we are at the end of a chain that goes way way back and every single one of them was very good at killing and getting someone to go to sex have bed with them right or if they didn't want to aggressively raping that person and that's who we are sex and aggression are our dominant instincts that's what it is to be a human being now the point is if you put this right we have Nietzsche Darwin Marx Frey by the time we get to the 20th century those are the big names everybody knows those names and they are international names they are setting the new philosophical framework and then we can add science entropy discovered late 19th century the idea is that there's all this energy all over the universe but what happens is that energy flows from high concentrations to low concentrations but once the energy is equaled out nothing can happen and so the prediction of this scientific theory is that there's not a God again organizing the whole world and there's an ultimate Happy Ever After in heaven but rather the whole universe of its energy is eventually going to spread out evenly and the universe will just die a heat death so that's see you that's the world and notice it is a philosophical world that is a early 20th century creation and the leading architects of it with the best arguments convincing the most intellectuals are Nietzsche Freud Marx Darwin and then some of the more pessimistic interpretations coming out of the sciences and there's not anything positive or redeeming or Progressive about that philosophical framework as I have sketched it now I'm not saying that I agree with this framework I'm saying now as an intellectual historian that's what was going on for the smart people 100 years ago this was your education now if you then put yourself in a historian shoes and you start living in the 20th century you've read your dear Darwin and your Marx and your Nietzsche and Freud and so forth maybe you agree and maybe you don't but what is actually happening in the world it's not just philosophical Theory in the 19 teens we have World War One breaks out and all of the so-called civilized nations of the world are killing each other millions of people die wives destroyed names and we're developing new technologies better to kill each other and the whole world goes on a frenzy of killing for four years what happens 10 years later an economic depression horrible this guy almost takes over the world at the end of that we learn about the holocausts and now we're into the 1940s and then in the next decade we're back to war again in Korea and the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States now have nuclear weapons and missiles that can fly thousands of miles and they have more than enough to blow each other up multiple times over and this is the 1960s and then we go to war again in Vietnam and you might not know this one this is Kent State University in Ohio a nice Midwestern University peaceful student protests that are going on the governor gets the little Panic he sends in the National Guard which is kind of a military force and they end up shooting some students in the streets of the United States Detroit Philadelphia riots over racial issues unemployment at an all-time high rate ghettos and so forth and so now we're up to the 1970s and the point then is going to be it's not just philosophy Theory it is if you pay attention to what's going on in the world and you read the history a certain way it's negative negative negative negative negative and you're an artist how do you capture the reality that you think and feel the world to be alienation from reality from other people from yourself destruction you get so frustrated you just want to destroy and express your rage anger and frustration and so it's not then I think accidental that the most sensitive and the most intellectual of the artists are going to be unrelievably negative now this takes us back to Marcel Duchamp in 1917 and what has changed if art then is a reflection of the way the world is well go back to the urinal and think of the urinal as a urinal what do you do with the urinal guys you piss on it okay you can try that as well piss on it right piss on everything it's all [ __ ] it's all pointless right and that's the mood that you have okay I've got some more quotations here I want to uh then put it in philosophical form if you want to say art is about truth that's a philosophical commitment well what is the truth and another artistic cliche is to say is not only the content matters but the form matters what you create and how you present it the what in the how the form and the content both are there for your truth what forms are going to be useful at expressing your truth now if you think that the world is ugly and fractured and hideous and that people are disgusting even if they might look pretty sometimes what forms are you going to use and the argument is going to be if the world really is ugly nasty alienation empty aggression predation then using those old realistic forms where we have nice colors and proportions and perspectives and everything is nice and neat and fits that doesn't work to capture this truth we have to break up the forms we have to explode the forms we have to rip off the surface prettiness to get to the ugliness and the emptiness that is really inside and so the truth is negative and the forms have to be negative as well so here's Jackson Pollock uh the drip painting right so he would put a huge canvas on the floor and then just right and various things and he's philosophical about it notice what he says here Modern Art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we are living in the modern painter cannot express this age the airplane the atom bomb in the old forms of the Renaissance or any other past culture each age Finds Its Own technique what were the old forms what we learn in our history it's about proportion and perspective and we learned the mathematics and so forth but those forms don't work anymore because those presuppose that the world is ordered causal everything fits and so forth we need to explode that we need to somehow destroy all of those forms and go for the form less what seems like chaos and Randomness and perhaps something out of that will emerge Picasso is explicitly doing that we look at things from one perspective according to our eyes but that only gives us a partial perspective and we are always traditionally looking for Symmetry and proportion and we want things to be beautiful but if the truth is ugliness fracture disproportion then we need to take the human face apart and re-put it together in a way that is deliberately ugly right you don't want to kiss that face and that's the point this is a self-portrait offering yourself to the world right well who are you you're stretched out at the same time you're exposed and vulnerable and there's not much substance to you right it's a desiccated vulnerability and Salvador Dali right we take a lovely young woman and we want to violate her and to spoil her in various ways Francis Bacon what do we want to do about traditional authorities religious authorities political authorities people we look up to well we hate those guys for all of their corruption and their hypocrisy and here we have one of the popes sitting on a pope-like chair but it's also an electric chair right we just want to cause this guy to experience that man and woman de kuning did a whole series of women portraits and they all look like this what do you think guys horrific she's crazy she's a predator right she's going to bite the flesh off your body rauschenberg took one of the decoonings and says so great I feel inadequate and what do we often do when we feel that we are inferior and people who have done a lot better well we hate those people and we just want to smash their stuff right um people who are driving an old crappy car and you're not sure it's going to start the next time and it's a cold night and you need to get home you go out into the parking lot and there's some guy with his new Ferrari parked there and you hate that guy take your keys and you just scratch the paintwork hey yeah that's right right so if you feel inadequate you want to destroy and you give in to that so what rauschenberg did was took one of the kooning's paintings and he worked for hours over the course of several days to just completely obliterate it and destroy it and the message is it's only by destroying the past better achievements that I can somehow redeem myself and possibly become an artist and the theorists are coming along now this is a March through the 10s 20s 30s and 40s of the 20th century formerly in art history you read the textbooks they'll typically say around 1960 1970 modernism is ending and we start getting into post-modernism and so there are some variations there but they're not going to get into those but you find the same thing happening philosophically there are the modernist early 20th century movements but by the time we get to the 60s and 70s the postmodern philosophers are coming along Foucault Dairy DAW and I will just give you a quotation from each of them speaking about effacement and just destroying human faces and so forth here's a quotation from Foucault about his writing I Can Lose Myself I just paused there traditionally we say when we write that I want to discover myself or find myself and now we're in opposite I Can Lose Myself at appear at La last two eyes I will never have to meet again I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face your face the most personal part of you your expression of who you are to the world and you want to destroy that and the extends that more generally to the human species man is quote an invention of recent date that will quote soon be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea we're welcoming the erasing of all human faces Dairy dog about ugliness the world is ugly we're all monsters and the postmoderns are the ones who are honest about it we do not quote turn our eyes away when faced by the as yet unnameable et cetera et cetera Etc but the point is the formless is the mark the mute not able to speak and express infant terrifying form of monstrosity yes the modern and post-modern philosophical and artistic worlds are hideous but the honest courageous person will go into it and he is urging that all right now I'm going to skip along one more from the same time this is Kate Ellis philosophical writer of the time about post-modernism the apolitical pessimism of both postmodernism by which creation is simply a form of defecation defecation a fancy English word for taking a [ __ ] right and so manzoni uh an Italian artist on the time said well yes Duchamp did the urinal artist something you piss on well what else can we do so we took these tins empty and he defecated into 30 something of them and sealed them and then offered them for sale as his work of art yeah if art is something special that comes from the artists all right well what really comes from the artist what are we really all right and one of these within the last 10 years sold for over 50 000 U.S dollars uh apparently they've never been opened there's a possibility I don't know if you want to open it but there is an intellectual part of you that says did he really and how would we know right but of course if you open it so you might be playing a game but the wait there is something right to them but the point is everything is [ __ ] and we want to basically spread [ __ ] over the world now that's a negative portrait but partly my purpose tonight is to try to explain the unrelieved negativity why it has been so prominent and to say that there are deep reasons for it and those deep reasons are philosophical if you read the major intellectuals of the late 1800s and early 1900s this is the world they portray artists absorb it and artists do what they do and they find unique ways to express it in their artworks and there is a logic to the apparent ill logic there is a sense to the apparent nonsensical nature of the art World here I want to end on a positive note the last few minutes or so I am running a bit long but I'm having fun so I hope you can bear with me for a bit there are signs in the last 10 or 15 years that things are changing right fairly dramatically one sign of the change is the increased amount of humor by artists poking fun at modern artists or modernist artists and post-modern artists so here's a Spanish artist right the model's reaction right so as a lovely young woman who is apparently posed for a modernist artist right and then finally she gets to see what he has done and she knows that she's beautiful and lovely and young and right this is the reality this is what the modernist Arts right and who has done the better job so it's meant to be poking fun right at it we're not going to take you guys to too seriously yeah if that's what you want to sleep with okay fine right but 30 reality is much more attractive this is the decoony right represented there and again right uh this I believe is a Cuban artist right a lovely young woman and somewhat classical form of classical motifs so Rebirth of the classical understanding of feminine beauty and then what have the postmodern's been doing well they've been in effect doing graffiti and defacing all things lovely and Beauty so we're turning the tables on them and we will reject you okay another uh I think I have a theme Here Right lovely healthy looking young women uh Timothy Tyler the constructionist this is a technical term within post-modern literary criticism jock Dairy DAW and so forth so here's his deconstructionist and there's some interesting references here right we've been in a box we've been taking again healthy lovely real people and we've been putting them in a in a box in an artificial environment where they can't survive and flourish so she is breaking her way out of the box she's also not waiting for Prince Charming and the hero to come and rescue her she is a strong Modern Woman she is going to free herself and go off and live her life and we have some references here Moma the Museum of Modern Art again in New York there's Andy warhol's soup can right and there are a few other things if you look closely but again we need to break out of this post-modern framework there also are signs that if you look at the Modern artists and the postmodern artists you would never have any sense of the astounding things that have happened over the course of the 20th century with their focus on yes lots of bad negative things happen in the 20th century but life expectancy around the world at the beginning of the 1900s 1917 I looked it up life expectancy was 41 years it is now 67 years over the course of the 20th century there's been an increase of 25 years of life when is that ever talked about or celebrated in modern and post-modern art the number of people living in poverty has gone down the number of people living under slavery has gone down the number of children dying before they reach one year or five year has gone down we have made astounding progress as a result of chemistry technology science and so forth and those facts need to be taken into account and then further afield there's a there's a lot of sign that younger artists coming along are interested in what has made progress possible yes of course there are negative things and art should be about the negative things as well but it should also be informantly making a judgment call and take into account the positive things and if you look at what's going on in biology right in uh exploration Under the Sea uh out in astronomy and fractal mathematics if you were all in interested and curious the scientific worlds are opening up brand new parts of the world that have never been explored before and if you are an artist and you're looking for territory and you are creative and about Innovation then go where the new discoveries are being made and become cognizant of those and see how those can inform your art but again that requires breaking out of this fairly narrow box that modernism and postmodernism some contemporary artists uh that I think are doing good work Martin vachell a French woman and we start to see just in the last generation a return to the human figure and what's interesting here is obviously a healthy powerful male figure but also he's an older man and that's interesting so you can be viral and healthy and beautiful and if you respond to that even sexy for a lot longer life is not about by the time you're 40 or 50 years old it's over and you just subside into nothingness that's progress It's the Nigerian painter and those of you interested in light will appreciate the way he's playing with all of the light and the reflections of course we have horizontal lines but the light going vertically and the way things are balanced and picking up and Reflections and so forth foreign California artist Michael Newberry saying the Greek myths have spoken to us for Millennia and there's a reason why we always go back to the Greeks and here we have the Icarus Legend but what happened in the original Icarus Legend well he and his father they flew up into the sky and they got too close to the Sun and it's a tragedy the sun melted their wax wings and they plunged to their deaths well is that the way life has to be if you are daring and inventive and willing to fly high and test your outer limits and here we have Icarus at the end of his flight and it's been successful and he's landing and of course there's some Christian imagery that's being played with here but rather than a symbol of sacrifice and suffering and death it's turned into success he has succeeded in his flight so there's a lot that we can learn not only from The Sciences but also the traditional Greek and traditional religious myths those are not yet exhausted further afield this is an Australian artist Peter shipperhein there is for perspective but you know this is like a six foot and he's a pretty big guy himself this is a Monumental zerathustra right now that's an explicit Nietzsche reference right and there's other aspects of nature that are worth reading not only the diagnosis of nihilism that many of the modernist and post-modernists but Nietzsche and positive value creation and being a new a new creator of values but again on a Monumental male scale our lovely feminine figure a young woman just the curve of her lines this is an American sculptor in Pennsylvania this is on a park outside of Philadelphia and a young child and a somewhat balanced on her shoulder but the child is ready to go off and explore but still to some extent protected by and supported by his mother in this case and that's positive and again returning to something that is eternal and deep in The Human Condition and then further afield a painter from Utah saying look artists there are some things that we've done over and over again but really the world is so wide and so open and we're just now starting to go to new worlds and if we are willing to go to those new worlds we will see things that have never been seen before so a young woman obviously out in space put a new perspective on there so the point is the battle has been joined in the artistic community but the reason we're stuck is that the philosophical and intellectual battle is now being joined but it's still early stages and as long as Darwin Nietzsche Freud and the others are the dominant intellectuals they are important they need to be read but we need other intellectuals to replace with a positive Vision as well so if you are creative or you are sponsoring creative or interested in encouraging creative people uh of course have them learn their art history and their art techniques but they also need to be if not philosophers at least philosophical I don't know who the Contemporary equivalents to Freud Nietzsche Marx Darwin and the others will be but we're in the process now of sorting those out so of course we read Jordan Peterson and we read Stephen Pinker and that's important because they're both really smart guys one is more conservative politically and one is more left liberal politically that's fine we can learn from both of them and we will sort out who has something to offer and the point is that both of them in their own way are trying to get out of the nihilism and on to something positive and there are dozens of others out there as well so I'm going to stop there and thank you for your attention and to the extent that Maria is the boss says there is time I will field questions thank you thank you [Applause] okay should I just field them myself I think so I feel exactly the same because and then people is really uh well sometimes they don't understand why it's so ugly but they understand bad things or whatever what you're saying but it's very interesting for me to see that the thing you like yeah yes uh yeah so promise yes so some artists are they don't agree with that negative world view and they are in some cases rediscovering and reworking traditional forms but also there's been a huge amount of development in art technology the new paints that are possible and of course all of the new media and what computers can do for us so uh people who genuinely want to do something positive are they're trying and so there are lots of new more representational and classical and figurative schools that are opening uh and there are now conference this is from an academic's perspective uh encouraging signs that there's enough people interested that are now conferences bringing together art critics and artists and philosophers and in some cases Vision scientists or sound scientists to talk about the new directions in art so uh it could be the beginning of a new I don't know if Revolution is too strong but at least some new directions that can compete so yes my pleasure but all the way through nothing about um you don't know nothing okay so you you okay okay that's I always always worked in thinking that people also be something about the nature of human beings that's the things that they are that attracts our attention is yeah that provokes so all the philosophers you've been mentioning their statements has have always been provoked yes and nobody cares about people that want to present something that's agreeing on sure mentioning Shakespeare a few years ago these stories were also about initially of human beings really badly and so that's that's one of our foreign it's it's so distinct to our it was the last century that's the Arts yeah the influential Arts have been been so powerful right all right so uh a few interesting things right in what you're what you're saying there uh no I am not saying that art in the past was not interested in the ugly or the pessimistic or the cynical that I think has always been a part of our history and I think it should always be a part of Art and art history I think if you are an artist and you are engaging with the world and with yourself you do have to recognize that there's good and there's bad there's Beauty and there's ugliness uh so there's positive and there is negative and if you are aware only of one side or the other then I think you are right partly blind and I think uh part of then of being an artist is like being a philosopher being like a human being is engaging with the world as it really is now there's a follow-up question though say there is say beauty and there is ugliness there's good and there is bad which is the most important and which do I want to work toward furthering so there's two additional value judgments that you have to make so what you can say is I think the world is say equally balanced in good and bad right now and that's a descriptive claim but then do I want to just through my contributions to the world maintain the equal balance of the good and the bad now if you then make a judgment call that says yes I do then what you're saying is I really don't make much of a difference to the world the world is just going to carry on equally good equally bad independently of my efforts so you're making already at that point a philosophical Claim about yourself and if you take yourself as a representative human being you can generalize that to say human beings can't make a difference to the way the world is but if you then say I think the world right now is equally balanced between good and bad but I want to make the world a better place and so what I want to do is emphasize the good whatever I think the good is and in my art emphasize the good then you're also making a philosophical statement about yourself you're saying I think I have some competence but I can make a difference in the world and I'm saying that to me I think the good is more important than the bad yes there is the bad but I'm going to prioritize the good over the BET and that says something about your your moral character the same I think would go the other way if you say yeah there's good in the world but I'm not going to focus on the good I'm going to use my agency and my power to spread more ugliness and and negativity in the world and what I want to do is use my power to create something that is provocative right but the provocative Direction I want to go is and to make you uh have in your life more negativity and that also then is a philosophical Claim about our social relations I want to make your life more negative that's what I want to do and that's a philosophical claim now the point about uh you get a lot packed into your question so maybe I will come back but the the word provocative uh I can come back to that if we have some time because there's another interesting set of issues there so go ahead sure thank you my pleasure and the other day I was talking with a French friend because the Paris neighbors and I can become the exposition so we're just talking about that and he told me oh breaking his house with another plan don't you think it was a it's kind of crazy for me but okay anyway and I have a Prejudice Prejudice yes about one uh I think I I was thinking about other mother post-modernity yeah I think I have to I discovered with you two things first audio is not necessary but I believe it's it's edition of humanity and I think when I saw all the pictures and you're talking it was a coverage to myself that yes of course I mean if if we uh we we try with art and with everything that she met humans are perfect for their beauty I think it's also helping to bring some everything I say no no we're not perfect so I think at that part of the story is really necessary to rebuild something uh we are so really appreciate your location okay yeah but I at the end I escalate your your show the new vision and I don't know it's not bad I mean yeah when you broke something you can build something okay yeah that's that's nicely said um sometimes I I think about literature examples so suppose you think about literature that works and so Shakespeare and uh Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo and uh Rand and so on the literature that works is not only right positive beautiful right to characters so at one level uh if the literature is going to be successful it has to have an understanding of the actual human condition which is very complicated so there's good and bad beautiful and ugly young and old right living and dying and so on and the great works the Epic ones they have everything in them right that's a that's an important part of it so if it's too one-sided then we start to say this is uh this is too fantasy right this is not realistic because partly what we want is for the art to engage us philosophically because we're all grappling with our own lives and however good or bad our lives are they are also mixed and we're trying to sort out the mixture and make decisions in our own lives about what I can improve and what I can't improve and what my short-term goals and long-term goals are going to be so that has to be reflected in the literature so you will have good characters and bad characters you have honest and dishonest just and unjust beautiful and ugly and we're trying to sort out all of these but then at the same time the artist does the literary artists need to make an overall judgment and is it just that I'm portraying this is the way the world is and I just leave it at that or am I going to be optimistic and emphasize one side over the other so yes I don't know take a a detective story right so somebody gets killed and then the detective comes in and in a good detective story there's lots of very different sorts of people and most of the time they have some good and they have some bad and they have different kinds of motivations and we learn a lot about human motivations and human types and all of the rivalries and so forth but by the time we get to the end of the detective Story the author has to make a decision is the detective going to find out who the Killer is or not and that's a philosophical decision and some detective stories they will say the detective fails and that's a philosophical statement right we will never ultimately figure out the Bad and the bad people will get away with doing bad stuff and the good ultimately are impotent but of course if you go the other way and you say the detective figures it out Miss Marple Agatha Christie right or whatever your detective is she figures out and that then is to say it's a moral lesson as well the bad people yes they exist and all the people in her stories are mixtures of good and bad but the important thing is the bad guys get caught Justice is done and we celebrate the fact that human beings like Miss Marple are very intelligent and they can figure that out so you do have to you have some philosophical skin in the game you have to make your commitments if you're going to be successful in art so yes oh sorry am I out of order okay go ahead um about margins for Ceci and his comments from Ireland entertainment oh yes I saw something going through my Facebook feed but I don't remember what it was basically he said that about the movies were at Art and I wanted to relate it to to this because for example movies like Mario the MCU The Marvelous magic universe and all the movies that they they show each year can I just enter just give me an example is this Iron Man yes okay all right so that's the Marvel guys okay okay foreign well how do they fit into this into this category of postmodernism and how do they get out of that because for example comments about for example Mark Hamill who is the actor who portrays Luke Skywalker in Star Wars he talks about the industry of escapism and how that does that feel that does that does that fit uh into this Panorama about art in the in the postmodern world uh what is the stateism for people okay for families and how does that connect to the human in all of us yes well another uh Rich set of observations right uh in in a question so we have Martin scorsese's initial claim that Marvel Comics and the movies or are not actually works of art uh now I don't know what his reasons for those are but my initial reaction would be to say he's wrong they are a form of art they are a fictional representation of characters they have uh characters in Conflict there's plot and there's resolution and there's a moral of the story so I think it's art now he might be then making a shorthand claim their art but they're low art or they're just not good art but absent knowing what his reasons are for saying they're not art I can't comment on that unfortunately well the other part then is uh escapism and that was the other big Concept in the second part of your point and uh I guess I would first ask what do you mean by escapism and sometimes that's used as a pejorative or as a as a negative of saying what happens when you go into Art Is You Leave the World Behind and you go to a pretend reality but by calling it escapists it sounds like you're saying I'm not saying you but the people who use this concept that you shouldn't do that you should always stay in the real world and art is not real it's just make believe and so it's childish and and unreal now if that is what is meant by Escapist then I would say it's the wrong concept to use when you're talking about art because precisely what art is is meant to be in some cases an abstraction on and in a creation of alternative possible worlds and that's precisely it's positive values one of the wonderful and important things about human beings is that our cognitive apparatus is aware of reality but we can also disengage from reality and consider in our imaginations theories and other possibilities uh in order to learn about the world and about ourselves uh the way the philosopher Carl popper put it she said this is the most important thing about human beings is that we can let our theories die in our place so that is to say we precisely can come up with imagined Alternatives and imagine worlds and figure out which ones work and which ones don't work uh and then the ones that don't work don't try those ones whereas animals who are not able to do that they just have to live in the real world and if they make a mistake then they die so to speak as a as a result of it so the point is that escapism we need a positive concept for that to capture the genuine value of considering alternative realities that are made up so uh with that clarification am I being fair to your question I think yes I wanted to add something about okay those sort of two positions like negative and the positive one yes and the positive one being like you said about escaping from the reality that we are but uh today because sadly because we are indifferent to it and we have to go to that other places so that's why I wanted to intertwined with the postmodern approach to Art yeah and you are having you have the necessity to escape from the ugliness of the world okay instead of working inside yeah so let me say right it is possible of course that you are in a bad situation in your life and so one value of art can be that you are just fighting hard to get through your life for 12 hours a day and what art can then do is give you an escape and so it's like you go on a vacation for one hour music a novel a movie and it refreshes you psychologically it's by the break because you forget all of the negative and then you wake up the next day and you are refreshed and you're able to fight again so I would then say art as escapism for that kind of person in that life situation is enormously valuable and there are millions of people who report that that is exactly what it has done for them but also if you are in a negative situation what art can do is help you break your concentration with the world that you are living in because it dominates your Consciousness and give you a sense that there are other possibilities I can be in a terrible situation I'm living in the south side of Chicago surrounded by gangs and people are being shot but I can read a story right about people living in Japan doing something or other creating video games and I'm a young person and that inspires me and I realize there is another world it doesn't have to be like south side of Chicago for me and then I can not just get through the day but then I can say all right I'm going to somehow get out of South Side Chicago and I'm going to go to Japan right or I'm going to go to Hollywood and so forth but I would say art is more Universal than that but even if your life is going well uh and beautiful you have a beautiful family and you love your work and you have a lovely home uh we still respond to Art because we are curious about the rest of the Human Condition we're interested in what's possible 100 years from now so we read science fiction uh and so forth and so art enlarges our sense of possibilities and gives us a sense of maybe I all of these things that I'm doing right now are great and wonderful but there's something I never considered before and maybe I should pursue that other positive value as well I think I'll have to come back just because yeah there'll be some other gig at the back Gabrielle and postmodern art yes and I something else I've noticed about people who admire more postmodern art that there's also some type of pretentiousness and it says like superiority to training to admire that type of art yeah well I think we know from all walks of life that some people are interested in achieving something and they have their own independent judgment about what counts as accomplishment and they want to themselves accomplish something and of course then be respected socially based on their accomplishments and there are other people who want that recognition from other people but they don't want to earn it or work for it and so they learn the games to play in order to get counterfeit honors and so forth so the art world is not unique in that regard so you find that in all walks of life you'll find people who are pretending to be more spiritual than they are to gain religious Kudos or to be richer than they are to get into the right country club or whatever so the art world is a world that some people enjoy and so they want to have status and then there's always then the question are you going to be a genuine artist or Genuine art critic and so earn your status or are you going to find ways of playing games now one of the ways in which modernism and post-modernism help a certain sort of person is that it is right deliberately obscure and often deliberately playing around with meaninglessness and so if you have some gift of verbiage playing around with words then yes you can play social games with other people you can make it sound like you know what you are talking about and that person they're naive they don't understand what you are saying but they're going to say oh he sounds like he knows what he's talking about the fault his mind and so you'll get an indirect boost of prestige so the point is then that in contrast to non-post Modern forms of art where you have to say here is my theme and you're trying to make it clear and here are the techniques that I use and you can explain what those are and uh so their Clarity and communication is a premium if your philosophy is anti-clarity and anti-communication it does open the door to to all sorts of hangers on as well so I would say the the art world is more populated by that sort of people now than it was in other eras yes oh I am sorry I'm sorry a trend in children's literature Classics are too harsh foreign so it's an accident it's not a murderer okay yes yeah so the question is about children's stories and classic children's stories oh there's two questions then okay good yes yes so yeah I was going to repeat the question yes so the question is about classic literature classic children's literature and when you look at it a certain amount of it is very harsh so the first question is a question that we would each ask as parents and teachers of young children which classic literature is their Classics and we're all supposed to know them do we judge are still appropriate for our children to learn and at what age and I would say that there's no straight answer to that that is going to be a judgment call by every parent that is going to be for your children and it's not going to be they're six years old so they can handle it because not all six-year-olds are the same so it's going to necessarily be an individual judgment call by parents and teachers for for each of their children so I remember for example uh uh with my my daughter when she was young thinking oh the Grimm fairy tales right from the brothers grim and all of the classics and so on I'm going to read her these stories so I bought them and I read them I said no I'm not going right because they're really nasty right and horrible and that then leads to the second part right of your question what about the phenomenon then of taking the classic stories and revising them in a Kinder gentler right nicer whip yes that's right and then I would say uh um that you should not do that right but I think what you should do is write your own story and just to have it have a different version of this uh change the names of the characters and change the change the outcomes as well so other people's artistic Creations don't change them that's theirs that's right that's right okay uh sorry go ahead I'm here I have time okay [Music] [Music] oh yeah yes so that was uh art basil Miami or just art basil Switzerland which one was that it was Miami okay this is this is for Gabrielle right that's right ooh I bought the uh hundred thousand dollar banana I think it's the duct tape that's really worth about ninety thousand the banana is only ten thousand dollars so uh there are a lot of issues all right [Music] we're going to solve a discussion around yes that's right cars yes yeah no that's uh yeah and that one in particular I just again saw that floating through my Facebook feed so I didn't follow up but there are you know thousands of variations on that every year that are going on at a certain point you say oh my goodness all right right okay so this time it's a banana okay great yes that's right yeah okay so yeah so who cares all right is it does it matter that it's a banana as opposed to what if it was a rutabaga or a watermelon right so it was duct tape right uh would it matter if it was painters tape right it's like no it doesn't really matter so it's just a it's a gesture but I think the the thing you were saying toward the end is what's more interesting is the discussion about the work rather than the work that's one of the very interesting things about Modern Art and post-modern art in general because almost no one buys those Works in order to enjoy them as works of art instead they buy the work because they want to have a big debate and discussion about them which is to say the work is almost just a symbol for a set of ideas and of course this is part of what conceptual art is all about but the actual object doesn't matter it's all about ideas and then the the whole point of the work of art just is to generate a certain kind of discussion so in this case we would say well this is meant to be a discussion for people who are already in the art club right the kind of people that yeah the painted work yes that's right so it's in one sense it's deliberately exclusionary right we want to make sure that 99 of all human beings have no idea what's going on here because we are part of the one percent and we understand that this is a banana and two years ago there was this guy in Zurich and he did something with a carrot and so it was you know and it wasn't on the on the wall it was on the ceiling right uh and so we're having a discussion and it's among us and what we then get is the sense that we're in a club and we're excluding right other people and then the person who pays the hundred thousand dollars right or whatever that's someone who really wants to be in the club and they've got a hundred thousand dollars to burn so please let me enter the club and so forth but of course the people who are the art critics and the other artists right they might let that person into the club but they're really going to laugh behind laugh at that person that what an idiot right that he's a pretentious right hanger on and so on so I I lost I lost track of the order well yes I don't think there's a we and I think that's that's the the hard part because uh I think right now what we have is a large number of subcultures so there's a long-standing divide between High art culture and popular culture so the kinds of movies that come out of Hollywood and that 99 of the population enjoys the kinds of movies that are I don't know this is an overstatement right the French existentialist movie where everybody mopes around for two hours and then commits suicide right so we've seen that movie 30 times right right but the one percent where I say oh that's really deep right and so forth but the 99 who like Hollywood movies they hate that so there's a huge right cultural divide there as well but then at the same time uh you know within if we just stick with the movies right there are people who love the romances and the actions and The Westerns and the detective stories and so on and some people like science fiction and some people like all these and some people people like new movies so I don't think that we have right now a universal art culture anymore I think particularly now that we are Global we have hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of niches the interesting thing though for me though as a philosopher is who gets the stamp of approval by the professors of art by the philosophers who study art what foundations have the 500 million dollar endowments so that they can do grants to artists so they're the ones who have the power and what art critics are writing for the New York Times and so forth so what is going on there because that is a decisive culture shifter and that's the terrain that I am I am working working on so I think High art culture is still largely post-modern but I think nobody believes the post-modernism anymore I think 20 years ago when I started writing about art you find uh Museum directors and art critics they still believed in post-modernism but I think they don't believe they just uh it's part of their salaries to write about this stuff they have their reputations are based on it or I I have been working at this museum for 15 years and now I'm the assistant to the the main curator of the museum and so I'm on a career path the only way I'm going to become the the main Museum director is if I continue on this path because already on the board the people who write the million dollar checks every year right and they're writing the million dollar checks because they want to be in the club but they don't necessarily believe in it anymore so to some extent it's a self-perpetuating uh culture but it's still uh important culturally and they're not going to change until better ideas replace the existing I think they're open to it the rest of the culture definitely is open to it but the the philosophy needs to to come along compellingly so we have to stop there you say okay thank you really good questions [Applause]

Channel: CEE Video Channel

Views: 23,066

Keywords: how art became ugly, freud, marx, darwin, nietzsche, salvador dali, marcel duchamp, willem de kooning, robert rauschenberg, michel foucault, jacques derrida, art, modern art, postmodern art, art and theory, hilton kramer, jan vermeer, romeo & juliet, ayn rand, octavio paz, negation, critique

Id: EEZeOCyxCG4

Length: 110min 19sec (6619 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023