Predicting the past is our way to the future. – Bob Dylan, on “Blood” Episode of Theme Time Radio Hour.
Archive for December, 2008
#262 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008#261 – Framed
Monday, December 29th, 2008images of the marginal, placed at the center.
Enjoying the images in Fragments, the blog maintained by the Climax Golden Twins.
These photographs suggest that the frame is everything, that the margins create the center, and that ephemera is essence.
Image: Climax Golden Twins
#260 – How Patronizing
Saturday, December 27th, 2008new models for newspapers.
Michael Miner’s fascinating article on new business models for local newspapers suggests that patronage rather than profit might fit the bill.
While many fret the disappearance of the local daily, and others look to the music business for journalism’s survival, I wonder if it is the art gallery, or perhaps the museum, that might serve as the model. Without ever saying so, Miner’s column suggests this. Maybe the newspaper could function like an artwork, its makers the artists funded by patrons?
Newspaper Collage: Hans Haacke, Violin and Cigarette: Picasso and Braque (1990)
The artworld model gives newspaper editors and writers a sense of independence: drawing on the cult of the artist, they become autonomous creators rather than mere propagandists. (Yes, yes, I know the cult of the artist is a deeply problematic proposition, but it does exist, at least as a powerful myth.)
And while journalists become the Picassos of digital print, patrons get something even better than hoarding paintings on their own living room walls for noone else to see: they get to show off their patronage in the public commons.
The old model of the newspaper is dying. But like all unruly forms of the commodify (music, literature, art, information, maybe even love itself), the news wants to be free. It yearns to live. This is because the news does something beyond deliver a good to market. It also delivers good to civil society.
That is, the news is like oxygen in the atmosphere of the commons: it sustains the shared space of knowledge, facts, opinions, ideas, and debates, disagreements. We’d be lonely and isolated without it (which is perhaps what the “free” market of capitalism wants). The sociality of the news is what makes it so important — and what keeps it in the air.
That makes the art patron model imperfect and compromised. Would we only get all the news that’s fit to fund? After all, patrons might censor or distort the news through their economic might. But as David Beers of Vancouver’s Tyee told Miner, the advertising model was far from perfect on this count anyway.
So perhaps the patron model offers a new way to sustain the much-needed public sphere of the newspaper in the information age.
From galleys to galleries?
#259 – Analog Analogue
Saturday, December 27th, 2008homemade instruments in the digital flow.
Where digital and analog meet, Walter Kitundu turns the tables, creating hybrid instruments that unite fingertips with electricity.
The sounds are weird, full of grooves, skipping over gaps, threading the needle. Kitundu reveals that behind the instrument is the question of generative power.
#258 – Making Art-Making Happen
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008a young curator’s untimely death, and inspiring life.
One of the saddest, but also most moving and inspiring, stories of the year: Laura Pearson’s “He Helped,” about the short career of curator and arts administrator Ben Schaffsma.
#257 – Wedlock
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008the marriage act.
Lately, Culture Rover has been mesmerized by Peter Cardone’s photograph, “My wife wants me to take pictures of her,” whose title and image capture something so essential about spousal relationships.
Peter Cardone, “My wife wants me to take pictures of her,” 2008
Something about this photograph encapsulates the secret communication — the almost-physiological conversations of emotion, sensation, and meaning — that occur between a couple. Is it the ambiguous location, which looks like a driveway in front of a garage, and suggests a couple on the threshold between public and private, either on their way out of or into their home? Is it the wife’s gaze, which is at once suspicious and welcoming, impatient and curious? Or is it the title, which makes one wonder whether Cardone’s wife actually wishes to have her photo taken, or whether it is Cardone who desires that his wife want to have her photo taken?
The photograph is so casual as to be a snapshot. It’s a “picture,” not a “photograph.” It is something vernacular, not high art. And yet, in its magnetic energy, which pulls the reader toward the dreamlife of domestic normality, the image begins to look more and more staged. Is this even Cardone’s wife or just a model or friend playing his wife? Has Cindy Sherman entered the building (or better said emerged from the garage in the background)? Is this photograph so real as to appear not real? Or is it just a moment in the driveway, between art and the everyday, on the way home from or to the market?
Image: Peter Cardone
#256 – School of Hard Knocks
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008to bail or not to bail out higher education?
From the right, Eric Gibson attacks higher education (“Pleading Poverty: Colleges Want Parents to Foot the Bill for Their Largess”). From the left, Chris Hedges does the same (“The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff”).
Gibson wants colleges and universities to tighten their belts and get within the limits imposed by the “free market” without ever asking whether this neo-liberal model is still credible in the current era of financial crisis. Hello? Bank bailouts? Why no higher ed. bailout? Gibson refuses to entertain this proposition. He seems to think universities have turned students into lazy, big-government loving welfare princes and princesses but that schools will no longer be able to sustain the tuitions necessary to luxuriate our youth.
Hedges, meanwhile, mounts an anti-elitist critique of those mealy-mouthed, wimpy college students, who kow-tow to authority and are meek, mild robots in the armies of the rich and powerful. Universities, he believes, have turned students into frightened sheep who fear to dream of a life of critical thinking and rebellious intellectual exploration.
Like Gibson, Hedges also does not turn to the idea of increasing governmental investment in higher education. Instead, he is content to throw out the bathwater of more engaged, critical institutions of higher learning with the babies he so despises for their passivity and elitist yearnings.
The most telling quotation from these two essays comes from Robert J. Massa, vice president for enrollment and student life at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. According to Gibson, Massa told the New York Time, “What we’ve done in higher education is let our dreams and aspirations dictate our cost structure.” To which I thought to myself: “so, what’s wrong with that?”
Shouldn’t we let our dreams and aspirations lead us, especially when it comes to educating our youth to become smart, productive, capable, and critical citizens of the nation and the world? Would not this be a smart use of our governmental resources and tax dollars?
Sure, both Gibson and Hedges are correct: universities and colleges do not need to coddle students. But they do need to create robust campuses and cultures for the study of knowledge and the skills of critical thinking. They need to give a greater number of young people (and middle-aged and older people as well) access to this world.
Aren’t universities and colleges too big to fail?
Addendum: Jesse Hagopian, “I’m Changing the School’s Name to Chrysler”
#255 – A Modest Proposal
Friday, December 5th, 2008to ban magazine insert subscription cards.
Culture Rover hereby decrees, despite claims that they actually work, that all magazine insert subscription cards either be (1) attached to the spine of the magazine or (2) abolished from existence.
Image: Cartoonstock
#254 – Capital Capitol
Thursday, December 4th, 2008schools sink while banks get all the credit.
We “bail out” but do not “buy in.” Finance triumphs over schools.
Robert Reich will tell you: it’s capital.
See also: “College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.,” New York Times.
Image: Northern Illinois University/Abraham Lincoln HIstorical Digitization Project
#253 – A New New Deal Culture
Thursday, December 4th, 2008a poster post.
In ReadyMade Magazine, Steven Heller calls for a new WPA-style Federal Arts Program in response to the economic crisis of our times. In doing so, he believes we need a “brand-new graphic language” that builds upon the populist art of the 1930s without nostalgically retreating to it. As part of Heller’s article, ReadyMade commissioned five graphic design artists to create posters.
The results are a bit disappointing to me. I agree with all of the messages in the art, and I find their expressive forms promising on the graphic front, but they remain cliched when it comes to the sloganeering.
There’s too much of the pre-economic crisis mood in them: hackneyed upper-class calls for localism, idealistic peacenik “can’t we all just get along” utopianism, and the sentimentalization of children. Yes! I approve!
But though I like the iconographies, which are bold, and though I agree with the principles, which are righteous, none of the posters move me when it comes to the new paradigm we find ourselves in as Americans: one in which we have a promising new progressive movement politically, but we face an enormous economic meltdown.
Of all the posters, however, Chistoph Neimann’s is a bit more intriguing. There is a playful bitterness to it, a sarcasm that would never have appeared on a 1930s WPA poster, but which strikes something of the mood I feel in this in-between moment.
As we wait to see where the Obama era will take us while, simultaneously, we feel the full catastrophe of the Bush era (and to some extent, the Clinton years) sinking in, Neimann’s poster both points out how little art matters in America even as it asks, in the same breadth, whether art might be able to matter a lot.
That is, Neimann’s poster speaks with forked tongue. It shows the American eagle — a symbol of the polity — being at once stained and robed in art. The eagle looks proud, but a tad surprised as well. The poster suggests that art has been essential to the formation of the United States even as Neimann hints (in what I hear as the sardonic use of the word “special” and what I see as the comic-book humor of the portrayal of the eagle) at how Americans have tended to marginalize, dismiss, and lampoon the role of art.
When it comes to art in America, Neimann seems to say, the eagle has landed, but it is also about to flee. Maybe, in this in-between moment, it might shake its tail feather as never before.
Image: ReadyMade; Christoph Neimann