This evening I filed my assigned story on Laurie Anderson, whose musical piece Homeland has its Spoleto USA opening Wednesday night. Not an easy story to write, I told editor Stephanie Harvin, because interviewing an artist like Anderson doesn’t make you want to go write prose — it makes you want to respond to her enigmas with enigmas of your own.
Am I serious or bemused? Or just coy? Well, I’d say, you decide, and then I’d skate away on two blocks of melting ice.
I spent the morning reading about Anderson, watching Anderson’s videos and listening to Anderson’s music, and I have to say I enjoyed “Only an Expert,” a portion of Homeland, more than any of her better-known material from the 1980s. It’s clearly about some big ideas, the kinds of ideas you’d like to talk about if you’re interested in culture and society and politics and art. Very cool, very contemporary stuff.
Only here’s the rub: If you could have that conversation (and when you’re dealing with someone with the celebrity of Anderson, as a practical matter that’s a privilege you must to earn), would it take you any closer to the subject?
In her dealings with me, at least, Anderson adopted a polite artistic persona that was intriguing in the way that a fan dance is intriguing. It’s a perspective that asserts the value of artists without completing the argument — because like so many of her successful peers, Anderson avoids any statement that would define art in limiting terms.
My opinion? Defining art isn’t as important to artists who hunt near the top of the arts-funding food chain. So while Anderson agreed that her general social critique in “Only an Expert” certainly applied to artistic experts as well, my weak follow-up question didn’t generate any worthy alternatives, much less a user’s guide to distinguishing between the positive and negative contributions of the artistic expert class.
Collecting a deeply thoughtful answer on that subject hardly matters to the immediate goals of modern journalism. Besides, journalism is generally considered one of the pathologies to which art supposes an antidote. It’s likely the wrong tool for the job. So I did my job as a newspaper reporter and let the relatively unimportant stuff slide.
But as a human being? It’s hugely, personally important.
What is art? We’ve come to accept an answer that supposes that everybody gets to have their own opinion, but that some opinions matter more than others, and certain opinions matter not at all. The people whose voices are not valued have learned that art doesn’t matter to them anyway, declaring along the way that questions like “What is art?” are meaningless b.s. Yet the breakdown of the old mediated gateways to expression — both for artists and people who care about art in all its various guises — means that this is no longer just an academic exercise.
Journalism is going through a difficult transition as it adapts to a new world in which our gatekeeping function has been exploded and our ability to dictate “newsworthiness” and taste from behind closed doors has been called to account. As “amateurs” (many of whom have much greater specific knowledge of individual subjects) begin to challenge the professionals in areas we once took for granted, journalism is being driven toward a future that is far more transparent. Its salvation likely rests in open standards that can be clearly communicated and applied by anyone across any medium.
The world of fine art hasn’t been hit by this wave yet, but it’s coming. So while it’s still possible today for a serious artist or arts administrator to say that there are no rules in art but still use words like “good” and “bad” to describe the art they encounter, there’s an expiration date on that pose.
Why care? Because so long as “experts” determine who gets funding, exposure, prestige and access, the “because I said so” rationale is going to run afoul of people who are creating and participating in art and want to know why they’ve been shut out.
Refusing to explain your standards of evaluation in an inclusive and explicit way still seems avant garde today, yet this post-modern attitude has been the fashionable stance in Western art since at least the 1960s. It began as a response to authority. It has now become authority.
In his newly published book Arts, Inc., Former NEA Chairman Bill Ivey argues against this status quo and predicts the return of the American “citizen-artist,” a concept that predates the mass media and seems strangely alien to those modern Americans who are still net-consumers of culture. Visionary legal scholar Larry Lessig has been leading a quiet crusade for a public-minded reform of America’s copyright and intellectual property laws, which have been warped by decades of corporate piracy. Across the world, a wave of do-it-yourself culture-builders are creating a new set of ethics and values based on grassroots participation within social networks. Something of historic significance is taking place, but as Gil Scott-Heron prophesied, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
Talking about art matters because figuring out a way to compensate artists fairly for what they bring to society — both tangibly and intangibly — is likely one of the most important tasks in freeing up America’s cultural productivity. It matters because defining the roles of artists is a step toward replacing the 20th century system, which gave a small minority of artists huge wealth, kept most artists in poverty, and made fortunes for non-artists at record companies, publishing houses and movie studios.
I asked Anderson — a hero to new-media geeks for her fearless, early-adopter, D.I.Y. approach to tech, art and music in the 1980s and 1990s — what she thought of this movement. She neither praised it nor demonized it, but it’s probably most accurate to say that she didn’t really seem to warm to the topic. It’s a thread in a complicated culture, she said. Is it generally a good thing or a bad thing that the barriers to participation and creation have been lowered? It’s always been hard to create good stuff, she said. “It’s maybe harder now, since everybody is drawing out of the same box of crayons,” she said (Photoshop, Final Cut, etc.).
Later, while talking about America’s foundational cult of the individual, Anderson spoke of it as turning toward narcissism. Her example? Blogs.
No, it wasn’t quite Lee Siegel and his hopelessly reactionary Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, but my heart sank just a bit anyway. Maybe she just hasn’t tapped into the new vibe yet. I dunno.
I suspect that art and artists will remain forever marginalized as frivolous by the larger culture so long as artists view themselves as accountable only to the other members of the art tribe. And if the rest of us can’t routinely distinguish good from bad in a meaningful way without expert guidance, then I suspect that the next wave of culture, like a surging river, will make its own path around that obstruction.
Anderson is here to perform what is by all accounts a fascinating piece of music, not delve into someone else’s explorations. But I believe the subject has value for the rest of us.
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It’s hardly surprising that you didn’t get very far with Anderson, if your conversation with her was as plagued with jargon as this essay is — words such as “vibe” and “cool,” and quotation marks that effectively render the enclosed phrases meaningless — mainly because you don’t appear to have formulated any meaningful definitions for yourself.
You could hardly expect a serious artist (and Anderson is nothing if not serious, even rigorous, in her approach to the subjects she explores — even though many people, including some “experts”, find her tedious and uninteresting) to take an interviewer seriously who never once, in this entire piece, makes an attempt to state in a simple sentence, what art is. And make no mistake, it is not hard to state simply and clearly what art is — although the expansion of that definition, and expanded it must be for the purpose of any real discussion, is what brings argument and complex disagreement in its wake.
And you’re surprised to find that Anderson may have negative feelings about blogs? And that somehow these blogs are the “vibe” heralding the arrival of a new world of folks who will make their “own path around [the] obstruction” of being “marginalised as frivolous.”
Here’s what’s frivolous: self-indulgent reporters trapped in the oh-so-cool vibe that Anderson sees, and clearly too, as a deeply-flawed — and epiphenomenal — trend in developed-country culture, particularly and especially in the United States.
I actually thought I had a decent 25 minutes with Anderson. I was worried about it and prepared for it more than I probably needed to. But as I explained in the piece, the purpose of the interview wasn’t to satisfy my personal curiosity but to nail down enough material to write a newspaper piece. I didn’t attempt to engage her in a discussion of art, because that wasn’t the job.
So we didn’t go there.
But the subject of art, like the subject of journalism, was present in my mind as the interview progressed, and my wish to probe deeper into that tangent was personal, not professional. I wanted to hear more from her not because she owed it to me, or to reporters, or to bloggers, but because she’s a significant voice. One I respect.
I’m interested in this because the subject of so much of my writing and speaking in the past three years has been variations on the theme of techno-cultural change. It’s a change that is occurring around us, but it’s an elephant being described by blind men. Everybody’s got a piece. Maybe even you’ve got a piece, Ecuiram, although your scorn suggests a typical misreading of new-media culture based on lack of exposure to its ongoing discussions.
As for a simple sentence about what art is, I don’t have enough confidence to write that sentence (not because I lack confidence — but because I’m sufficiently aware of what I don’t know to put any confidence behind such a sentence). And I don’t think it’s really my place to define for serious artists what art is (although I’ll observe that this definition has changed many times and suggest that it’s on the verge of changing again).
It is my place (as it is anyone’s place) to point out that our culture’s relationship to art is not what it could be, or should be. We have arts organizations in this town that produce quality work and yet eke out only a fragile existence, dependent largely on their relationship to a finite pool of donors. Symphonies around the country are struggling. Yada yada yada.
This status quo isn’t likely to improve so long as the fine arts are held separately from and unaccountable to the larger culture.
In the meantime, I’d like to read your definition of art and your thoughts on how to expand that definition into this new world in which there are more voices and opinions and participants.
Here are 10 points I wrote about the subject of art three years ago.
1. People need art.
2. Art is in the hands of too few people.
3. The spirit of unlimited bandwidth encourages us to revitalize the spirit of art in literature, filmmaking, music, painting, dance — in everything. But we must do it ourselves.
4. On the all-important subject of kitsch: Milan Kundera is to be taken as written. As this passage from Wikipedia explains:
5. When artists make art with the assumption that it is too good for regular people, regular people learn to reject the possibility of art in their lives. This leaves them with nothing but kitsch.
6. A diet of kitsch is like a diet of refined sugar: addictive, self-destructive and soul-killing.
7. Yes, “Art is whatever an artist can get away with,” but that is the lowest possible common denominator of art, like saying that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Both are true, but neither is true in a limiting sense. They provide baselines for art and freedom, but they do not set their ceilings. One can be free, or an artist, and aspire only to these truths, but one should not confuse the LCD with the highest expression of a concept.
8. When what is on the canvas alone is not enough to make a judgment on its quality, then art has been replaced by theory.
9. When theory is less important than the theorist, then art has been replaced by fashion.
10. When only fashion determines success, then art has been replaced by conformity.
Art is the re-shaping of human experience into forms other than those in which it took place.
Who are the artists who make art with the assumption that it is too good for regular people?
Since when has fine art (are you speaking only about painting and sculpture, as fine art has conventionally been defined?) been held unaccountable to society at large. Damien Hirst, Robert Mapplethorpe, Chris Orfili…only a few of the names of artists whose work has set off firestorms of controversy, and in cities as sophisticated as London and New York…..not to mention “Places with a Past!”
Your perspectives (local versus wider world) seem to shift back and forth. A discussion of this community’s weak support of the arts and a discussion of art’s current situation in national and international communities…well, that’s a much more complicated task. In Charleston’s case, that discussion would have to widen to include the pervasive anti-intellectualism that characterizes this place…and that in spite of having not one but two universities in the region, not to mention MUSC.
But ideas are dangerous….especially to kitsch, as you imply if not say directly in your response. And your assumption that I am scornful of “new-media culture” is way off the mark. I only ask that it provide what art always does: insights into what it means to be a human being. It is art, in fact, that alone can provide us with the means of first understanding and then harnessing “techno-cultural” change, because it is art alone that frees us from linear reality and enables us to imagine.
I like Kundera, too…let me encourage you to read another eastern European: Mircea Eliade….TOTEM AND TABOO, THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE….and finally Julian Jaynes’ THE ORIGINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BI-CAMERAL MIND. From there, a move on to Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, Derek Bickerton…even though they are not dealing directly with art and the making of it, their explorations of what consciousness is lead us inevitably and productively both backward to Lascaux and Altamira and forward to Rover and Opportunity — and to the imaginative mind responding to change….art.
[...] Dan Conover recently interviewed Laurie Anderson whose musical piece Homeland has its Spoleto USA opening Wednesday night. Not an easy story to write, I told editor Stephanie Harvin, because interviewing an artist like Anderson doesn’t make you want to go write prose — it makes you want to respond to her enigmas with enigmas of your own. [...]
“You could hardly expect a serious artist” (meaning the rest of the artists in the country are not serious ….) “to take an interviewer seriously who never once, in this entire piece, makes an attempt to state in a simple sentence, what art is.
The writer, Ecuiram LeVar, goes on to state: “Art is the re-shaping of human experience into forms other than those in which it took place.”
I guess no one told the directer of the Halsey Gallery of Contemporary Art about THAT definition since the show that is currently being exhibited by that organization is made up of 1,100 copies of other artist’s “reshaping of experience” - art. However the display case that houses the exhibition designed and constructed by Clemson students is well…artistic.
Ecuiram LeVar is nothing if not verbose - “It is art, in fact, that alone can provide us with the means of first understanding and then harnessing “techno-cultural” change, because it is art alone that frees us from linear reality and enables us to imagine” Oh Pleease. This is art babble at it’s worse.
EcuiramLeVar is also condescending - “In Charleston’s case, that discussion would have to widen to include the pervasive anti-intellectualism that characterizes this place…and that in spite of having not one but two universities in the region, not to mention MUSC.” It seems this writer feels entitled to condemn a whole city as “anti-intellectual” because it doesn’t conform to his/her/it’s personal standard. Enlightened? I think not.
May I suggest that for the purposes of discussing art for the unwashed masses like myself, although I’ve studied and worked in creative ventures for over 40 years, words like good vs. bad art ( “And if the rest of us can’t routinely distinguish good from bad in a meaningful way without expert guidance…”) be replaced with a discussion of art that has meaning for the viewer vs. art in which a viewer finds no personal connection or meaning.
Words like good and bad convey judgment of art against a set standard that becomes meaningless when personal response rather than a state of perfection is considered as a criteria of value in an artwork.
Dan, I enjoyed your sensitive, honest handling of this elusive and subjective subject. (…”journalism is generally considered one of the pathologies to which art supposes an antidote.”) Well put and true.
Two words for Ecuiram LeVar- Lighten up.
@Em2C
Thanks, mom.