Toothless Fairey
Let me get meta on the following quote:
Despite its rousing first impact, the exhibition leaves you with a sense of dismay at the devolution of a certain avant-garde dream into a kind of visual easy listening for the college-educated masses.
[…] Mr. Fairey has acknowledged his debt to Ms. Kruger, but he seems cheerfully oblivious to how his ideas about being subversive through art are fatally familiar, not to say naïve. They were radical half a century ago; now they are the stuff of college art history courses. Does anyone not realize that capitalism is contradictory? Is anyone’s world really rocked by something that can’t be immediately categorized? Every day we are swamped with images and ideas that pretend to confound conventional thinking. That’s popular culture.
This line of criticism, against Obama iconographer and longtime illegal artist Shepard Fairey, is, as sound as it is, well…fatally familiar (right down to the ‘sense of’ dismay, unable somehow to reach actual dismay). For me to say of this criticism “I like this” is not blogging, right, but what else is to be done with such not-so-new information? Celebrate it ‘for its own sake’, is one answer, meaning celebrate it for ours — cultural criticism as ritual. To complain about Shepard Fairey is to reperform the thing complained about.
This is the distressing prospect that provokes bloggers — especially young, smart bloggers — to reach for the overthink. Surely there must be something extra-new, extra-penetrating, all-too-insightful to say about this fleet phenom, that speck of mental dust. What virtuosity, skewering a speck of dust! Analyze ye rosebuds while ye may, be not coy….
The only way out (it seems) is up. Meta-criticism offers the hope of novelty at an upshifted scope that wards off triviality. Not coincidentally, the same is true of electing Barack Obama. And here we are again at Fairey.
The New York Times reviewer from whom the above quote came has a pretty limp recommendation for pulling the artist out of the kaleidoscope:
What is missing from his work is a deeper, more personal and therefore less predictably formulaic dimension. What might that be?
It would be, predictably, casting himself as a character in the same glamorama that now jumbles up Andre the Giant, Lenin, some Arabian women, Mao, etc., etc. Like reaching for the overthink, going ‘personal’ in an effort to go ‘deeper’ throws the pop artist into the most formulaic of dimensions. Every day we are swamped with images and ideas that pretend to confound the line between creator and created. That’s popular culture.
But I can’t stop here, right? Those who offer only potent criticism are at risk of allegations of Negativity and Underthinking, implying as they do that perhaps the most needful kind of critique for some subjects is silence. In such a culture as ours, that kind of pessimism is too easily mistaken for nihilism. Too irresponsible! And, still, any meaning is better than no.
So consider Brian Thomas Gallagher, who beat the Times to punching Fairey earlier this year at n + 1:
Staring into the deep blues and reds of the “Person of the Year,” one fears that in skewering Fairey, one is potentially pinning down who Obama might turn out to be: a mere bundle of associations, linked—inevitably and irretrievably—with movements he did not start, a politics he does not support, and a transformation he cannot possibly represent. In the image, past ideologies and present branding beautifully fuse in a political tableau distant from any actual politics.
Well, maybe, right? One might actually hope that this is so. Who wants a transformation that can be adequately represented? What I fear is a generation or two of conscious and unconscious beneficiaries — meaning non-beneficiaries — of ‘trickle-down politics’: something is going on at the top, something vast and administrative and expert, and what matters is that it supplies resources for an aesthetics of endlessly novel contradictions (including, only for the purposes of later contradiction, noncontradiction) — and, of course, that it maintains the conditions of peace and stability necessary to conduct this kind of aesthetic practice indefinitely. And profitably?
In Faireyland, abandoning ‘actual politics’ to a distant managerial class is an act of aesthetic pragmatism, the better to traffic in HOPE than in Obama himself. (The apotheosis Fairey never achieved: replacing the word HOPE with REAL.) Gallagher describes Fairey in cutting terms as a radical shill, but the real question is whether he’s simply a particularly inspirational kind of liberal (small and large L). As Jim Ceaser has remarked:
Pragmatism is the magic word to describe what liberals want, but do not want to argue for. It is at this point, as Burke might have said, that we enter “the fairy land of philosophy.”
I finally get it now, James. A lot of your “pink police state” writings seemed to be trying to make connections that I thought were imaginary. But now I understand it!
What you fear is…just capitalism.
— Joseph · Mar 18, 01:37 PM · #
I wish you would say what you are tryng to to say more plainly. It all sounds very interesting, but I feel like I’m reading Roland Barthes or symbolist poetry. You could ask that I read it twice and think harder, but can you really ask that? Isn’t all we can really expect one reading? Especially on the internet? Is what you are saying impossible to say more strightforwardly, or are you really more interested in the language than the message? Or does the fun with language add something to the message? If so, how much? Enough so that the added value of the fun language outweighs the percentage of text that goes uncomprehended?
And I don’t just address this meta-criticism to you, I address it to all you academicly trained, abstract thinking, world-commentators out there. Who is your audience? What are you really trying to do with your prose style? What are you really trying to communicate?
— cw · Mar 18, 02:37 PM · #
Stotting, methinks.
— JA · Mar 18, 02:54 PM · #
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, James— my intuition is that the only alternative is Thomas Kinkaid, painter of light, and lots and lots of green, rolling hills and snow-bound cottages. And that, kitsch, is far, far more noxious.
I’m all ears about another alternative, though.
— Freddie · Mar 18, 03:21 PM · #
An alternative for Freddie (and everyone) is what I’m tempted to call WYSIWYG art. That is, if you need a jumble of meta-theory to justify your work, it probably isn’t really justifiable.
There was an exhibit at the Saint Louis Art Museum on abstract expressionism that focused a lot on the influence of the critics Greenberg and Rosenberg. One remarkable thing was how much the artists seemed to resent these critics, whether by politely rejecting their theories or by more hostile declarations. I’m not saying that art criticism should be stopped—an impossible goal—just that art doesn’t really need criticism, and that the art appreciator is often better served to just watch, look, and listen, and tune out the chatter for a while.
— Blar · Mar 18, 04:13 PM · #
“Stotting, methinks.”
Very witty. Obscure yet preicise. It was worth googling.
“The incidence and context of stotting were studied in Thomson’s gazelles. Results suggested that gazelles were far more likely to stot in response to coursing predators, such as wild dogs, than they were to stalking predators, such as cheetahs. During hunts, gazelles that wild dogs selected stotted at lower rates than those they did not select. In addition, those which were chased, but which outran the predators, were more likely to stot, and stotted for longer durations, than those which were chased and killed. In response to wild dogs, gazelles in the dry season, which were probably in poor condition, were less likely to stot, and stotted at lower rates, than those in the wet season. We suggest that stotting could be an honest signal of a gazelle’s ability to outrun predators, which coursers take into account when selecting prey.”
— cw · Mar 18, 04:34 PM · #
RE: Stotting
As far as I’m concerned, James is the best wordsmith of the TAS/Culture11 junta, and by a wide margin. The only person who comes close is that cigarette smoking nun, and she’s nowhere near as consistent. When/if James figures out who James is, or at least who he want to be, I reckon he’s going to be a hell of a writer.
— Tony Comstock · Mar 18, 05:46 PM · #
When/if James figures out who James is, or at least who he want to be, I reckon he’s going to be a hell of a writer.
Wow, what a condescending, backhanded compliment! Don’t worry, James, you’ll make it to the big leagues one day! Keep a stiff upper lip.
— Freddie · Mar 18, 06:25 PM · #
“I’m all ears about another alternative, though.”
How about neo-classicism, or other explorations of traditional styles? The choice isn’t just between sentimental kitsch or revolutionary kitsch. It just seems that way after one has accepted the deconstructionist critique of tradition, which personally I haven’t.
— Ethan C. · Mar 19, 02:03 AM · #
Huh. I quite liked the Shepard show I saw the other day at the Boston Museum of Contemporary Art, not because pointing out capitalist contradictions or political power misapplied is particularly new but because a) I have rarely seen these things fused in visual form in an effective manner, and when I have it has contained no trace of irony or criticism, and b) regardless of whether it’s been done, I found it very effective.
You yourself, in this post, lamented (unless you were agreeing) that soundness is not enough; there must always be something more, it seems. I particularly liked the way Shepard turned the notion of political-heroes-as-objects-of-consumption (the poster) on its head, and his sheer visual and verbal nimbleness—many of the pieces I saw made me chuckle with recognition, appreciation, and resonance. Did I learn something new? No. Did I enjoy the art? Certainly. There was a time—a long time—when skill and excellence in technique and execution was enough for work to qualify as art; now one has to be saying something “new” for one’s work to count. In Fairey’s case, I think perhaps that trying to find what new thing he is doing or saying may be a perfect example of “going for the overthink.”
Speaking of resonance, I could argue that one actual form of artistic value was the reversal of resonance and wonder. Greenblatt defined resonance as the ability of an object in a museum to call forth its cultural and historical context, to take its place in and illuminate that which it came from, while wonder is the ability of an object—taken and framed out of any context—to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, to arrest or shock. Historical objects are generally displayed to evoke resonance, and art objects are displayed to evoke wonder (even when they rely on particular connections). I think Fairey’s work is most effective when it is resonant rather than when it reaches for the wondrous, and that in itself is rather subversive in the conceptual, avant-garde art world. (I do not pretend that he had any such intention, but I like it anyway. If he didn’t intend it, does it no longer matter?)
— Miranda Meyer · Mar 29, 08:37 AM · #