The Limits of Legitimate Art
It was Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer who most famously placed art front and center in the examination of a society’s worldview. When most Christian leaders were focusing on teaching and preaching, Schaeffer sought to remind us that one can worship God through art. Or, as he put it, “art work can be a doxology in itself.” In my mind, no theologian has understood art or its impact as well as Schaeffer. Thus, I couldn’t help but wonder what he would’ve thought about a couple of “art” pieces that came to my attention recently.
First was Aliza Shvarts, a Yale art student who purposefully impregnated herself in order to abort the children. Gossip blogger Perez Hilton provides Aliza’s full explanation, which is disturbing to a degree that I cannot describe. As the saying goes, you have to read it to believe it. But just in case you don’t believe it, Aliza is willing to prove she did it, with tapes and all.
Not long after I learned of an “art project” in 2000 by Jonathan Yegge at the San Francisco Art Institute. Yegge took a volunteer, blindfolded him, gagged him, and then proceeded to engage in oral sex, give him an enema, and swapped feces repeatedly. This, in his mind, was “performance art.”
Finally, I learned of Guillermo Vargas Habacuc’s “art” in 2007 which involved tying a dog to a rope in an art gallery, and starving it to death. Here’s a brief story on it all, along with highly disturbing photographs. Allegedly Guillermo has been invited to repeat the “performance” for the Visual Arts Biennial of the Central America this year.
“All meaning to all individual things or particulars was removed. Things were being made autonomous, and there was nothing to which to related them or to give them meaning.”
14 Responses to “The Limits of Legitimate Art”
Hoax springs eternal. Deo gratias.
http://nysun.com/news/national/yale-students-art-project-creative-fiction
Somehow though, this doesn’t make it any better.
My links address this, gjoe. The school claims it’s a hoax, while the student disputes this claim and adamantly defends that it happened. She claims to have tapes which prove it all.
It’s wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt, but nonetheless:
“It is reported in blogs, Internet forums and YouTube uploads that in 2007 Guillermo Vargas allegedly took a stray dog called Natividad from the streets of Managua, Nicaragua, and tied it to a short leash as an exhibit in an art gallery. It was initially reported that the dog was left to die with food just beyond its leash’s length as patrons passed by in the gallery. Many images have appeared on the Internet showing a thin, emaciated dog tied to a line in a room full of standing people. There are no indications in the photos of where, when or who took them.[2][3] He refuses to say whether the dog survived the show but the director of the C
I certainly hope Wikipedia is right about the Vargas “exhibit.” Even so, none of these disgusting things qualify as art. Some people seem to think that anything which intentionally provokes a reaction in others is art. By that standard, I could pick my nose on a train or go to the beach and treat the sand like a cat’s litter box, videotape my actions and people’s reactions, and I could call it art as long as I could BS some artsy-sounding “meaning” to my performance.
Did Yegge pay for the volunteer’s hepatitis treatments?
Is performance art really art? My jury is still out, but there’s one thing that stands clear: with one exception, only in the modern era does one find art forms that are intended to insult the audience.
(The exception is artwork created to express the glory of the State or one of its components. Romans putting up a statue of Caesar in Athens was not exactly a friendly act.)
Qualify as art?
The idea that something is art was only invented during the Renaissance and was more or less limited to painting, sculpture and architecture. Years of institutionalizing it in art academies eventually provoked a response from artists which more or less became “modern art.”
Nowadays even art historians and directors of major museums are loathe to designate something as art or not-art. There’s just no consensus on what is or isn’t. With me, it’s like what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about porn, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” Then it becomes a matter of deciding, is it the good, the bad, or the ugly.
I’m not inclined to say animal cruelty qualifies as art EVER.
Another example of how pathetic our culture has become – they can call it Art if they want – it is evil none the less!
I shall rephrase my question: how much of performance art is really art?
To determine whether X is art, one must identify what genre X most strongly resembles, and then determine whether X meets the most fundamental definition of that genre. Take music, for example. Music is a series of tones intended to convey a mood or, in an abstract way, to represent a story (”Scheherazade”) or some object (Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” – all four of which make me seasick). The random-notes “compositions” of John Cage (a target of Schaeffer’s) are not music. His “4′33″ is not music, either, but it is art – an unintentional Leonard Pinth Garnell comedy sketch.
More than anything else, performance art seems to resemble theatrical skits. What is a skit? It has to mean more than just engaging in some public activity, otherwise anything done in public, even blowing up a municipal building, could be performance art.
The activities of Habacuc and Yegge do not strike me as art.
As for Aliza Shvarts…I tried reading her monologue at Perez Hilton’s site – I’ve seen less gobblegygook in Sokal’s “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” She’s gotta be a frontrunner for Andrew Sullivan’s Poseur Award for 2008 – and for the entire decade.
Where was I? Oh…her work isn’t art, either – it’s journalism. But is it real or fake journalism?
Art is a word to describe the following experience: We observe something (say, a painting, or a movie) and feel an emotion. We then realize the possibility that what we are observing was created by another conscious being, who was directly aware of the same emotion we feel, and wanted to share that emotion with another conscious being.
This direct communication of emotion is art. I can say to you “I’m sad.” That’s not art. But if I can do something, like tell you a story, relate an experince, draw you a picture, etc., and cause you to experience the sadness I am trying to express, that is art.
That’s why an exact duplicate of the Mona Lisa is not a new work of art. The whole point of the duplicate is to communicate, as much as possible, the emotional message of the original. In effect, the creator of the original Mona Lisa is continuing to speak, through the copy.
I only bring this up because I find that the discussion of “what is art” so often focuses simply on the emotional response to what is observed, rather than on the feeling of communication with the artist.
Unfortunately, some people never get past the emotion itself. Since we all generally want to feel good, they start seeking out art that makes them feel good. And since the communication element is completely ignored, of course “happy” and “pretty” art is considered superior to other art. So “art” for them becomes anything that somehow makes them feel good.
However, this is a very lonely way to observe art, very similar to being a child unable to read, and preferring picture books to all others.
Art is a word to describe the following experience: We observe something (say, a painting, or a movie) and feel an emotion. We then realize the possibility that what we are observing was created by another conscious being, who was directly aware of the same emotion we feel, and wanted to share that emotion with another conscious being.
Drawing from the above, and from my remarks on music, one could propose this definition for art: “A creation of humanity whose primary purpose is to serve as an abstract representation of an event, idea, emotion, or physical object.”
The first condition rules out raw nature and Cage’s audible compositions; raw nature was not artificed by people, and while Cage devised the random note generator, the notes themselves were not his creation.
The second condition rules out journalism, a concrete reporting of an event (hoaxes and misinformation notwithstanding). Architecture in and of itself is not art, but it can incorporate art forms. A column is not art, Doric ornamentation is.
Jackson Pollock’s abstract paintings are a grey area. His method isn’t completely random, so the first criterion isn’t totally shot. But what of the second? If “No. 5, 1948″ (for example) is intended to communicate nothing, then it is not art. (I am tempted to dismiss it as mere wallpaper, but even wallpaper communicates something.) If there really is some mood or idea or whatever that Pollock is trying to convey, then such nebulous meaning makes it bad art, not non-art.
With those examples in mind, how does performance art stack up? I already classified one as bad journalism. Yegge and the Michael Vick wannabe do not strike me as meeting the second criterion.
FYI, Aliza just got the Poseur alert.
Performance Art is generally a load of rubbish. This whole whole abortion saga is just some sad loser trying to get a lot of attention for herself. IE pretty much normal for performance art.