No More Nasty Nicknames

by Jerome du Bois

In some of my past postings, though not recently, I've used what I now see as a lame tactic --giving someone an insulting nickname, or morphing their real name into something silly-sounding. I won't do it anymore, and I don't even want to bring up past examples. But I did ask myself why I was doing it in the first place.

There's more than one answer --trying to be clever, rebutting someone who stuck a nasty nickname on me first, frustration with obtuse jerks, responding to constant hostility-- but none of those are justifications for such cheap shots. I'm better than that. I don't need to do that. Nasty nicknames are not arguments or reasons or debating points. They're pre-adolescent schoolyard tauntings. They're admissions of weakness, and that's the last thing I want to be. So, no more nasty nicknames from me --though I'll still use lower-case adjectives and nouns such as "submental" and "jerk" and "small beer" and "imposter." Always with supporting arguments.

This name-twisting is all over the culture, though. Look no further than the Phoenix New Times, for example, which strains weekly (and weakly) for new names for various public officials. Or the venomous Daily Kos, which I never have visited, but have heard quoted often enough, with their many insulting nicknames for the President. Once, when I referred to conservative writer Jonah Goldberg and his book Liberal Fascism, one reader sent a stupid email which changed his name to something disgusting.

It's lame. What does it accomplish? Nothing. Debasing a person's name is a poor substitute for argument, but some people think that's all they need to do to win one. But it just reveals that the writer is drawing from a dry well.

Post-Race Poster

ACKNOWLEDGING CHRIS SANTA MARIA [UPDATED]

by Catherine King

I'm categorizing this posting with "The Black Theatre Group Changed Me". That's because I need to give credit to a local artist who is incredibly talented, and I would feel negligent and unappreciative if I didn't say anything.

No, Jerome and I are not totally negative, but I wouldn't expect anybody to understand. This is for the record. Witnessing, I call it, though art blogger and spiritual master Franklin Einspruch does not accept my definition.

Truth be told, when Chris Santa Maria first sent The Tears of Things JPEGs of his work, many months ago, I raved on and on to Jerome about what a great painter he is, in my humble opinion. Honest. And when we first saw JPEGs of his new portrait series, now at eyelounge, I almost wanted to e-mail him, just to say that I thought he was wonderfull, in spite of all the negativity that swirls around our blog's reputation.

But I didn't and here's why: I read on and saw that he's hooked up with all the meaningfull and important local art people, so my endorsement was unnecessary, maybe even unwelcome. He sure doesn't need it.

Still, I have to say, for what it's worth, that he's very talented. This is a case where the student, Chris Santa Maria, clearly surpasses his teacher, Beverly McIver. I've written about her before. I wouldn't even say anything, except that I, too, could paint portraits if I wanted. Here's a self-portrait, that was part of a larger collage. It's about fifteen years old, and it looks pretty much exactly as I did then, for the morbidly curious. Alkyds on canvas paper. But portraits do not interest me. People are not my favorite subject. So slay me.

In my opinion, a painter needs to bring something more to a portrait than photography provides. Many people can work from photographs, myself included, but why bother to translate media exactly? That self-portrait of mine? Painted from life, THE ONLY WAY I WOULD EVER PAINT A PORTRAIT. That way something living is imparted to the art.

I don't know for sure if Santa Maria is working from photographs, but in spite of his talent, he brought nothing more to the portraits than a camera would, except maybe texture. I know people are dazzled by hyper-realism, which he has achieved. But it's the SOUL, I suppose, that is missing from his work. Paint from life, and if you can achieve nothing more than photorealism, then just stick with a photograph. That's what I'd advise him, if I were his art teacher. And I do have a Masters in Secondary Art Education.

[UPDATE May 4th]:

This is Jerome. After Catherine posted this piece we received an email from Chris Santa Maria, and after a couple of exchanges we found ourselves at eyelounge at noon today, Sunday, meeting the guy and examining his seven portraits.

In the interim we found out about his blog, and did some catch-up reading. He does some strong exploratory writing, and doesn't post frivolity. We recommend it, and we're going to put him on our blogroll as Catherine's first addition to it.

Chris Santa Maria is a pleasant young man who seems comfortable in his skin, quietly intense and serious about his art. And the portraits are, in my opinion, completely successful. I think he achieves soulfulness, despite the photographic sourcing, because he knows and cares about his subjects. They go beyond mere formulaic mechanism. My favorite was Uncle Bunky. Even before Chris shared a little about this man, I could see by the subtly wry slant of his mouth that he was well aware of how often life could blindside a person.

for marvin

Better Than An Artist

by Jerome du Bois

An online art critic from Seattle misreads me badly. I'm not surprised, since she is impressed by the infrathin Josh Greene, and admires a creep like Jon Haddock. I don't know how Haddock got into her posting, but I won't be discussing either one of those two clowns in this piece. Instead, I'm taking issue with this critic's first sentence:

The Ralph Nader Award for Art Criticism goes to Jerome du Bois, who thinks Duchamp and everything that flows from him stinks.

Marcel Duchamp is one of my heroes. I've written about him several times, most recently in the second part of "Obsession and Wordplay," most completely in "Step Outside." I've admired him and the solid arc of his life for years.

This woman makes a mistake in thinking that Josh Greene is somehow an aesthetic descendant of Duchamp, which is ludicrous. Greene is a cringing weenie, completely dependent on public sufferance of his infantilism, his umbilical feeding off the art milieu. Duchamp was always a mensch, dependent on no one but himself, and completely separate from the art world. He preferred the real world. Calvin Tompkins said most of it in his excellent biography:

It has been argued that Duchamp's influence is almost entirely destructive. By opening the Pandora's box of his absolute iconoclasm and breaking down the barriers between art and life, his adversaries charge, Duchamp loosed the demons that have swept away every standard of esthetic quality and opened the door to unlimited self-indulgence, cynicism, and charlatanism in the visual arts. As with everything else that we tend say about Duchamp, there is some truth in this. What could be more subversive than the readymades, which undermined every previous definition of art, the artist, and the creative process? To call Duchamp destructive, however, is to miss the point. What he was interested in above all was freedom --complete personal and intellectual and artistic freedom-- and the manner in which he achieved all three was, in the opinion of his close friends, his most impressive and enduring work of art. Heavy-duty art critics who pounce on that claim as a cop-out, a tacit admission of his failure to become a great artist, don't have a clue to the new kind of artist that Duchamp became.

I'll add this much: Marcel Duchamp was better than an artist, because he recognized and refused early on the egotistical amorality and narcissistic ambition among his French contemporaries --"a basket of crabs," he told William Copley later in New York. Of course, America had its own crabs, too, and still does. Artists are taught that they are somehow special and different from other people --above, apart, exceptions to the rules, touched by some ray of power-- but it isn't true. Very few people are true artists, and very few true artists today come out of art schools. Still, a lot of fools buy the vamping of the new operators like Josh Greene. Duchamp saw through that bullshit and stepped outside. The world could use more like him these days --independent, curious and bien dan sa peau --at ease in their skin-- with no influence over each one but his or her own imagination.

Twenty-First-Century Courtly Follies

by Jerome du Bois

Time to polish the cliché of the ivory tower.

Hear the glory of the royal art scam through the thin tinny trumpet of K. Vanesian. This woman is a courtier of the inner circle of complacent sycophancy that is ASU's Herberger College of the Arts, a coterie of vanity, pride, and folly. ASU's President Michael Crow plays the distant king, John Spiak a prince or duke, the baton they pass around is called "community engagement," and visiting "artist" Josh Greene is the jester with two jobs to juggle.

The first is for Greene to endorse Crow's community engagement commitment with his silly and insulting "residency," which has checkmark reverberations which satisfy everybody's bureaucratic obligations; for example, the fourth-grade teacher who gets to use a visit to Greene's stupid scene to fulfill the district's requirement for an art outing (and he/she can double-dip and make it a "social studies" outing as well); the artist gets fifty-eight drawings from kids who are required to carry out an assignment no matter how they feel about it; Josh Greene gets all fifty-eight as a certificate, a palpable marker, a credential that he did his part in this daisy chain; the teacher's principal and the district bureaucrats are reminded that the tentacle of ASU/Crow's embrace --expanding yet tightening too-- is welcome, since they get to check off their own bureaucratic requirements --checkmarks up and down the line-- so that finally the legislature is satisfied, turns the spigot, and the money flows. The money must flow.

Josh Greene's second task is to glorify the role of the curator, John Spiak in particular, the role of what passes today as an avant-garde artist (himself), and the role of the art museum in a mutual admiration and legimization ritual as mannered as a medieval court --and just as rigidly separated by class. Vaneisan plays right along. This "Social Studies" rubric, no matter how boundary-breaking and democratic and outreaching and "socially interactive" and relationally aesthetic it styles itself as, is designed to showcase just how special, separate, wise, and superior the artists and curators are, compared to you, citizen, with your flat feet on the street, scratching your head and asking, But where is the art?

Don't let them scam you, citizen. Your eyes, your heart, your ears, your brain --they have not deceived you. You're right: There is no art there. Examine Josh Greene's website, and you'll see that he's simply an operator --he doesn't make anything-- and though he has an academic degree in sculpture, his goal is to empty the world of significance. And more: he wants to flatline the heartbeat of art.

For him, for curators like Spiak and Heather Lineberry and Marilyn Zeitlin, this whole art-and-curating gig is a folly, a shadow play of puppets in cardboard crowns, an aesthetic three-card monte dealt by five-sided comedians laying out the pattern in pleasing, familiar harlequin tessellation. It's fun for them, because they're all getting paid, and paid well, and often with taxpayer money. Why wouldn't they hire a jester? They know he's going to be a safe one, not the like the jesters of old who often ridiculed their own patrons, up to and including the king. Everybody's just having fun.

But it isn't amusing to the citizen on the street, who lives in a world at war, and who looks for signs that we can better ourselves, that we can rise above ourselves, when too many around us take the easy way out, turn to cruelty, or wallow as low as they can go.

By serendipity, I suppose, I've been rereading Christopher Fowler's fourth Bryant & May mystery, Ten-Second Staircase, which includes an impeccable skewering of British art twits who resemble Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, and Grayson Perry. The epigraph is by Alexander Pope (1688-1744), and it's sadly apt to today:

The wit of cheats, the courage of a whore,
Are what ten thousand envy and adore;
All, all look up, with reverential awe,
At crimes that 'scape, or triumph o'er the law:
While truth, worth, wisdom, daily they decry--
'Nothing is sacred now but villainy.'

There's more for the interested reader. Let's take a look at the list of Mr. Greene's "completed" projects.

The Q In Question

by Jerome du Bois

I decided against continuing to field increasingly irrelevant grounders from Winkleman and Einspruch in the short comment thread to the last written posting. Besides being irrelevant they became irrational, ending up with Orwellspeak such as "wingnut" and "anti-gay." (Winkleman: "You defined yourself as such through your blogroll." Insanity.) Einspruch stopped sputtering "prove this, prove that" and avoided extending the discussion about "lazy arguments" to advance even more of his own.

And please notice, dear reader, that this lag in time of mine, this refusal to leap to respond like a Pavlovian dog to the latest comments, to keep some stupid stick in play, ought to put the kibosh on the notion that we seek as much traffic as we can get. Click click click. Have they said anything yet? What? No? What about now? Wearisome.

But to heck with all that because I got back on track, ruminating about questions, the origin of my first posting about ArtBloggers@. Back then, when I read Mattera's minutes--

We didn't get to the big questions-- Are we mainstream yet? Do we want to be? What is the future of art blogging?

--I dimissed those questions as sophomoric, because Catherine and I have been asking questions of the art world at both higher and deeper levels for five years on the blog. Even more disappointing, when we called out the panelists on their laziness, they claimed that we misunderstood the structure and function of the event. I don't think so; I think they failed themselves, and they're embarrassed. When I made a suggestion about generating questions in rounds by repeated emailings, I got back "you do it, we're too busy." Maybe they are. But I note that during that last comment buzz here both Winkleman and Einspruch got back to my posting lickety-split, even when I didn't notify either one about it. And a few days ago, over on Winkleman's blog, there was a very long comment thread on artists as writers (hereafter AAW), with repeated comments by Einspruch, Sharon [Somebody; I thought it was Butler, but I've been corrected, by Butler], Joanne Mattera (with an eye-opening elitist statement), and Winkleman throughout the day. How busy can they be?

But forget about it --except for that AAW thread; I've found it very useful for the present posting, and I'll be referring to it below. Anyway, I got to thinking about questions, and the Q that begins that word, because back in the Eighties, when I was doing graduate work in public administration, public sector ethics, and organizational behavior, I was required to understand and create the design of social-psychological instruments, mostly questionnaires. In these courses, which many considered a grind but I thought were fascinating, we spent a lot of time trying to create clean questions, questions gone over like a groom at a wedding, for every spare hair of prejudice, every crease of careless definition, so as not to skew the results. One must be so particular, for every word counts, and we're not trying to fool people here, we're trying to capture a faithful trace of the truths that people, millions of people, hold to be self-evident.

It was while taking these classes, and taking them seriously, in my independent research outside of class, that I came across a methodology that ran counter to the prevailing models -- under the general term R-methodology-- which were based on large questionnaire populations, stratified random samples, and hard-nugget, operationally-defined variables.

The alternative was called Q-methodology, which could get strong research results from small sample groups, not necessarily randomized, with vaguely defined variables. It had many attractions, including the possibility of clarifying the definitions of those very same vague variables, but in the prevailing academic environment at the time it was on the outs because it was inside-out. "You can't generalize from such small studies." But Q wasn't about generalizing or aggregates or percentages of populations; it was concerned with human subjectivity, the individual mental world, the commonly-shared mental world, how they're built, how they're connected, and operationalizing some of that rich structure. So I pursued it on my own, reading everything I could and designing my own studies on the side. Anyway, one of the advantages of Q over R-methodology is that the "Q-sorting technique," the core action which provides the raw data for factor analysis, is a subtle and flexible way to sift the relevant from the irrelevant questions in any area. Art, given its roots in subjectivity, is a rich field for Q-studies. I've been away from the research field for many years, but a quick internet scan doesn't bring up many Q-studies among or about arts professionals. Instead, as it was when it first took off in the mid-Sixties, Q is being used in mostly in market research, advertising, public relations, and political research, because that's where the money is.

I thought I knew a lot about William Stephenson, the polymath genius who promulgated and refined Q-methodology, but just yesterday, as I was catching up on him and Q, I ran across a new fact that I found quite charming: in the mid-Fifties, when Stephenson was working as an advertising consultant for the Ford Motor Company, he was the only person in the boardroom to stand up one special day and say that the new model, the Edsel, was a very bad idea. His Q-studies revealed it. He was overruled, and the Edsel rolled off the production line and right into oblivion.

I'll leave it to the reader to follow up on the fascinating William Stephenson (1902-1989). He should have been the communication prophet that his contemporary Marshall McLuhan turned out to be. McLuhan was flashy, and lots of people love aphorisms, but Stephenson had more precise, better-tested ideas. He had a real instrument, a powerful tool, the Q-sort, with its grounding in The Great Conversation. Though he was best-known as the author of The Play Theory of Mass Communication, and a professor of journalism, he was a philosopher, a psychologist, and a physicist, with PhDs in the latter two fields; and he made suggestive connections, in his later years, between the statistical structures of Q and those of quantum mechanics. He claimed they were anchored in the same probablistic domain. He was deep, that's for damn sure, and I'm glad this dustup with the ArtBloggers@ panelists reacquainted me with him.

I bring it all up because the Q-sorting technique, as I mentioned above, is an excellent way to generate productive questions. So I decided to sketch out how one would go about a hypothetical Q-sort experiment which would try to find the best questions generated by the question:

As art world professionals, what are the most important questions we should be asking ourselves?

But where do these questions come from? They come from the concourse.

Haven't We Met Before?

Spirit Photography by Jerome du Bois

Evil is real.

Where Do These People Think They're Coming From?

[This post concludes (probably) our attempt to criticize some panelists and attendees from the ArtBloggers@ "conference" held in New York City at the end of March.]

by Jerome du Bois

For the past few days, from time to time, I have checked around the ArtBloggers@ panelists' websites to see if any of them slipped up and acknowledged that Catherine King and I are live persons from planet Earth who criticized them. Stonewall. They showed up here in the comments, all right, huffing and puffing, posing and losing, but you'd never know it from their own home bases. These people can't handle controversy. Like Bartleby but with less reason, they would prefer not to. Instead they hand flowers to one another in a daisy chain of happy links to whatever.

So while I was checking . . .

Those sophisticated New Yorkers Edward Winkleman and James Kalm ("The Guy On The Bike" --don't look at me, that's how he bills himself) are all atwitter about a feud between Tyler Green and Christian Viveros-Fauné that tries to swirl around the tired subjects of conflicts of interest and art criticism versus journalism. As if ordinary intelligent people cannot, by themselves, without help from experts, make these category distinctions. As if people were not natively street smart. As if people are not always keeping a sharp eye out for the angle. (Evolution is a reality. Some of Winkleman's commenters made these same points.) To me it's particularly pungently amusing because I have no illusions about the editorial integrity of Village Voice Editor Tony Ortega, who I have encountered once before. Not to mention his boss, Michael Lacey, another one of those sensitive rich men who lives in his own bubble world and believes it's a match with the real one. Then when he steps on his tongue at the wrong venue, he acts surprised.

Winkleman and Kalm are eating this up and opinionating like mad, with Franklin Einspruch, among others, commenting. Probably because it has nothing to do with them. Very brave when it isn't happening to you, eh wankers? But when Catherine and I questioned the seriousness, sincerity, and depth of the ArtBloggers@ Red Dot conference, all we got back was juking and jiving and insults. Then one of the bloggers, Sharon Butler, posted and then removed a link about our criticisms. Since then they're all mum, they've moved on to other things, shaddup already willya!

No. Not just yet. I'm going to hammer on their doors one more time, and also some of the attendees. In my first post, I emailed only the panelists and Einspruch. In the second post, I emailed nobody and received nothing. Then we received a comment from Einspruch, bloated, sonorous, and stentorian; all it lacked were the harrumphs at both ends. I could tear it up, but Catherine already said it all, so I'll just pick out one phrase: "lazy arguments." Does he mean like this one from his new bud Hrag: "Wow you are bitter"? (By the way, is that the new progressive buzzword this mynah bird was squawking?) Or like this one from his old bud Bannard: "If people can't immediately see what a dull, second-rate painter Jasper Johns is not much can be gained from talking to them. Not about art, anyway." Or this example from Olympia Lampert, worth quoting again in full because you can't make this stuff up:

If I slam you and say that your art is insipid and uninspiring, I will not be ashamed of saying so. If I think you're the bees knees and the next big thing, enjoy it for what it's worth-- for after all, what the hell do I know. But one thing can be promised. I will have an opinion always, and I will share it with you. There will be no holding back. I believe that is the job of a critic. I am not here to make friends, nor enemies. If one leans on the side of either, so be it. For every friend I make, I will have 5 enemies, and for every enemy I make, I will have 5 friends. So I can't do math, but what I can do is share what I feel is from my heart mixed with the knowledge from my brain.

Meanwhile Einspruch's own comment contains only assertions, no examples, and ends with ad hominems. And notice he won't go after his friends as he's gone after us.

Is this what becomes of the deconstructed? They get meaner as the years go by? Because we know it's not about "lazy arguments" at all. This is visceral. Einspruch seems to hate us, and he ought to honest about it, especially to himself. Better than pretending he's above such an emotion.

Edward Winkleman writes of the Tyler-Christian feud:

Just the other day I was complaining to someone that there are no great public battles in the art world anymore (nothing like the classics we still see among literary figures, such as the feud between Wolfe and Mailer). With no well-defined camps beating each other up in successive addendums to their manifestos, a casual observer would be forgiven for thinking the entire system took Rodney King's plea to heart and decide to just all get along.

The fact that this feud is about criticism and not art doesn't make it any less juicy to my mind. It's all very good food for thought and classic snarky writing. Knowing both men have much more pressing matters to attend to in their lives, I don't actually wish it to continue . . . . that is, unless they promise to keep it as fresh and funny. Just so long as no one puts an eye out.

Except when it comes to us, Mr. Winkleman. Then, we don't exist. We don't give a damn about a "great public battle." We don't give a damn about how many hits we get. What we care about is that when someone arrives on our site they find something worth reading, something with substance, supported by reason and soul and heart. And sometimes anger. But not bitterness. That implies ashes in the mouth, but our anger is as fresh as fire.

Little House/Big Graveyard

by Catherine King. Do not reproduce in any form.