Art imitates life—and death

The New Neo Posted on by

Is the wildly successful avant garde artist Damien Hirst (about whom I wrote here, and who specializes in works that feature dead animals) finally feeling the pinch of the economic downturn?

Well, at the very least, his employees are. He seems to have a stable of them who help churn out his lucrative works, and half of these people have been laid off recently.

The contemporary art scene in general seems to have fallen on hard times lately, despite earlier assertions that it was recession-proof. In this piece from Prospect, Ben Lewis and Jonathan Ford describe the recent precipitous (and well-earned, IMHO) slide of such works. They also point out that the market may have been artificially propped up for a while by dealers bidding on the auction lots of their own artists to drive up the prices.

In the thread on my previous post on Hirst, commenter Mitsu remarked that I’m totally missing the point of Hirst’s art, and that “[Hirst’s] work isn’t simply ‘animals in formaldehyde’—it’s about the line between the living and dead, between the animate and the inanimate.” Mitsu finds such artwork interesting both scientifically and artistically.

I find it neither. What I find interesting is the phenomenon of people willing to pay big bucks (and I mean big) for “art” that is both revolting and simplistic in its message, and that partakes of not one iota of artistry itself.

Mitsu’s conclusion that I fail to get the point of Hirst’s art because I fail to appreciate it is also a simplistic one. I have the capacity to comprehend Hirst’s memento mori message, as well as its commentary on the line between life and death.

This is actually a classic artistic theme. In the past, it was explored in certain Dutch still lifes, but in a much more beautiful manner that involved the use of actual skill.

See the following for an excellent example, and note the drooping flower in the foreground:

basketofflowers4.jpg

Here is a discussion of the type of classic still life that points out the decline and decay present in all life. Some of the Dutch paintings deal with the theme even more overtly, featuring insects and/or dead game. Hirst hardly invented the concept, but is merely one of the worst “artists” to ever explore it.

If I wanted to go to a lecture on death and dying, I would do so. I go to art shows for something quite different.

Didactic art and political art has never been my cup of tea anyway. But I think I “understand” it as well as most. For evidence of that, you might want to take a look at my three-part series on political art (first part here).

And, in skimming that series for the purposes of this post, it occurs to me that one of the things Hirst and his revolting ilk are attempting to do is to position themselves as the anti-kitsch. Kitsch is the subject of Part III of my series. The most relevant passages is this:

Kitsch is detested for its simplicity and its easy appeal to sentimentality, as well as its formulaic qualities…

Kundera states that kitsch is:

“defined it as ‘the absolute denial of shit.’ [Kundera’s] argument was that kitsch functions by excluding from view everything that humans find difficult to come to terms with, offering instead a sanitised view of the world in which “all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.”

So, Hirst seems to want to place before our kitsch-besotted eyes all the “shit” that has supposedly been denied by prettier art. Unfortunately, he throws out the baby (art itself) with the kitschy bathwater, creating a reactive statement that is neither art, nor propaganda, nor interesting, but merely repulsive.

Obama: liberal frustration, conservative satisfaction

The New Neo Posted on by

Who would have thought that, a mere month after the election of Barack Obama as our next President, it would be the liberals who’d be frustrated and the conservatives who’d have slight and catlike smiles on their faces?

Certainly not me. Right after the election, when I suggested to my fellow disappointed McCain voters that they give Obama a chance before becoming too gloomy or angry, I hardly envisioned that over the Thanksgiving holiday when relatives would ask me how I was feeling about Obama my answer would be, “Probably better than you are right now.” And yet that’s what has happened.

I’m not saying conservatives are overjoyed with the man. Nor am I. Plus, with Obama, the caveat is that his positions today have no real relation to his positions tomorrow—as we noticed during the election, but as liberals are just now beginning to learn. The man is a quick-change chameleon. But so far, his appointments have been far better than I feared, and better than I had any reason to hope for, considering his past and his campaign promises.

Most liberals feel differently. The only question for most seems to be whether it’s time to criticize him yet, since he’s not even taken office:

OpenLeft blogger Chris Bowers went so far as to issue this plaintive plea: “Isn’t there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration?”

Even supporters make clear they’re on the lookout for backsliding. “There’s a concern that he keep his basic promises and people are going to watch him,” said Roger Hickey, a co-founder of Campaign for America’s Future.

Good luck with learning what Obama’s “basic promises” actually were. As I recall, the main one was change. I suppose on that score, those liberals who see his Cabinet as Clinton-lite or even Bush-lite are already bitterly disappointed. As the headline of David Corn’s piece in yesterday’s WaPo complained, “This Wasn’t Quite the Change We Envisioned.”

No, it wasn’t, and I for one am glad. But a promise of “change” that was so vaguely definied—and seems, so far, to be limited to having a President with smoother rhetoric and darker skin than his predecessor—was always, as Obama himself so clearly wrote, bound to disappoint “some, if not all” of the supporters he encouraged to project so many disparate hopes onto him.

Date of infamy: forgetting Pearl Harbor

The New Neo Posted on by

Sixty-seven years ago today Pearl Harbor was attacked.

That’s long enough ago that only the elderly remember the day and its aftermath with any clarity. Several generations—including my own tiresome one, the baby boomers—have come up since then, and the world has indeed changed.

Prior to 9/11, the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941 was the closest thing America had to 9/11. The differences between the two are profound, however: at Pearl Harbor we knew the culprit. It was clearly and unequivocally an act of war by the nation of Japan, which was already at war in the Pacific.

But it was, like 9/11, a sneak attack that killed roughly the same number of Americans—in the case of Pearl Harbor mostly (although not exclusively) those in the armed forces. And the Pearl Harbor attack, in the reported (but disputed) words of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, awakened the “sleeping giant” of the US and filled it with a “terrible resolve.”

In the case of Pearl Harbor, that resolve lasted the duration of the war, an all-out conflagration that required far more sacrifice of the US (and the world) in money, comfort, and the all-important cost of human lives. The scale of such a loss is not even remotely comparable to that of our present conflict. In addition, the first years of World War II featured many losses and much peril. It was a different world, however, and failure was not an option.

Yes, mistakes were made in both wars—and always will be. But it is impossible to remain politically correct and successfully wage an asymmetrical war against an enemy that uses terrorist tactics. If you’re going to try to do that, you may as well not try, because every single life sacrificed to that cause will have been as though it were wasted.

The tactics and even the strategies of World War II don’t fit today’s wars. But tactics and strategies aren’t the issue—although they are extremely important, as the surge reminds us. The overarching issue is will. And, in that respect as in many others, current generations don’t compare to the one known as “The Greatest Generation.”

For some contrast, go back to FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech (a misquote, it turns out: he actually said “date which will live in infamy”). If you follow the link and scroll down to the first selection under “Media,” you can listen to an audio of it, as well.

Here are some of the less famous quotes from the speech; I have selected them because they speak to the question of will. FDR was assisted in mustering that will by the relative clarity of the enemy and its intent in World War II. But it still seems to me, on reading these words, that such unequivocal determination could not be summoned today, even if given the exact circumstances of the infamous attack of December 7, 1941:

…No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces””with the unbounding determination of our people””we will gain the inevitable triumph””so help us God.

[NOTE: This is a revised and expanded edition of a post first published in 2006.]

Iraq: suppose they gave a victory and nobody noticed

The New Neo Posted on by

The title of this post was inspired by the saying, “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?”—one of the stupidist slogans of the peace movement of the 60s.

The news that Iraq has ratified a formal US/Iraq military and strategic alliance has fallen under most people’s radar screens. Ho-hum. The economy is (rightly) on people’s minds these days. But let’s pause to realize how successful the Iraq venture has been, and to cheer on the Iraqi people so far.

Yes, there are always caveats with Iraq, yada-yada-yada. But this news should be celebrated as much as the war was previously excoriated.

One way to do so (celebrate, not excoriate) is to take a look at this photo essay about normalcy returning to Iraq . The very first shot, of some Iraqi policemen, caused me to remember the dark days when recruits were mowed down as they waited in line to volunteer for the force. The times they have certainly a’changed.

The inadequacy of Indian police

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s more on the Indian police who couldn’t shoot straight—or at all.

Once you read it, you will no longer be surprised that the police were ineffective during the Mumbai attacks. But you might be even more enraged about it than before.

Here’s a sample:

Obviously [India] has needed a much better-educated, better-paid, better-trained national anti-terrorist police unit for years, but none has been established. Thus the forces available to fight the terrorists in Mumbai were pathetically inadequate in quantity, quality or both.

That was clearly true of Maharashtra’s state anti-terrorism squad, which is headquartered less than 10 minutes from the sites of the attacks but which had a total of 35 officers — and fewer than 15 on duty. This, to protect a state population of 96 million, 18 million in Mumbai alone. The squad’s commander, Hemant Karkare — who was killed early in the attacks — was a 54-year-old investigator, not a fighter even at the level of an ordinary infantryman.

By contrast, India’s National Security Guards, formed in 1985, are well trained. But the guards are a military-style commando assault force, with no real experience in civilian hostage rescue, even though that is one of their official missions. With 7,500 trained men, they could have responded adequately in a military way, if only someone had managed to call enough of them in quickly.

It’s not that India was taken by surprise by terrorism. Unlike the US pre-9/11, they’ve had many fatal terrorist attacks on their soil. The methods at Mumbai were somewhat different, it’s true. But there’s really no excuse for not having anticipated something of the sort and having some rudimentary preparation and training to deal with it.

The author of the piece, Edward N. Luttwak, ends by saying that India will now remedy the situation. I sincerely hope he’s correct.

Damien Hirst: signs that the recession can’t be as bad as all that

The New Neo Posted on by

Or perhaps it’s just a sign that people have gone stark raving mad.

What am I talking about? Back in mid-September, when the economy was already rather iffy, the “artist” (I use that word advisedly) Damien Hurst had a monster of an auction, netting $200 million dollars for about two hundred lots of his work.

That’s an average of a million a lot. And a lot of those lots fetched a lot more than a million dollars a pop—some as much as eighteen million.

Who’s Damien Hirst, you might ask? And rightly so. I wrote about him here, although I didn’t name him. He’s the artist who specializes in “art” that consists of animals—or sections of animals—preserved in formaldehyde.

The following is an excerpt from my earlier post. You be the judge of how much you would pay for this sort of art:

I seem to recall an entire room consisting of cow segments. Memory could be playing tricks on me, but the image I retain is of a large creature that had been cut into four or five sections, each of which was placed in a huge vat of greenish or bluish preservative behind plexiglass: one for the head, one for the forequarters, one for the midsection, and so on, crossing the entire room.

I suppose it was some sort of political statement. It also smelled, as I recall…At some point I just wanted out, and I voted with my feet: I left.

One of the pieces that recently sold for about seventeen million dollars at the auction was a shark in formaldehyde. I wish I had known this back in college when we dissected a shark in biology lab; I would have tried to save mine and market it.

Then again, maybe not. Some things are beyond imagining. And perhaps that is Hirst’s greatest gift—because I certainly don’t see that he has any others—to have imagined that people would buy this garbage, and pay very good money for it.

Sorry to have to do this, but one photo is worth a thousand words, and all that. I call this one “Two Sharks.” It’s Hirst with his seventeen-million-dollar work “The Kingdom.” Worth every penny, don’t you think?

twosharks.jpg

We’re not getting older, we’re getting better

The New Neo Posted on by

Just as in Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average, it seems that most “older” people (defined as over seventy) are convinced they look younger than they actually are. About ten years younger on average, in fact.

They also say they feel about thirteen years younger—at least in Berlin, where the study was done. And preliminary results in the US are consistent with its findings.

Women are less sanguine about the difference between their looks and their actual age. They estimate themselves to be younger-looking than their age, but not by as much of a gap as their male counterparts.

The article has a few thoughts about why people tend to say they look younger than average, but I have some theories to add. The first is that the study doesn’t seem to have taken into account the fact that quite a few people, even in that age group, have now had cosmetic surgery. So they may indeed look younger than their chronological age (although the less fortunate of them end up looking as though their eyebrows and hairline are about to merge).

Another idea—and the one I think is operating most strongly in the group as a whole—is that we are not sure how people get their notion of what a certain age normally looks like. My guess is that most of us base it on how we perceived our parents and grandparents when we were growing up.

Aside from the fuzziness of memory, which can cloud the issue, I believe there is a very real difference between then and now. Back then people allowed themselves—or maybe even forced themselves—to dress and act older, befitting their age and dignity. And, at least in urban settings, they didn’t exercise as much into their later years. In rural ones, life tended to be harder than it is today, and it wore people out faster.

I find I can’t tell how old people are at all just by looking at them. Most of the time, of course, I don’t check, and people don’t wear their ages on their sleeves. But among my friends, we all tend to look—well, at least ten years younger than we are. Which must make us just about average.

RIP Odetta

The New Neo Posted on by

I just learned via American Digest that the folksinger Odetta has died at the age of seventy-seven.

In my youth, I saw her perform at The Bitter End in Greenwich Village. Since that was quite some time ago, I suppose it was also (relatively speaking) in Odetta’s youth. I also saw her perform just a few years ago, and she was still a powerhouse.

When she was young, she was one of the first African-Americans (Negroes, at that time) to sport short, natural, unstraightened hair. It was part of her proud presentation as a black woman of force and stature.

And stature Odetta had, in abundance: she was a big woman. I’m not sure how tall she actually was, but on stage she seemed a giant. In later life she had lost a great deal of weight, and I was surprised that she appeared rather diminutive the last time I saw her perform.

But she was never diminutive as a stage presence, even then. That voice! The Times obituary doesn’t really describe it, so I will. I first heard Odetta on a record, and for a moment I thought she was a man because of the extraordinary power and depth of her voice. But then it rose high and wailing, and it was clear her feminine name was not a fluke: she was a woman, after all.

But it was in her booming, resonant, vibrating lower (how low can you go?) registers that she shone. And rumbled. She could crack that voice like a whip, too, when necessary. Here are two short videos of Odetta in her prime—and what a prime it was:

The next one is very recent, within the last year and a half. In it you’ll see a demonstration of soul clapping its hands and louder singing for every tatter in its mortal dress.

RIP, Odetta.

Two million and counting

The New Neo Posted on by

At some unspecified, unknown moment last night, my sitemeter reached the two million hit mark.

It’s not a milestone I ever expected to reach when I began blogging—I would have been surprised to get a total of one thousand hits back then, and I didn’t even have a sitemeter. But here I am at the two million point, thanks to you all.