On Jun 6, 2010, at 11:15 AM, William Conger wrote: > People have been predicting the next thing in art for a long time. The sad thing is that to a large extent, the next art is predicable. The market controls art and artistic invention and thus the novelty of the new needs to be predicated on it comes from. Otherwise the arguments for the new have no basis for their supposed validity. Legions of artists have been concocting the new in this fashion ever since the market took precedence over the reflective nature of the aesthetic endeavor. Clement Greenberg ridiculed the practice, derisively, referring to "concocted art" (now masked by such terms as "research") and "avant-gardIST" artists. Avant-gardist artists are those who continue avant-gardism as if it were an evolving tradition instead of revolutionary breakthroughs. Another voice from the past is Harold Rosenberg's. He wrote a book, now its pages are brittle and yellowed, titled The Tradition of The New. The predictability and dumbness of new art is only slightly relieved by the pretense that it embraces the world of events beyond the merely formal. Don't misunderstand me. I favor new art by which I mean the constant effort to re-symbolize human experience through visual metaphors. I favor all genuine efforts to lay bare and give form to some unfolding -- scarcely glimpsed -- reality of human experience. At first, perhaps always, it has no previous identity, no market preparation, no tradition, no understanding, no "artists' statements" (prime evidence of concocted avant-gardism) ) and yet it forces a realignment of all that came before. Another idea taken from Rosneberg is that this sort of genuine newness can come from anywhere, from the seemingly familiar to the accidentally incomprehensible.
A widely-held view is that everything changes (not a new idea itself) and that change is for the better because it is an evolutionary response (that's the new idea from the mid-19th century). There is a teleological character to change, even, such that change tends not only to the better but to the good itself. Frances often asserts this. In politics, there are typically progressive and conservative positions. Progressivism is seen as always trying to produce change for the better (for the good) and conservatism is seen as resisting change in order to hold onto the existing good. Popular attitudes, driven strongly by commercial marketing, tout the "new and improved" item, which is hardly improved and largely not that new. (Note that the slogan "new and improved" implies that the item is improved because it is new or at least changed in some way.) Ironically, a large portion of the population to whom the advertisements for the "new and improved" breakfast cereal or automobile are aimed are politically conservative voters! In the world of art and art writing, it's often heard that X's new show was a disappointment because he/she still seems to be doing the same thing since the previous big show three years earlier. Redundancy and its sidekick, derivation, are held up as defects, flaws, or shortcomings in the artist's insight or conception. Mere variation--the result of the simple fact that one cannot easily repeat the same work over and over without a bit of orbital drift and change--is not sufficient. It has to be significant and *new*. As to the truly groundbreaking works, they rarely have any progeny. Joyce wrote Ulysses and followed it with Finnegan's Wake, his last novel (of a total of 5 he wrote), and as far as I know, there have been very few successors to them of any great note. (I read Flan O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds, which was devilishly hard to follow. Perhaps Borges?) I think that in the realm of visual art, there are more pretenders to the throne of Duchamp. But since the Large Glass and the several other similar pieces he did, he made no others (and even quit making art altogether). The imitators have had little success equaling or outdoing Duchamp. (I think it's easier to emulate the kind of "new" things in visual art than in literary art, probably because of the matter of instantaneity of sight versus the cumulative effect of reading over time. Or that may just be my own bias.) As to your earlier message about Harris's supercategories, it seems to me (not having got my hands on the book yet) that there might be lexical leakage of "art" upward to a metacategory, but nonetheless, there do exist instantiations of some things that, until now, we have called "art" (meaning any one of the several fine arts) or "visual art" (specifically pictures, photographs, and sculptures) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
