Yesterday I wrote an article for another site about the debate over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. George Will provoked the debate anew in a Newsweek column basically defending the NEA but trashing its funding for what he called “postmodernist” art. Defenders of what passes for art these days were horrified with Salon.Com running an article by Carina Chocano saying that anyone who said the state could decide what wasn’t art was a fascist (which, of course, was accompanied by the author’s own vision of what the NEA should fund, which sort of made her argument irrelevant).
Anyway, while visiting the BBC’s web site I came across the perfect example of the inanity of much contemporary art. The story, Man ‘destroys’ life for art, describes how “installation artist” Michael Landy on Saturday will begin his latest exhibit entitled “Break Down.” Basically Landy is going to take everything he owns, and with the help from assistants, reduce it all to rubbish.
It’s supposed to be some sort of statement about consumer culture, but more likely on how far art in the Western world has sunk. The best part of the BBC story describes a previous exhibit by Landy, saying that “in 1994, his still life composition of a bin full of rubbish at the Karsten Chubert Gallery in London was accidentally thrown away by a cleaner.”
The interesting thing is that Chocano tries to beat Will at his own game by attempting to belittle the conservative faith in the free market to produce art. Chocano notes that instead the free market has given us shows such as “South Park” and “Temptation Island.” The only problem with that argument is that the only people who think “South Park” and “Temptation Island” constitute art are the insulated postmodernist academics in art and English departments across the United States.
One of the most unintentionally amusing examples I’ve run across of this was a brief phase a couple years ago where I read every novel and story that the mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. One of the collections of Hammett’s short stories had an essay written by a post-modernist who blabbered on for 10 or 11 pages about how rather than being well written mystery stories, instead Hammett’s work was a prime example of the postmodernist claim that meaning is always subjective and reader-determined since the “reality” of the mystery novel constantly shifts (the kindly butler in the first chapter is revealed to be the brutal murderer in the last chapter).