Art Wortd Coop

I tried to publish a response to the comments, but Blogger said it was too long. Here is my response:

Thank you for making this discussion possible!

@Kate: You know I never thought of the graffiti comparison . . . and I do identify with graffiti art; in fact, I'm reading a book on it right now. But Marden's work does not remind me of street sketches or graffiti art.

To me, creative graffiti has more heat, more intensity, more attitude and character.

I'm glad you told me how you receive the work--as "loopy and strangely restful". Excellent description.

And certainly I can acknowledge this experience. Thank you for opening up my mind.

@Anita: Thank you for sharing this. Formlessness indeed can be beautiful. As in water.

@Joey: Your response was pitch-perfect to my ears. Thank you. I agree.

You know, I'm not an art student. I never was. I studied literature and literary criticism. Literary critics do the exact same thing.

Coming from a younger generation, I would like to see a language, and a particular manner of discussing art, literature, and culture, that is not limited to a select few. I do not like the idea that only certain people can hold the meaning of an object in culture.

I understand the difference between critical judgment and non-critical judgment. I believe intelligence and the ability to articulate one's thoughts and feelings is all that is necessary to distinguish the two. To make a critical judgment, to discuss a cultural topic, one should not have to rely on the guarded terminology, references, and phrases of elite or specialized discourses. We all have our frames of reference, we all have our contexts of understanding art, literature, and culture. Why is one context privileged over another?

But I think democratic language is possible, at least within a given culture. Why should we let language be further fragmented into tiny sub discourses, and sub sub discourses. After a certain point, only two people can understand each other, and then not even that!

Art critics, literary critics, historians, scholars, are cocooned within their own vocabularies; I would like to democratize language. So everyone can talk about art, culture, and literature.

@Peter: My pleasure . . .

@Villa: I thank you for this story. I would not like to admit it but the more I looked at Marden, the more I opened up to the possibility of feeling slightly differently toward these works. But I do not want to exaggerate this; it was no great shift from my initial impression. I simply became more sympathetic to the works.

You describe something that happens a lot in life. Such as when you first meet someone who you can't stand; the next thing you know they're your best friend.

I'm open to a change of heart on anything. This happens in life, and to refuse to acknowledge change, is to be a fundamentalist. We change our ideas, our views, and our feelings constantly change. I embrace contradiction as Whitman once said.

@Jamie: Like with Editorial Joe, your response was pitch-perfect to my ears. Maybe it's a generational thing. I don't know. But I hear you!

@Mark: You're an outstanding writer. You understand art on many levels. But I'm going to have to disagree with you about the question of difficulty.

Yes, ballet is difficult, writing novels is difficult. I'm not arguing about whether what Marden does is difficult or not. Having watched the Charlie Rose interview, I'm aware of the complicated process behind Marden's paintings.

But that's like saying because a novel is a thousand pages long, and caused the author great strain to produce, then the novel itself is great.

Some of the book reviews I read in the New York Times fall into this trap. . . A critic will imply in one way or another the plot was weak or the characters were undeveloped, but because the work is "ambitious", the novel should be considered worthy of our attention.

My primary question is do Marden's works justify his fame, the MoMA exhibit, the world tour, and so on?

Could we be putting the spotlight on better artists and better art?

And if I stood in front of a Marden, would I change my heart and mind? I doubt it, I really doubt that the real thing before me would change my heart on his work. But I'm willing to yield to this argument.

I looked at scores of his works last night. I asked my heart, "Do you feel this?"

My heart said, "No, I do not feel that."

One more thing Mark, I love Pollock. I've seen the movie. I've read about Pollock and I've seen his work.

Pollock's work moves me. I am in awe of it. Marden, on the other hand, is a faint echo of Pollock, not even that. As someone remarked on Twitter, a parody of Pollock.

Anything can be done well or poorly, effectively or ineffectively. Anything can be interesting or not interesting.

Abstract expressionism or photo realism or country music. The school does not dictate the quality and (yes, here's that word again) the originality, or the challenging, daring aspects of the artwork.

But you cannot compare Pollock to Marden! I will not let you make that comparison. Two totally separate levels of creativity and mind.

Marden, in my view, does not have a unique voice.

As Jamie said, "I'm astounded that this man has spent so many years doing such unimpressive work."

@Kayin: Art critics have little power in the art world. I'm reading a book right now called, "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark"; and the power is in the hands of major museums like the MoMA, branded dealers, and branded auction houses.

When the MoMA decided to put Marden in the museum it wasn't as transparent as that. His art sales will be affected by this--there is a lot of marketing and stone cold business behind art museums, exhibitions, dealers, and collectors.

What this means is we stand to lose great art in place of branded art, art by institutional decree, art that is not really good but serves as coin in the art market.

It's complicated and ugly.

@Chip: I have nothing against Abstract Expressionism. If art makes me feel, then it doesn't matter what school or tradition it's from. Rothko, like my comments about Pollock, is in another league. Rothko and Pollock came up with the stuff that Marden only seems to be creating poor, distant imitations of.

And originality, while I agree is a difficult argument to make, is still an element that must be reckoned with. All works have sources. All works derive from something that came before; but not all works are derivative.

Thank you so much guys for sharing with me your thoughts. My intentions are not to dominate the conversation with my views. I write these articles to engage others, to find out what other people think, and then through a conversation I like to come to a place where we can share our ideas.

Lethe

I envision a moment--perhaps two hundred years from now--when people, not institutions, get to decide what hangs on museum walls.

Brice Marden was floating around the Internet earlier today. I found a New Yorker article on Reddit Art, which I tweeted. And then a friend, in response, sent me the Charlie Rose interview with Brice Marden.

Who is Brice Marden?

He is an abstract expressionist painter who gained worldwide attention in 2006 because of the Brice Marden Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

The show traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in early 2007, and then to Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart . . .

The MoMA called the exhibition "an unprecedented gathering of [Marden's] work, with more than fifty paintings and an equal number of drawings, organized chronologically, drawn from all phases of the artist's career." (Wikipedia)


Sometimes I use Twitter to get a sampling of public opinion on a prominent artist or intellectual figure. Last week it was the Lacanian-Marxist political philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. This week it is Brice Marden.

I'm interested in what people think. I tweeted the New Yorker article to see what people think of Marden's work, and the merits of the article itself.

We already know what the Museum of Modern Art thinks of Brice Marden.

If for some reason the show does not make that clear to us, we can always read the 330 page hardcover book (published by the Museum of Modern Art) about Marden's importance to the art world, "Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective."

At the time of this publication and retrospective, Charlie Rose also thought Brice Marden was important. So he interviewed him.

And surely, forty years of painting must mean something!


So what did people say on Twitter when I asked if they liked Brice Marden's paintings?

@TDeregowski love it, saw a big show at the whitechapel.

@LT78 brice bardon = snooze. sorry. (This comment was erased, probably b/c the author realized she spelled his name wrong)

@twicklicious Brice Marden, excellent marketeer, not so much "artist" though.. (personal opinion)

@ownnothing I've never liked Brice Marden's work. Flat, lifeless, doodles, color studies. Are these paintings for the ages?

Now let's look at what the New Yorker had to say in 2006:

Marden’s current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art confirms him, at the age of sixty-eight, as the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades.

The surface eludes them. Sombre color seems at once to engulf you, with a sort of oceanic tenderness, and infinitely to recede. This effect distills that of the furry-edged, drifting masses of ineffable color with which Rothko aimed, he said, to evoke a mood of “the single human figure, alone in a moment of utter immobility.”

His grays and grayed greens and blues recall the ungraspable nuances of Velázquez and, at times, the simmering ardors of Caspar David Friedrich. (Am I dropping too many names? There’s no helping it. Marden, an artist bred in museums, communes rather directly with all past painters whose temperaments correspond to his own.)

Regardless of the merit of these aesthetic judgments, never has a writer been so accurately self-conscious of his own journalism.

The Peter Schjeldahl article in the New Yorker drips with what the anonymous commenter (from my recent essay Art, Taste, Money) detested as art-speak, intellectual art babble, hyperbole, and so on . . .

We can almost picture the anonymous commenter, after reading the New Yorker, lifting up Peter Schjeldal by his shirt collar and shouting, "Just tell me what you think of the goddamn painting!"

The interview with Charlie Rose is also revealing.

Marden: There is a real responsibility of being an artist. I mean you’re not just doing this stuff to make pretty things for people to hang on their wall.

You know, there is some meaning to it. You are living in the culture and you are reflecting on the culture.

I mean they’re going to know more about this stuff in three hundred—I mean, this stuff is made to last . . . You look at Venetian painting and you have some idea about what’s going on—you don’t have to read about all the battles--

CR: Art is the permanence of a civilization.

Marden: Yeah, well, it’s a reflection of a culture.


Terence Clarke, a blog critic, finds the trumpeting of Marden's work absurd. As for the meaning that everyone seems to be talking about, he writes:

In the case of Marden's work, Stella's dictum (what you see is what you see) is an accurate assessment. You theorize about its deeper meanings at the risk of describing the emperor's new clothes. There is little here of the great intentions that I've read about in descriptions, by many critics, of Marden's art. They may think such intentions are there. Maybe even Marden thinks they are. But they aren't.

Clarke also has something to say about feeling.

Metaphor is what makes good art so riveting. It opens the soul to variegated depths, to an acknowledgment of emotions. To conflict. To soul-saving resolution. It stirs the heart's blood, surely one of the classic purposes of all art.

And of these particular elements--emotions, conflict--he finds a definite dearth in Marden.

In another segment of the Charlie Rose interview:

Marden: I think there’s a lot of painters around doing it (abstract expressionism) . . .

CR: There’s a line that goes through Pollock and you and . . .

Marden: Yeah, but I don’t know who they are. I mean, I sort of know some of them. I mean, it’s still going but . . . it seems to me the big thing going on now is like non-abstract expressionism—

CR: It is?

Marden: Well, it has much more to do with the kind of literary, storytelling . . . as I said, it’s more literary, it tells little stories. Not little stories, but there’s a narrative, there’s a lot of narrative stuff going on . . .

CR: Does it influence you?

Marden: Ehhhh, maybe, I don’t know . . . I mean these things, these long paintings are sort of a narrative, but no, I don’t want to tell stories in my paintings. If I tell the story, I’d rather it be a symphony rather than like a book.

CR: With movements . . .

Marden: So you respond to it viscerally, rather than intellectually . . . You can look at it, you’re figuring it out, but at the same time, if you’re beginning to have some sort of jump in your stomach, then I think you’re sort of getting it.

I did in fact have a "jump in my stomach" tonight, but it was not looking at Marden's oeuvre, nor any individual painting.

The "jump" came from all of the voices around me, responding to Marden's work. All of the voices that contributed to this meaning of Brice Marden.

I'm interested in what people have to say. Not institutions. Not the MoMA. Not the New Yorker.

Meaning takes care of itself. The artist need not worry about meaning. If the art has integrity, originality, and yes, beauty, it will provoke meaning.