|
Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
View current page
...more recent posts
Goodreads has posted a C Magazine article by Emily Vey Duke titled "Suffering, Empathy, Art and the Greater Good." I love Vey Duke's writing for it's open-heartedness and genuine striving. I like that she is casting around for ways to better connect art with a non-art-educated public. I disagree, however, that there is something inherently wrong with teaching Duchampian nominalism. Also, I believe a healthy suspicion of art tropes about beauty and truth is not only a beneficial trait, but imperative to a genuine and communicative expression of either beauty or truth. In my student days it was an over-reliance on emotion, direct expression, machismo, and navel-gazing therapeutic personal brain barfs that seemed to be dragging art into a murky and inaccessible quagmire. Now I see Vey Duke calling for us to value the "explicitly emotional in art as highly as we value the ambiguously clever" and my instincts are to cry out No! Gawd, spare us the myopic whinging and purging of a bunch of young artists' personal angst.
At the same time I recognise what seems to be a systemic lack of rigour and ambition (and I would not exclude my own practice, especially considering a recent rash of afternoon napping). I chalk this up to the legacy of post-modern slacker-type despair ... in which making anything at all was seen as somehow heroic in the face of the perceived (I've always believed incorrectly) abject meaninglessness of all symbols. Furthermore, a crappy-looking aesthetic was required as a sort of apology, an acknowledgement that the artist was aware of the sheer audacity of saying anything at all. After the cold brash onslaught of deconstruction, an intimate personal approach was necessary..."please don't take my little art offering too seriously, it's just my two-cents worth of pain and insight."
Fortunately artists like Vey Duke and others have taken up symbols afresh as considered and effective tools for art communication. Hearts are back on sleeves and this is probably a very good thing. I am just wary of current trends of creeping anti-intellectualism. Expertise has become a bad word in the art world, and this is a problem. If you believe in your work, then there is nothing wrong with working really hard to achieve excellence in your field.
For the most part, I agree with Vey Duke. My plea to artists (and I plead with myself here as well) would be: don't be ashamed to work hard for your art. Don't sell yourself short by presenting self-effacing shoddy work if you have in you an idea that is excellent. Don't hold your own intelligence in check, and be brutally honest with yourself and apply your own criteria to determine what is good enough.