staring down the barrel of a dissertation deadline, what do i do? well, i spent the last hour doing catalogue searches from the journals of the conservative critical doxa (the new criterion, partisan review, etc.), trying to find just where it was that i got the line "the new generation of deleuzo-guattarians" from five or six-odd years ago. (and now i will continue to procrastinate by writing in my blog.) i still haven't retrieved the origin of that wonderfully arrogant and dismissive line, but i did come to a realisation about how our industry (that is, the art writers industry) has changed over the last couple of generations.
but, before we get into that, i found this hilarious:
JAMES PANERO: In the October roundtable [entitled "the present state of art criticism," available here], Benjamin Buchloh calls you a �critical placebo,� and elsewhere Hal Foster says you�ve developed a kind of �pop-libertarian aesthetic.�
DAVE HICKEY: They all work for the Man.
that aside, reading through all of these old warhorsey jeremiads, i was reminded once again of just how much people who care about the sanctity of "high art" hate rosalind krauss, who is a personal hero of mine. the stakes aren't identical: in the 60s, her mentor at harvard, clement greenberg, in a fit of counter-oedipal anxiety, said to her: "Spare me smart Jewish girls with their typewriters"; while frustrated academics the world over bemoan krauss and her journal october for constituting a critical and institutional doxa that grants the best jobs and publications to krauss' and her colleagues at october' disciples (and, in turn, those disciples' disciples and, someday, maybe me); and there is no end to the students, either too stupid to understand or too lazy to crack a book, who find krauss' writing, among the finest there ever was and a staple of everyone's art history syllabi, too challenging and/or reference-heavy. and then there is the opposite position of critics, artists, and scholars who bemoan krauss and october for not being radical enough, for being too invested in charting a historicist genealogy of radicalism in modernist high art, to the exclusion of actual radicalism, both in the choice of objects of study and, more importantly, in the mode of critical engagement and political practice. but that is a whole other debate that i won't get into right now.
but the main reason people hate rosalind krauss is because she has gone down as the figurehead for art critics who discuss the field of criticism, its tradition, and the assumptions of its critical judgments. to the haterz, this happens at the expense of a focus on the work of art and its inviolable sanctity (that is to say, in the presence of a work of art, it is impolite to discuss anything other than the work of art, and only in the strict manner that it proscribes�i once had this interdiction pointed out to me by one of my students). in the words of the new criterion's richard kimball (in an ad hominem attack disguised as a review of krauss�s book the optical unconscious, entitled "feeling sorry for rosalind krauss"), this approach is to "theorize" rather than "paying attention to what one saw."
james panero, current managing editor of the new criterion (and�get this�born in 1975) writes:
A world of difference separates those who criticize art from those who seek to know about how art criticism is done, because art criticism is done by doing it. To ask after the details beyond the most practical ones is already a step in the wrong direction. Art critics who make the �criticism of art criticism� their business do not stay in the business of art criticism for long.
The 1960s generation of art critics, who did focus on the criticism of criticism, proved this to be the case. For a moment in the late 1960s, they invigorated Artforum magazine with a certain form of criticism�my colleague Hilton Kramer famously remarked at the time, �The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.� Yet the 1960s generation departed from their one commercial enterprise after less than a decade. In 1976, Rosalind Krauss, along with the editor Annette Michelson, left Artforum to found a hermetic quarterly journal called October.
In need of a power base, not to mention a livelihood, Krauss�s generation also took to the universities�Krauss herself to the City University of New York, then to Columbia University�where it set about seeding and gaining control of an entire network of art history departments. Krauss became famous for her letters of negative recommendation against dissident thinkers.** Her severe legacy is still felt in the universities,*** even if much of the art being produced today has departed from the minimalist and conceptualist formulations with which she and others once held sway, writing for Artforum those many years ago.
If Krauss�s journey sounds distant from the practice of art criticism I first mentioned above, of writing about art in the galleries or museums for a daily, weekly, or monthly publication�it is. Yet Krauss has profoundly affected the way modern art history, art criticism, and art are taught.
(**note: i don't know that krauss is notorious for it, but industry gossip informs me that this has, indeed, happened. at least once, anyway.
*** note: a little snooping on wikipedia has revealed that panero's wife is, you guessed it, a "frustrated academic.")
maybe you have to work in the field to truly detect the hate in those seemingly matter-of-fact words. i mean, clearly, he doesn't like krauss or october, and clearly, the critical orthodoxy that they represent has been threatening the obsolescence jobs such as his for almost my (and his) entire lifetime. (just look at how artforum's website has become a gossip blog, or at the punk kids writing art criticism in the village voice; where is a true child of old money and good culture (see his wedding announcement, linked from his wikipedia entry), and defender high art and its privileges such as panero going to work if his job has been annexed at both ends by critical theory-toting university professors on the one hand, and snot-nosed art school dropouts from brooklyn on the other?) but there is more to the hatred of rosalind krauss, as if the work that she does not only threatens the livelihood of the old-timey, man-of-letters type of critic, but also cuts deep into their souls and tears out a part of their being. i'm not sure how exactly to describe this, but i think that most observers who have followed these culture wars can detect it on sight and intuitively grasp its root.
but, in the long phasing out of the paneros (and richard kimballs, hilton kramers; the schjeldahls and the kuspits, etc.), something strange happened. i was invited to give a talk at the institute of fine arts at nyu, sponsored by the frick museum of art, a couple of months ago. in attendance, aside from institute of fine arts students, were mostly nyu art history professors (notoriously among the most old-school of anyone, ever) and frick museum trustees and donors. i was pretty nervous, being that all of my work is about high art as a class ritual and the talk i was to give being no different. so there i was, at the ifa in the upper east side, across the street from central park. and, instead of getting shit thrown at me like rosalind krauss surely would have forty years earlier, they found it charming. [tousles my hair] aww, look at him. calling us out for sustaining a barbaric class ritual. isn't that adorable? so add that to the list of accomplishments of rosalind e. krauss' illustrious career: thanks to her, i'm cute.
as reported in the new york times today, reed college has cut 100 incoming students in need of financial aid in favor of 100 others who can afford the full tuition. reed, which long prided itself for its need-blind admission policy, now has two waiting lists: one for the needy and one for the rich. reed apparently costs $50,000 a year to attend now. insofar as it was a country club when i went there, it sure wasn't this.
marcel duchamp once proposed the use of a rembrandt painting as an ironing board. he called this a "reciprocal readymade." the art historian tom mcdonough writes: �unlike the case of the classic Duchampian readymade, there is no question here of revoking the artwork�s reification, there is no spontaneous overcoming of exchange value�rather, in a dialectical trans-valuation, reification becomes use value, the artwork�s exhibition value is put to use in an iconoclastic gesture that depends precisely upon the value bourgeois society accords its protected enclave of culture.� because what good is art if you hold onto it only to reproduce class relations and social inequality? maybe the art's inflated exchange value can actually be put to use in pursuit of all of those humanist ideals that art is supposed stand for, like, you know, expanding the pursuit of knowledge beyond merely those who have $200,000 at their disposal.
immediate observations from a reed facebook group, beginning with the former student body president:
Andy Bruno (Russia) wrote
at 22:18 yesterday
Re: the NYT story that Noah just posted: un-fucking-believable! I guess Reed has decided it needs to spearhead a new bout of class discrimination in higher education. This is my official apology to the class of 2003 for having agreed to write that letter a few years ago begging for alumni donations. Don't give them shit. At least not until they figure out how to manage money without fucking over the poor. Sorry, but I am really pissed right now.
Andrew Rumbach (Cornell) wrote
at 00:11
I agree. What good is an endowment if you don't use it during the lean times? Will be very interested to see how the college responds - this is a PR disaster for them.
Sam Gustin (Columbia) wrote
at 04:18
We'll remember this episode as a low point in Reed history.
Colin Diver and the rest of the board of trustees should ask themselves why they made the decision to cut off 100 worthy applicants -- and be prepared for tough questions. I did the back of the envelope math and found that 100 students, given a full ride, would cost Reed $5 million annually.
Reed has an endowment of about $360 million, down from $470 million last year.
As a reporter, I'm pissed off that Glater -- after gaining rare access to Reed trustee meetings -- ran such a paltry article, with no real insight into the college itself or its finances. Glater and the Times editors, used that access for a classic one off -- run and done -- at Reed's expense.
Reed's PR folks got played, and Rumbach is right: this is a PR disaster.
Noah Rindos (Washington, DC) wrote
at 10:25
The other way to look at this is to recognize that as the alumni of Reed we also have a responsibility to support the financial aid office - especially in economic times like these where it is easy to justify no action. It is easy for us to sit here and be critical (in true Reed fashion) or we could do something about it.
If every person who is a member of this group gave $65 we could completely sponsor a student for a year.
i had seen this coming for some time, though. there was a piece in the times a couple of years ago about how the top universities were starting to use their enormous endowments to fund all students except for those from households with annual incomes of $200,000 or more. this move to abolish student loans, while a fantastic thing, seemed to spell bad news for smaller and poorer schools such as reed (and, i assume, brandeis). because if all the top candidates who would normally go where they got the best financial aid package all went to harvard, yale, princeton, stanford, etc., who but the truly wealthy would ever go to reed, which used to offer what financial aid it could, but always (in practice, not theory) required its students to make up some of the difference? of course, the economy has rendered all of this pretty to think so, but, of course, the economy has hit places like reed, which produces more than its share of pretty to think so professors but few captains of industry, the hardest.
when i was at reed, i spent all sorts of time learning about how it worked that you can take a urinal and put it in a museum and�lo!�you have art. the point, it always seemed to me, was that art, like class, is arbitrary, and that we need to think hard about the way privilege reproduces privilege at the same time as we theorise about how museums "produce" art. so, to all those self-righteous and indignant defenders of the rose art museum at brandeis, maybe you should start feeding into reed's endowment. country club could use a new ivory back-scratcher.
6/04/09
HOME ALONE
twenty years ago tonight, my parents, grandmother, and aunts left my brother (aged 5) and me (7) home alone to march outside the chinese embassy in vancouver. it was the only time i'd ever seen or heard of any of them engage in any kind of political protest. the spectre of 4. june, 1989 haunted my family for the next eight years. the way the two numbers, nineteen and sixty-eight, when spoken together mean something hopeful and messianic for western-european intellectuals, something that violent state repression couldn't diminish because it was an idea, an abstraction, and not a political movement that could succeed or fail�the four numbers 1, 9, 9, 7 (yi-jiu-jiu-qi) terrorised us, because it also was an abstraction. those students were not heroes, and could only signify what the tanks signified: the looming threat of 1997. it almost seems silly now, twelve years later.
but, more than a decade of "one country, two systems," we have a vivid reminder that the fear remains. today, hong kong is the only place in the people's republic where 4. june, 1989 is being publicly acknowledged, and, what's more, we are reminded that hong kong is not autonomous, as we've all come around to believing at some point over the last twelve years�from time magazine: "In the run-up to the anniversary, two Tiananmen-era dissidents, Xiang Xiaoji and Yang Jianli, were turned away at Hong Kong's airport. The city won't comment, but it denied charges that it kept an immigration blacklist at the behest of Beijing." those of us who have spent five whole years throwing rocks at germany might do well to think about the politics of memory and state-sanctioned collective amnesia in our own houses, right? (from the ap wire: "'We've been under 24-hour surveillance for a week and aren't able to leave home to mourn. It's totally inhuman,' said Xu Jue, whose son was 22 when he was shot in the chest by soldiers and bled to death on June 4, 1989.") but what strikes me as significant in this case is that one act of political protest my family engaged in, while my brother and i were left home alone. the thought was that if all else failed, if everyone didn't succeed in desperately smuggling themselves out of hong kong before 1997, at least the children would have canadian citizenship. all my cousins who grew up in asia were born in canada. great pains were taken to ensure that. so great the fear that that was the thinking: better orphans than the alternative.
