Project on the Nature of Taste

Spruce up your sensibilities, Ladies and Gentlemen. The New York Institute of Philosophy is launching a huge research project on the Nature of Taste.

Peru Ana Ana Peru at Brooklynite

A few thoughts here.

Liam Singer

Check out the music of Liam Singer. Not only does he write a mean song, he roasts a mean coffee bean for Grumpy.

Hyperallergic

Hrag Vartanian has just launched his new arts blogazine, Hyperallergic. I signed on to be a regular contributor, so much of my arts writing will move from here to there. Check out my article, Street Artvertisements: "Hell, No!".

Street Tweet

It might seem to be a paradox of contemporary communication culture that in an age of total access the preferred vehicle of communication is the superficial tweet or status update directed at no one in particular, but to everyone on the list (which may in fact be everyone). And when someone vulnerable and desperate ventures an honest personal remark, a confession, she is met with incredulity, ridicule, or, worse, no comments or "likes" -- just silence in the vast web. But the thought that there is a paradox or cultural deficiency here overlooks the fact that we use these social tools in large part to develop a social persona. (Here I am at work on mine (a confession?).) When someone's "true self" bleeds into the fabric of this social weave, they threaten to stain the whole garment.

These needs to confess have not been totally banished from the land of information -- they have a home in the pages of social confession media. The desperate can blather on in their Live Journal or personal blog. But the problem is that no one knows or even cares if they're genuine. It could just be an extension of the social media persona so artfully crafted in the social persona development rooms (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace). They could just be seeking attention or developing their dramatic writing skills. And here's the real paradox, the real frustration. Our social media personae threaten all genuine confession. In a world of total exposure our secret lives are suffocating. One might feel a need to escape and give one's secret life some air.

These thoughts, or something like them, might be behind a delightful and modest piece of street art I came across last week. The piece consisted of four postcards and an explanatory letter taped to a public mailbox. By putting the confessions on the outside of the mailbox, the artist states that what is normally concealed and private, dark and secret, is being made public. The anonymity of these questions and claims mirrors the anonymity of a social media confessor. The tweet-sized statements are made on throw-away postcards, mailing items specially designed for superficial updates. The attempt to confess takes the form of an archaic tweet. They are disorganized and askew, as though posted in desperation. These confessions, stamped and sans address, are going nowhere in particular, just "out there" into the vast anonymous sea of information.

Unless you change that. The artist explains that the cards contain things that the artist "will never confess," that is, will never address to anyone in particular. But you might. The artist hopes that someone will fill in the appropriate address, so that someone will actually make the statement they need to make.





"These are things I'll never confess but I hope you will. Take them. Enact what liberation or pain or self-indulgence that comes from admissions like these. It isn't that complicated. I'm just too scared and I wonder if everyone else is the same."



"Why didn't you call me while you were in the city?"

"Do you think I'm attractive?"

"You're so nice to me that I mistake the affection for love."

"I'm never going to give you that shirt you borrowed back. Sorry."

Cirque de la rue

Street Art and Photography

Hrag Vartanian recently published an interesting piece in the Brooklyn Rail: Longtime Exposure: Considering Street Art Photography. He points out that it is wrong to dismiss street art photography as mere arts documentation. One reason is that, in some cases, it is an art unto itself. But the myriad quick-snapping street art documentarians who have no pretension to artistry seem to be playing an increasingly significant role in street art. Their photographs are the heart-and-lung machine of art with a pathetic (albeit fascinating) life span.

The role of these photographers could be explored in more detail. It would be interesting to explore ways in which street artists exploit the fact that their work will be (hastily and clumsily) documented. For one thing, an artwork's being street art seems to require a commitment on behalf of the artist to the work's ephemerality. (This is not to say that the artist expects the work to perish, only that that the artist has no claim to the work's integrity.) But if the artist fully expects the work to live on in the vast expanses of the World Wide Web -- no matter what happens to its earthly manifestation -- then is there really a commitment to the ephemerality of the work? Could a horde of street art documentarians actually change the nature of street art's commitment to ephemerality (and thereby change the nature of street art)?

Interview of me on "Shock"

Check out this interview of me about blading and philosophy.

Status by Association

incomplete works

Remnants of a stikman (the way a stikman sticks)

Ellis G with diagonal light and garbage

Os Gêmeos at work

Os Gêmeos, Going Up at Bowery and Houston

Categories of Mustache

The mustache has been back in style for a couple of years now. The late-twenties crowd has been really pushing the beard, and, if you watched the Academy Awards ceremony last February, you probably noticed that every male movie star and his dad wore a (gasp) goatee. Facial hair is back. To help everyone cope intellectually, I have begun to invent categories of mustache. Here's a couple of mustache categories to get us started. The "must(not)stache" is a mustache that you should avoid. It does not suit your overall aesthetic and gives facial hair in general a bad reputation. Here is Clooney sporting a must(not)stache followed by a guy wearing a "miststache" -- a wispy fibrous growth above the upper lip. And yes, the miststache can be a must(not)stache.

must(not)stache

miststache

Wooster Street, 6.20.09

This is just a little experiment. The video is a documentation of some of the street art on and near Wooster St. and Grand in SoHo. I start just below Spring and end up just below Grand, at the Candy Factory. It's also a kind of meditation on the ephemerality of street art. The video begins with shots of newer pieces in the area -- quel beast, papa loves baby, fitschen -- and ends by noting the dilapidated state of the Candy Factory. So much of the art there has lost its integrity. Even a (seemingly ironic) sign that said "Street Art" is missing -- it was posted over what remained of an OBEY piece. The works of stikman in this area emerged as a kind of metaphor. Stikman uses a wide range of media -- wood, paper, plastic, and paint, to name a few. But a lot of the stikmen placed amongst the other pieces of street art are faded, broken, or completely missing. The little guy in the crosswalk, in his own original space, remains.



Wooster Street, 6.20.09

Someone Did It

I've been waiting for someone to do this. Ji Lee's "Duchamp Reloaded" Project:




More soon...

"Whole in the Wall" at the Helenbeck Gallery

The Helenbeck Gallery just opened what they call “the largest American and European street art exhibition in New York.” "Whole in the Wall" is three spacious floors full of art backed by corporate sponsors, and stamped with the approval of numerous artists and artworldlings. Funny thing is, there isn’t a single piece of street art. So it turns out to be no larger an exhibition of street art than the current exhibition of Alice Neel’s work at David Zwirner gallery.

It’s not that surprising. So few gallery shows of “street art” acknowledge the difference between street art and things that look like street art, but the difference is there, and it’s important. Street art is art whose material use of the street is internal to its meaning. A Blade, Crash, or Daze piece on canvass does not employ the street as one of its artistic materials. So it’s not street art. It looks like street art because we know these artists’ styles. The stuff they put on a canvass looks a lot like what they used to put on subway cars. But as we know from the history of art (Fountain, Brillo Box, and kin) visual indistinguishability does not mean artistic indistinguishability. As with many things in this world, looking the same does not mean it is the same.

Furthermore not every artwork a “street artist” makes is street art. This seems obvious, but it often goes unrecognized in the gallery setting. If you put together a show full of works made by “street artists” it does not follow that your show will be full of street art. In fact, I can almost guarantee you that it won’t contain any street art. A street artist cannot magically turn a canvass into street art by christening it thus, no matter how much money and Red Bull you give him.

That said, shows like “Whole in the Wall” and can be important. They can help fund artists who are otherwise financially on their own; they can raise awareness about the skills of artists whose work is normally less accessible; they can teach us about the history and current events of an otherwise ignored yet important artistic practice; and in some sense they can help to “legitimize” street art – but only indirectly, by supporting the very artists, styles, and practices whose real significance we feel on the streets. But does street art really need legitimacy from the artworld? It most certainly does not need institutional legitimacy. Street art has no place in the artworld’s galleries and museums. And its artistic legitimacy is, in so many cases, manifest – a fact that the artworld merely needs to corroborate, not construct.

Although “Whole in the Wall” does not have any street art in it, the works it contains bear interesting relations to street art. One thing that “Whole in the Wall” is useful, though not necessarily commendable for is its abundance. The show helped me to see that there are a few fairly independent ways in which street artistic styles can inform gallery work. Given that past attempts have been made to "gallerize" street art and that we can expect more in the future, it might be useful to carve out these critical categories.

The first is a category of art that I will call street(less) art. This is art done in a distinctively street artistic style but on canvass rather than the street – gallery art that looks pretty much the same as it would on the street. The contributions of Blade and Blek le Rat are the best examples of this. Blade simply decorates the canvass with pieces that would have adorned subway cars. The only difference is that, since these pieces are not done illegally in a train yard under severe lighting, time, and material constraints, the pieces are more polished – straighter lines, sharper edges, more considered coloring. But aside from the polish, there seems to be nothing new. Whether you like these pieces will depend on whether you like the “rags to riches” version of Blade’s work, taken from the streets and polished up.



Blek le Rat’s stencil of a sheep (The Sheep, 2009) is another example of street(less) art, but this one even lacks polish. It is straight up stencil-on-canvass-instead-of-wall. As such, it conspicuously lacks a standard stencil surface.



It calls attention to the fact that, inside these gallery walls, the street is nowhere to be found. Blek’s other contributions achieve a similar effect through different means, namely, by adding a background instead of leaving it blank. Instead of a sheer white, Blek fills out the canvass with a hazy blend of earth, stone, and rust colors, which makes the background look conspicuously like the walls of his street pieces. The backgrounds of these canvasses seem to represent a street wall. But it is only a representation. In each case – white canvass, or representation of the street – the very thing missing is the real, concrete, public street.

In the gallery

On the street

Blek’s works on canvass pinpoint one of the most pressing issues raised by “Whole in the Wall” and similar shows. What is the proper way to treat street art in a traditional gallery or museum setting? You can’t just put graffiti on canvass and call it street art. Blek’s pieces show that street(less) art harnesses an important critical power in its ability to call itself out as street(less) art. They are a welcome contribution to a show that is apparently unaware of, or at least unconcerned with, the issue.

Several other pieces were striking in the way they put familiar typographical styles of graffiti to formal use – they call attention to a category of style that I will call formal graffiti. Sharp uses formal graffiti for mere design; JonOne uses it for what looks like abstract expression; and Plateus uses it in sculpture. In each case, we register the presence of graffiti either where there is none, or where it is being used for some other artistic purpose. Graffiti is writing done in a certain style and with a distinctive attitude. The presence of the relevant style in these works suggests graffiti, but a closer look reveals that something more is happening. In the Sharp piece, letters periodically emerge from mere lines done in a graffiti style, as though escaping from the primordial graffiti-scribble soup, but they never contribute their significance to a name or phrase. There is no attempt to make a move in the graffiti language-game. It's just design. Such a move would, in any case, be totally impotent in this setting. The JonOne piece is just the opposite -- the messy repetition of his tag creates an abstract Twombly-esque gestalt. The tag obsessively repeated, filled in, overlapping, and messy becomes cave-writing, primitive expression, scribble. (Rothko also seems to be present in the background.)

Sharp

Plateus

JonOne

The abundance of “Whole in the Wall” helps to bring out what street artists’ gallery work has in common, but this large collection of works is displayed under no apparent organizational principle other than that, as the organizers would misleadingly put it, “it’s all street art”. There is no historical narrative, no illuminating theory, and no indication of artistic influence other than some helpful yet limited descriptions of each artist. This lack of any substantial contextualization, theorization, and edification would be unproblematic if the organizers did not intend for their show to “underline the entrance of contemporary street art in[to] the history of art.” Also conspicuously missing from the show is any work from artists in the contemporary New York street art scene -- a lacuna that makes one question whether the organizers really understand street art, graffiti, their histories, and, ultimately, why street art and graffiti do deserve wider attention. It’s not because a piece on canvass can sell for $200,000.

This leads me to the most ostentatious part of the show whose presence is given a puzzling justification. The art was accompanied by antique furniture from the collection of the French dealer Jean Gismondi. The Helenbeck sisters explain: “The contemporary works will be juxtaposed with antique furniture & works of art representing the old and the new and reinforcing, ironically, the entrance of street art into one of the main areas of the art world.” The “main area of the art world,” I take it, is art history, or perhaps the art market. I honestly do not understand how very valuable antique furniture can do this “reinforcing” (and do it “ironically”). Presumably, the curators wanted to place the art amongst valuable works that have stood the “test of time” to suggest that the works on display can do so as well. If that was their purpose, then why did they choose antique furniture? The way antique furniture “stands the test of time” is very different from the way artworks do it. Antique furniture does it by, well, standing; artworks do it by being great. They might have done better by showing us how, if at all, the works on display show signs of artistic greatness. But that requires careful consideration of the relation between time-tested works, graffiti, and street art – a process that might have required more time and forethought than the organizers’ opportunities allowed.

[Revised: 06.12.09]

Park Art

The sun is out: Time for park art!

Arrest and OBEY

I grew up skating at the Santa Rosa bowls, a graffiti-blanketed cement skate park in Northern California. The graffiti was so familiar to me that if someone painted over it, or if it was buffed out, it would change the feel of the park. Nearly all the good hips and lines were named after whatever prominent graffiti happened to be on them. A lot of it was perplexing. I was a seasoned expert at the park before I learned what the huge “Pabst Blue Ribbon” piece meant. The piece that bewildered me the most at the time was a small sticker, about 4” by 6” that had a picture of André the Giant on it and said “André the Giant has a posse”. It wasn’t long before I heard about Shepard Fairey.



I’ve been following Fairey’s work ever since. In the mid-to-late nineties I was traveling around the world, and it seemed like everywhere I went – and I went almost everywhere – there was an OBEY poster poking out of the cityscape. At the time, I didn’t know much of anything about Fairey’s intentions. I just thought it was cool to see these posters everywhere; my fondness for the weird little sticker at the bowls would creep up and, if only for a moment, I would feel at home in a foreign place.




As I got older, I began to understand the significance of Fairey’s “OBEY” posters. They don’t really have a fixed meaning. According to Fairey, they have as many meanings as they have viewers. One might think that they are the products of an insidious underground culture; or that they are a critique of the increasingly resourceful advertainment campaign we’re subject to; or perhaps that they are more political in nature, that they question the influence of governmental and cultural pressures to conform to a culture that may not have their best interests in mind. What you get out of them is really just indicative of your own interpretive predilections, indicative of the workings of your mind, rather than Fairey’s. They are an intentionally perplexing invitation to question our relationship to our surroundings. It is a short step from: What is that OBEY poster doing there? To: Come to think of it, why am I forced to look at this huge Pepsi billboard everyday?

Fairey has been in the news a lot lately. His important depiction of Obama both contributed to the president’s victory and tangled the artist up in a legal mess. Most recently Fairey was arrested in Boston on several counts of felony vandalism. In the debate surrounding Fairey’s arrest, at least as The New York Times portrays it, there are roughly two sides. One side says that Fairey’s art is mere vandalism, so he should be prosecuted; the other says that it's art, so he shouldn’t. Surely the response to those who think that the posters are mere vandalism is not that Fairey’s work is art and therefore it’s not vandalism. Art can be vandalism. Some of the best art is vandalism. The response is that its value as art trumps its illegality; we should ignore, or better allow, the vandalism in the name of Art.

I wish I could wholeheartedly agree with this response, but there is a point that I think is overlooked in the debate. In my view, street art is art whose material use of the street is essential to its meaning. This way of thinking about street art has several advantages. For one, it implies that commercial art that is a lot like street art – stencils, posters, stickers, and so on – is not street art. That’s because commercial art means the same thing whether or not it materially uses the street. It means buy this, see that, be this, no matter how these messages are pitched. In the story Fairey tells about his OBEY posters, the street plays an ineliminable role. One might think, then, that the posters are street art fair and square, perhaps even good street art. This would mean that we should take seriously the idea that the value of Fairey’s work trumps its illegality.

The problem is that Fairey’s OBEY posters are ambiguous between commercial and street art. In 2001, Fairey started a clothing brand called OBEY, which uses the images and graphic styles distinctive of his posters. In 2003 Fairey started Studio Number One, a commercial marketing company that uses his distinctive graphical style. In effect, Shepard Fairey is making a ton of money exploiting his own style for commercial projects. Fairey’s clothing and marketing companies stand to gain financially from the high visibility of his OBEY posters. As a result, one really must ask whether they are the “blank canvass” or “experiment in phenomenology” Fairey claims them to be, or whether they are, instead, commercial pleas to buy OBEY, see OBEY, just OBEY.

If the OBEY posters venture too far into the realm of the commercial, then a third claim can be wedged between the claims of Vandalism! and Art!, which is Commercial Art! Insofar as Fairey’s posters are commercial art, he is guilty of illegally using the public space for advertising.

There is a widespread motivation behind a lot of street art and graffiti. People are upset about the use – legal and illegal – of public space for commercial advertisement. Why should we be forced to view advertisements everywhere we go? Why should the public space, our space, be sold to or co-opted by companies who litter it with their desperate pleas? Early in his career, Fairey raised this question with his OBEY posters. Years later, he’s apparently found the answer.

New "Art Photo"

It has been a while since I posted some of my own stuff. Here's a shot from the Gretchen Ryan opening at Fred Torres Collaborations. It reminds me of this one.

Vanity Man

MOMO, Barnett Newman, and The Sublime

In 2006, the street artist MOMO made what is likely to be the largest tag in the world; it's even amongst the largest artworks ever created. It’s larger than Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, and James Turrell’s Roden Crater. The artist tagged “MOMO” across the width of New York City with a thin line of paint. The piece starts in the West Village and ends in East River Park just south of Houston Street. It is over two miles wide and about one mile high. This is clearly artistic graffiti that makes a general use of the street. MOMO simply placed his name on the street. It just happens to be very large.

(A very small part of) MOMO's Manhattan Tag

The sheer size of this tag is not the only thing that contributes to its significance. Equally important, in my view, is the style, in particular the thinness, of the line he painted. The vastness of the tag is evident to anyone who pays attention to it, yet any attempt to obtain an all-encompassing vision of it is futile. Any aerial position that allowed one to see the relevant section of Manhattan would be too high to see the thin line. The artist himself has never seen the whole thing. However, tagging is all about “getting up” – graffiti writers want to make their name as visible as possible to as many people as possible, and especially to other writers. It is sweetly ironic that the biggest tag in the world is designed to be invisible in its entirety. MOMO’s giant tag is unreadable, and so in a sense, anonymous.

But the significance of this piece outstrips, and outshines, its irony. In a way, MOMO has taken an idea of Barnett Newman’s one step further. Newman’s paintings are widely considered to be sublime. According to Immanuel Kant, the experience of the sublime involves two parts, a feeling of displeasure followed by a feeling of pleasure. The sublime, to put it overly simply, is the experience of an object or event that overwhelms the imagination or the senses – the infinite, the power of nature, the vastness of the universe –, while recognizing that we can use our reason to grasp the totality of such things. The pleasure we take in the sublime, according to Kant, is the pleasure we feel in realizing that, although our imaginations are stymied (the source of displeasure), our reason understands. Reason’s got Imagination’s back.

Vir Heroicus Sublimis

Newman wanted his large paintings to be experienced up close, so that they take up even the farthest reaches of one’s peripheral vision. He wanted the viewer to be overwhelmed by the vastness of the painting; viewed at the appropriate distance, our senses are incapable of taking in the whole thing, resulting in a Kantian feeling of displeasure at the inadequacy of our imagination. This feeling can be overcome by the pleasure felt when we use our reason-laced autonomy to take a step back and view the whole painting, thereby completing the two-course meal of sublimity.

MOMO’s piece artfully supplies the feeling of displeasure directed at our inability to see the whole tag. But there’s no stepping back. Any attempt to bring the entire piece into view simultaneously takes it out of view. One is confronted with the fact that one’s senses simply cannot take in this work. MOMO’s piece intimates at an irresolvable sublimity. What we can do is draw the piece out on a map; we can use Google Maps to visually imagine the piece. The resulting “feeling of pleasure” would be a pleasure in the power of the imagination to recreate the piece in a digital medium.

Erik Burke is engaged in an important artistic project. Check out this new video documenting it.


Writers Bench from Miss Tint on Vimeo.

And now get on up to 149th St. Grand Concourse to see it!

The City's Natural Beauty

Umbrellas 2009

Umbrellas have been showing up in my life again, perhaps in a way less devastating than before, and more beautiful. Now in trees instead of lying, gale-tattered, in gutters and garbage cans. Spring is arriving. Rejoice!


from urban prankster


from the cherry blossom girl

Framing Street Art

Street art raises interesting questions about framing. A picture frame is normally a kind of signal to its audience. It says that the thing inside is art and by doing so it makes certain attitudes and activities appropriate with respect to it. We can interpret, criticize, and appreciate the object in a way that would be inappropriate were it "unframed". Often, framing happens without any actual frame, just by placing an object in the right context, as Duchamp's Fountain and Warhol's Brillo Box illustrate. In these cases, however, the frame is the artworld. The objects are placed in a museum or gallery, where people know what to expect. They expect art.

Artists like Warhol and Duchamp exploited the artworld's framing power. We can art-critically evaluate Brillo Box because it is in an artworld context. The availability of this context makes possible the questions concerning Brillo Box. Street Art, by definition, lacks access to this framing power. So what can the street artist use as a framing device? How can the question of something's art status appropriately arise for an object in the street?

Consider the following post.

Selling Snowballs: Failblog and David Hammons

I recently saw this picture on failblog. It's a picture of a man selling snowballs in New York City.



Failblog obviously interprets this as a picture of man desperately selling snowballs to make extra cash. That could be right. However, he is conspicuously well-dressed and holding a designer shopping bag. He is in clean, warm clothes and is wearing decent shoes. He doesn't look all that desperate. Could he have something else in mind?

In 1983, the artist David Hammons performed 'Bliz-aard Ball Sale' on Cooper Square in NYC. He stood in the cold selling variously sized snowballs. His piece is a critique of the fact that anything can be commercialized, and the artworld exploits this fact. It is so extreme that Piero Manzoni can sell his shit to the Tate Modern.



What makes Hammons' piece art? What could make Hammons' piece art in such a way that the first man's activity is not art? Brillo Box raised this question in the context of a museum; Hammons raises it in the context of the street.

Collaboration, Appropriation, or Elimination?

Below is a very cool video that documents the (important, I would argue) ephemerality of street art.



The creator of the video, Erik Pakurar, suggests that by the end of the video the door hosts a "collaborative" artwork. This is a cool idea, but I wonder if it flies. In the history of street art, the modus operandi involved a sort of "politics of erasure". In many cases, the act of placing a work destroys an older one; the new work consequently takes on an air of superiority (which might even be regarded as a positive aesthetic feature of the work). It seems to me that thinking of the pastiche of overlapping pieces as a collaborative work is incompatible with thinking of the works as possessing this "air". Do we regard the works as successive moves in an ongoing battle, or as contributions to something bigger than any one artist envisioned?

Alternatively, we might think of each addition to the wall as, in part, an act of appropriation wherein the older pieces are incorporated into the new one. In this case, we should call it "collaborative" only if we would be willing to call works like Warhol's Brillo Box a collaboration between Warhol and Brillo or James Harvey. The latter seems wrong because Brillo (or Harvey) had no intention of creating an artwork with Warhol, which is obviously part of the point of Warhol's box.

Whitney Lockert

Yours to Give

Minimalist Communication

The other night I went to Think Coffee on Mercer to get coffee and do some reading. As usual, it was packed and there wasn't a single free seat. So, I got into "sane-sense-of-personal-space" mode and asked a guy if he would share his table with me. He politely agreed and I sat down. Shortly thereafter, I had to leave, so I packed up and departed. When I got outside I performed my compulsive full-body self-scan to see if I had my keys, wallet, and phone, and low and behold my phone was missing. So, I went back inside and there it was under the nose of my studious table-sharer friend. As I grabbed it, I glanced at him and he reciprocated with a countenance that unambiguously communicated what we were both thinking: "You left your phone here. You would have been fucked. Good thing you remembered it." Look at that. Factual, counterfactual, and normative claims all in a glance. Maybe we should do more philosophy just by staring into each other's eyes.

Why Wikipedia Rules

A lot of people hate on Wikipedia because so many of the entries are of low quality -- unclear, incomplete, false, outdated, and unreliable. But the utility of Wikipedia is unparalleled when it comes to information about the little facets of culture that are too new, too "cool", or too elusive or obscure to warrant the meticulous and numbing labor of hermetic and obsessive pedants. Just look at the wonderful entries on Post-Rock and Pomosexuals, Lolita Fashion, Champagne Socialists, and Soul Grinds, not to mention the mysterious world of Beards. Ironically, this strength of Wikipedia totally obviates our need to maintain friendships with cool people who are in-the-know. We can just spend our extra time wondering if I used "obviates" correctly, or congratulating ourselves that we noticed a spelling mistake in the "soul grind" article.

My Aesthetic Theorist Can Beat Up Your Aesthetic Theorist

It is the philosopher's privilege to call upon the artist to show that what he is about is either good in itself or a means to good. It is the artist's duty to reply: "Art is good because it exalts to a state of ecstasy better far than anything a benumbed moralist can guess at; so shut up." Clive Bell, Art p.79



By the way, Bell is totally channeling Rubens's style here. See below.

Rubens's Self Snapshot

Early in his life as a painter, Rubens painted this. It's normally considered a kind of homage to his friendship in Mantua, with Rubens himself in the forefront, his brother Philip immediately to the left, and on the far right Philip's dear teacher, the classical philologist and Humanist, Justus Lipsius (the other three figures are unknown). But as an homage to a dear friendship, one striking feature of this painting deserves explanation. Study the way Rubens decided to paint himself. Unlike the others, his face glows. His complexion is clean and vivid. Unlike the others, his garb - radiant, elegant, and full - is not a dull shadowy black, but an almost sparkling gray. This vain self-glorification seems inconsistent with mere homage. The light shines on Rubens.

I suggest we understand this painting in a different way. This painting is rather like a self-snapshot we take with our friends. Rubens painted it so he could remember how he felt, who he was with, what mattered to him, when he was in Mantua. It's a painting of himself, for himself. The light shines indeed on Rubens -- like a camera flash at arm's length.