"Reduced by its ignorance into regurgitating regurgitations"

Richard Serra is right when he "refuses to call his picture [above left] a work of art." It is a party-line tantrum in paint with nothing original or intelligent to feed a viewer's mind or heart. (We've blogged about Serra's disconnect with audiences before.) Franz Kline's superficially similar untitled painting (1957) at right IS a work of art. As Michael Klein wrote of the great abstract expressionist's oeuvre, "The internal architecture of his monumental black-and-white paintings makes them a tribute to the vitality of abstract painting per se, but also refers to the American landscape that formed and influenced Kline's vision."

"It's hard to imagine what influence most of this work could have on the next generation of artists," writes a dispirited Blake Gopnik re the Whitney Biennial, "the country's most prestigious and comprehensive roundup of contemporary art," and we couldn't agree more:

The state of our nation's artists is grim. As perhaps it should be, given their views on the state of the nation and on the world at large. . . . It's hard to think of any group show as big as this 2006 Whitney Biennial that has offered such a consistent, coherent vision.

Caught inside his Pauline-Kael bubble of self-regard and navel gazing, Gopnik mistakes the culturally inbred stable of New York celebrity artists for "our nation's artists" and doesn't recognize the irony of what he terms "a consistent, coherent vision." Weren't artists supposed to be unique visionaries? Can you say groupthink?

"In this Jordan Wolfson work, a man delivers Charlie Chaplin's final speech from 'The Great Dictator' (1940) in sign language," runs the caption of another Whitney work. "Post critic Blake Gopnik said: 'The passion of [the original film's] speech are turned into futile gesture, unintelligible to all but a few viewers.'"

We checked out the WaPo's slide show of selected works from the show and found one -- a video by Jordan Wolfson pictured above -- that had something to say to us, although probably the opposite of what the artist intended. We're assuming Wolfson suffers, like his fellow Whitney "visionaries," from BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) and -- rather than trying to say something about the Nazi-like rise of Islamist radicalism while England slept -- had something on the order of Bush=Hitler™ in mind. We loved The One-Minute Pundit, Eugene David's take:

The always contemptible Whitney Biennial has come at an apt time, and it and its partner in risible pomposity the Os-CARS® show us how psychotically detached from life AHT has become. Perhaps all this flatulence in oils and videos does symbolize our general ennui, but I prefer to think it reflects the brain-deadness of a self-appointed elite that stopped learning and thinking and growing decades ago, and is reduced by its ignorance into regurgitating regurgitations. But the truly depressing thing is there's no grand new cultural broom to sweep these bozos clean from the landscape; they replicate like amoeba, or rather like gray goo, and leave our consciences smothered with their nothingness. And in that sense, they damningly reflect the public's impotence.

Not to worry, Eugene. The public's impotence is a thing of the past. As Glenn Reynolds writes in An Army of Davids, "small is the new big."

Comments

[goomp]

A world full of information is pouring down upon us in a volume undeamed of ninety years ago. It takes a bit of time to learn how to absorb it and separate the wheat from the chaff. A sinecured cultural elite lost in its hubris has declared it understands when in reality it generally understands nothing of the real world of human nature. The elites' grip on their claim as worshipped founts of knowledge is slipping as the masses slowly learn to handle the modern torrent of new thouhgts and ideas.

[NahnCee]

You don't think the world-wide rush to make up creative cartoons in response to the Mohammadan's tantrums means anything?

[Scott]

Looking at that first black and white... my first reaction was, what a goofy, sad little piece o' poo that is. If nothing else I thought art was supposed to stop short of "spelling it out" - that's what billboards are for after all. Art is supposed to make you work and then (hopefully) be delighted when you "get it".

But then I thought about it a little more and mused that it could actually be taken as a somewhat wry statement of the reflexive, unthinking anti-Bush sentiment repeated like gospel by so many uninformed lefties - it has after all gotten to be such a mindlessly accepted and repeated theme that in a way, Serra's piece could be seen as a powerful if simplistic spoof of the rest that get almost as blunt, and seem to be drawing nearer that point every day.

That would have been reasonably brave and clever. Sadly, it looks like Serra has put this forward in all earnestness as his contribution to the BDS movement, and in so doing has helped usher it on past its last pretensions of depth or sophistication.