A "This I Believe" essay after the shooting in Orlando 2016

Why I believe in gun control—

This I believe essay.  Note: I believe.  This is why I support gun control.  This is why I want my legislators to support gun control.  I'm not trying to change your view--this is not meant as a persuasive essay full of supportive information.  But I ALSO believe that the more we talk about why we believe what we do, the more we begin to have reasonable open dialogue which respects our mutual humanity and works for commonality.  I hope you believe that bit.

• ·        Because my father collected guns and used them for hunting and target practice.  I was taught to use guns as a tween, with the understanding that guns are killing machines and should always be used as if they will kill every time you touch one.  I remember being shown the can I shot the first time and told “If this bullet can go through metal like this, think about what it can do to the human body.” I believe that all guns are weapons and must be treated as such, no matter your use.
•   Because my models showed me the importance of responsibility: my father renewed his gun license and my mother did a class before receiving her license.  I believe that background checks should be universal.  There should be no loopholes for purchase at gun shows or on the secondary market.  Training should be an expectation of the state, not a voluntary action. 
• ·         Because in 1996, my brother Brian Henry Altvater was murdered, at 20 years old, by his childhood friend. This is a grief I bear always.  I have now lived more years without my brother than with him; I regret that tremendous loss. As I read about the victims of the Orlando shooting, most of them in their 20s, I am reminded of the emptiness that sucks your life out when you hear the news, the bleakness of waiting for news and resolution, and that shock that hits back when you do not realize it will. I believe that no one else should have to experience that.

• ·         Because the man who killed my brother used a gun that was legally owned. I believe in trigger locks to prevent the use of legally owned guns by individuals who are not authorized by the owner to use the gun.  Accidents caused by children not understanding the lethality of the weapon are now a major regular occurrence.  I believe that we need to be responsible for our actions that affect our children and their actions.

• ·         Because the man who killed my brother claimed, in defense and appeal, a brain injury and a psychiatrist-diagnosed dependency disorder that could have explained his actions under the stress of potential change in their relationship by my brother’s engagement and job change. While this was undiagnosed at the time of my brother’s murder and would not have changed my case, it will change the case for others. I believe that we need to treat mental issues more carefully and support the strengthening of regulations that keep guns out of the hands of individuals who have psychiatric concerns.  I believe that strengthening also includes individuals who have misdemeanor domestic violence convictions, misdemeanor hate crime convictions, suspected terrorism (no fly list). I am comfortable with the exclusion of more individuals, though I know that others disagree.

• ·         Because I support our police and military. I believe that we should support those who fight for our safety.  But these are the ONLY individuals who should have the ability to mass fire weapons.  These guns fire 13 bullets per second with incredible force.  Military-style assault weapons and high capacity magazines should be forbidden to regular individuals.

• ·         Because I am raising two beautiful children. I believe I can’t tell you more clearly.  In seeing the horrors of Sandy Hook where children were gunned down in the safe place of their school, or the Aurora movie theater, or the shopping center in Tucson, I cannot believe that we can make the world completely safe for them but that we are obligated to try, just as we try to protect them from the hazards of smoking/second-hand smoke, alcohol, driving, etc. Because I continue to explain why our playground is named for a little girl named Ana Grace Marquez-Greene who died at Sandy Hook and why the flags at my workplace are at half-mast today.  I want to honor children for their lives not mourn them in their deaths.

• ·         Because I am bisexual, because my daughter identifies as gay, because my husband and children are Jewish. I believe that we need to support our minority communities.  I believe that we need to use our words and actions to make it difficult to be racist, bigoted, and hateful. I believe that we need to use our words and actions to heal isolation and wrongs and to be aware of our privileges.

• ·         Because I teach at a university. I believe that the pressures in that community argue strongly for better mental care and support NOT concealed carry laws.  I believe that a “good guy with a gun cannot necessarily stop a bad guy with a gun”, that this is a job for those with training and access—the police.

• ·         Because I am white, middle-class, Christian. I believe I have undue social/cultural privileges by virtue of nothing more than the accident of birth.  I believe gun violence in America disproportionately ruins the lives of Blacks and Latinos, the urban poor.  I believe that my voice and my vote and my actions matter to my fellow beings and I have a responsibility.

The Magdala Stone and What We Think We Know

Happy Chanukah!  As I help my family celebrate their holiday, I am aware of the intense variation in experience that art brings to our experience of religion.  Coincidentally, the NYTimes had a large article about the Magdala Stone yesterday (subscription limited so if you want to read about the find in detail, you can check here and here as well).

The Magdala Stone was found in the remains of a 1st century synagogue in Magdala.  The important context is that the Second Temple was still active in the period between 50 BC-100 AD that this dates to; from coin evidence it may date to 29, and most likely predates the 70 CE destruction of the Temple by the Romans under Titus.  The area was a hotbed of revolutionary fervor against the Romans and it was actually razed (partially? fully?) by the Romans when they conquered Migdal (Magdala). The synagogue was decorated with a mosaic floor and frescoes on the wall.  This large block is decorated on the top (a large rosette, ringed with petals), and the sides, with the most notable side showing a seven-branched menorah, flanked by 2 large amphorae.

Magdala Stone, 1st c. BCE-1st c. CE

One of the striking things for archaeologists and historians is the way this stone calls into question what role the synagogue might have played in this late Second Temple period.  What strikes me is the reminder of how far away the Temple in Jerusalem was, and that a stone like this might be carved with deliberate symbols and suggestive architecture to evoke the holiness of the Temple, to bring it in to the local experience.  There are plenty of medieval Christian examples where round buildings evoke the Holy Sepulchre as a way of connecting the two sites spiritually.  There's no reason not to suggest that the importance of the synagogue as a place of study and assembly is enhanced by an object that connects the viewer to the holiest of places.

A consistent fallacy of Jewish art is the idea that it didn't exist in the pre-modern period, that the Second Commandment prohibiting graven images (Exodus 20: 4-6) prohibited making imagery and displaying it in holy contexts.  Sufficient discovery of mosaics, frescoes, etc. from catacombs and synagogues, especially in border towns like Dura Europas, have long argued for the production of Jewish art in religious contexts.  It seems important to me to specify that these works exhibit a lot of what we consider outsider traits in production and that we see them here on the Magdala Stone: very flat, linear carving style of what are three-dimensional objects (perhaps countering the false naturalism of Greco-Roman idols), tremendous shifts in scale (amphora as large as the architecture) and perspectives (often showing profile and aerial views mixed together).  When the NYT writes:

Ms. Talgam concluded that she was looking at a three-dimensional depiction of the Temple of Herod, including its most sacred inner sanctum, known as the Holy of Holies.

I think it's really important to spell out what we mean.  The Stone itself is a three-dimensional altar-like or table form.  The decoration is emphatically not.  It resists the context of the mainstream artistic style of the oppressors.

I do wonder about function here.  We know mosaics and frescoes jazz up those plain stone walls while serving a potential didactic function.  Was this a spot for sacrifices which we thought only happened in the Temple? Could we set the Torah here for reading and studying?  Was it a podium for speaking from? 

Ultimately, I think the point of this stone is to remind us that religious experience is fluid in space, time, and audience.  What a good message for Diaspora Judaism at Chanukah.  What a good message in a time of religious fundamentalism, prejudice, and fear.

The life of museums

I was struck today by an article in the New York Times by Graham Bowley, "Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery Reopens with a New Focus" (subscription limit on free reads; go to the Museum link--following--if you don't want to waste your free reads), on the redesign and reopening of the Smithsonian Museum's Renwick Gallery.  The Renwick is the part of the American Art museums that deals with "craft and decorative art".

These are loaded terms--CRAFT and DECORATIVE.  They imply less impressive circumstances of commissioning and viewing, less expensive materials, not within the Salon hierarchy of value placed on "fine arts", less skillful artists whose names we often don't know.  We picture baskets and grandfather clocks and silver table settings.  You've been to those nearly empty galleries with dusty roped off chairs and brocade settees and been frustrated because all you'd like to do is sit down for a moment.  We're not taught well how to look at these objects because we see them every day.  We "get" the idea that these are nicer bowls than what we eat cereal in just from the context that they are in a museum but we don't know how to think about them in the place of history.  

There's more than one aspect of this discussion going on.  There's clearly the preservation mission of the museum.  To recognize the traditions of making an object that link it to a regional or period way of working with the materials is what leads us to understand colonial American silver or Gullah baskets.  These are styles and methods that will disappear with time, new social priorities and aesthetics, globalization/cross-pollination.

Gullah Fanner Basket, Lynette Youson, 2002

Tea kettle, Kierstede, 1710, silver

But the Renwick focuses on 20th and 21st century works, and there's a duty here to bring viewers into the issues of contemporary art as applied to these media.  To realize that when we understand the traditions of silversmithing in America, we can see a work like Tea for One, by Jeffrey Clancy, 1976 and maybe see the commentaries on silverwork, on tea as a social phenomenon, on gun ownership in America, the blend of "ornament and utility" that this is part of the artist's series.  There's a beauty and a danger here.

Jeffrey Clancy, Tea for One, 2002

The Renwick is showcasing some new galleries with works like Jennifer Angus's In the Midnight Garden that draw attention to our lived environment (and for me, the traditions of wallpaper under William Morris and the Victorians/Edwardians).  Her use of cochineal dye, made from insects, and the careful patterns of flowers, whirls, and skulls create a vibrant and vivid space.  The materials are bugs themselves--drawing attention to our natural world and our interdependence. “Our mortality is closely linked to the environment,” she said. “The fact of the matter is we can’t live without insects.” (from NYT article)  What draws me to this work is that it is part of our space; it shapes our whole experience. 

Jennifer Angus, In the Midnight Garden, 2015

Craft and Design are immersive--because we experience them in our daily lives.  So to see them as art, we have to break that habit of dismissiveness, but also see these works as part of our cultural discussion.  “It’s not enough to update the building,” said Elizabeth Broun, the Renwick’s director. “We have to rethink.” (NYT article)  Also: The museum wanted art that “looks out,” she said. “It is not a precious object in a studio. It engages the world in a broader way.”

This is somewhat a false distinction as artists are still working in the studio, some with fine materials, some with delicate and technically intense methods.  BUT...the sense that "decorative" art is conversationally engaged with its audience, in a way that the "high" arts of painting and sculpture have always been acknowledged to be doing, is an important change.

Take a moment to watch their 2 minute video on the upcoming show and opening, Wonder.  You'll be amazed at where contemporary "craft" is going:

Lying to ourselves: Plagiarism

Wearing my academic, non-art-historian hat today...

In my work as a professor and now as an academic dean dealing with cases referred by other faculty, I have seen a lot of plagiarism.  It comes in all forms: most usually out of laziness and further out of procrastination.

Today what I'm writing about is our "intent to deceive" and rationalizing.  I actually think very little plagiarism (as opposed to some other forms of academic dishonesty like looking at someone else's test, etc.) comes out of a real intent to pass off words as one's own, in order to take credit for the idea or phrase.  Some is a process of immediate rationalizing, and it happens as quickly and easily as the cutting and pasting. 

"I read it and it's clearly right because that's what I would have said too."
"I couldn't say it better."
"This person's an expert and I'm just a student."

But when caught, there's a whole other level of rationalizing that happens:

"I didn't take that much. It's like 2 sentences."
"I didn't take any exact words.  I wrote each paragraph in my own way."
"I thought that I only had to use quotes and citations if I took the words directly."
"I thought if I cited it at the end, it would be enough."
"I didn't know how to cite it."
"If I had meant to plagiarize, would I have taken it directly from SparkNotes (or some equally easy source)?"

Of the rationalizations that make me angriest are the ones that actually do suggest that the speaker is completely aware of the rationalization:

"I e-mailed you my notes copy by mistake. It wasn't what I meant to submit."
"I left off the citation page."
"I didn't think you would notice. I did it on my last paper and you never said anything." 
"I didn't think it would matter that much.  This isn't a big assignment."

Lying is apparently a very normal developmental thing we do to cover ourselves when we commit a wrong.  (a nice discussion that summarizes our childhood lying is here in Slate.)  Rationalizing and lying seem to be hand and hand here.

Repeatedly comes the advice that parents (read here teachers) should not give the child the opportunity to lie.  In the Slate article the example is: rather than saying "Did you take the cookie?", react with "I know you took the cookie and now you're full and the consequence is no cookies tomorrow night."  So the advice to professors is often--give assignments that don't encourage the behavior. I often do this--choosing artists and artworks about whom there is little written (and I often have students who say "I couldn't find anything on the internet" to whom I reply, "yes, I know").  Choosing assignments that directly require synthesis of ideas and new applications of ideas is a lot of work and it doesn't always get at what we want the student to learn.  There are reasons why certain assignments are commonplace--they get at the heart of the matter for understanding.

Also repeatedly comes the advice to separate the lie from the misdeed.  I had a case where the student had not done the assignment for a professor within the parameters of the assignment but then had lied and said that he had done it as she had asked.  This happened twice.  The student was reluctant to separate the lie from the misdeed, in part because he didn't feel he had committed a misdeed.  

Also repeatedly comes the advice to create a culture of honesty.  If every professor discusses plagiarism as clearly and fully as possible...If every assignment were set up so as to encourage specifics and synthesis...If every student valued the interaction with professors, tutors, and peers enough to use their resources well and wisely...If every infraction were dealt with swiftly and clearly according to agreed upon policies...If we model right behavior in our own public lives/words....If we encourage students to value honesty...

I'm doing these things.  I'm creating new assignments often.  I discuss plagiarism in my class.  I have writing examples up on Blackboard and I walk students through them before the first paper.  I could do more peer review so as to have them catch each other...They use SafeAssign (a version like Turnitin which helps catch plagiarism).  I make it clear that there are consequences for not including citations.  I try to warn them repeatedly of due dates, extra help resources, etc. so that I am not encouraging situations that force them to panic and plagiarize.  We do lots of in-class writing to hone their skills (and so I know who they are as writers).  We have multiple paper assignments.  I extensively comment and review plagiarism offenses when they occur; I penalize them and follow through on what I have stated on the syllabus.

I know I have colleagues who do these things, more who do than do not.

So is it just human nature?  Is this an intractable problem?  Do we just cut it down as small as we can and deal with the instances as they inevitably come? 

What do your institutions (past, present, future) do that's working?

Posted with comment: Art in Island Museum and the Viewing Experience

Recently, Hyperallergic (an art website) published an article, An Art Museum Designed for Taking Selfies, about the Art in Island Museum in Manila.  The gallery is set up with high-res posters of great masterworks from museums all over the world with the express purpose of taking selfies.  I'm going to use Jean Francois Millet's 1857 painting, The Gleaners, to talk about the pros and cons of this experience.

Visitors at the Art in Island

Millet, Gleaners, 1857, oil on canvas

Part of the difficulty for me comes with the idea of the AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE.  If we're talking about this painting we want to acknowledge that the Selfie-Gleaners is a very different work than the Millet-Gleaners.  It is larger, both in the canvas (the actual painting is 33x44") and in spatial representation where the women come forward from the canvas.  The color is substantially different (based on the original, which I have seen, the green is far too vibrant both in the field and the dress, the blue cap too light/acidic).  A high resolution image can never really replace the tonal and textual variants of the brush work; it is far flatter than what you see in person.  And heck, Michelangelo's Pieta is a sculpture, not an artificially perspectivally rendered picture.

But am I being fair to the Selfie-Gleaners when I have to admit that relatively few people see the Millet-Gleaners in person at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris?  Admittedly, the Musee sees about 3 million viewers annually (based on 2009 figures) but that seems like a drop in the bucket when you consider the internet exposure.  There isn't necessarily an AUTHENTIC viewing experience going on for most folks.

My major objection here is the subject change that the Art in Island folks have affected on the painting.  Millet-Gleaners is about the societal reality of the mid-19th century which left some in such poverty that they gathered the wheat remains in the fields just to have a small amount to eat.  It was back-breaking work with poor reward and subject to the field owner's directives of how clean to gather in the crop.  And critics at the time felt the stress of the Socialism--Millet's painting spoke to the current social realities of the 1848 Revolution, with its labor and food riots, and harkened to the upheavals of the 1793 Revolution; Marx and Engels would publish the Communist Manifesto in 1848.  It is impossible to see this as anything other than a glorification of the value of Work, with a class emphasis on the foregrounded poor and the distant and inaccessible wealth.  Unlike his contemporaries, Daumier and Courbet, who both ended up in political trouble (jail, exile) for their leanings, Millet denied the political interpretation of his work, arguing that he was painting the honesty of the human condition.  It was not possible in France of the mid-19th c. to extricate the work from its Socialist reception.

The Selfie-Millet gives the women paintbrushes.  It changes the narrative completely.  While there is a referential element of "What Makes Art?" implicit here, it gives a false impression of the work, taking it completely out of its creative and historical contexts.  It denies its history.

The Selfie-Millet also circumscribes what you experience in the art.  You take your places amidst the scene.  You are encouraged to catch the shoe of Fragonard's swinging woman (but from a position that is not that in the painting--of the lover looking up her skirts while her husband unknowingly pulls her on the swing). Napoleon crowns you, not Empress Josephine.  But you aren't allowed to BE the woman on the swing or Napoleon.  It is NOT a neutral experience.

To some extent, that's what a selfie is about.  Selfies put the individual into the context of the work.  They are documentary--a record of being at a place or event.  But that documentation is fundamentally present centered and a historical--it pulls the work of art forward into the moment of time belonging to the viewer.  The museum experience--with its neutral walls and quiet atmosphere and extensive wall-text or audio tour--is about putting the viewer into the history of the art work (or at least a neutral space out of time).

If the viewer thinks they have gone to an art museum, then the Art in Island space is bad.  It is not a museum.  It is not even a real experience of the artwork.  But it certainly exists in the context of novelty entertainment--cardboard beach cutouts of musclemen and bikini girls, rodeo cowboys, families in WWI airplanes (all photos in this book before 1930 so you have a sense of this phenomenon).  To that extent, perhaps it's good that the Selfie-Millet is SO out of context--you cannot mistake it for the real work or the real experience. I'd clearly prefer it if all of the works were significantly different from their originals.

Perhaps the Art in Island experience makes it sufficiently fun to interact with art that a viewer would be more likely to go to a real museum and see the art.  I don't buy it.  To be successful as entertainment, Art in Island must crop paintings, change their size, rearrange their space so as to make the viewer to interact with them.  The Art in Island experience is about shaping your self with art as a backdrop.  An art museum seems sterile and flat if it it is specifically set up to NOT direct your experience in the most individualistic/self-centered way.  Maybe this is the distinction folks made for years with television--that it was the dumbing-down, passive experience of theater or live story-telling.  We could argue whether that is true (now or ever) for television, but I do think this is making the experience of artworks EASIER, less complicated, more accessible for the viewer.

If human beings aren't always easy animals, I see no reason why we should expect our experience of the culture we make to be easy.

Leftist Tricks! A Response to John C. Wright's essay

I don't know John C. Wright and I understand that he is a controversial figure in the science fiction world.  I was directed to this essay, "How We've Been Robbed of Beauty by the Left" by a friend who thinks I would be interested in the ideas.  I'm going to try to stick to the ideas in the essay because we clearly see art and art history very differently.  Other writers are also tackling this same subject.


Wright starts his essay:

To be a man means to seek a truth that satisfies the mind, a virtue that sates the conscience, and a beauty that breaks the heart. Deprive a man of any of these things, and he will find neither happiness nor rest.

To a degree, I agree with him here. This is why human beings seem compelled to create.  We use the visual work to express our inner beliefs, to bring them out to where they can be seen by others and shared and discussed (embraced and denied).  But I think that we can't diffuse these three into separate categories.  To a degree--if a work presents a truth that speaks to our understanding of the world, then it is compelling in the same way that beauty is compelling.

Wright seems torn between an idea of "true beauty" and "sublime beauty" and this "Leftist" idea that 

According to the Left, beauty is a matter of taste, and arbitrary taste at that. There is no discussion of taste because to give reasons to prefer tasteful to tasteless things is elitist, nasty, uncouth and inappropriate. To have taste implies that some cultures produce more works of art and better than others, and this raises the uncomfortable possibility that love of beauty is Eurocentric, or even racist. To admire beauty has become a hate crime.

I believe that my idea of beauty is shaped by my own taste.  I like some ways of handling surface better than others--I love the sfumato that draws Correggio's figures from the darkness and gives them such softness.  Cranach's even light and hard edges seem false to me.  I am drawn to some physical types rather than others.  Give me Correggio's Venus over Cranach's any day.  Cranach's elongation of the head and neck, his handling of the transparent drape over the pale skin, his perfect orb breasts were certainly considered beautiful in their day.  But so too were Correggio's handling of skin, shadow and light, and curves and flesh.  In the same period! These two artists were both successful; patrons found their work beautiful at the time.  (History matters to our understanding of beauty)

Lucas Cranach, Venus and Cupid, ca. 1530

Correggio, The Education of Cupid, ca. 1528

 It isn't just a question of "taste" and "tasteless".  It isn't a question of one culture producing "more" works of beauty than others; it is a question of that culture producing more works which appeal to me as a beholder.  I am drawn to European works because I am shaped by that same European culture.  I recognize that there are things to be appreciated in African masks and that they must be considered under the idea of compelling expression.  Do I find them beautiful?  Sometimes.  Do I find them harder to respond to? Often.  Do I find it worthwhile to try to see what the culture felt was beauty in them? Always.

As a relevant aside--Every semester I teach medieval art, some student writes on their evaluation that they wish we had studied more secular art, that all this Christian art is the same.  The fact that the culture prioritized the production of Christian art--putting its economic support behind its values and beliefs--shapes what we have to see now.  Am I drawn to it because I am also a Christian?  Maybe.  But is that iconographic argument going to shut out my appreciation for Muslim geometric ornament?  Probably not.  There we begin to compare apples and oranges.

Wright then gets tries to get us caught in the art versus kitsch controversy.  It's a false controversy.  We all recognize different  venues for decoration.  No one puts the Mona Lisa and wallpaper in the same category of "beauty".  I'm not going to rehearse Clement Greenberg or Walter Benjamin or any of a dozen theorists here.

Wright asserts: "If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then there is no such thing as training the taste."

This is part of what culture does, Mr. Wright.  It trains us to believe certain things are valuable because of an idea of beauty.  This is how we have supermodels--women who embody our cultural ideal of beauty.  (And why none of them look like they were painted by Rubens...)  Our culture trains us in an idea of beauty from the very beginning--colors for genders, Barbies for girls and Batman for boys.  Training the taste is about understanding what a culture values and WHY.

Wright gets at a central tenet of modern artistic theory:

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then anything, anything at all, can be declared to be beautiful merely by the artist. Like God creating light from nothing by the power of His word, the artist creates beauty not by any genius nor craftsmanship, but by his naked fiat. It is beautiful not because he actually created anything, but only because he says so.

But Wright misses the essential dynamic of this equation.  It is only in the viewer's response to the work that the declaration is validated. Willem de Kooning articulates the dynamic really well:

Painting isn’t just the visual thing that reaches your retina, it’s what’s behind it. I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in -- drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or an idea. It doesn’t matter if it’s different from mine as long as it comes from the painting which has its own integrity and intensity.

So far, this is all one problem with Wright's argument: beauty isn't easily articulated and agreed upon.

The second problem is the ahistoricity of Wright's discussion.

All of Wright's examples are extremes of artistic discussion, prompted by issues of modernism NOT of issues of beauty.  He cites Duchamp's urinal (1917) as an example of an artist trying to put over this issue of anything being "beautiful".  Duchamp isn't making something "beautiful".  He's making a readymade, a work chosen by an artist to be considered in a new context. And to see Duchamp outside the context of Post World-War I art and the Dada movement, whose aim was to be shocking and to counter expectations of "good taste", or outside the multiple editions of this work, or outside Duchamp's own personality is to fail to understand that moment in history.  You are subjecting historical values to your present moment.  The objectives were totally different.

Among other examples, Wright mentions Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, 1987.

I teach this photograph in my modern art class.  I begin by teaching it without its title.  We talk about the warm colors, the glow of the crucifix, the soft edges, the surface speckles.  The students find it a positive image--often beautiful, Mr. Wright--until you discuss the circumstances of making the photograph.  But as a Catholic, Serrano is addressing the bodily incarnation of human beings and the beauty of the sacrifice of Christ in that human form; Serrano uses his own body to shape that idea.  Serrano describes himself as a Christian artist of today. 

In addition to choosing the most controversial, deliberately un-beautiful works of modern art (such as Piero Manzoni's Artist's Shit 1961, Damien Hirst's A Thousand Years 1990, and Tracy Emin's My Bed 1998), Wright suggests that "Ours is the first generation in the history of Christendom to have no fine arts at all. The public has turned away from the neurotic wallowing in self-disgust that dominates the fine arts and seeks to slake its craving for beauty in the popular arts..."  Nonsense.  John Singer Sargent, the American Impressionist, was still painting in 1915, making him a contemporary of Duchamp.  In the midst of World War I, plenty of artists were trying to make conventionally beautiful works:

Maynard Dixon, Corral Dust, 1915

Louis Comfort Tiffany, 1915

 

Patrick Henry Bruce, Composition I, 1915

It's a question of what you want to believe is "BEAUTIFUL".  Is modern abstraction not beautiful in its undulating shapes and colors (and its desire to communicate artistic feeling without propaganda)?

Wright states: 

At any point before World War One, if you asked any philosopher or intellectual what was the point of art, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, all of them of each generation all the way back to Socrates would have said the purpose of art is to seek beauty. Socrates himself would have said that by beauty, by the strong love and longing created in the human breast at the sight of something sublime, we are drawn out of ourselves, and are carried step by step away from the mundane to the divine.

Socrates actually said that art is imitative of reality and therefore removed far from the divine.  The ideal of the bed is imitated by the carpenter when he makes a bed and that the painter or poet merely imitates the imitation (Book X of the Republic).  If, as Keats suggests, beauty is truth, then the accurate depiction of the blobfish is beautiful because it is truthful.  You can swing the quotes but "ALL" is simply not true, Mr. Wright, and even our Classical philosophers  had trouble defining beauty.  To bring historicity back into this--World War I changed a lot of things.  And our world is definitively not the world of the Renaissance or the Classical Roman Empire. (Art and politics is tricky--Hitler's support for Aryan inspired figure types? Beautiful from the perspective of line and proportion and color but scary in the ideology it supports.  What about Stalin?)

I find Mr. Wright's degeneration into a class split that reveals the supposed strength of our character reductive and offensive:

Imagine two men: one stands in a bright house, tall with marble columns adorned with lavish art, splendid with shining glass images of saints and heroes, mementos of great sorrow and great victories both past and promised. A polyphonic choir raises their voices in golden song, singing an ode to joy. The other stands in a slum with peeling wallpaper, or a roofless ruin infested with rats, hemmed by feces-splashed gray concrete walls lurid with jagged graffiti, chalked with swearwords and flickering neon signs advertising strip joints. Rap music thuds nearby, ear-splitting, yowling obscenities. A bureaucrat approaches each man and orders him to do some routine and routinely humiliating task, such as pee in a cup to be drug tested, or be fingerprinted, or suffer an anal cavity search, or surrender his weapons, or his money, or his name. Which of the two men is more likely to take a stand on principle not to submit?
Which one will automatically and unconsciously assume that human life is sacred, human rights are sacrosanct, and that Man is made in the image and likeness of God? The man surrounded by godlike images? Or the man surrounded by mocking filth?
Which one, in other words, is more likely to fall prey to the worldview of a dark world cosmos without meaning, without truth, without virtue?

These word portraits are not realities, either one.  The rich are not celebrating their lives in odes to joy; the poor aren't living in the abjection of feces-splashed walls.  These are generic straw men.  What gives Mr. Wright the right to assume that from our slough of despond, despite being surrounded by the filth of our modern lives, we do not aspire to virtue and dignity with a fierceness not experienced by those in the comfort of beauty?

Collecting strategies: Ephemera

Collecting ephemera is always difficult.  How do you live in the historical moment and yet stand outside it enough to be able to know what will have value?

The Victoria and Albert Museum, one of England's premier museums with a long history of collecting contemporary design, has developed a collecting strategy they're calling "Rapid Response Collecting".  In their press release:

The objects [which include the toy below, the first 3d printed gun, a pair of jeans from the factory that collapsed in Dhaka Bangladesh, Katy Perry false eyelashes, a new designed cable for taller and faster elevators] have been recently acquired as part of the Museum's new approach to collecting contemporary design and architecture, known as 'Rapid Response Collecting'. This new strategy will help the V&A engage in a timely way with important events that shape, or are shaped by design, architecture and technology. Regularly updated with new objects, it will be the first gallery in the Museum that can be responsive to global events, technological advances, political changes or pop cultural phenomena that have an impact on art, design and architecture. The long-term result will be a permanent legacy of objects in the collection that will help future visitors and researchers to access material culture in the 21st century.

Ikea soft toy, now in V&A collection

What's behind this strategy?  It seems to me motivated by a couple of things:

1. The very real pace of ephemera in modern cultural life.  Modern packaging and things like lottery tickets, photos, etc.--all the sort of things collected by the Ephemera Society of America, in fact--are transient.  They aren't designed with the idea of lasting forever, the way a painting or sculpture is designed to transcend its own time.

2. The pressure of a consumerist society which manufactures so many material objects.  With so many brands of soap and so many postcards and advertisements, we're simply hard pressed to choose and so there is the desire to collect everything.  In fact, this article brought the new strategy to my attention and it made the point:  
"It’s great that a huge, historical museum like the V&A wants to engage with the present in such a tangible way, but what’s been announced about Rapid Response Collecting so far seems like a random jumble more than an articulated vision. Hopefully the curators will pull everything together in a more meaningful way in the permanent museum gallery dedicated to the program, which opens to the public July 5."

3. The connection between the museum and culture as a driver of culture.  To what extent does the Museum create value by owning and displaying an object?  To what extent do companies like Ikea design and promote to reach BOTH mass and exclusive markets?  I'm clearly NOT a design historian precisely because I look at this Ikea toy and think: why collect this and not Ikea fabrics?To what extent is one MORE culturally representative?  Do I really understand the wider culture from the corner in which I'm standing?

4. Pockets! The fear here is that if you w...a...i...t...to see whether the doll will be the next Cabbage Patch, you might not be able to collect the best example.  Perhaps it will have disappeared completely, despite momentary cultural prominence.  Perhaps--horrors!--children will have played with it and the best examples will still be dirty and torn and broken.  Perhaps you will have to pay more than you wanted to... Maybe someone else will get it before you. 

That seems to me a big issue here.  The V&A seems to be saying--better to spend now, collect everything and sort it out as history determines cultural path.  Then whatever you don't want, you can deaccession on Ebay. This strategy depends on money: having the money to get into the game at a certain level, the money to buy somewhat indiscriminately, the money to house/store these objects, the money to create a curatorial vision from the objects, the money to deaccession works when they don't fit that vision.  And clearly, collecting ephemera depends on having deep pockets.

Does that mean we shouldn't collect ephemera?  obviously, I think there's a value to seeing our culture through the eyes of what we created on a mundane level.  Should we wait, carefully following the trends of history and hoping to catch the right moment?  Is it better to collect widely or focusedly? I think as a historian I advocate focusing, trying to watch what's happening in the media to help understand the culture.  Knowing that we will never catch it all.  Hoping that as social history develops, we can catch ephemera before it disappears, rather than as it appears. 

Will these collections tell us as much in a hundred years as we imagine they will tell the space aliens who dig up our ruined civilization thousands of years from now?  Is this all a strategy of our human desire to stand in the water of culture, gathering up a small handful of what flows rapidly by?  Is it our human nature to want to gather in these objects because by extension, they are proof of our presence, of our importance?