Circular Cruises/This Is Not Art

This Is Not Art

30 June 2001

Most of the images in this essay do not belong to me. They are used for purposes of comment and criticism, as permitted by Fair Use provisions of copyright law. After all, the essay wouldn't make a lot of sense if I didn't show the works I was talking about. Full source credits for the images appear at the end.

Once upon a time, on this very website, I had extensive montages of altered and spliced photographs, drawings, and other visual items. In fact, during the beginning of the life of this site, that was the primary type of content.

A fair number of these collages and pieces monteés contained in them somewhere an impression of one of my rubber stamps, a stamp I've had for years. It says "This Is Not Art."

Some viewers probably figured this was meant to be Magritte irony: Oh, look, it's a work of art which is paradoxically claiming that it isn't art. That would be a fun game, and I am certainly capable of playing it, but in the case of my montages I was being completely straightforward: I was using the stamp to announce my ambivalence over whether the work was actually art. In fact, I was pretty sure it wasn't ... and as time went by, and I became more and more sure, I gradually removed all my montages from the site.

I have never regretted the loss. I try to put ideas on the site, and those pieces had no ideas. Only images.

I believe that it's a fool's game, this business of "what is art?" - and historically I have tried to avoid the question in real conversation with real humans. At best it ends with people agreeing to disagree. At worst it ends with shouting, anger, and severely damaged friendships. We will never agree on art.

So why am I writing about definitions of art, breaking my own rules? Well, there are two reasons.

The simpler one is that sometimes I want to react negatively to an artist - either in my journal, these essays, or some other text on my site - and I can't tell you why I am reacting negatively to the artist unless you are able to understand my peculiar set of ground rules to begin with. So you might say that I am not trying to explain art (which really would be folly); I'm just trying to explain myself (as usual).

I've never understood the scorn people have for the old cliché "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." It seems to me that taste really is the final arbiter. If you don't happen to like something, you really don't need to justify it to anyone, nor have reasons for your dislike. However, it helps - if you know you're going to end up talking about art sometimes anyway - if you can justify your reactions. That's where I am now. In my case the statement is more like, "I know a little something about art, and it still doesn't affect what I like."

The more complex reason I have for writing this is that a combination of recent circumstances have brought the topic to the forefront of my brain, and until I get all this recollection and rumination out of my head, it'll keep taking up space there. That's the part that'll take me another several thousand words to get through.

So let's start.

On the twenty-fourth of June, there was an article in the Boston Globe from a London correspondent, talking about the public reaction to a new work of art in Trafalgar Square. Now, if we must generalize: I have always thought of Brits as being rather no-nonsense people, collectively, so many of the quotations in this article do not surprise me at all. It seems that most of the interviewees don't like the new piece. They'd rather have more of the same stuff that's everywhere else in Trafalgar: Statues of dead war heroes and politicians.

I understand wanting to keep public art conservative and inoffensive to all - which is why most public art is so horrible - but I fancy I can also understand what was going through artist Rachel Whiteread's head when she made the new piece.

You see, there was a plinth which had been empty for over a hundred years - an elevated empty place, built to hold a statue. If I were Whiteread and I were looking at that plinth, I would think: This plinth has, in its own way, become as much of a fixture as a statue would have over this period of time. The empty space on top of the plinth has become a presence in and of itself, though no one really is aware they think of it that way. Nothingness can be something, in the right context. How do I call people's attention to the fact that the empty plinth has taken on a life of its own without actually changing the emptiness of it? I mean, if I put a big flashing arrow on the plinth pointing down at it, I have filled the space, changed the context, and destroyed the thing I'm commenting on. There has got to be a way to fill the space without actually filling it.

I think Whiteread's solution is magnificent:

Monument. Rachel Whiteread, 2001.

Make a transparent copy of the plinth, invert it, and display it on top of the real one.

This is very clearly not to everyone's tastes - and again, I won't fight with that, I believe that personal taste is the final arbiter in these matters. But to my taste, this works as art, because it has one of the fundamental aspects of art: It has a goal. (And it's clever. My tastes are such that I am likely to give bonus points for being clever.)

A few years ago, the four words after the colon in the paragraph above would have been "It has a message." But I've changed that. I no longer think "message" is entirely accurate. Art does not necessarily need to be saying something, it doesn't even need to be achieving something. But I do need - absolutely require - to get the sense, from a work, that the artist had a goal in mind when she began it. (Whether she accomplished the goal is irrelevant; I just need to know what she was trying to do.)

And to get that sense of a goal, the goal has to be accurately communicated to the viewer. There has to be, if you'll forgive the phrasing, some communication between the artist and viewer, using the artwork as the medium of transit.

The biggest problem with "art needs to have a goal" as a philosophy is: What if that goal is so far beyond your ken that you can't see it? What if that goal is based on a culture, doctrine, discipline, or other piece of knowledge that you just plain don't possess? In other words, if you don't personally get the joke, how do you know it's a valid joke?

This was brought home to me with the work of Mark Tansey, who is one of my favorite painters, but whose jokes are often completely over my head. By choice.

See, Tansey's primary targets are the people who deconstruct art and/or literature - people who write and talk art/lit theory as a profession. This immediately makes Tansey and myself kindred spirits, because I believe that all such professional theorists need to get real jobs. (Yes, this essay is art theory, but I am goofing in my spare time. Trying to do this professionally strikes me as one of the more useless B-Ark-style human pursuits.)

Because I make it a point to give such theorists a wide berth, I often don't understand some of Tansey's jokes. And yet: Tansey is good enough that sometimes you can see what he's driving at, even if you don't completely get the point. That, too, is a mark of skill.

Four examples with decreasing complexity.

Derrida Queries de Man. Mark Tansey, 1990.

Of the four images, this is the one which needs the most backstory. With the other three, even if you don't understand the more complicated jokes, you can get something from the image itself. Here you can't, unless you are familiar with the jumping-off point: the famous illustration of Holmes and Moriarty fighting to the death at Reichenbach Falls.

Illustration by Sidney Paget for "The Final Problem" by Arthur Conan Doyle, 1893.

Even coming to the picture with no prior information, though, the viewer should at least be able to tell that the word "queries" in the title is ironic. That's a hell of a query going on there.

Further knowledge unveils the real joke: This painting is a comment on literary theory, and the cliffs on which the "query" is taking place are literally made of words.

Jacques Derrida is the inventor of "deconstruction" as a formal theory. He is known for two primary points of ideology: First, that all philosophical doctrines or metaphysical certainties are suspect, and second, that the world is a vast text or dense system of meanings, whose meanings can only be revealed and utilized by taking apart the text into layers of subtext. I agree strongly with the first point, I agree mostly with the first clause of the second point, and I despise him for the final clause.

Paul de Man was also a deconstructionist and collaborated with Derrida among others. The reason Tansey shows them "querying" each other this way is probably because de Man criticized Derrida's "close reading" - read, deconstruction - of Rousseau, whom he said was "one of the group of writers that is always being systematically misread." Them's fighting words.

N.B: Don't assume I'm a huge maven - like I said, I try to avoid knowing about people like this. The Holmes joke I got instantly because I am a huge Holmes fan; I got Derrida and de Man bios from my encyclopedia of literature, and the Rousseau comments from my book on Mark Tansey.

Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Everything In Sight. Mark Tansey, 1981.

This one gives you more without research. Even looking at it completely cold, you see that this man is trying to clean everything around him, armed with only a brush and pail. His task is hopeless; the work literally goes on forever.

That is the point of the painting. Further knowledge only adds meaning, without ever affecting the central goal. The man in the painting is author Alain Robbe-Grillet. Here is what my encyclopedia of literary figures says:

Robbe-Grillet claimed to write novels for his time, especially attentive "to the ties that exist between object, gestures, and situations, avoiding all psychological and ideological 'commentary' on the actions of the characters" .... Robbe-Grillet's is a world of objects, hard, polished surfaces, with only the measurable characteristics of pounds, inches, and wavelengths of reflected light ....

Tansey is saying that Robbe-Grillet's task of "cleansing" the world of preconceived notions or "commentary" is impossible, and by implication is criticizing certain art theorists who held this same "cleansing" as desirable in the visual arts.

Myth of Depth. Mark Tansey, 1984.

(Partially cropped, w/scan marks down center. See notes at end on Tansey scans.)

Simpler still, yet effective. This painting is about the fact that paintings create the illusion of depth. The waves look like a three-dimensional surface, but they're not - it's just a painting! And the man walking on the water is demonstrating that he is, in fact, in a painting ... to the chagrin of the people in the boat.

It is not necessary to know that the man walking on the water is Jackson Pollock. In fact, it doesn't even add much to the joke.

(For the true completist: The people in the boat are, more or less left-to-right, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler (barely visible), Mark Rothko, Clement Greenberg (in back, pointing), Arshile Gorky (with life preserver), and Robert Motherwell. I won't bother with the bios.)

One more, this time with the least backstory of all.

Triumph Over Mastery II. Mark Tansey, 1987.

First reaction: This workman is painting over some Renaissance-looking artwork (it happens to be Michelangelo, part of the Sistine frescos), destroying a masterpiece with plain white paint on a roller. Blunt force over artifice. Or, as the title says, triumph over mastery.

Second reaction: The triumph is more complete than you might think, and maybe more self-destructive - he has also succeeded in painting out his own shadow (and that of the ladder).

That's all you need to know.

I can't tell you how much I adore this painting. It may very well be my favorite piece of art of all time. But not everyone would react the same way. And the most voluble anti-reaction would be the people who claim it has too much message, that it is too clever by half.

Let's consider that potential objection for a moment, because it's important.

It took me a while to understand that some people don't like their art to lecture them. Like Robbe-Grillet, they really do prefer an art world that doesn't have hidden connotations or higher meanings. And these people have perfectly valid views. That's why I changed my definition from "must have a message" to "must have a goal."

Even so, it occurred to me that there are some goals I just don't take seriously, and many of those goals have to do with holding up a mirror to the world. I think there is a part of my brain that says holding up a mirror is not enough. (Or insists that it should be a funhouse mirror.)

Others would say that it is the primary and most noble goal of art.

Consider some examples. Claes Oldenburg's giant soft-sculpture oscillating fan, his giant ice-cream sundae, his giant typewriter eraser ... the man clearly has a well-developed sense of whimsy, and that gets points in and of itself (just as being a smartass, in my lexicon, gets points automatically). But are his pieces art? Making a giant ice-cream sundae is certainly fun, and certainly pleasant to look at, and both of those things count as "goals" - but they are not necessarily enough for me; I can't really put the giant ice-cream in the "art" category.

Oddly enough, I do put Typewriter Eraser, Scale X in that category, because there I believe he was calling attention to a vanished object, an object which faded into the background even when it was still being used in offices every day, the same way that Whiteread was calling attention to the fact that an empty space had taken on a life of its own.

So maybe that's closer to my inner definition of "art" - it has to be calling the viewer's attention to something, somehow.

This would certainly explain why I like Andy Warhol's soup cans, for example - calling attention to a background object - but I dislike his polychromed Marilyn Monroes and most of his later output, which seem to have been done purely for visual whimsy, like Oldenburg's ice cream. The Marilyn pictures are merely noting that Monroe is iconic, which we all already knew. The soup cans are noting an icon as well, but also adding another message on top: that this is an icon you may not have noticed was an icon. (The impact of the soup-can paintings has diminished over the years for that reason.)

This whole speculation - that the mirror is not enough - has been near the top of my head because of a Japanese artist named Takashi Murakami. Murakami comments on the tendency of Japanese culture to make everything kawaii (that is, cutesy), of the tendency to make anime women (and men) almost pornographic in their exaggerated features - when he is at his best. When he isn't, he is merely holding up a mirror without comment, and in some cases is merely playing with visuals without saying (to me at least) a damned thing.

Here's three examples: A very direct comment (some would say too direct), a not-so-direct comment, and a piece which doesn't seem to have any comment at all.

Hiropon. Takashi Murakami, 1997.

In the first, Hiropon, he is very clearly making fun of the oversexed anime babe, carrying that idea to its logical (and absurd) conclusion. Actually, for the average hentai (X-rated anime) woman, these breasts are not much larger than usual, which is part of the point.

A few things worth noting which are not obvious from the picture: This sculpture is over seven feet tall, considerably more than life-size ... and, despite the breasts, the woman has no genitals - just a smooth crotch. (Explicit depictions of female genitalia are illegal in Japan, even in cartoons. The hypocrisy there is also part of the point.)

(There's a male counterpart to this sculpture, called My Lonesome Cowboy, but I figured Hiropon would be marginally less likely to raise eyebrows here. Suffice to say that My Lonesome Cowboy does for ejaculate what this one does for breast milk.)

Some people would say that Hiropon is too unsubtle, that there is no need to inflict a message with a ten-pound maul. I think that depends on the audience for the message. I believe an unsubtle message ultimately reaches a wider audience than the subtle ones, even if the subtle ones are more fun to uncover. The payoff on the more obscure Tansey works is great once you do the legwork, but everyone understands Myth of Depth instantly. Life is full of tradeoffs.

Chaos. Takashi Murakami, 1998.

In Chaos, Murakami takes his very kawaii signature character, Mr. DOB, and scrambles his parts as if caught in a bad matter-transmitter accident. The conflict of the end product - individually cute parts combined to make a grotesque whole - is what this is all about. The idea that the cute can also be grotesque is the closest I've seen to a central, recurring message in Murakami's work.

A portion of Cosmos. Takashi Murakami, 1998.

And then we come to the flowers. And it's really the happy flowers that made my brain churn ... because, of all the Murakami images, these are the ones that stick with me the longest ... and it's not just me, all my friends who've seen the art think so too.

The happy flowers are iconic. But, like Mr. DOB, they are iconic of Murakami - they are his own symbol, his own brand, an icon created for himself and not really a comment on anything else. Their primary meaning is not, I think, one that says anything about anything. They are simply what they are.

And that's not good enough. So I'm left in a position where the most central and most entertaining Murakami image is one that I do not consider art. I am not interested in Murakami as an entity or as a brand. In fact, the idea of artist-as-brand really bothers me.

And it occurred to me instantly, even while I was at the Murakami exhibit, that this is also what bothers me most about Warhol.

Murakami is on record as saying that he tries to eliminate the division between art and merchandise (my words, not his, but he has definitely expressed the sentiment). He will happily sell you souvenirs, and some pieces of his art look like they were designed to be souvenirs in the first place. Warhol is also notorious for this.

Not to put to fine a point on it, this makes me crazy. And here is where my principles come into conflict with my own goals, and those of my artist friends - where one set of standards is at war with another set inside my own head.

My best friend Marc is an artist, and a very good one. He is perpetually struggling with what I call the Money Questions: How should he sell his work? How much should he focus on selling his work, as opposed to creating it? To what extent is an artist dependent on promotional skills, as opposed to creative skills? And, most of all, is it possible to be an "artist" if no one sees what you do?

Like me, he despises the merchandising aspects of art - the need to get your pieces in front of an audience. However, I believe I am more realistic about it: While I would prefer to wash my hands of all self-marketing, I believe that without a viewer my art is effectively meaningless. If no one sees my messages then my messages might as well not exist.

Making art "for myself" is a somewhat useless pursuit, because I already know what I have to say. The only times that making art for myself is worthwhile is when the art is used as a basically therapeutic exercise - when I am using the process of expelling it as a means of sorting out my thoughts (like this essay).

The end result of this is, that since art without an audience is usually meaningless and I hate trying to find an audience, I simply make less art. Almost all of my art these days falls into the therapeutic category, and thereby doesn't need an audience. Anyone who does happen to stumble across it is an added bonus. But Marc is trying to make a living from his art. I am not. Therefore, at some point, Marc will need to sell himself. It's unfortunate, but true. However, selling oneself is not the same as prostituting oneself, and I believe that there is a Rubicon here, which Murakami and Warhol have both crossed at various times.

The problem comes, for me, when the selling of the art is pervasive enough that it informs the creation of the art. That is: I don't mind going to great lengths to sell the art once the pure idea has been realized. But if the idea has been altered while in the process of being realized, with an eye toward selling, then at best you are making commercial illustration, and at worst you are pandering.

I believe in the purity of creation, in other words. I believe an artist should set goals based on what's occupying her mind, without any thought to whether it will be a salable or palatable message to the audience. If the work is finished and no one wants to look at it, too bad; start another work and file that one away and hope that it'll come into vogue one day. But don't make art that you think is what people want to buy.

Some would say this is overly idealistic of me. Perhaps so. I will definitely agree that it makes being a successful artist more difficult, especially in this day and age, when museums are apparently in the pandering business.

Once upon a time, the narrow tastes of the public were the limiting factor, but you could generally find a daring museum willing to buy and display your work, even if they knew no one would like it. (Mind you, this was in a time period when Picasso was dangerous and subversive.) Nowadays, museums are in the business of giving the public what it wants, which means endless displays of Impressionists and lines around the block for the exhibition of Jaqueline Onassis' dresses at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (That is not a joke. The queues for this, last time I went to the Met, necessitated special crowd-control measures. Do you find that frightening? I do.)

I'm told this is pessmistic, that museums are still buying off-the-beaten-path works aplenty, especially the museums that specialize in modern art. To which my reply is 1) in this day and age, unfortunately, a work that gets bought and not promoted does not get viewed, especially since museums all have far more in their collections than they have space to display, and 2) there aren't enough museums like that.

Mind you, I am no great defender of a lot of "modern art," particularly the more abstract forms which strike me as absent both goals and messages (we will use Mark Rothko as the character note for that entire genre). But at least such examples force me to think about what they do and don't like, force me to confront my tastes and actually use my brain ... as opposed to the same old Monet paintings, which practically everyone likes but which, by the same token, no one has to think too hard about.

The biggest problem I have with "modern art" is that so much of it seems to be done for the sake of being able to do it. While perhaps it has a clear goal, the goal seems to be one that I consider ... suspect.

It is time to consider Tom Friedman.

I encountered Tom Friedman by sheer chance. I went to the Museum of Fine Arts with Marc, and as we were browsing through the museum's store afterward, he brought me a book on Friedman and asked me if he could borrow the money to buy it. I told him I'd buy it for him if - leafing through the pages as I said it - he'd let me study the thing and write about it first.

Marc is about to finally get his book.

I knew even on first skim that Friedman would bother me, but I had to read the book to figure out the full reason why.

Untitled. Tom Friedman, 1995.

Friedman's works are often visually striking, especially his beautiful toothpick sculpture (which the publisher wisely used as the cover image for the book). But they're an empty kind of striking - they make you say "Wow" (and often "I can't believe someone would actually do that," which we'll discuss in a second) ... but there is nothing after the wow, there is nothing more to the piece than the initial amazement. Friedman does things because they can be done (and possibly because of psychological problems), and for no other reason but that.

That is not really good enough. If that's art, then the MTV show "Jackass" is art, and I refuse to allow that possibility, at least on my own value scale. If your mileage varies, that's your business.

I'm going out on a limb by asserting that Friedman may be a few cards shy of a deck, but really, what his works say to me, more than anything else, is "This is a man who has a real problem with obsessive-compulsive disorder." And that's a valid message, but like Murakami's branding, it is a sort of meta-message which has little or nothing to do with the value of the art itself.

The final work Friedman did while in art school - sort of his goodbye to the school - was to take a fresh ball-point pen and sign his name on a wall in concentric circles until the pen ran dry. Like most of his work, it is visually striking; like most of his work, it makes you respect his determination/persistence/insanity level; and like most of his work, there is nothing more to it than that. There is no there there, to quote Gertrude Stein.

Some representative Friedman works:

Approximately fifteen hundred pieces of chewed bubble gum, molded into a sphere. The sphere is displayed wedged into a corner at head height and hangs by its own stickiness.

A used bar of soap with a perfect spiral of the artist's pubic hair embedded into its surface.

A roll of toilet paper, unrolled and then rerolled as perfectly as possible, but without the cardboard tube.

A piece of paper that has been poked by a pin as many times as possible without tearing the paper - it is now as pliable as a paper towel from all the perforations - hung from a wall by the pin used to perforate it.

Two pieces of paper wrinkled in an absolutely identical fashion.

Untitled. Tom Friedman, 1990.

A symmetric arrangement of pick-up sticks. One set is thrown onto the floor to create a random layout, then the other set is arranged to create an exact mirror-symmetric copy of the first.

Untitled. Tom Friedman, 1990.

One important test, I believe, is that (although I have chosen to show you some of these pieces to illustrate their visual wow-factor) you do not need to actually see any of them to get their one joke. It's all in the description. Put another way, any of these pieces could be reduced to the placard on the wall describing the piece, with no loss save that initial visual blow. Worse yet, in some cases you absolutely must have the placard or there is no point. If you don't know what happened with the perforated paper, you probably will never realize the madness that went into creating it. Probably the two ultimate examples of this pure-concept one-joke art:

1) a blank rectangle of paper that had once been folded into thirds, each third approximately 8.5" x 11", and

2) a large blank rectangle of paper, about 32" x 32".

Give up?

The first is a Playboy centerfold that has been completely erased. The second is a piece of paper which, over the course of five years, the artist stared at for a total of a thousand hours.

Are you amused?

If you saw these hanging in a gallery, would you still be amused? Or would you somehow feel cheated, as if you were seeing something that was pretending to be something it wasn't?

That's the way most of Friedman's work makes me feel. And although I have backed away from saying that "art must have a message in order to be art," something about the sheer and complete absence of a message in these pieces strikes me as wrong. In fact, I think there is an anti-message here, in a way - a conscious effort to divorce the pieces from any message whatsoever, including context clues (nearly all of Friedman's works are untitled). It's sort of like Robbe-Grillet's ideal - pure objects, with no messages save the fact that the object even exists.

I suppose the absence of the message could be a message in and of itself. I can see that's valid. But I can't stop my brain from assuming there is no message because the artist couldn't think of one, or didn't know how to put it in - in short, I assume that art which isn't trying to communicate something is art which has failed on some level or another.

So perhaps you could say what bothers me about Friedman's work is that it is art which contains absolutely no message, but it may also be equally valid to say that what bothers me is that it is a message which contains absolutely no art.

I'm aware that may sound to you like I'm contradicting myself. So now I'll make these waters even muddier. Thanks for your patience.

As I say, I have a friend named Marc, and he is an artist. That is his profession; it is the way I talk of him to people. I am not an artist in the sense that he is, although I suppose my words can sometimes be art. Marc is an artist: He consciously attempts to make art as his vocation.

And yet, many of the pieces Marc makes are not art by my peculiar definition. There is no disputing that. Marc tries to keep his work message-free. I think that if I told Marc I found an implicit message in any of his work, he'd look at it and wonder what he'd done wrong.

Marc's primary medium is pottery. And from his pottery, there are two more important facts to be considered:

1) Sometimes, being visually interesting in a way that hasn't (or hasn't often) been seen before is enough of a goal for me; that alone is enough to justify calling it art.

Untitled (Coruscated Chalice). Marc Mancuso, 2001.

Untitled (Serpentine Urn). Marc Mancuso, 2000.

2) Sometimes it doesn't have to be art. Art is sometimes an overrated term.

Artists have been arguing the "art vs. craft" distinction for a long time. It's a useful argument as far as it goes, because it acknowledges that art must be more than just skill with the material. There are plenty of skilled cabinetmakers and skilled furniture-makers, people who can do utter magic with wood and veneer. But there are very few pieces of furniture I would call art - even one like this:

Cabinet-Vitrine. Gustave Serrurier-Bovy, 1899.

And to a certain extent, that absence of a goal or message is what artists are trying to get at when they argue endlessly about art vs. craft. But what bothers me is the notion, always lurking beneath the surface of such arguments, that craft is inferior.

Why is craft inferior? What's wrong with just craft? A well-made piece of furniture is its own reward; it's a joy to have and a joy to look at. So it's not art; so what? I would put the cabinet above in my house in a second; and I'd spend a lot of time staring at it, too.

Similarly, though I don't think these vessels are "art" per se, there is absolutely nothing wrong with them.

Untitled (Blue Plate Special). Marc Mancuso, 2001.

Untitled (Jar For Acorns). Marc Mancuso, 2000.

So I get a little fidgety when Marc asks me whether his pieces are art, because I am not sure the question is relevant. And I do think that some of it depends on the medium. Craft-without-art is far more acceptable in a piece which has a functional dimension, like a pot or a plate or a chair; there craft can suffice. And in pure portraiture, craft without art is generally acceptable - as in the works of John Singer Sargent, which are noted for their style, skill, and realism, not for having any sort of Big Ideas or artistic goals.

In other words, the need for an Artistic Goal is most pronounced in the pieces that have no other purpose but to provide one - that have nothing else to fall back on, you might say.

Marc is going to kill me for this, but what the hell:

Untitled (Coral Construct #64, Red). Marc Mancuso, 1999.

I don't like this piece (and several others he's done like it) for more or less exactly this reason. It is clearly not functional, but it is also apparently not art, since it doesn't seem to have a goal. It just sits there. It is, in fact, Friedman-esque: You admire the artist's skill, patience, and dedication at splicing all those little pieces of clay into this lacework ... but once you get over the miracle that the trick was performed successfully at all, you realize there is nothing else to the show.

Mind you, some people would say that about the upside-down plinth we began with ... which brings us full circle and demands that I reiterate: Art is subjective. I am talking here about my tastes and trying to explain them. It may be that you disagree with me in all particulars, in which case more power to you and perhaps we will discuss it over beers one day.

The point is that I tend to condemn similar things, so when I meet another artist whom I feel is pulling the Friedman tricks or the Murakami/Warhol tricks, I am likely to react in the same way I have to those artists. And it is simpler to provide the explanation in advance with a few key examples; that way I have a shorthand to use for later, a page that I can refer people to once and for all.

And that way I'll never have to write six thousand words about this ever again.

Notes and Sources for the Images

Whiteread: AFP news photo, taken from the Boston Globe.

Murakami: Taken from Takashi Murakami: The Meaning of the Nonsense of the Meaning, 1999, Harry Abrams. (Exhibition catalog, created by Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard College.) No photo credit is given for Hiropon or Cosmos; Chaos was photographed by Douglas Baz.

Tansey: Taken from Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, by Arthur Danto, 1992, Harry Abrams. No photo credits are given. The reflection and shadow across the middle of Myth of Depth was an unavoidable consequence of it being spread across two pages of the book. Tansey's pieces are fairly large; Triumph and Queries are both about five feet by eight feet. This means that already they have lost detail in the smaller book reproductions, and my scans are smaller still to facilitate page loading. I suggest you find the book (or, if you're lucky, you have a museum with one of the originals - I managed to catch a Tansey show one week when the Museum of Fine Arts apparently ran out of Monets, but I never expect to get that lucky again).

Friedman: Taken from Tom Friedman, 2001, Phaidon. Unless I've missed something obvious, the photographers are credited but not matched with individual photos, so I have no idea who did what.

The Art Nouveau cabinet is taken from the Art Nouveau 1890-1914 exhibition catalog (2000, Victoria and Albert Museum/National Gallery of Art). The Oldenburg photo was taken by Dennis Brack and appeared in the August 1999 issue of Smithsonian. The Paget illustration was taken from one of my many Sherlock Holmes collections and originally appeared in The Strand magazine, way back when.

All the Mancuso photographs were taken by me. The titles in parentheses are mine (I have taken to naming his pieces defensively, for my memory's sake), and all dates are my guesses since he doesn't keep track.

Copyright © June 2001. All rights reserved.