The Persona as Form

The always insightful Mike B. of Clap Clap had a thought-provoking post last week about the status of celebrity gossip and the creation of public personae in our culture. One of the major points that he makes is that, though we tend to be ashamed when we read about the starts’ exploits, celebrities have become a form of entertainment in themselves, distinct from (though not always unrelated to) the media that initially made them famous. I would like to ask the question that we here at the Foundation always ask: can a celebrity persona be art? The creation of a unique persona is practically a prerequisity of a star’s rise to prominence, and it is often done with intent, be it by the celebrity him- or herself, or by a publicity agent, and, as Mike B. observes, it takes a narrative form quite similar to that of characterization in fiction.

One difference that Mike B. notes is that celebrity personae gain a special social meaning because of their general exposure. In a follow-up, he responds to the example of Bob Dylan’s carefully constructed public image. I would make a claim that Dylan’s persona is a work of art, but Mike B. observes that, though Dylan is well-known as a musician, the details of his character are mainly of interest to his fans, and don’t have the sort of cultural currency that facts about, to use Mike’s example, Brittney Spears do. Perhaps this means that Dylan’s is not really a celebrity persona – but couldn’t a celebrity persona equally well be a work of art?

~therighthandofnixon

Best review you’ve ever read? Why?

There has been a lot of discussion lately, especially within the restaurant community, about a restaurant review published on June 11th by Frank Bruni of the New York Times on Ago in Tribeca. Needless to say this was arguably the worst (as in most negative) review by the New York Times (at least that I am aware of) and yet has received the best (as in most acclaim) praise. Here is where the “artistic” relevance to this blog comes from. Is all the praise this review is receiving due to its excellent description of the restaurant? Or is it receiving praise because it has transcended its “primary purpose” (that of a review) and has become a work of literature worth reading? To the extent are more people reading this particular review because of its style, humor, and overall creativity rather than because they are curious about the restaurant?

I am particularly enjoying this issue as being one who regards both the creation of a restaurant as well as the writing of a review as artistic endeavors, or at least as having the potential to be artistic endeavors. So to that end has this review become artistically active because it has so distanced itself from having another purpose, that of informing its readership to the quality of this restaurant. But if it is failing to do that then in reality its a bad review. I’m sure many familiar with the review would defend its informative capabilities and they would probably be right to do so, however one must also acknowledge the bizarre circumstance by which the reviewer was reviewing, its one of those “the wrong person to let that happen to” kind of cases.

What interests me about this scenario is (and this may seem abstract or even dumb to some of you) that this review can almost be seen as say a film adaptation of a work of literature, but one that has surpassed the original work and established itself independently. In regards to the restaurant, Ago doesn’t really serve a purpose, this bizarre wall of wine could have occurred anywhere. What I really mean is that there is nothing unique to who the restaurant is that produces this result.

I’ve made some assumptions along the way here that lead to arguments once had on Literature’s Next Frontie, where does journalism fall in the world of art? With reviews we have a similar situation as there is a primary difference between a reviewer and a writer, that of purpose. A reviewer has a job to do that must fulfill basic requirements in order to be published, a writer is free to write what ever he or she chooses (though it better be good in order to be published, and don’t ask me what good is because since I am not a publisher I do not have to make that terrible decision).

Thus let us turn this into a discussion on two points: First, can a review be art? And if it becomes art, does it then no longer exist as a review? Second, where does this particular review fall and from where is it receiving the praise? For a more culinary crafted discussion on this review please visit Coffee Straws.

Cheers,

Huysmans

Fun Myths and Inauthentic Fun: Robert Johnson and Gogol Bordello

The man that rock and roll fans most associate with acoustic blues, Robert Johnson, is not one of the more accessible blues singers. His music does speak for itself, provided you can get past the thin 1930s recording quality and the sometimes difficult-to-decipher singing style, but what’s really won Mr. Johnson more acclaim than other (I would say equally) worthy blues singers of his time like Blind Willie McTell, Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James, is the particularly alluring body of legend that surrounds him. The stories vary in credibility – that he was fatally poisoned at 27 for sleeping with another man’s wife (probably more or less true); that only two photographs of him were ever taken (true as far as anyone knows); that a few weeks before his death he had gone electric and started a rock band-like trio, fifteen years before Elvis (it’s at least conceivable); that he had sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads in exchange for his phenomenal guitar skills (most likely he just practiced a lot) – but as a whole they tend to build him up into a sort of metaphysical being sent to earth to plant the seed of rock and roll. Much has been written about the cult of authenticity, and how it’s really a sham, and I don’t have anything to add on that topic, but with Robert Johnson it’s not authenticity that matters, but myth, and even though it’s a sham the mythology really does work – it really makes listening to his music more fun. The question is, does it work better before you find out it’s all just myth – that he was probably just a regular entertainer trying to make a living and get laid?

At the other end of the myth spectrum is the Brooklyn-based “Gypsy punk” band Gogol Bordello. Roma music has very little place for the illusion of authenticity – like the culture, it’s heterogeneous and malleable to the point that the “real thing” is impossible to pin down – and it has no scruples about wearing its appropriation on its sleeve, which makes it pretty much immune to origin myths. (Their Web site has an “Origins” section, but it’s jokey and it seems designed to instantly shoot down any sense of mystique that might develop: “But let’s not get too nostalgic here…” ends one page. “That was basicly [sic] two weeks ago.”) Robert Christgau writes that the guitarist of the Serbian Roma band Kal, who toured with Gogol Bordello, uses Chicago blues-style licks “not as a reference but as a common resource, just like the Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan speed syllabics.” Gogol Bordello relates to its source material in much the same way. There’s certainly some artifice to it – I suspect that the singer, Eugene Hütz, who grow up in the Ukraine, exaggerates his thick accent on purpose, and I’m pretty sure some of the grammatical errors in his English lyrics are intentional. But when I listen to the music I don’t care – if Hütz is exaggerating the signs of his eastern-European origins, he’s not doing it to distance or even distinguish himself from the listener. It’s not self-conscious multiculturalism, but more like aculturalism, and the result is that the band actively resists being mythologized as exotic. They never sound like anything more mysterious than a bunch of people playing whatever they want to play, not worrying about what cultures they’re borrowing from.

~therighthandofnixon

The Eco Zoo: Printed digitally

if:book posted on a rather interesting animation project called The Eco Zoo. The site is built using Papervision, which simulates a two dimensional design in a three dimensional space. The Eco Zoo has used this flash based program to create an environmental message through a series of pop-up books all presented in this point and click world. As if:books commented, the site suggests a comparison or even competition between print and digital forms of pop-up books. After visiting the site and reading through the different eco friendly stories told I must say its a beautiful site and the message is a good one. But the real question posed by if:books and the one I’d like to discuss here is what are the implications of such creations on the realm of printed works? Or to take from the great Edward Said, what does a site like this tell us about how the internet perceives its own artwork?

This site is a perfect example of the internet imitating the book, each pop-book individually asks the user to turn the page by pressing next, at which point it animates a page turn to reveal the next two-dimensional display. What can be said also about this form of presentation is its connection with the intent of the material. The moral of the site is to take better care of our environment. Therefore to better present that, the site masks itself in a “physical” looking environment to help establish the connection between the text and the subject.

I encourage our readers to take a look at this site as well as if:books post on it and ask the question about what this suggests in regards to how the internet looks at itself. I personally believe that a digital representation of a pop-up book can never replace the real thing, just like a digital representation of a painting does not detract viewers from seeing the original. There is something tangible and real about a physical object, an aura (Walter Benjamin) that cannot be replicated. The internet will become critically and artistically equivalent to text when it discovers its own forms of representation.

To the Eco Zoo! and remember to recycle,

Huysmans

Bob Dylan, Visual Art, and Marketing

The recent Times interview with Bob Dylan has mostly gotten attention for the (characteristically cryptic) endorsement of Barack Obama that Dylan threw in at the end. The Times even published a news article about their own feature in order to expand on the point. As a Dylan acolyte, I am certainly glad to hear that the man himself likes the same candidate as me, but there’s more to the interview than that endorsement, and it relates in particular to the subject of this blog, which is art. Dylan has become a painter.

The particular point I want to comment on is the position of an artist with a reputation in one area crossing over into an unrelated one. Of course, the celebrity novel that rides on name recognition rather than actual quality is not an unfamiliar thing, and one could easily assume the same of Dylan’s visual art – that it would not be in a gallery if it were made by an unknown. (Dylan has published a novel, by the way, although it’s hardly the sort of thing you’d expect to come of a celebrity book deal – from what I’ve read of it, it’s reminiscent of André Breton’s automatically-written Nadja. It’s calledTarantula.)

But while a People Magazine-level actor would hardly have trouble getting a novel out there, the world of visual art is different from that of trade publishing. Sez Dylan, “The critics didn’t want to review it. The publisher told me they couldn’t get past the idea of another singer who dabbled. You know, like, ‘David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Paul McCartney…Everyone’s doing it these days.’ No one from the singing profession was going to be taken seriously by the art world, I was told, but that was OK.”

Perhaps this reflects well on the visual art establishment – that Dylan’s celebrity status turned out to be a hindrance to getting his art out there rather than a boon. Dylan himself compares the visual art world favorably to the music industry: “From the small steps I’ve taken in [the art world], I’d say, yeah, the people are honest, upfront and deliver what they say. Basically, they are who they say they are. They don’t pretend.” In any case, it shows that critics have a much more prominent place in visual art than in literature, which tends to listen much more to the market than to the experts. What complicates the issue is that it’s not just a matter of the difference between a gallery, which is a destination, and a book, which is a product: the first edition of Dylan’s art book, Drawn Blank, came out in 1994, while his first gallery exhibition, held in London, is just opening until this Saturday.

As regards the art, I’m reserving final judgment until I see more of it, but I haven’t been blown away yet. From the examples that the Times article provides, it seems to go for the same sort of mood that Dylan’s most imagistic songs convey, and it pulls it off fairly well. I’m not sure whether it really adds anything substantive to that mood, but I like to think that it’s getting attention for its own merits, and not just because it’s Bob Dylan. Even if it’s read as outsider art, which it probably could be considered, that’s a better position to be in than celebrity tie-in.

~therighthandofnixon

The Mixtape About Nothing

I figured I’d follow up my post about tongue-in-cheek “tributes” to popular culture with something a little more positive: the up-and-coming rapper Wale’s tribute to Seinfeld, The Mixtape About Nothing. It really only uses Seinfeld as a jumping-off point, but Wale’s fondness for the show is clearly there, and he manages to come off as appreciative but not fawning. Apart from the Seinfeld references, Wale has a fresh sound, and he avoids spending the whole time rapping about the fact that he’s rapping, a tendency that has ruined a lot of promising MCs in the past. I recommend this mixtape unreservedly. And hey, it’s a mixtape so it’s free.

Thanks to Passion of the Weiss for pointing me towards it.

~therighthandofnixon

Newspaper Comics and their Enemies

The comic strip as a medium has produced some genuinely great art, but for every Calvin & Hobbes or Krazy Kat there are a dozen bland strips that have seemingly been on autopilot since time immemorial. While the Web has opened up avenues for some great comics that are too cerebral, too crude, too dark or too Dada for the mainstream press, for the most part the comics page of the newspaper has been coasting steadily downhill for more than a decade.

But the bland safety of the modern newspaper comic, combined with the ready availability of image editing software, has opened up another avenue for comic strip expression: messing with boring people’s work.

Garfield has been a particularly popular target lately. As “Sticherbeast” writes on Metafilter, the strip was intentionally designed to serve as a marketing vehicle, and in its blandness it doesn’t radiate the sense of innocence that can give one a twinge of guilt for upsetting a fictional world’s order. A message board thread started the trend by testing the strip’s nominal assumption that Jon (the human) cannot hear the animals’ dialogue, deleting it from every panel. This led to things like Garfield Minus Garfield, which takes the strip’s loser bachelor humor down to a Waiting for Godot level. For the most part, the parodies are rather lazily done, not attempting to match the strip’s style when they do involve new drawings, and some are even generated mechanically – a newcomer, Garkov, uses Markov chains (a method for generating random text) to create new and sometimes improved Garfield dialogue. But some people put quite a lot of effort into the project. Lasagna Cat, a completely bizarre video “tribute” to the strip which goes uncomfortably far in deconstructing, if you will, the finer points of Jim Davis’s work, must take a lot longer to produce than the strips themselves. This is the best one, by the way.

I’m not sure what the first comic to be hacked like this was (of course it was going on before computers, though it required more work back then), but messing with the Family Circus (a comic that is both very coy and very conservative, making it a particularly ripe target for this sort of thing) has a particularly long tradition. The classic seems to be The Dysfunctional Family Circus, which doesn’t push the right buttons for me (it reminds me of Crazy Magazine’s tasteless parody of Casper the Friendly Ghost), but there’s also The Nietzsche Family Circus, which is wonderful:

Of course, as that Crazy Magazine feature shows, this sort of thing can easily end up being too mean-spirited in attempting to “subvert” the source material, or at least too blunt in its mean-spiritedness. Fatal Farm, the group that did Lasagna Cat, also did a series of hacked sitcom title-sequences most of which end up guilty of this crime. As an art form, the subversion of someone else’s art is limited in scope, and it can never avoid being about the original, if it’s going to have anything to say at all. Even the most Beckettian of the Garfield parodies wouldn’t stand on their feet without the reference to their model – an original comic about a lonely man talking to himself would be held to higher standards. Its comment is ultimately directed at Garfield, and that comment is almost unavoidably critical. That’s why it’s no surprise that best subversions go for baffling instead of blunt. The funniest title-sequence parodies are the ones for The Golden Girls and Designing Women – rather than just splicing disturbing images into the Baywatch credits, which is stupid, they almost manage to pass for genuine attempts to improve the titles. Especially in the Designing Women one, I’m laughing at an imaginary director who thinks that the titles he’s come up with are perfectly good, not at the show itself. I’m guessing the people who really made the video don’t think too highly of the show. (I have no opinion myself – I barely remember it.) Perhaps there’s always some maliciousness to things like deconstruction, some ill will towards the target, but it’s not maliciousness that drives the video, it’s goofiness. Goofiness is easy to like.

~therighthandofnixon

The Wii versus the Xbox 360: which furthers the artistic development of the gaming culture?

Let me first say that I acknowledge the many who are instantly discouraged by such a title as it automatically assumes artistic merit in video games. But for the members of the Comparative Blogging Foundation, that is an easy assumption to make. I would love to engage the very basic question of that merit but first I’d like to start with the question answered and work backwards. Assuming that there is artistic potential in the video game world, which system (between the Xbox 360 and the Wii) is furthering the artistic development of the gaming genre? I do not think there is an easy answer to the question and have personally witnessed both sides defined their viewpoints fiercely. But I will say this:

In observing the interactivity that has come to represent many of the installation art exhibitions of the current era, perhaps the Wii’s desire to further the interaction between the user and the game is a better development. With the Wii, the user is required to actually act out the actions of his or her avatar as the narrative develops. Without the user’s physical input the game would not proceed thus suggesting that the art of such games cannot exist without the user. An idea that has come up here before, that of the need for viewers for the art to actually exist.

But to contradict that, the users involvement is already required with the Xbox, in fact one could say that the user is required to participate in a less obvious fashion. Or to use an almost cliche art term, the user has to participate in an “abstract” way with the use of buttons and joysticks. Also on the Xbox side is the power that system operates with. With the processing advancements only capable by a system backed by Microsoft, the Xbox 360 has opened the figurative doors for game designers to animate almost without limitation. This freedom allows for the traditional artists of the genre (the graphics designers and game developers) to fully flex their creative muscles and create extraordinary worlds and character development that would have been unthinkable even with the original Xbox.

But on the other hand when has art been measured by processing power? Are movies today more artistic than in the 30s? I am not convinced that such advanced processing power is the key to better development. After all it is not the power that creates the art but rather the artists working with that power. To better explain this point I would like to bring in the Disney films. I feel that one would be a thin ice to suggest that the Pixar films of today are more artistic than the classic Disney films of the 30s and 40s. Well let me restate that. They may find the Pixar films to be more artistic but they certainly wouldn’t attribute it to the computer power behind the films. What it ultimately comes down to is the designers behind the games.

But, going back to the Wii for a second, that is true about the designers when dealing with what a game can do. But when you are talking about redesigning the interface between the user and the game, that has wide reaching ramifications that should not be overlooked by simply stating that the designers are the real artistic developers. I am of the opinion that experience counts more than presentation. And by that token I must align myself with the Wii camp and say that a focus on the experience will ultimately pay off.

But this is not about conclusions, this is about discussions. So I know open up the forum: Which system, given the Wii and the Xbox 360, will bring out the art of gaming?

-Huysmans

Don’t Worry, Adulthood Still Alive

NY Times with a “culture is going downhill”-type article by A. O. Scott. It’s an enjoyable-enough read, but as a piece of cultural criticism it’s awfully naive. Scott extends the eternal adolescence of comedy actors like Adam Sandler to the U.S.’s male population as a whole, pining for some vaguely-defined adulthood that seems to have slipped away from us.

It’s currently fashionable to reject outright anything that, like this article, suggests a longing for the past. I’m skeptical of this. Certainly there’s a tendency to idealize the past and ignore the serious problems that we only began to overcome in the past grueling century. Certainly, for instance, the fifties were not as neat and tidy as the TV shows and movies that serve as some of the decade’s main emissaries to people of my generation. But it’s easy to overcorrect in attempting to avoid this glamorization of the past. It’s easy to wind up denying not just that the past might be better that the present, but that it could be different from the present at all. Of course the past is different, and it would be foolish not to consider the possibility that the present might, in some ways, be worse.

But we do have to be careful to avoid giving in to nostalgia – we have to carefully examine the terms on which we’re talking, and even more carefully consider just where our judgments about what is better than what come from – we don’t want to apply the standards from some time in the past to the present.

The NY Times article could easily be accused of that. It never makes it quite clear what it means by maturity and why we should aspire to it – no doubt we should aspire to maturity, but a concept like “maturity” is not the sort that does well outside of its natural habitat. There is a core meaning involving doing the right thing even when it involves giving up on pleasure or comfort, and that’s certainly a virtue, but “maturity” and “adulthood” carry massive loads of cultural baggage, and though we don’t have to reject this baggage, we do have to acknowledge it as cultural if we’re going to apply the terms to culture. A. O. Scott seems to treat adulthood as an eternal unchanging truth, which it is not.

But that’s not Scott’s most overt critical sin. I would just like to point out that, though Sandler’s characters are typically meant to be likable, the audience is supposed to be laughing at their childlike behavior. Laughter is basically incompatible with approval. I don’t think, like Umberto Eco, that comedy is necessarily conservative, but Adam Sandler’s characters make no sense unless we keep in mind the particular ideal of masculine adulthood that they so flagrantly fail to realize.

~therighthandofnixon

When dining is an art: The Per Se Experience

To continue the culinary art trend I would like to dedicate this next post to the incredible eating experience that is Per Se. Dining culture has always demonstrated a high yield of artistic creations. The art of dining can be seen in everything from the atmosphere to the food and all points in between. Soon we will be publishing a post on the vague line that separates craft art from art art and I can see this post fall into a similar category. The question being that whether or not I can so easily equate the experience at this restaurant with an artistic experience? What it comes down to is how one defines art. Is art a talent driven process and product that exists primarily for its “artistic” qualities? Or can art be so vaguely defined as the result of a choice? I am critical of both questions but find that in my current thinking I fall much more to the latter, art to me can always be found (or rather has the potential to be found) anywhere a creative choice is being made. Thus the choice of design and taste in a restaurant falls squarely in the realm of art.

That being said Per Se’s Website has arguably the best description of the artistically driven culinary experience. The flash animation driven website describes Keller’s belief in pursuing the food creations that make people happy while always challenging their expectations. He commits to the ideas that he can neither create the same experience twice nor the perfect experience. Thus he works toward the unique interaction between the patron and each of the nine courses offered each night. It is in his commitment to the interaction that takes place that makes his operation an artistically driven one. Perhaps one could argue that his endeavor is more artistic than that of the portrait painter. In the latter case, it is the end goal that is the artistic product, but even more so that goal is expected to be concrete, solidified, and timeless (after all for many commissioners of portrait work the entire idea is to immortalize the subject). In the case of the former the art is created through the interaction and is designed to be fleeting, temporary, transitory, one that only exists at that specific moment and with those specific players (the ingredients and the guest).

But on the other hand, can one call a chef and a high class fancy restaurant more artistic than a portrait painter’s studio and clients? Perhaps such a comparison is meaningless, but its ramifications are anything but. To engage in that comparison is to do exactly what I set out to do, and that is to accept Thomas Keller’s operation as an artistic one.

Is it an artistic operation?

-Huysmans

For a review of my dining experience at Per Se please visit the new Coffee Straws Blog.