The Art of Talent: Evgeny Kissin

In the world of artistic discussions performance has been considered an experiential artistic work because with every performance of a piece the piece changes and takes on new character. I have always loved that about staged art, no matter how many times you see it, each time is unique. So the questions of artistic value for a performance become divided based on whether you are trying to analyze the creation of the original idea or that of the current interpretation. The problem with revisiting the classical works is that the original idea is not necessarily preserved to the creator’s specifications, then again Barthes that might not be a problem.Thinking a little bit about the intensely complicated issues that were only briefly described above I have had the enjoyment of listening to Evgeny Kissin at Carnegie Hall. He is no composer and therefore is not a creator of musical compositions and yet has been credited as one of the most talented artist playing piano today. This is an interesting form of art if you really look at it, yes it is easy to define him as an artist but the way he is “creating” art is not necessarily in the tangible world. The pieces he performed are credited to others, to the composers who first wrote them. It can be compared to how a copy artist might practice his trade by painting the work of a great master. However that comparison fails to recognize the performance aspects of staged art. Though the copy artist will add his own take to the painting, the ultimate goal is to make it look like the original. A better example would be that of Picasso who recreated Velázquez’s Las Meninas in his own style. Kissin isn’t appreciated because he sounds like everyone thinks the piece should but rather because of his phenomenal talent to do what ever he wants with the piano. His hands can be anywhere, his timing is flawless and his style is unique.

He is an athlete of the art world and just as the art of athletic performance can be valued in its own way; his ability has the artistic potential in his movement, in his sound, and in his style.

So is this a different way to look at the arts? Can we judge an artist for his talent in the field? Can this form of art be considered a revival of the talent driven art of the salons? And what about the Dadaist who will consider this nothing more than a copy? Beyond any question or answer that can be conceived the reality in my opinion is that the creativity needed here is more hidden and harder to define than with an artist in the traditional sense, and yes in this sense I am including the Dadas in the category of traditional since they were creating. It’s a creativity that is in the way a piece is interpreted, in essence perhaps the best comparison is to a translator. In literature a translator is creating her own interpretation of the work of art and is therefore cultivating a new art work in the simple fact that the words change. Since it is not a one to one relationship between two languages, it is far from that as Saussure defined for us in the beginning of the 20^th century. And in finding the best way to make that interpretation, a new work of art is born, and the translator becomes an artist. The same is happening here. In Kissin’s interpretation of how the notes on paper and the markings associated with them should be converted into sounds we hear. That conversion is creation and Kissin, the artist.

Thoughts…

-huysmans

Understanding Art… Question 1:

If it is in a museum… is it art?

Here are some profound answers:

http://www.google.com/search?q=museum&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Art

Googling Question: This is not for the faint of heart.

The Internet verse Tradition Part 1

It began as a discussion between one of my closest friends and myself years ago. But now with us both beginning our professional lives it is time for the discussion to move up a notch and to become a series of dialogues I hope to have here.

The topic is grand and vague and in most cases too confusing to understand what the hell is going on, but somewhere in the language lies a very interesting debate over the future of human interaction and the creation of art. The Role of The Internet, on its surface a seemingly endless answer with parts that are constantly growing and changing with or against time. But that simple yet confounding fact does not exempt the internet and its future from discussion, just the contrary actually. So now it is time to begin again. Pay close attention Mark, I’m ready to do this on your turf now:

The first concept I have been struggling with is the idea of separating two very distinct areas of the Internet’s development (I don’t mean to say there are only two but rather that there are two that this will focus on, or at least that there are two I don’t want to get confused over). The first is the internet as a tool of communication, as the great democratization of information distribution, where as my friend reported he was able to hear about the Hudson crash through Twitter faster than any “credible” news media service could deliver. Now the second area is the Internet as a medium for the creation and publication of art and it is in this title that I want to explore. I want to look at the pros and cons of the Internet as the democratization of publishing, or rather I want to look at the idea that the Internet is doing such a thing to begin with.

The question at hand is whether or not editors and “credible” publishing services are needed as filters for highlighting what is actually worth reading. On the opposite side of the fence, that of the internet users, the editors are replaced (or augmented by) the sheer populairty given select published pieces by the masses. Thus the question really is: Should the masses control what is read or the editors or some combination of both? We should start with that last addition, perhaps the internet has no intentions of destroying the traditional methods of publication and critisicm, but if that were true than we shouldn’t have seen the destruction of nearly every newspapers book review section save the Times. So it is clear that we can agree a change is happening, and that this change is destroying, to a certain extent, the authority of traditional editors and critics.

But maybe it isn’t destroying them, maybe those critics and editors are moving to the Internet, are combining with it to create a new format for finding the next great literary publication. Along with that point is the Long Tail effect of the Internet to allow for every possible niche market to find itself and its companions, but in order to find what you are looking for in that respect you have to be pretty experienced with how to search, is that an assumption we can make about the masses?

Anyway that’s enough for part 1, I apologize for introducing a lot of differing points but I had to start somewhere. The real question I have for the Internet is this: How will it protect the minority opinion in art if the masses are always dictating the path?

-huysmans

3D animation… a new style of film?

Since its inception I have experienced 3D animation as I would a roller coaster in an amusement park; something that entertains and excites for only the time you are experiencing it. I never walked out of a 3D film movie thinking it was anything above possibly entertaining for the time in the theater. It was always presented as one of those “look at the spectacle we can make” or “watch how we bedazzle the screen and almost startle you a little.” That was true of EVERY 3D movie I saw up until this past weekend.

Enter Coraline.

I am not a movie reviewer and I won’t even pretend to have opinions about movies that should be listened to by any great number of people, I mean I convinced my friends to see The Weather Man on my birthday (and I actually liked it). But for this film I will forcibly put on the reviewer and critic hat and say this is the first work of art to be done in the medium of three dimensional animation. There are no gimmicks, no cliche tricks here, just pure artistic beauty coupled with an intriguing and thoughtful plot that had me analyzing it while walking home.

So here is to a new style that will hopefully develop from Coraline’s success. But more importantly here is to the unlocking of a new theatrical experience that has been up to this point trapped behind the glass walls of consumer art.

Liz Phair: Modernism and Modern Feminism

A while ago I wrote that the aim of shocking one’s audience is necessarily conservative. The example I used is South Park – the show is amusing and occasionally clever, but I’m really surprised that more people haven’t commented on its reactionary tendencies, which I find rather obvious. While they play the ‘messages’ at the end of episodes for irony, at least in the use of corny music, most of the episodes do make statements fairly unambiguously, and more often than not those statements are socially conservative. Exhibiting transgression as shocking, disgusting or laughable reinforces the idea that there’s something wrong with it; this is why Umberto Eco made the claim that all comedy is conservative. Perhaps South Park’s left-leaning fans just don’t want to ruin the show by teasing out its politics; I really can’t reconcile it with my beliefs, which are, in the end, really not that extreme.

I don’t reject art because I disagree with it, but I do find it interesting to think of how its political identity relates to that of its audience. Another example of intentionally-shocking art that I’ve been thinking about lately (because it’s been back in the media, naturally) is one of the great rock albums, Liz Phair’s ‘Exile in Guyville.’ The album may not be particularly shocking today (this is one of the reasons why Chris Dahlen’s review in Pitchfork Media claims that the album now sounds dated), but in its time it was fairly notorious for the highly explicit presentation of Phairs’s (Phair the character’s, if not Phair the actual person’s) sex life. The album has often been called feminist, and feminism often shows through in Phair’s independence and sexual aggression, which places her in a traditionally masculine role. But the absence of a traditional relationship is conspicuous, and the need for one comes to the surface in ‘Fuck and Run:’

Whatever happened to a boyfriend
The kind of guy who tries to win you over
Whatever happened to a boyfriend
The kind of guy who make loves ’cause he’s in it
I want a boyfriend
I want all that stupid old shit, like letters and sodas.

There’s nothing necessarily reactionary about the need for stability, even if takes the form of “letters and sodas,” and it’s fairly clear that the relationship Phair wants is an egalitarian one, but the album presents the alternative to jukebox-and-milkshake heterosexuality as bleak and loveless, and makes some pretty clear attempts to shock people with the details of it. This takes a bit of the irony out of these lines. There is a real longing for the courtship rituals of the (idealized) past in them.

But I don’t think this longing is reactionary. I would compare it with the sentiment of the Modernist poets, and in particular T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. If the main idea of Modernism was that poetry can only be successful if it has a strong sense of the ‘now’ – T.S. Eliot once claimed that the most important thing for a young poet to study is the internal combustion engine – the Modernists had very little affection for the time they lived in. The Modernists’ fixation on classical antiquity is in part explained by their belief that an understanding of the present must be grounded in an understanding of the past, but the genuine longing for a return to Byzantium was not peculiar to Yeats. What redeems the Modernists from being nothing more than curmudgeons is that they knew full well that the present was not the past, and that the time in which they lived really was that bad. Their longing for tradition came from a serious feeling of uprootedness that affected people across Europe and the U.S. in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and the sense of ‘tradition’ that they longed for never entailed stasis.

Phair’s work is, in much the same way, directed towards the present rather than the past – the record’s immersion in the indie rock culture of the early nineties is the other reason Dahlen calls it dated – and even though her longing for “all that stupid old shit” really is genuine, it does retain the bitterer part of its irony: she knows that it’s not coming back. The pathos in this situation could be interpreted as reactionary, except that Phair seems to be aware of the falsehood of the idealized past she craves; the real cause of her predicament is her inability to reconcile the actual nature of her life with the lingering remains of the tradition from which it has violently broken off which still reside in her consciousness. Classical feminism may not work this way – most of Katherine Mansfield’s protagonists, for instance, find themselves acting out social roles that they don’t genuinely feel engaged with, while Phair finds herself disengaged from social roles that she still has internalized. But that doesn’t mean Phair is not a feminist. Like Mansfield’s characters, she is after a way to resolve her life with the way she really feels, and a return to the strictures of the past is not the way to do that.

(Also, in response to the allmusic.com piece I linked to, which says of the album’s supposed parallel with the Rolling Stones’ ‘Exile on Main Street,’ “Just try to match the albums up: is the ‘blow-job queen’ fantasy of ‘Flower’ really the answer to the painful elegy ‘Let It Loose’?” Of course it is, and the fact that ‘Flower’ takes the place of a spiritual is one of the album’s most cutting jabs.)

~therighthandofnixon

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

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

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.

We’re Back… Defending the New

The conflicts of our own Wash U graduation are now behind us and following our commission on the front lines of the political battle for the past few weeks the Foundation will now resume business as usual. The Right Hand of Nixon has many posts in the work and though I have to begin preparing for Teach For America I too have much more time to devote back to this site.

So with that short introduction said and done I will also leave this short post on one of the new and pretty incredible animated films, Ratatouille. First I have found that this particular Pixar film has the potential to fill numerous posts. There is the visual representation of gustation, more generally there is the animation itself (which has moved well beyond trying to imitate reality and has entered into its own abstract version of representation). But for this short post I want to focus on the speech given by the films sinister looking yet ultimately agreeable food critic, Anton Ego. Ego delivers a speech following his proustian moment eating ratatouille.

His speech touched me the first time I saw it and again this past week when watching it. He defends the New. Here is his review in full:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau’s, who is, in this critic’s opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau’s soon, hungry for more.

-IMDB: Ratatouille

Though when stepping outside of the world of the story we realize that the new being defended here is a cooking rat, the idea of the challenge in its defense is not outside of our world. The new at times, especially in art, can appear and actually be that outlandish (as a rat cooking better than most humans). But the reality is that though at times the new can fail it truly does need support, it needs friends.

I have nothing to say except Ratatouille and Pixar are heading in the right direction to view art in such a way as to defend the new. I hope that spirit persists in Wall*E this summer.

-Huysmans