Transgression, An Elegy
February 4, 2021 1:46 AM Subscribe
But it’s a new era: the transgressed-upon of the world are speaking, and the world is listening. This changes many things, profoundly. It’s been a long time coming. As to whether injury will prove a wellspring of cultural vitality or a wellspring of platitudes and kitsch, that is what’s being negotiated at the moment. Long 6300-word essay by Laura Kipnis for a journal called Liberties, edited by Leon Wieseltier.
At the very least, trauma is more of an equal-opportunity creative force than inspiration or talent, which were handed out far more selectively. Trauma is a bigger tent. The injury and the wound — and importantly, the socially imposed injuries of race, ethnicity, gender, queerness — have long been paths to finding a voice, an intellectual “in.” This is hardly new: wounds have long been sublimated into style or form — so argued Edmund Wilson, and before him Freud. It seems like injuries more frequently enter the cultural sphere minus the aesthetic trappings these days — perhaps there is more patience or attention for unembellished pain. The question we’re left with is how much of the world can be understood from the standpoint of a personal injury: does it constrict or enlarge the cultural possibilities?
As a defense of the 'classics,' maybe this article picks exemplars less popular with other cultural conservatives, but that's still its genre--reactionary nostalgia, as usual missing a reasonable survey of interesting counterexamples. I guess the pull quote insinuating 'traumatized' artists are, uh, mostly talentless, careerist posers might be intended to cover that? A no true Scotsman way out if people come along and name "social justice left" transgressive artists like Xandra Ibarra ("Texas City Censors Oakland Artist Xandra Ibarra's 'Obscene' Feminist Video," Feb. 2020) or transgressive left-ish pop culture like Human Kind Of (a Rick and Morty kind of show that centers women)? The historical stuff doesn't make sense to me either: late 1700's literature collapsed from neither the transgressions of Sade nor the traumas of Mary Wollstonecraft ("Reading the Wound: Wollstonecraft's Wrongs of Woman, or Maria and Trauma Theory"), and it isn't collapsing now.
posted by Wobbuffet at 4:24 AM on February 4, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Wobbuffet at 4:24 AM on February 4, 2021 [2 favorites]
The author seems to be too narrowly conflating transgressive with a kind of physical violation of another, where there have been many artists whose work was more morally-conceptually transgressive seeking to define their own identities in the face of a culture that denied them.
What constitutes transgression surely shifts over time as values change and those being challenged gain or lose standing and voice over the notions of social morality. The author is right to point to the artworld itself as sometimes having been a force for a kind of roundabout upholding of the status quo by providing a safe haven for deeply questionable acts or values, but at the same time, demands for art to uphold a "correct" moral standard have also been made many times before, with less than ideal outcomes as the certainty involved automatically lends itself to necessary question. The author is looking at some important issues, but doesn't seem to have delved deep enough into the history in this piece for a more robust understanding of the back and forth.
I say that as someone who has never much cared for the kind of transgressive art the author seems to be focused on, but then the transgressive art I have appreciated isn't all that transgressive to me for having had or gained my acceptance of the values and ideas behind it. That too is one of the dilemmas around transgressive art, it's often someone "other" that is supposed to be scandalized, which seems right until its your values being questioned.
posted by gusottertrout at 4:50 AM on February 4, 2021 [4 favorites]
What constitutes transgression surely shifts over time as values change and those being challenged gain or lose standing and voice over the notions of social morality. The author is right to point to the artworld itself as sometimes having been a force for a kind of roundabout upholding of the status quo by providing a safe haven for deeply questionable acts or values, but at the same time, demands for art to uphold a "correct" moral standard have also been made many times before, with less than ideal outcomes as the certainty involved automatically lends itself to necessary question. The author is looking at some important issues, but doesn't seem to have delved deep enough into the history in this piece for a more robust understanding of the back and forth.
I say that as someone who has never much cared for the kind of transgressive art the author seems to be focused on, but then the transgressive art I have appreciated isn't all that transgressive to me for having had or gained my acceptance of the values and ideas behind it. That too is one of the dilemmas around transgressive art, it's often someone "other" that is supposed to be scandalized, which seems right until its your values being questioned.
posted by gusottertrout at 4:50 AM on February 4, 2021 [4 favorites]
At the very least, trauma is more of an equal-opportunity creative force than inspiration or talent, which were handed out far more selectively. Trauma is a bigger tent.
Wowsers, what a smug fucking thing to say!
Despite all the concern trolling about the left's offendability, Kipnis accepts her own offendedness without question -- for example, when she tosses off the canard about standup comedy being, like, put in chains or whatever by the leftist thought police. The fact that comedy has moved on from Andrew Dice Clay truly seems to grate on Kipnis.
The glib cracks about the centering of trauma (and the complaints about the comedy thought police) reminded me of Hannah Gadsby's material about Picasso and his abuse of Marie-Thérèse Walter. Setting aside for a moment that Gadsby's material is some of the most interesting comedy in decades, part of what Gadsby was saying was that our lionization of The Great Talented Geniuses (almost always white men) silences other voices that may well have better and more profound things to say. What if trauma has never been a bigger tent than inspiration or talent? What if most of our inspiration and talent has been forced to wither on the vine for most of human history because those who possessed it didn't fit society's notions of who gets to be A Talented Genius?
posted by cubeb at 6:46 AM on February 4, 2021 [7 favorites]
Wowsers, what a smug fucking thing to say!
Despite all the concern trolling about the left's offendability, Kipnis accepts her own offendedness without question -- for example, when she tosses off the canard about standup comedy being, like, put in chains or whatever by the leftist thought police. The fact that comedy has moved on from Andrew Dice Clay truly seems to grate on Kipnis.
The glib cracks about the centering of trauma (and the complaints about the comedy thought police) reminded me of Hannah Gadsby's material about Picasso and his abuse of Marie-Thérèse Walter. Setting aside for a moment that Gadsby's material is some of the most interesting comedy in decades, part of what Gadsby was saying was that our lionization of The Great Talented Geniuses (almost always white men) silences other voices that may well have better and more profound things to say. What if trauma has never been a bigger tent than inspiration or talent? What if most of our inspiration and talent has been forced to wither on the vine for most of human history because those who possessed it didn't fit society's notions of who gets to be A Talented Genius?
posted by cubeb at 6:46 AM on February 4, 2021 [7 favorites]
I'm still reading the article, and already I've got a lot more to say, but my initial impression is that yeah, this is what happens when you try something and it doesn't work out. You try something else. We tried being transgressive for a while, some people got hurt in the process, and so we stopped. That the "something else" we've pivoted to is trauma-based is just maybe an indication that the era of transgression actually hurt quite a lot of people and that we should have tried something else sooner. If you have an issue with trauma-based values, maybe you shouldn't have persisted so long with traumatizing values. When a pendulum swings so far in the other direction, it's often a sign that it swung too far in the original direction.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:18 AM on February 4, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by kevinbelt at 7:18 AM on February 4, 2021 [1 favorite]
It's worth noting that for all Kipnis's valorization of art transgressing the old social boundaries, the very first example she presents is of a man reinforcing an old social boundary! She admired Vito Acconci's work because he plumbed the depths of his soul, dredged up desires that supposedly weren't supposed to be spoken about, and presented them to the world. And what do we end up with, for all that valiant plumbing of all those profound psychic depths? A man in a public space, with a literal platform and a literal microphone, claiming whoever he wants as grist for his sexual gratification and making sure they know it. That's not a transgression of social boundaries -- that's precisely the same public abuse that women (including Kipnis!) have had to deal with forever. Counterpoint to Kipnis: Vito Acconci wasn't transgressing jack shit. If he really had, I bet the gallery wouldn't have given him that space to begin with.
posted by cubeb at 7:48 AM on February 4, 2021 [9 favorites]
posted by cubeb at 7:48 AM on February 4, 2021 [9 favorites]
This sounds like a thesis, or at least a slogan: transgressors are the cultural ancien regime.
posted by doctornemo at 9:30 AM on February 4, 2021
posted by doctornemo at 9:30 AM on February 4, 2021
I do like this bit of context for our moment, including print media, the digital world, and performance:
The cultural genres that have flourished in the last few decades have likewise been the ones most dedicated to muddying the art-life distinction: the memoir explosion, autofiction, the psychobiographical/pathographical doggedness in criticism, confessional standup and the heirs of Spaulding Gray, along with the relentless first-person imperatives of social media, where everyone’s now a “culture worker,” everyone “curates” every-day life into pleasing tableaux for public display.
But I was disappointed with some other stuff, like "We have left literature behind and been plummeted into the sphere of moral contagion." That's baldly ahistorical. Most societies for centuries thought of literature precisely in terms of morality and social corruption. Think about the British panic over the novel, for example, which might encourage the lower classes to act up.
posted by doctornemo at 9:33 AM on February 4, 2021 [2 favorites]
The cultural genres that have flourished in the last few decades have likewise been the ones most dedicated to muddying the art-life distinction: the memoir explosion, autofiction, the psychobiographical/pathographical doggedness in criticism, confessional standup and the heirs of Spaulding Gray, along with the relentless first-person imperatives of social media, where everyone’s now a “culture worker,” everyone “curates” every-day life into pleasing tableaux for public display.
But I was disappointed with some other stuff, like "We have left literature behind and been plummeted into the sphere of moral contagion." That's baldly ahistorical. Most societies for centuries thought of literature precisely in terms of morality and social corruption. Think about the British panic over the novel, for example, which might encourage the lower classes to act up.
posted by doctornemo at 9:33 AM on February 4, 2021 [2 favorites]
Kipnis' essay is worth a closer read than I'm seeing in the comments here.
One's unlikely to agree or disagree, wholly, with the contents. That's not the point. "To transgress, or not; and for what purpose" is not an ethical debate from which a victor can emerge, no matter how much a certain kind of readership (not so quietly) desires a nice neat consensus, packaged and ready to signal "I Am On The Right Side Of This Topic".
Kipnis' best point is in the third-to-last paragraph:
"What’s left out of the anti-transgression story are the rewards of feeling affronted — how takedowns, shaming, “cancelling,” the toolkit of the new moral majoritarians, invent new forms of cultural sadism rather than rectifying the old ones. All in a good cause, of course: inclusiveness, equality, cultural respect — so many admirable reasons!"
"Reaction", in the political sense, is generally associated with conservativism. In a way, that's changing. THAT is the essential idea here. It is OF NOTE that the left has taken up the mantle of rule-making.
This essay ought to provoke a little self-reflection on the left, the undertaking of which should never be "cancelled", no matter how politically or socially inconvenient it might be.
posted by justinethanmathews at 2:39 PM on February 4, 2021 [3 favorites]
One's unlikely to agree or disagree, wholly, with the contents. That's not the point. "To transgress, or not; and for what purpose" is not an ethical debate from which a victor can emerge, no matter how much a certain kind of readership (not so quietly) desires a nice neat consensus, packaged and ready to signal "I Am On The Right Side Of This Topic".
Kipnis' best point is in the third-to-last paragraph:
"What’s left out of the anti-transgression story are the rewards of feeling affronted — how takedowns, shaming, “cancelling,” the toolkit of the new moral majoritarians, invent new forms of cultural sadism rather than rectifying the old ones. All in a good cause, of course: inclusiveness, equality, cultural respect — so many admirable reasons!"
"Reaction", in the political sense, is generally associated with conservativism. In a way, that's changing. THAT is the essential idea here. It is OF NOTE that the left has taken up the mantle of rule-making.
This essay ought to provoke a little self-reflection on the left, the undertaking of which should never be "cancelled", no matter how politically or socially inconvenient it might be.
posted by justinethanmathews at 2:39 PM on February 4, 2021 [3 favorites]
One's unlikely to agree or disagree, wholly, with the contents. That's not the point.
The problem is that whatever point she might have gets drowned in apologia for abuse, which is the problem that has been getting pointed out above. It's part of a larger phenomenon that I've seen, where the dispossessed have been finally able to assert the point that they are not the collateral damage of society, and there has been a thread among those who used to dismiss them lamenting that they can no longer do so. We see this in this piece when she talks about how rejecting the "offended" used to be how things worked:
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:10 PM on February 4, 2021 [4 favorites]
The problem is that whatever point she might have gets drowned in apologia for abuse, which is the problem that has been getting pointed out above. It's part of a larger phenomenon that I've seen, where the dispossessed have been finally able to assert the point that they are not the collateral damage of society, and there has been a thread among those who used to dismiss them lamenting that they can no longer do so. We see this in this piece when she talks about how rejecting the "offended" used to be how things worked:
Note that as of 1999 it was still possible to be ironic about offending people, because offended people were generally regarded as morons.Ultimately, it's nothing more than the same old argument we've been hearing about "not having the right to not be offended", hoping that people won't notice how that argument requires that the people affected have their voice taken away - and now lamenting and complaining that people have noticed, and have said "no, they get to speak their turn."
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:10 PM on February 4, 2021 [4 favorites]
The problem is that whatever point she might have gets drowned in apologia for abuse
With respect, I don't believe there's consensus around this reading, not even close. In fact, I think it might be that your perspective (that I broadly agree with) represents a highly vocal minority, at least in the art-MAKING world. The "chattering classes" (those that write ABOUT art, politics, culture) seem more detached every day.
I don't know many working artists who appreciated Hannah Black's letter, despite the curatorial classes' near-universal acclaim. I don't know many musicians who read, follow or care when critics write about "cultural appropriation". And though this is likely to be contentious, actors privately fear the lynch mobs of #MeToo even as their public-facing stances are unwaveringly supportive of this great spectacle of reclaiming the entertainment industry for the "dispossessed". Whether or not these movements represent real change is difficult to actually ascertain, and to Kipnis' point, many involved DO seem to be innovating in the field of "hypocrisy".
That obviously good ideas like holding Weinstein-style monsters accountable for their actions ultimately metastasize into "rigidity" of thinking, into crass hashtags and Kipnis' "sadism", speaks to something interesting and maybe apolitical in our society's psyche. Certainly one "side" has no monopoly on "abuse", and increasingly those who wield the right to define what constitutes abuse also wield a (dare I say) "populist" kind of power.
The desire to look for the victims in every story, while almost always well-intentioned, has in its assumptions a dark corollary: to control society-level conversations and deny those victims agency. Which is, of course, the point. Power & control -- they can't all be "dispossessed", can they? Definitely not for long.
This is why "transgression" is important in art. Thinking for yourself and freely rejecting toxic frameworks (that define the terms of an act without your knowing) shouldn't go out of style. I have no use, personally, for the performance art that Kipnis uses to make this point, but I agree broadly that it shouldn't matter.
Again, I don't think I agree, necessarily, with everything Kipnis is saying here. But there's good stuff in there, and I'd hate for it to be missed by dismissing 6000 words as "apologia for abuse". It's just -- not.
posted by justinethanmathews at 4:03 PM on February 4, 2021 [4 favorites]
With respect, I don't believe there's consensus around this reading, not even close. In fact, I think it might be that your perspective (that I broadly agree with) represents a highly vocal minority, at least in the art-MAKING world. The "chattering classes" (those that write ABOUT art, politics, culture) seem more detached every day.
I don't know many working artists who appreciated Hannah Black's letter, despite the curatorial classes' near-universal acclaim. I don't know many musicians who read, follow or care when critics write about "cultural appropriation". And though this is likely to be contentious, actors privately fear the lynch mobs of #MeToo even as their public-facing stances are unwaveringly supportive of this great spectacle of reclaiming the entertainment industry for the "dispossessed". Whether or not these movements represent real change is difficult to actually ascertain, and to Kipnis' point, many involved DO seem to be innovating in the field of "hypocrisy".
That obviously good ideas like holding Weinstein-style monsters accountable for their actions ultimately metastasize into "rigidity" of thinking, into crass hashtags and Kipnis' "sadism", speaks to something interesting and maybe apolitical in our society's psyche. Certainly one "side" has no monopoly on "abuse", and increasingly those who wield the right to define what constitutes abuse also wield a (dare I say) "populist" kind of power.
The desire to look for the victims in every story, while almost always well-intentioned, has in its assumptions a dark corollary: to control society-level conversations and deny those victims agency. Which is, of course, the point. Power & control -- they can't all be "dispossessed", can they? Definitely not for long.
This is why "transgression" is important in art. Thinking for yourself and freely rejecting toxic frameworks (that define the terms of an act without your knowing) shouldn't go out of style. I have no use, personally, for the performance art that Kipnis uses to make this point, but I agree broadly that it shouldn't matter.
Again, I don't think I agree, necessarily, with everything Kipnis is saying here. But there's good stuff in there, and I'd hate for it to be missed by dismissing 6000 words as "apologia for abuse". It's just -- not.
posted by justinethanmathews at 4:03 PM on February 4, 2021 [4 favorites]
Sort of curious who canceled Vito Acconci? Kipnis mentions him more than a dozen times as if he's somehow beyond polite discussion, but Google Scholar offers up more than 1400 citations since 2017. Also curious when masturbation as an art form became the sole purview of the alt-right when Acconci was mocked in his own time via Susan Mogul's feminist masturbation video and Xandra Ibarra is out there warning that, "If I can't cum on my tacos, neither can you." Did I miss Mogul or Ibarra doing something problematic? Like, that's possible, but it wouldn't be that stuff.
posted by Wobbuffet at 4:04 PM on February 4, 2021
posted by Wobbuffet at 4:04 PM on February 4, 2021
The desire to look for the victims in every story, while almost always well-intentioned, has in its assumptions a dark corollary: to control society-level conversations and deny those victims agency. Which is, of course, the point. Power & control -- they can't all be "dispossessed", can they? Definitely not for long.I think the scare quotes you use around dispossessed betray a total lack of respect for the victims of rich and powerful artists. I don't think you see them as real people, or at least don't see their pain as valid.
The whole "transgressive" movement as described by Kipnis seems to be rooted in a similar lack of empathy. She's willing to criticise transgressive artists, but she seems to share the idea with a lot of trump voters that the real problem is that the wrong people are getting hurt.
Any artistic movement based on hurting people is always going to turn its guns on the vulnerable, because art is funded by rich shitheads.
posted by zymil at 5:05 PM on February 4, 2021 [1 favorite]
I don't think transgression is either necessary or sufficient for thinking for yourself and freely rejecting toxic frameworks. It's a big claim to say that it is and an enormous one to say that it must be. Romantic periods are very fond of the claim, but that's only a fraction of history and art.
(The original Romantic period is described some as being a reaction to population growth -- a youth boom? Is that true of all the shock & sensibility artistic periods? Is there an analogy in Chinese artistic history?)
posted by clew at 5:21 PM on February 4, 2021 [1 favorite]
(The original Romantic period is described some as being a reaction to population growth -- a youth boom? Is that true of all the shock & sensibility artistic periods? Is there an analogy in Chinese artistic history?)
posted by clew at 5:21 PM on February 4, 2021 [1 favorite]
With respect, I don't believe there's consensus around this reading, not even close. In fact, I think it might be that your perspective (that I broadly agree with) represents a highly vocal minority, at least in the art-MAKING world.
Why yes, that would be the problem - the art-making world protects its abusers from the outside world, often using transgression as the excuse. And as I have said time and time again, when you turn a principle into a shield for abuse, it should not surprise you when others stop viewing such principle as legitimate. Kipnis talks (dismissively) about Louis CK's abuse, but ignores that the art community is currently in the process of rehabilitating him, in large part by dismissing the reality that not only did he abuse upcoming female comedians, but then proceeded to (with the help of his agent Dave Becky) ruin their careers to protect his.
No principle can ever justify abuse - Following Piece isn't a work of art, but evidence of a crime. If the art world feels that "transgression" is an important principle, rather than complain about outsiders holding abusers to account they should instead clean their own house. And if they refuse to do so, then they should not act shocked when the wider world views their ideals as self-serving bullshit.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:39 PM on February 4, 2021 [3 favorites]
Why yes, that would be the problem - the art-making world protects its abusers from the outside world, often using transgression as the excuse. And as I have said time and time again, when you turn a principle into a shield for abuse, it should not surprise you when others stop viewing such principle as legitimate. Kipnis talks (dismissively) about Louis CK's abuse, but ignores that the art community is currently in the process of rehabilitating him, in large part by dismissing the reality that not only did he abuse upcoming female comedians, but then proceeded to (with the help of his agent Dave Becky) ruin their careers to protect his.
No principle can ever justify abuse - Following Piece isn't a work of art, but evidence of a crime. If the art world feels that "transgression" is an important principle, rather than complain about outsiders holding abusers to account they should instead clean their own house. And if they refuse to do so, then they should not act shocked when the wider world views their ideals as self-serving bullshit.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:39 PM on February 4, 2021 [3 favorites]
Kipnis' point was that, unlike Rudy Giuliani, the marginalized groups of today crying foul about aspects of art or culture or media or whatever aren't morons.
Given a) her dismissive language and b) her past writings, the point seems more like "I would like to dismiss these critics as morons, but doing so would cause me to lose face among people whose opinions I do actually care about." And yes, it's worth looking at that writing to realize that this is a person who responded to "don't make unwanted sexual advances" at a sexual harassment seminar with "how do you know without making them" (an account recounted in a piece arguing that pushback on abusive power structures and things like trigger warnings is "sexual paranoia") and argued that the pushback against Ian Buruma publishing Jian Ghomeshi's self-serving essay was a threat to intellectual culture. She claims to be conflicted, but in reality what she is now is growing more and more out of step from the communities she claims membership in, as they more and more reject her position (the line she put on the cover of Unwanted Advances - "if this is feminism, it's feminism hijacked by melodrama" - reads much differently these days, where the use of the claim of "drama" as a tool to dismiss abuse is better understood.) in a twist both unsurprising and typical, she now asks for the sort of safe space she once railed against now that she's on the other side of the power narrative.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:27 AM on February 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
Given a) her dismissive language and b) her past writings, the point seems more like "I would like to dismiss these critics as morons, but doing so would cause me to lose face among people whose opinions I do actually care about." And yes, it's worth looking at that writing to realize that this is a person who responded to "don't make unwanted sexual advances" at a sexual harassment seminar with "how do you know without making them" (an account recounted in a piece arguing that pushback on abusive power structures and things like trigger warnings is "sexual paranoia") and argued that the pushback against Ian Buruma publishing Jian Ghomeshi's self-serving essay was a threat to intellectual culture. She claims to be conflicted, but in reality what she is now is growing more and more out of step from the communities she claims membership in, as they more and more reject her position (the line she put on the cover of Unwanted Advances - "if this is feminism, it's feminism hijacked by melodrama" - reads much differently these days, where the use of the claim of "drama" as a tool to dismiss abuse is better understood.) in a twist both unsurprising and typical, she now asks for the sort of safe space she once railed against now that she's on the other side of the power narrative.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:27 AM on February 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
To be sure, it's more a reluctant and somewhat conditional surrender rather than an apology or complete change of heart, which makes the piece a bit odd to read for how it's built around her feelings about transgression rather than the how and why that kind of art came about and what has changed since that time. Which is unfortunate, but not off-message for the author I guess, because there really is some use in looking at how art and culture has and is evolving along these lines.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:23 AM on February 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by gusottertrout at 1:23 AM on February 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
I think the scare quotes you use around dispossessed betray a total lack of respect for the victims of rich and powerful artists. I don't think you see them as real people, or at least don't see their pain as valid.
Zymil, I used quotes to reference NoxAeternum's phrase.
There aren't very many "rich and powerful artists". The vast majority struggle, most don't succeed. This is important to fully understand -- when we talk about "artists", we are not necessarily talking about "the art world". We must resist childlike simplification here. In this conversation about transgression, we are not talking exclusively about rich white men doing as they please. We are mostly talking about unsuccessful people of all kinds, competing for a piece of the "attention economy".
Aeternum, your decision to frame all transgression as abusive is frustrating. The stalking piece can be interpreted as such, I'd say none of the other examples can be. This is an article about transgression as an aesthetic choice, as a stance, yet now we're here talking about whether I believe sexual assault victims' pain is valid .
For every Louis CK (an abuser!) there seemed to come with it an Aziz Ansari (not an abuser!) and that mostly proved to me that the public sphere is a terrible place for restorative justice; that the "public shaming" model of fixing REAL PROBLEMS doesn't work.
Whether Kipnis is truly demanding a "safe space" from the feminist community, I don't know. But as feminism becomes the domain of binary-thinking Refinery29 types and not say, Camille Paglia, I'd say I mostly agree with Kipnis that it's been "hijacked". It is after all her right to say this, and not really fair for anyone else to do more than agree, disagree or move on.
There is an extremely toxic tendency on the left to mark lines in the sand after which any disagreement makes the other evil, complicit, abusive, oppressive, or a member of "multi-racial white supremacist patriachy" (to paraphrase Robin James). This functions to defang actual left scholarship and to reduce the power of any individual thinker. This is bad for marginalized populations, who deserve a spectrum of viewpoints, and bad for society-at-large, which sadly "benefits" from quietly assuming all marginalized people think alike.
While extremely valuable scholarship, this language of abuse, of trauma, of intersectionality, should be used precisely and with rigor -- and unfortunately it rather lends itself to being used like a sledgehammer. You can use "social-justicey" sounding words to prove any "self-serving" point. This alone is not unusual, sophistry is not new. But the moral panic portion, where the left in perpetual emergency mode finds it righteous to cast out all disagreement, to call it "abuse" and not conflict (to paraphrase Schulman), that's where artists who transgress in good faith will suffer -- where they ARE suffering -- which is why the media-class left can't handle conversations around Camille Paglia, Quinn Norton, and now seemingly Kipnis.
Ultimately, using the language of social justice to caricaturize complex opposition as "abuse" is a misuse of such language, and bad for all involved.
posted by justinethanmathews at 7:52 AM on February 5, 2021 [3 favorites]
Zymil, I used quotes to reference NoxAeternum's phrase.
There aren't very many "rich and powerful artists". The vast majority struggle, most don't succeed. This is important to fully understand -- when we talk about "artists", we are not necessarily talking about "the art world". We must resist childlike simplification here. In this conversation about transgression, we are not talking exclusively about rich white men doing as they please. We are mostly talking about unsuccessful people of all kinds, competing for a piece of the "attention economy".
Aeternum, your decision to frame all transgression as abusive is frustrating. The stalking piece can be interpreted as such, I'd say none of the other examples can be. This is an article about transgression as an aesthetic choice, as a stance, yet now we're here talking about whether I believe sexual assault victims' pain is valid .
For every Louis CK (an abuser!) there seemed to come with it an Aziz Ansari (not an abuser!) and that mostly proved to me that the public sphere is a terrible place for restorative justice; that the "public shaming" model of fixing REAL PROBLEMS doesn't work.
Whether Kipnis is truly demanding a "safe space" from the feminist community, I don't know. But as feminism becomes the domain of binary-thinking Refinery29 types and not say, Camille Paglia, I'd say I mostly agree with Kipnis that it's been "hijacked". It is after all her right to say this, and not really fair for anyone else to do more than agree, disagree or move on.
There is an extremely toxic tendency on the left to mark lines in the sand after which any disagreement makes the other evil, complicit, abusive, oppressive, or a member of "multi-racial white supremacist patriachy" (to paraphrase Robin James). This functions to defang actual left scholarship and to reduce the power of any individual thinker. This is bad for marginalized populations, who deserve a spectrum of viewpoints, and bad for society-at-large, which sadly "benefits" from quietly assuming all marginalized people think alike.
While extremely valuable scholarship, this language of abuse, of trauma, of intersectionality, should be used precisely and with rigor -- and unfortunately it rather lends itself to being used like a sledgehammer. You can use "social-justicey" sounding words to prove any "self-serving" point. This alone is not unusual, sophistry is not new. But the moral panic portion, where the left in perpetual emergency mode finds it righteous to cast out all disagreement, to call it "abuse" and not conflict (to paraphrase Schulman), that's where artists who transgress in good faith will suffer -- where they ARE suffering -- which is why the media-class left can't handle conversations around Camille Paglia, Quinn Norton, and now seemingly Kipnis.
Ultimately, using the language of social justice to caricaturize complex opposition as "abuse" is a misuse of such language, and bad for all involved.
posted by justinethanmathews at 7:52 AM on February 5, 2021 [3 favorites]
Aeternum, your decision to frame all transgression as abusive is frustrating. The stalking piece can be interpreted as such, I'd say none of the other examples can be. This is an article about transgression as an aesthetic choice, as a stance, yet now we're here talking about whether I believe sexual assault victims' pain is valid .
Because you're more focused on how people view transgression rather than the point that historically, transgression has been used to defend and excuse abuse - and that Kipnis has been part of that defense. As I pointed out before - you want people to see transgression as anything but enabling abuse, you need to not let abusers use it as a shield. Otherwise, people - in particular its victims - understandably stop seeing the principle as valid.
In short, I'm not saying "all transgression is abusive", but that a good portion is, and there has been a blind eye turned towards it - and this impacts how people view transgression as a whole.
There is an extremely toxic tendency on the left to mark lines in the sand after which any disagreement makes the other evil, complicit, abusive, oppressive, or a member of "multi-racial white supremacist patriachy" (to paraphrase Robin James).
Ah, "disagreement", the classic piece of euphemistic language used to dismiss arguments by focusing on the difference of views while ignoring the actual substance of the disagreement. Yes, I "disagree" with someone who publicly states that the idea that professors have the power to coerce students is ridiculous, given how many times we've seen professors abuse their power over students and receive little to no punishment while the student sees their academic career derailed. Furthermore, a lot of those "lines in the sand" are things like "no means no" (this is what makes Ansari an abuser, by the way), or "people are, as a rule, not looking to be hit on at their place of employment". And given that, it's not surprising that people are rejecting individuals who push back on those points. Or in other words, what's being "cast out" is not "disagreement", but arguments for dismissing abuse.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:33 AM on February 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
Because you're more focused on how people view transgression rather than the point that historically, transgression has been used to defend and excuse abuse - and that Kipnis has been part of that defense. As I pointed out before - you want people to see transgression as anything but enabling abuse, you need to not let abusers use it as a shield. Otherwise, people - in particular its victims - understandably stop seeing the principle as valid.
In short, I'm not saying "all transgression is abusive", but that a good portion is, and there has been a blind eye turned towards it - and this impacts how people view transgression as a whole.
There is an extremely toxic tendency on the left to mark lines in the sand after which any disagreement makes the other evil, complicit, abusive, oppressive, or a member of "multi-racial white supremacist patriachy" (to paraphrase Robin James).
Ah, "disagreement", the classic piece of euphemistic language used to dismiss arguments by focusing on the difference of views while ignoring the actual substance of the disagreement. Yes, I "disagree" with someone who publicly states that the idea that professors have the power to coerce students is ridiculous, given how many times we've seen professors abuse their power over students and receive little to no punishment while the student sees their academic career derailed. Furthermore, a lot of those "lines in the sand" are things like "no means no" (this is what makes Ansari an abuser, by the way), or "people are, as a rule, not looking to be hit on at their place of employment". And given that, it's not surprising that people are rejecting individuals who push back on those points. Or in other words, what's being "cast out" is not "disagreement", but arguments for dismissing abuse.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:33 AM on February 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
Because you're more focused on how people view transgression rather than the point that historically, transgression has been used to defend and excuse abuse.
This is exactly right -- because the discussion here is about the evolving role of transgression in art. If your position is that it has MOSTLY been used to "defend and excuse abuse", I have to fully disagree. A very vocal, very small minority of media class writers/thinkers use "abuse" as a pretext for dismissing art and disengaging from its attendant complexities, and it's a powerful derail. I do not believe the "wider world," to use your phrase, is interested in purging the canon of problematic work. I think it's also worth investigating who benefits, in the end, from encouraging audiences to have in their toolkit rhetorical devices which enable them to casually dismiss entire art movements and the human beings involved in their practice -- and to ask which top-down societal trends might foster that kind of paranoid conservatism. Why are so many people being encouraged to shut up, all at once? Should whole societies absorb the hyper-anxious psychology of the academy? Why do so many in the literary bubble think everyone else is on board?
There is the idea of the "Yes, and", in theater and otherwise. In this context, while I think the framework of transgression as outlined by Kipnis can have regressive qualities, it's not necessary to derail the conversation -- (WHICH IS ABOUT ART) -- and make the abuse (or impression of abuse) the only salient point. There is a middle way, which is to say "Yes, this is bad, AND, it is good." Or not!
With that said, I'm conscious that it's starting to look like I'm some kind of alt-right sympathizer, and while I hate disclaimers, I feel the need to share that anyone who construes this yearning for a "middle way" as shorthand for, say, excusing Roman Polanski, is gonna be really disappointed. I'm not interested in protecting, defending or excusing abuse, although having met enough drunk, backstabbing careerist shitheads in NYC media that list should really be called "We're All Mostly Shitty Media People, and We're Overpaid Regardless Of Our Gender" but that's got no ring to it does it? These are matters of degree, not of intent, and I do not mean to create the impression that I have no empathy for actual victims. I do -- I question expanding art's victim class, and for what purpose.
posted by justinethanmathews at 11:06 AM on February 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
This is exactly right -- because the discussion here is about the evolving role of transgression in art. If your position is that it has MOSTLY been used to "defend and excuse abuse", I have to fully disagree. A very vocal, very small minority of media class writers/thinkers use "abuse" as a pretext for dismissing art and disengaging from its attendant complexities, and it's a powerful derail. I do not believe the "wider world," to use your phrase, is interested in purging the canon of problematic work. I think it's also worth investigating who benefits, in the end, from encouraging audiences to have in their toolkit rhetorical devices which enable them to casually dismiss entire art movements and the human beings involved in their practice -- and to ask which top-down societal trends might foster that kind of paranoid conservatism. Why are so many people being encouraged to shut up, all at once? Should whole societies absorb the hyper-anxious psychology of the academy? Why do so many in the literary bubble think everyone else is on board?
There is the idea of the "Yes, and", in theater and otherwise. In this context, while I think the framework of transgression as outlined by Kipnis can have regressive qualities, it's not necessary to derail the conversation -- (WHICH IS ABOUT ART) -- and make the abuse (or impression of abuse) the only salient point. There is a middle way, which is to say "Yes, this is bad, AND, it is good." Or not!
With that said, I'm conscious that it's starting to look like I'm some kind of alt-right sympathizer, and while I hate disclaimers, I feel the need to share that anyone who construes this yearning for a "middle way" as shorthand for, say, excusing Roman Polanski, is gonna be really disappointed. I'm not interested in protecting, defending or excusing abuse, although having met enough drunk, backstabbing careerist shitheads in NYC media that list should really be called "We're All Mostly Shitty Media People, and We're Overpaid Regardless Of Our Gender" but that's got no ring to it does it? These are matters of degree, not of intent, and I do not mean to create the impression that I have no empathy for actual victims. I do -- I question expanding art's victim class, and for what purpose.
posted by justinethanmathews at 11:06 AM on February 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
I think it has been said that a motivating element of "bourgeois" ambition is the desire for privacy. This idea that to be exposed to other people roughens the soul just like being exposed to the elements roughens the body. To be relieved from all that, the smells, the noises, their terrible dress sense... And so, seclusion as a kind of sacralization of the self, a retreat into an inner sanctum that is taken to be authentic & untainted as long as its unperturbed by undue outside influence. This means the teeming masses have to be policed. Anger, poverty and bad manners are particularly upsetting, so these need to be kept out, as well as any puncturing or ridicule of comforting myths and beliefs. The ballooning self projects outward as a sphere that's as delicate as it is inviolable, becoming ever more fraught with tension as it expands. Because the boundaries that protect it from transgressions themselves bring about the potential for transgression. When you have rules you will have rule-breakers. More rules don't solve that.
Tolerance is always tolerance of transgression. No-one tolerates the pleasant or wholesome. Tolerance is always toleration of the unpleasant or less than wholesome. People chew loudly, they fidget, they look at you funny, or they don't look at you at all. They say stupid shit. You can put them in school for 10 years, they still say stupid shit. Living and working together means to tolerate that to some extent. Nobody is entitled to remain wholly absolved from the smelly existence of their fellow folk entirely. Indeed, the burden is the blessing; the burden of suffering one another is the blessing that others have to suffer us in turn. But it remains a burden, and there's little need to tolerate those who seek to make it unbearable.
posted by dmh at 10:28 AM on February 6, 2021 [2 favorites]
Tolerance is always tolerance of transgression. No-one tolerates the pleasant or wholesome. Tolerance is always toleration of the unpleasant or less than wholesome. People chew loudly, they fidget, they look at you funny, or they don't look at you at all. They say stupid shit. You can put them in school for 10 years, they still say stupid shit. Living and working together means to tolerate that to some extent. Nobody is entitled to remain wholly absolved from the smelly existence of their fellow folk entirely. Indeed, the burden is the blessing; the burden of suffering one another is the blessing that others have to suffer us in turn. But it remains a burden, and there's little need to tolerate those who seek to make it unbearable.
posted by dmh at 10:28 AM on February 6, 2021 [2 favorites]
Thank you for posting, thought provoking.
posted by blue shadows at 4:53 PM on February 7, 2021
posted by blue shadows at 4:53 PM on February 7, 2021
Here's a different take on transgressive art, that goes a bit further into why the "who" the artist is and what boundaries they're crossing has importance.
I think there's still more to unpack around the ideas the main linked essay goes into, and it's been kinda gnawing at me this weekend to dig into it more now that there's been some time to let it sink in, so I might add more later when I get the time. (I offer that as much as a warning as promise in case some wish to remove the thread from activity before running into one of my long winded posts.)
posted by gusottertrout at 5:07 PM on February 7, 2021
I think there's still more to unpack around the ideas the main linked essay goes into, and it's been kinda gnawing at me this weekend to dig into it more now that there's been some time to let it sink in, so I might add more later when I get the time. (I offer that as much as a warning as promise in case some wish to remove the thread from activity before running into one of my long winded posts.)
posted by gusottertrout at 5:07 PM on February 7, 2021
I mentioned earlier that by choosing the examples she does, Kipnis is constraining transgressive art to a narrower space than it warrants, which, to Kipnis' credit, also best underscores the more problematic examples as sharing some sense of likeness with the more progressive examples that mostly go unmentioned in the article. In the same way, Kipnis using her own history as the hook for examining transgressive art, both leaves out too much of the relevant and important history around the subject and also again serves to better underscore the more troubling aspects without trying to champion them by association with the works that haven't come under question.
If one is just trying to give an account of the recentish history of transgressive art, one would need to talk about works by outsiders, some examples of which were mentioned in my link above, where transgressive art is used to challenge the status quo around the way it served to police identity and values. Along with that would need be how that art actually helped change those boundaries and how that happened within a specific framework of place and time. Work's like Jack Smith's film Flaming Creatures, flaunting a wide ranging queer sensibility, were seized by authorities for violating obscenity laws and through the subsequent protests helped the push towards overturning long standing deeply conservative ideals over what was acceptable "speech".
Lenny Bruce is a more famous example in the same vein, but so too are books like Lolita, Ulysses, Madame Bovary, and Lady Chatterly's Lover, each of which also was once considered obscene and had to be defended to be published. Groups like the Guerilla Girls and Act Up used transgressive art to challenge sexist and homophobic practices within the art world and beyond to important effect. One could go on and on drawing out examples of art challenging the social mores of the time and place it was made, going much further back than these examples, but the question here isn't just what it was then, but what we make of it now, and that adds to the difficulties Kipnis' piece touches on but doesn't perhaps delve into deeply enough to draw out the scope of the contention.
Take, for example, Allen Jones work from '69-'70, Women as Furniture. The piece is, as the title suggests, casts of women in bondage-like gear made to serve as a table, hatstand, and chair. The piece drew a great deal of criticism when it was first shown, and still is contentious in various art circles today, but also found support from writers like Laura Mulvey, who is a central figure in feminist studies for her work on the male gaze, among other things. Her understanding of the work goes against the wider claims of it being exploitational for the shock of it, to offering a reading that counters that as being "about" male fetishism in a meaningfully deconstructive way (to greatly simplify her points). Other feminist writers challenge Mulvey's reading, but find different areas of value by reading it within Jones larger body of works. These different understandings of the work are coming from women deeply invested in feminism, looking at the ambiguity of the piece and finding their own understandings of it that allows the work a charge of meaning they find of some value. Similar appreciation exists around Lolita and many other transgressive works from those who seek to uphold the progressive values that others claim are being harmed.
In a slightly different fashion, a work like Judy Chicago's Dinner Party was largely received with something akin to yawns from the more conservative element of the art criticism world, they weren't offended, just dismissive, while some feminists found it troubling for entirely different reasons and yet others, men and women, found the work deeply meaningful and powerful. And the public reaction, what of it there is to a modern art museum piece, covers the same wide range. Chicago herself distanced the work from the history of women making craft, like pottery and lace, by saying it was intended as a work of art, not just craft, which causes yet another layer to unpeel and read in looking at the piece, Chicago's other works, and "art" as opposed to handiwork and so on.
One of the problems with Kipnis' essay is that it flattens out the various works she talks about, and those one might also add in, as using the idea of transgression in a somewhat superficial manner, I mean that literally, by talking about it as more a surface feature. The surface subject matter of the works offends so these works are all categorized in the same way. That really doesn't suit the art as it is experienced or made in many more complex or deeper ways. Nabokov, for example, I suspect would not be greatly pleased to be talked about in the same manner as Acconci or have Lolita and Seedbed considered as equivalent for his aim being considerably different than Acconci's, even as there are some clear surface similarities worth looking at as well, puns and obsessive deviant sexual behavior most obviously.
Acconci's work seemed to seek to confront his audience by his actions within a specific place and time, but also draws on the awareness of the physical lengths Acconci submits himself to in order to achieve the ends of the work. Masturbating for eight hours, rubbing one's arm until the skin coarsens etc, is putting an emphasis on physical extremes in order to discomfort. Lolita does something different, it seeks to insinuate the mindset of Humbert Humbert to its reader rather than aggressively discomfort. Nabokov claimed he was trying to capture the experience of a baboon who could see nothing but the bars of his cage with Humbert, and as importantly sought to use the full range of his formal artistic powers to do so, in, one imagines, something of the way Nabokov took Flaubert's writing of Madame Bovary.
These are important differences to consider for how they shift the experience of the art and in the way art can seek and find "meaning" for itself and an audience. Along with that is the important distinction that Acconci's work was a performance piece, the experience of which is tied to a particular place and time we no longer have access to, even if "recreated" because that moment is gone. We respond to the piece by description and imagining what it might have been like to experience it, and likely doubt we would want to. Lolita, as a book, is exactly the same as when written, as intended by Nabokov, but even so the world around the book has changed over time, so we experience the same words and effects, but, depending on our attitude, might subject it to a context out of its time, depending on how we approach art.
This latter bit is of considerable importance, it can hold works to standards of predicting what we think now while minimizing the way the world was then. That is fraught with all problems as it holds "us" and our time as the standard of judgment for all time, even as we and this time will soon fall into a insufficient past and it can deny the importance of forbearers in how we reached this moment, as if our great awareness was sprung full blown. This is the kind of criticism that Guerilla Girls faced in recent years, the progressive elements of change they sought get questioned for what they didn't anticipate which is of importance now. This is part of a pattern of consumption of media and art that is troubling. What does art do for me, not what is it I get from the art or even art as exchange, it becomes is it acceptable to my values now, not what can I learn even as just part of history. The idea that the history of art needs to fit current values to be displayed is to suggest art history is about liking, that there is no real importance in seeing how thought and expression developed over time. If we treated all history like this, it would be the equivalent of saying we need to get rid of the parts with colonialism and genocide because that doesn't suit our values and reading about it is uncomfortable.
It also fits into the way many now browse art like a sampler platter, not wanting to engage with anything that challenges or is difficult or maybe even questionable in some ways, preferring works that simply reinforce or flatter, pander or say little at all aside from tweaking some basic emotional hooks over and over again. It's why we get Corporate Memphis as a omnipresent style and Disney movies as cultural highpoints. Consensus art is mostly neither, as it is art as corporate product rather than individual expression through form or individualized response, as we all come to the works from a different history and receive different experiences thereby.
That also speaks to the problem of policing art for standards, where we are increasingly turning to the corporate world to act as traffic cops, allowing certain works to go through, while halting others from access. This can feel rewarding in the moment, turning the powers of corporate world to good for a change, but it also instills the corporations with increasing control over what can be expressed, for the alleged greater good of course. That is not a great path to take.
There is more to say about the "victim" part of the issue Kipnis raises, where, for example, that too is being appropriated just like past experiences of subcultures and the marginalized have been to serve the wider public interest for claims of importance, weakening its power for those who it most needs to serve, while also seeming to increasingly fit a Manichean worldview of heroes and villains, where each seeks to define their experience as a fight against some injustice, even if its something as absurd as the war on Christmas. It's no coincidence the alt-right has so broadly stolen concepts from the left to try and turn tables of their own and even in more genuinely felt form, the desire to call attention to one's own feelings or needs becomes a battleground. But I've obviously gone on more than long enough, so I'll leave it there and hope the thoughts are too hard to parse, as one of the other big problems with how we consume media is in there being little common history one can rely on in conversation or knowing where others are coming from, we have to keep starting from near zero and begin again each time.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:25 AM on February 8, 2021 [3 favorites]
If one is just trying to give an account of the recentish history of transgressive art, one would need to talk about works by outsiders, some examples of which were mentioned in my link above, where transgressive art is used to challenge the status quo around the way it served to police identity and values. Along with that would need be how that art actually helped change those boundaries and how that happened within a specific framework of place and time. Work's like Jack Smith's film Flaming Creatures, flaunting a wide ranging queer sensibility, were seized by authorities for violating obscenity laws and through the subsequent protests helped the push towards overturning long standing deeply conservative ideals over what was acceptable "speech".
Lenny Bruce is a more famous example in the same vein, but so too are books like Lolita, Ulysses, Madame Bovary, and Lady Chatterly's Lover, each of which also was once considered obscene and had to be defended to be published. Groups like the Guerilla Girls and Act Up used transgressive art to challenge sexist and homophobic practices within the art world and beyond to important effect. One could go on and on drawing out examples of art challenging the social mores of the time and place it was made, going much further back than these examples, but the question here isn't just what it was then, but what we make of it now, and that adds to the difficulties Kipnis' piece touches on but doesn't perhaps delve into deeply enough to draw out the scope of the contention.
Take, for example, Allen Jones work from '69-'70, Women as Furniture. The piece is, as the title suggests, casts of women in bondage-like gear made to serve as a table, hatstand, and chair. The piece drew a great deal of criticism when it was first shown, and still is contentious in various art circles today, but also found support from writers like Laura Mulvey, who is a central figure in feminist studies for her work on the male gaze, among other things. Her understanding of the work goes against the wider claims of it being exploitational for the shock of it, to offering a reading that counters that as being "about" male fetishism in a meaningfully deconstructive way (to greatly simplify her points). Other feminist writers challenge Mulvey's reading, but find different areas of value by reading it within Jones larger body of works. These different understandings of the work are coming from women deeply invested in feminism, looking at the ambiguity of the piece and finding their own understandings of it that allows the work a charge of meaning they find of some value. Similar appreciation exists around Lolita and many other transgressive works from those who seek to uphold the progressive values that others claim are being harmed.
In a slightly different fashion, a work like Judy Chicago's Dinner Party was largely received with something akin to yawns from the more conservative element of the art criticism world, they weren't offended, just dismissive, while some feminists found it troubling for entirely different reasons and yet others, men and women, found the work deeply meaningful and powerful. And the public reaction, what of it there is to a modern art museum piece, covers the same wide range. Chicago herself distanced the work from the history of women making craft, like pottery and lace, by saying it was intended as a work of art, not just craft, which causes yet another layer to unpeel and read in looking at the piece, Chicago's other works, and "art" as opposed to handiwork and so on.
One of the problems with Kipnis' essay is that it flattens out the various works she talks about, and those one might also add in, as using the idea of transgression in a somewhat superficial manner, I mean that literally, by talking about it as more a surface feature. The surface subject matter of the works offends so these works are all categorized in the same way. That really doesn't suit the art as it is experienced or made in many more complex or deeper ways. Nabokov, for example, I suspect would not be greatly pleased to be talked about in the same manner as Acconci or have Lolita and Seedbed considered as equivalent for his aim being considerably different than Acconci's, even as there are some clear surface similarities worth looking at as well, puns and obsessive deviant sexual behavior most obviously.
Acconci's work seemed to seek to confront his audience by his actions within a specific place and time, but also draws on the awareness of the physical lengths Acconci submits himself to in order to achieve the ends of the work. Masturbating for eight hours, rubbing one's arm until the skin coarsens etc, is putting an emphasis on physical extremes in order to discomfort. Lolita does something different, it seeks to insinuate the mindset of Humbert Humbert to its reader rather than aggressively discomfort. Nabokov claimed he was trying to capture the experience of a baboon who could see nothing but the bars of his cage with Humbert, and as importantly sought to use the full range of his formal artistic powers to do so, in, one imagines, something of the way Nabokov took Flaubert's writing of Madame Bovary.
These are important differences to consider for how they shift the experience of the art and in the way art can seek and find "meaning" for itself and an audience. Along with that is the important distinction that Acconci's work was a performance piece, the experience of which is tied to a particular place and time we no longer have access to, even if "recreated" because that moment is gone. We respond to the piece by description and imagining what it might have been like to experience it, and likely doubt we would want to. Lolita, as a book, is exactly the same as when written, as intended by Nabokov, but even so the world around the book has changed over time, so we experience the same words and effects, but, depending on our attitude, might subject it to a context out of its time, depending on how we approach art.
This latter bit is of considerable importance, it can hold works to standards of predicting what we think now while minimizing the way the world was then. That is fraught with all problems as it holds "us" and our time as the standard of judgment for all time, even as we and this time will soon fall into a insufficient past and it can deny the importance of forbearers in how we reached this moment, as if our great awareness was sprung full blown. This is the kind of criticism that Guerilla Girls faced in recent years, the progressive elements of change they sought get questioned for what they didn't anticipate which is of importance now. This is part of a pattern of consumption of media and art that is troubling. What does art do for me, not what is it I get from the art or even art as exchange, it becomes is it acceptable to my values now, not what can I learn even as just part of history. The idea that the history of art needs to fit current values to be displayed is to suggest art history is about liking, that there is no real importance in seeing how thought and expression developed over time. If we treated all history like this, it would be the equivalent of saying we need to get rid of the parts with colonialism and genocide because that doesn't suit our values and reading about it is uncomfortable.
It also fits into the way many now browse art like a sampler platter, not wanting to engage with anything that challenges or is difficult or maybe even questionable in some ways, preferring works that simply reinforce or flatter, pander or say little at all aside from tweaking some basic emotional hooks over and over again. It's why we get Corporate Memphis as a omnipresent style and Disney movies as cultural highpoints. Consensus art is mostly neither, as it is art as corporate product rather than individual expression through form or individualized response, as we all come to the works from a different history and receive different experiences thereby.
That also speaks to the problem of policing art for standards, where we are increasingly turning to the corporate world to act as traffic cops, allowing certain works to go through, while halting others from access. This can feel rewarding in the moment, turning the powers of corporate world to good for a change, but it also instills the corporations with increasing control over what can be expressed, for the alleged greater good of course. That is not a great path to take.
There is more to say about the "victim" part of the issue Kipnis raises, where, for example, that too is being appropriated just like past experiences of subcultures and the marginalized have been to serve the wider public interest for claims of importance, weakening its power for those who it most needs to serve, while also seeming to increasingly fit a Manichean worldview of heroes and villains, where each seeks to define their experience as a fight against some injustice, even if its something as absurd as the war on Christmas. It's no coincidence the alt-right has so broadly stolen concepts from the left to try and turn tables of their own and even in more genuinely felt form, the desire to call attention to one's own feelings or needs becomes a battleground. But I've obviously gone on more than long enough, so I'll leave it there and hope the thoughts are too hard to parse, as one of the other big problems with how we consume media is in there being little common history one can rely on in conversation or knowing where others are coming from, we have to keep starting from near zero and begin again each time.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:25 AM on February 8, 2021 [3 favorites]
The idea that the history of art needs to fit current values to be displayed is to suggest art history is about liking, that there is no real importance in seeing how thought and expression developed over time.
gusottertrout, brilliant stuff!
posted by justinethanmathews at 2:02 PM on February 8, 2021
gusottertrout, brilliant stuff!
posted by justinethanmathews at 2:02 PM on February 8, 2021
« Older I think she sings standing still because her voice... | There was a vast demand for Patinkin-related... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:39 AM on February 4, 2021 [3 favorites]