"Culture is ordinary"

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
OK! Watch this and rate it out of 10! On your marks, get set, go!

http://www.ubu.com/film/paik_beatles.html

If it's on ubu, then it's going to be at least an 8. 😉

Originally posted by Palynka
If it's on ubu, then it's going to be at least an 8. 😉

You've passed the test, commissar! But do watch the film, it's only 3 minutes long.

Originally posted by Natsia
What is left for anyone to rebel or rally against?
What is left that has any true shock value? .

Why does art have to be about rebellion or shock? That's a very Romantic view.

Originally posted by Nemesio
All this post-modernist crap -- where nothing is better than anything else, where any crap stain
is a piece of art, where refusing to render judgement is considered a virtue -- is just an effort to
make the mediocre feel like they're not.

Duchamp could paint. He stopped and started making ready-mades. Is post-modernism merely a conspiracy to justify in retrospect his mediocrity?

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By who's standards? 😠

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(This character subscribes to the bourgeois myth of the autonomous subject! Watch him, he'll serve our purposes well.)

Artists have a job to do, show us our culture, express feelings so we can feel the way they conceptualized it. For example: the faces of war don't shock us any more. They're not so newsworthy, but someone still has to depict the sights, sounds and suffering. That's culture, artists have to get what's real.

Originally posted by Palynka
That all sounds very good, but then there's always the issue of how to decide (and who will decide) what is 'good' art and what is not. Is there an objective way to label art? To call a spade, a spade, you need to know what a spade is!

There is a difference between what is 'good' art and art that I like. There is a lot of art that is
'good' that I don't particularly care for, such as late Italian opera.

And just because there is 'good' doesn't mean that comparisons are even valid. I think it's useless
to compare Elvis to Ellington, to compare Michaelangelo with Renoir, or Bach with Brahms.
You have to compare apples with apples.

When comparing sports, you have to look at the standard of measurement. Boxing is, by
necessity, going to have more suspense than basketball (because at any moment, a losing fighter
can knock out his opponent). Hockey is going to have more action than golf. Football is
going to have more bonecrushing than buck-buck, and so on. All of them, in one way or another
celebrate the beauty and power of the human form. Clearly, baseball celebrates a different
aspect of that form (fine hand-eye coördination, say) than basketball (which is more aerobic
in nature). That is to say, you can definitely say that certain sports are better at certain
aspects. Cross-country skiing is better than bowling if you are interested in aerobic endurance.
Handball is better than baseball if you are interested in fast-paced play and scoring. Golf is
better than basketball if you are interested in seeing a man-against-the-elements contest. And
so on. You can make such evaluative judgments.

Furthermore, you can make some broader evaluative judgments. For example: I used to be a
pretty darn good tennis player when I was in high school and college. I was by no means anything
remarkable, I lost many games, but I was definitely competitive. Back then, I'm pretty confident
that I would have been able to beat Wade Boggs or Arnold Palmer at a tennis match. Was I
a better athlete? Of course not. I think it would be fair to say that, given the component
parts that make a player superior at his sport, Boggs and Palmer are better athletes than I (was).

Similarly, I think we can make evaluative judgments about art, that Mozart is better than
George Michael, that Van Gogh is better than Kincaid, that Shakespeare is better than Clancy.

Nemesio

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Yes, if you want to discard artistic worth, then who can argue? Sure they're both cultural pass-times.
That's a pretty obvious and unhelpful statement. And if one wants to embrace mediocrity like
Salieri in Amadeus, that's as far as one will take it: It's all good because it's all culture.

I think that's a crap model.

Nemesio

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Originally posted by catfoodtim
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you. Michaelangelo's David has been (mis)appropriated so many times that I think, as a cultural icon (whatever that means), it has become completely meaningless. Unless of course you use it to refer to 'Culture' generally of course. And round and round we go...

There is a lot of good art that has no cultural currency. There are thousands of poorly-known
compositions, paintings, poems, plays, and so on that are just delicious. For my part, I try to
make sure that I search for and perform such unknown organ works in my work as organist.
Just because it's well recognized doesn't make it any good (but neither does it exclude it), and
vice versa. And just because David is over represented in popular culture (like, by analogue,
Pachelbel's Canon in D) doesn't detract from the elegance of its artistry.

The Angel of the North I find intriguing. As a piece of art it isn't great at all, but what is interesting about it to me is what it signifies. I've seen it referred to everything from the Gateway to The North, or a phoenix rising from the ashes of all those abandoned coal mines. Does it represent the regeneration and rebranding of the North of England? To some people! Mainly, to a section of modern Britain it says more to them than some dusty old marble from Ancient somewhere-or-other.

I think it's intriguing when people are attracted to what you admit 'isn't that great at all.' But
so what? So people find it intriguing. People find car accidents and freak shows intriguing, too.
So 'intrigue' hardly has any meaning for associating better or worse (as you posited in your
first post). What I'm unclear about is why people would avoid saying something like, 'It's not
that great, but I like it.' It's like people are embarrassed that they don't like only great things.
So, they adopt Palynka's attitude, that there is no greatness. And that's rubbish.

Nemesio