Posts filed under “Art”
ART OPENING.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
FOR THE BACK OF YOUR CAR.
MODEST STEIN AND THE KEYSTONE COPS.
Illustration by Modest Stein of a scene from The Auctioneer, a silent-film adaptation of the play by Charles Klein and Lee Arthur. From an advertisement for the film in Motion Picture News, May 8, 1926.
It turns out that Stein was momentarily quite famous under another name way back in 1892. He was part of the trio of Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Modest Aronstam who plotted to assassinate Henry Frick in 1892. He got away with his part in the conspiracy, changed his last name, and prospered. (And, to be fair, it’s hard to say whether trying to assassinate Frick should earn you a jail term or a government pension.)
Now, isn’t it a shame that the age of two-reel silent comedies is over? We can imagine how Mack Sennett would have taken this hint from Stein’s Wikipedia article and turned it into a perfect scenario.
On his way to blow up Frick’s house with pockets full of dynamite, Stein—then still called Aronstam—saw a newspaper with a headline warning against “Aaron Stamm” as a Berkman conspirator. He became frightened, dumped the explosives in an outhouse, and returned to New York.
That is how Wikipedia tells the story. But in the Mack Sennett version, the big gag comes when the cop who’s been chasing him for the past reel and a half decides he has to go to the outhouse and takes his cigar with him.
KNOW YOUR WARNING SIGNS.
CALL FOR ARTISTS.
A VISIT TO THE ART MUSEUM.

Ginger Brooks Takahashi: What Causes One to Break Their Silence, 2020.
As a work of visual art, it could be criticized. Perhaps the most telling criticism of it is that Dr. Boli feels perfectly confident in publishing this photograph of it here, because any court in the land would hold that the visual aspect of the work does not rise to the level of originality required to establish a copyright in the United States of America. Copyright law is a mess in many ways, but it has its uses in the field of art criticism.
But it is not merely a work of visual art. It also speaks. The wall plaque says that the sound lasts for eight minutes and thirty-six seconds, but that is a lie. The sound lasts forever. It loops back to the beginning and starts over. The thing never stops speaking. It is not egregiously loud; it speaks at a normal conversational volume. But it never shuts up.
What does it say? Well, it talks about smells a lot. “Sulfur… rotten eggs… rotten eggs… rotten eggs… sulfur… rotten eggs… rotten eggs… like burning plastic… sulfur…”
Perhaps if it did nothing else, it would qualify as surrealist poetry. But art that is open to interpretation is not known in the world of art today. The interpretation must be controlled by the artist, because the artist has an important opinion that you must not misunderstand. Therefore, the speaking bullhorn also gives us enough context to understand that it is talking about the characteristic smells of heavy industry. Then it begins a long informative lecture about tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum.
The entire gallery is filled with this chatter, and it leaks into the next gallery. The voice is not interesting: we assume it is the voice of the artist herself, and she has no rhetorical skill. She drones. Because it is sound, it cannot be escaped the way one would escape an ugly picture by turning one’s back on it. The only way to escape is to leave the gallery and go to a gallery far enough away that it cannot be heard. If you wanted to enjoy some of the other art in that gallery, which holds objects from a wide range of eras, then, the artist might tell you, tough.
Now let us examine another work in the same museum.

Andrea Geyer: Manifest.
These words, as words, probably do rise to the level of originality required to create a copyright, in the same way that a corporate memo does. However, the doctrine of “fair use” permits us to reproduce a section of the work for the purpose of criticism. The actual work is much more extensive, because there are several more of these plain white fabric banners with plain black gothic capitals on them. (The banners are the art; the glass around them is just the building, which was there before the art and will probably still be there when the next generation of curators repudiates this art as a public embarrassment.) Perhaps you think we deliberately chose the dullest and most unpoetic of the banners to make a point. We invite you to visit the museum and draw your own conclusions. The banners are all similar lists of “demands,” and they all have roughly the same message: my view of what a museum should be is the correct one, and you are a bad person if you disagree. The demands are not expressed in poetic or colorful language, and the banners have nothing interesting about them visually, so the art lies only in the opinion of the artist. There is nothing else to it.
Together, these two works form a complete encyclopedia of what “art” has become in the early twenty-first century: unadorned declarative text and a bullhorn. The message had become the most important thing by the end of the twentieth century, but now, in the twenty-first, the message is the only thing. Everything else that might distract from it, such as beauty or complexity or ambiguity, is eliminated.
If you complain that these things are not art, or are bad art, then the people in charge of Art will call you names and dismiss your opinion as worthless, because the opinion of someone who sticks black letters on white fabric is worth much more than yours is. But Dr. Boli has been around long enough to develop an immunity to insults, so he is willing to say what others will not say. This stuff is bad art. It is not beautiful; it is not skillful; it is not interesting; it is not even informative; but it is annoying.
It seems that all the rules about what is art and what is not art have been repealed. And before we complain and demand that the rules be reinstated, let us point out the positive side of the current state of things. Because there are no rules, we have yammering bullhorns, and we also have Bouguereau. Since Dr. Boli knows that some of his readers are particular lovers of Bouguereau, he will end his complaint with one of Bouguereau’s trademark impossibly scrubbed and callus-free farmgirls. You can see it at the Carnegie Museum of Art, just out of reach of the blabbering bullhorn: Faneuse or The Hay-Maker.

Meanwhile, let us give today’s artists the credit due them. Ginger Brooks Takahashi created a work called What Causes One to Break Their Silence, and it caused Dr. Boli to break his silence. Mission accomplished.
WHERE ART COMES FROM.
COMMERCIAL BEAUTY.

An illustration from a 1921 advertisement for Djer-Kiss face powders, talcs, soaps, etc.
You will find but few other places in the World Wide Web where such standards prevail. If there is advertising at all, it is usually either unpardonably annoying or ignorably bland.
Imagine yourself living in a world, then, where this could be written and taken seriously:
At present, the bulk of professional drawing in this country goes to advertise our wares—a state of things which cynics enjoy. The offset is that while we are undoubtedly cheapening art by putting it to “base uses,” we are at the same time giving an almost compensating charm to our commercialism, and are making sure that artists can live—at least on a par with other professions. An exhibit of advertising “originals,” without their propaganda for this or that talcum or talking machine, is a really excellent art collection. The worker has his own standards of excellence, not altogether for sale; and meantime, the good by-product of better advertising is a training of the public taste in art. (“Drawing” in Book I, Education, of The Volume Library, 1931.)
Yes, it was possible to say that in 1931 and neither laugh nor be laughed at.
Now think of our advertising here in the middle 2020s, and ask this one probing question: Does it work?
Undoubtedly some of it does. But to limit ourselves to the Internet for the moment, what is the most usual reaction to an advertisement? When a panel advertising Malt-O-Cod suddenly pops up over the thing you were reading, do you give it your undivided attention? Do you think, “Ho, good, here comes something beautiful and well-executed by an artist whose work will improve my taste if I devote some serious study to it”? No; you do what it takes to make it disappear, often without even knowing what it was advertising.
But suppose it began to be well known that most, or at least many, of these advertisements were works of art by artists who deserved our praise and attention. What would be the result? We would look forward to the advertisements. We would see them coming and rejoice. We would give them our attention and even notice what they advertised. We would buy Malt-O-Cod.
This seems to have been the theory of the advertisers of the first half of the twentieth century. To a large extent, furthermore, it seems to have been correct. People did remember those advertisements and the products they advertised.
So what can we do? Nothing individually, but together we can do everything. Pledge yourself now to make your buying decisions on the basis of one question: which of the companies I am considering supports beauty?
Marketers themselves may be immune to beauty. They may consider the artistic sense an unfortunate curse and take drugs to suppress it. But they are mesmerised by numbers. If we show them that beauty sells, then they will give us beauty, because beauty will cause large numbers to dance in their spreadsheets and activate the reward centers of their brains. It is easy to make the pledge, because it seldom deprives us of anything worthwhile: when we are choosing between two detergents or toothpastes, it is usually true that they both work perfectly well. We can make our choice as whimsically as we like. Start making your choices on the basis of beauty, and see how quickly the marketers start shoveling great steaming heaps of beauty in our direction.
IN ART NEWS.
