The American Spectator : Shockless

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Shockless

By James Bowman from the July 2010 - August 2010 issue

When outrage becomes predictable it ceases to be outrageous.

In recent years, the Turner Prize for British artists under 50 has been awarded to (among others) Damien Hirst for the pickled bodies of a cow and calf that have been cut in half, to Chris Ofili for an image of the Virgin Mary adorned with elephant dung, and to Grayson Perry, who models human genitalia in pottery while wearing women's clothes. "One of my ambitions," he once said, "is to make the penis as popular a decorative motif as the flower." That achievement, at least, has so far eluded him. To the British, such artistic high jinks seem for the most part to take place in a spirit of good fun, and there is a certain amount of self-mockery on the part of those who have given the Turner Prize the alternative name of "The Emperor's New Clothes Prize" -- perhaps out of respect for Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), after whom it was named. He, at least, was a real artist.

Those who take it more seriously, however, are not so much the artists themselves as a group of perpetually enraged and traditionally minded rebels -- if that's not a contradiction in terms -- calling themselves the "Stuckists," a name implying that what they are stuck in is the mud. It was, at any rate, first applied by Tracey Emin -- who didn't win the Turner Prize when she entered her unmade bed in the competition in 1999 but became more famous than most of those who did -- to an ex-boyfriend calling himself Billy Childish who went on to become one of the founders of the Stuckist movement. He and the other Stuckists eschew conceptualism and postmodernism for what they call "Remodernism," and some might say that their manifesto claim that "artists who don't paint aren't artists" is more shocking than any amount of elephant dung. Unfortunately, it's not the sort of shock that makes your work a media event, the way that that of even the runners-up among the conceptualists is.

In recent years, however, the Turner has shown signs of turning away from "weird for the sake of weird" -- Moe Szyslak's definition of postmodernism on The Simpsons -- and back in the direction of those who can at least recognize the business end of a paintbrush. And this is a problem for the media, who obviously get a lot more mileage out of conceptual art than they do out of the traditional kind that doesn't lend itself to headline coverage. As a result, the announcement in May of the short list for this year's Turner Prize was accompanied by the following lament from Alastair Sooke of the Daily Telegraph for the days when

many British artists made brash, splashy and provocative work that knowingly incited the media, and made for great television. Newspapers and broadcasters loved reporting their provocations, and artists loved dreaming up ever more outrageous antics to provide fodder for newspapers and broadcasters. It was a potent symbiosis. More recently, however, things have quietened down: last year's winner, for instance, was Richard Wright, who makes gentle, exquisite wall paintings that are a world away from the headline-grabbing work of the YBAs [Young British Artists] who, championed by Charles Saatchi, dominated the 1990s. It's as if collectively our attitude to contemporary art has mellowed and matured.

As you can tell from the tone here, Mr. Sooke appears to have mixed feelings about all this. Art as media event has become so much what we mean by art these days that it is becoming difficult for us even to recognize it as art if it doesn't automatically provoke outrage and denunciations from those who are, as Tracey Emin put it, "Stuck, stuck, stuck" with their outdated notions of art and public propriety. The trouble is that when outrage becomes predictable it ceases to be outrageous. The latest exhibition at the Tate Modern, for instance, titled "Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera," which includes images of coitus, murder, and torture, was respectfully reviewed in the arts pages but excited little comment otherwise.

"The great triumph of the Turner Prize was that, during the 1990s, it won a large audience for contemporary art in this country," wrote Alastair Sooke. "But, now that this battle has been won, it faces a tricky problem: how can it sustain widespread interest when it no longer feels appropriate to describe the work that is short-listed each year as ‘shocking' or ‘controversial'?"

The problem, in other words, is that art has become -- as politics has lately shown signs of becoming -- a mere adjunct of the celebrity culture and its worship of all that is sensational in style and vacuous in content and that we no longer know any other way to look at it.

As it happens, 2010 is also the fiftieth anniversary of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (`A Bout de Souffle), a restored print of which was given a showing in New York and Los Angeles in May and June. Godard's film did something similar for the movies, which provided the occasion for this rhapsody from A. O. Scott in the New York Times:

Even if you were not around to hear, let's say, the catcalls greeting Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, or to unwrap a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses smuggled over from Paris in defiance of the postmaster general, or to examine Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" or Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans when they were first exhibited, the works themselves allow you to place yourself among the brave vanguard who did. And even if you did not see Breathless during its first run at the dawn of the '60s, surely every frame carries an afterimage of that heady time, just as every jazz note and blast of ambient street noise on the soundtrack brings echoes of an almost mythic moment.

Golly! Of course, if you go back and look at the picture now without any particular awareness of the context in which it first appeared you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Michel Poiccard, a small-time thief and mugger who fantasizes about being Humphrey Bogart. When he is pulled over in a stolen car, he shoots the motorcycle cop with a gun he finds in the glove compartment. He appears to have no particular feelings about this, but we see him being hunted down by the Parisian police while he attempts to romance Patricia Franchini, an American gamine played by Jean Seberg, who has journalistic ambitions. In the end, after sleeping with him, she betrays him to the police and watches as he is gunned down in the street. Once again, neither of them appears to have much in the way of feelings, either about the sex or the killing.

Michel's dreams of escape to Rome with Patricia and a satchel full of money become just another of his fantasies, like that of Bogartian cool, and do not rise to the level of genuine aspiration even when they seem about to be realized. The film, with its celebrated jump cuts and jazz score and commitment to emotional "cool," is not just all style and no substance but intended to be so. This is precisely what people like Mr. Scott like about it. David Thomson, writing in the New Republic, is a little less giddy with excitement, acknowledging that "the really fresh thing about Breathless wasn't that it cried out, ‘Look, a brave new cinema made by young people, full of life and invention.' No, it was a warning. It said (even in 1960), ‘Watch out, this game, this entertainment is over. Movie is all used up, and if we repeat it it will turn camp.' " Of course it turned camp -- or postmodern, which is the son of camp -- anyway, even if we didn't repeat it. That's the only reason we are still allowed to watch Turner Classic Movies or American Movie Classics on cable.

Still, Mr. Thomson's view seems a little excessive. If, as he says, Breathless "was one of the clearest statements to date (in 1960) that classical film was dead and over," and that "we have really gone no further in our funeral observations in 50 years," it seems a little odd that five of his own favorite films "of all time" as chosen for Sight and Sound in 2002 were made after 1960. If, indeed, "classical film" was "dead and over," its death seems to have had no more resonance or significance than Mr. Belmondo's in the movie. I think what he means is that it was a sort of ritual death: one which must now be continually reenacted, like that of youthful rebellion that I discussed in this space last month (see "Rebels Without a Clue," TAS, June 2010) -- and for the same reason, which is to recapture what Mr. Scott calls the "mythic moment" of the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois order in which style took a back seat to substance. We have to keep reminding ourselves of the potency of this myth lest we forget and find ourselves growing nostalgic for content and meaning. Maybe that's what's happening with the Turner Prize. I hope so, but I wouldn't bet on it.

About the Author

James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (28) | Leave a comment

Kenny| 8.17.10 @ 6:58AM

"Art is what you can get away with."

Andy Warhol

Alan Brooks| 8.17.10 @ 8:50AM

" 'is to make the penis as popular a decorative motif as the flower.' That achievement, at least, has so far eluded him."

Don't be so sure about that, what with today's pornocracy. You can click the mouse right now and millions of images-- all thoroughly lacking in taste--of penises are available.

Appleby| 8.18.10 @ 7:14AM

Remember that this is the generation who has made the droopy wee-wee a pandemic of such epic proportions that every time we turn on the teevee we are seeing some man conversing with his reflection about the agony of the droop or tossing the cell phone and remote into the pool and leading his third wife off to tango, thanks to that triangular pill.

The older these guys get, the more fixated they will be on the centre of their existence. All we can do is be thankful we do not work in nursing homes.

Miss Alabama| 8.17.10 @ 9:28AM

Art is fashion.

The art world favors vision and spontaneity over skill. And so many artists today follow the Andy Warhol example in which "life style" and "self presentation" outweigh actual works. So many artists lack craft, but they make up for it with brash, repulsive personalities that the media love to spotlight.

Performance art, above all other styles, is the most pretentious, the most vacuus.

Even the museums are becoming more fashion conscious. Go take a look at some of the latest exhibits.

Grandpa Mark | 8.17.10 @ 7:05AM

I was an art major, and I can tell you nearly everything about it is calculated, from the subject matter to the clothes on their backs and their greasy hair and nerd-chic glasses. You want to find "true" art (meaning something coming from an honest place) go to a county fair. Believe me, there's more depth and meaning in the quilts and the canned green beans than anything I ever experienced in art school. And you don't have to have Doctorates in Museum Studies, Sociology and Early Hungarian Cabinet Making and a townhouse in Greenwich Village to appreciate it.
If you're lucky enough, as I was, you'll have a professor who is not out to make "A Statement" but who truly loves their chosen medium. Then it can be fun. But so often it crosses over into something more complicated and it loses all its athenticity.

Alan Brooks| 8.17.10 @ 9:36AM

Actually, they ARE making relevant artistic statements, albeit they are negatives ones.
Yoko Ono makes "artistic" statements.
Robert Mapplethorpe made "artistic" statements.
Such art can help us lose weight; you look at bad art long enough and you vomit, losing a few pounds.
OPRAH: "I want to tell you about a marvelous way to lose weight, just last night I looked at a Jackson Pollock and puked for a half hour-- now look at how slim I am-- like a ferret" (audience applause)

Grandpa Mark | 8.17.10 @ 10:16AM

Mr. Brooks,

You miss my point. Some people, like Grandma Moses, pick up a paintbrush and paint because they happen to enjoy it. They're not trying to make a statement, they just happen to love painting, they same way some people enjoy knitting or model railroads. It gives them pleasure. To equate this with Mapplethorpe is nonsense and is catagorically unrelated.

Alan Brooks| 8.17.10 @ 11:11AM

No sir, everyone is making a statement-- everyone is grinding an ax. Merely because Grandma Moses has a sweet smile doesn't mean she isn't a harridan deep down. Perhaps you go by external appearances too much? Ever notice how charming used car salesman are? a fellow who sells swampland in Florida is the nicest person you could meet.
A Grandma Moses could be Lizzie Borden for all you know.

B. Hussien Warhol| 8.17.10 @ 12:50PM

No, sir, some people actually enjoy life. Give it a try.

cuban pete| 8.17.10 @ 2:05PM

Yoko Ono couldn't make an "artistic" statement if her life depended upon it. She is a talentless drone who never had an original thought. She was able to secure a comfortable existence away from the great unwashed by marrying a successful rock and roll musician.

Miss Alabama| 8.17.10 @ 2:23PM

Your remarks about Yoko Ono are dead right.

She is one of the most vacuous personalities I have ever encountered. I once had the insufferable experience of listening to her give a gallery talk about "Art Adds," a project that put her "art" on the sides of taxi cabs.

All her life she has aspired to be one thing and one thing only--hip.

She has no soul. She is nothing.

Alan Brooks| 8.17.10 @ 4:35PM

"B. Hussien Warhol| 8.17.10 @ 12:50PM
No, sir, some people actually enjoy life. Give it a try."

Speak for yourself, if you enjoy life then why are you a rightwing pighead ? And who are you?, are you the guy who goes by the handle Bill Hussein O' Stalin? Use your real name.

Petronius| 8.18.10 @ 2:26AM

I'll second that, but from the other end. Back in 1972 the herald of shlock, Gunter Grass wrote a farce in 2 unnatural acts called Uptight which I saw at the Arena Stage. The protagonist, (agonist really), utters the big dig. "I want to do something that will make 'them' shit in their pants!"
Them is We who refuse to pay attention to their bitching until it draws the desired reaction. If civilized people ever govern this country again, these wretched exhibitionists should be given high colonics and suspended naked upside down.

Appleby| 8.18.10 @ 7:18AM

Anybody with a two year old is familiar with this kind of behaviour. P J O Rourke calls this Toddler Liberation -- the urge to pull down your pants in public, yell Poo Poo Head in a crowded church, and stick everything in your mouth.

Shane| 8.17.10 @ 8:17AM

What amazes me is that a computer game with stunning visuals made by armies of programmers and artists, which gives millions of people pleasure and amusement, is dismissed as low art.

Then someone smears excrement on a stuffed goat: high art.

Maybe there is something to all of this that I just don't understand, but I find so much of it tedious. Shocking is easy. Beautiful is hard.

Se Levi| 8.17.10 @ 8:55AM

As an aesthete I hate to think of the boring hours I wasted with the "Avant Garde". I think the best comment was made by John Simon sitting in on an intermnidablePhillip Glass evening: I could be home listening to Beethoven String Quartets--which he proceeded to do.
If one wanted to be truly provoking, one could do scenes from the life of Mohammed.

Bill| 8.17.10 @ 9:11AM

Isn't it interesting that over the past couple of generations, as modern and postmodern art is created and forgotten almost as soon as it appears, that painters who aroused revulsion a century and a half ago, namely the Pre-Raphaelites such as Waterhouse, Lord Leighton, and Alma-Tadema, not to mention Jean-Leon Gerome, have gained greatly in popularity? Even in recent art, the hyper-realists have gained ground.

gearjammer| 8.17.10 @ 9:14AM

Alan seems dissatisfied with the taste of penis' he has encountered of late. Maybe he can try maple syrup or his favorite condiments. Sarah Pallin might have some recipes to share with him.

Robert Pinkerton| 8.17.10 @ 10:02AM

The statement, "Art for art's sake," sounds as if it should be the title of a triumphalist autobiography of a narcissistic psychopath whose forename is Arthur.

Petronius| 8.17.10 @ 10:37AM

Yeah, I'm getting old. But a professional manure arranger is not an artist. My father was an artist. Oil or acrylic, his paintings are pleasing to look at. I can be merely subjective about that. A bad painting is one I do not care to look at. But animus is what is behind the Turner prize committee. Bovine entrails floating in lucite blocks are redolent of an old Don Martin strip in Mad Magazine. A sculptor, mallet in hand eyes a block of stone. He picks up a chisel and knocks a chunk from the middle of it. The next panel has him showing it to his agent. "Here it is P.U. I call it Man's inhumanity to Man. Shall I have it shipped?" The agent replies as he picks up the small piece from the studio floor which was chopped out, "No thanks. I'll take it with me."
Hauteur over such matters is pointless among we who believe in common sense and possess conventional tastes. To those committee members it is their unspoken insult to the outside world that they alone are the arbiters artistic content and execution. They select such junk to tell all others that they cannot possibly know anything. So we in turn ridicule them.
To view the latest offering of Cetchewayo the Gorilla, go to Kirov-Renshaw.blogspot.com. And join in our fun.

Seek| 8.17.10 @ 11:13AM

David Thomson epitomizes everything I detest about film snobbery -- antiquarian smugness that talks down to us, the multiplex heathen, ever lecturing us on the evils of special effects, bright color palates and method acting. He makes John Simon look like Quentin Tarantino.

Most old American movies, I contend, are barely watchable because of their interchangeability. Thomson's brand of criticism does nothing for me -- and I doubt for the rest of filmgoers.

gearjammer| 8.17.10 @ 11:51AM

Many old movies were cranked out assembly line style just to put something on the screen to entertain. We are talking pre tv era here. So of course they were somewhat interchangeable. But, if you don't think many of the old movies did not have more authenticity, a better sense of the human condition, a better sense of basic humanity-then you are blind.
Real people are not super heroes nor do they dream 24/7 about being one. We live in a phony world, an artificial universe created by legions of " artiste" who are just that as well. Pot, booze,other drugs-the heartbeat city noise electric-pic electric is non stop. Some of us are not willing or unwilling consumers of this barrage of crap. So we go on search missions for a movie or tv show or a song that is not a total debasement of our senses. You can find something-to be honest some people in the industry of art-culture(yuk) seem to be aware. But the purveyors of this ugly sick spirit killing good society murdering weaponry are incredibly strong and financially fortified. A 120 million homes paying into them via cable, etc is these vampires main bloodline. Cancel that and these bloodsuckers start dying off.

Seek| 8.17.10 @ 1:32PM

I see a new movie (or two) a week. There is nothing "immoral" about them. And even if there were, it hasn't altered my own moral bearings. The idea that cinema acts as a trigger for negative copycat thought or behavior, and thus must be quarantined to "protect" society, is one of the oldest canards used by censors everywhere.

The old movies, far more than the newer ones, created an artificial world. Characters behaved in ways ludicriously contrary to the way normal humans live. Part of the problem, to be sure, was the thankfully-discarded Hays Production Code. Yet even beyond that, the old movies were badly done compared to today.

I'm not blind either.

Don L| 8.17.10 @ 5:39PM

"I see a new movie (or two) a week. There is nothing "immoral" about them. And even if there were, it hasn't altered my own moral bearings. "
I would disagree. The fact that you don't see anything immoral about today's many morally vacuous movies -tells me that you have already altered your moral sense.

The voyage to immorality is a slow subtle one and after a while, you forget which port is the right one.

Ken (Old Texican)| 8.17.10 @ 12:29PM

I try really hard...
Not to be an old "grunt"...hassleing the younger generation.
I have never crossed the street to "view" art-crap.

It does pith me off to have payed 2 cents in taxes for the crap.

Redstateboy| 8.17.10 @ 5:04PM

I view these shock "artists" with the same contempt I view Rap "artists". Rappers don't have a voice to sing and these "artists" can't paint or sculpt.

Don L| 8.17.10 @ 5:34PM

I just saw "Letters From Iwo Jima" to see if the Japanese fanatical bushido was properly included (the Hirshima politics thing is reawakening now) and was "shocked" to see that our soldiers slaughtered the nice frightened surrendered Japanese in cold blood...
Don't they ever get tired of beating up on America?
We gave them their nation back Hollywood and Germany and Italy too, which is much more than I can ever say about your soviet friends that are still marching into sovereign counties without a wimper from this same crowd.

Liberal hypocrisy -not really -no one sane ever expects the left to tell the truth. Lying is a badge of honor.