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Over the next couple of weeks I will outline five fallacies of art criticism as a lead up to a talk that I will be giving at an SVA ‘Artist Talk on Art’ Panel, which will take place on September 19th. (The panel itself will address ‘Art Criticism Today’, and I will have the great honor of being joined by Robert Ayers from Modern Painters and artinfo.com. More details on that to come.)

1st Fallacy of Art Criticism:

That the writing should only address what’s “in” the work–i.e. what can be seen, heard, felt, smelled, etc. in the work itself, which is understood in this scenario as necessarily and wholly ‘autonomous’.

It is a common swipe, often leveled at younger critics by elder practitioners, but just as often voiced by someone who is unhappy with something they label as ‘jargon’ or other unfamiliar language. Why, the unhappy party asks, must the critic make reference to some ‘ism’ or another, or some set of concepts, or theories, or whatever, which, from this perspective, seem extraneous to The Work?

Autonomy, of course, is not the problem here; it’s the confidence the unhappy party has in just what constitutes The Work, which is. As those familiar with the landscape of contemporary art are certainly aware, The Work, is not as stable a term as it sounds. In many cases, there is nothing “in” it at all. Arbiters of conceptual and performance art liked to call this the condition of The Work’s “dematerialization.” Though it is a foolish description, the sensibility is correct. To treat certain works of art as “aesthetically robust” is to miss their import: think of Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning (1953), or Robert Morris’s Statement of Aesthetic Withdrawal (1963) or, for that matter, Koons’ Balloon Dogs (1993-).

Elsewhere I’ve discussed Gedi Sibony’s activity as one that walks the line of artistic “legibility”–indeed, I think this is its “content,” but it’s hardly a content that can be found “in” the work itself, as if some kind of “close looking” at Sibony’s surfaces of cardboard or drywall could reveal something more about its ultimate meaning. (And I don’t place much store by the idea that Sibony’s configurations are so carefully composed as to harbor some sort of subjective interiority; like any readymade, the gesture suggest it, but there is no subject there–though neither is it really an object either.)

The call for the critic to “treat” what’s “in” The Work alone stems from a presumption of what Work can stand, properly, as a Work of Art, which gets us into the business of asking, What is a proper Work of Art?–and that’s not interesting, nor productive, at least from my critical perspective. For something to fall under the critic’s gaze, it must have gained already some kind of (semi)autonomy; whether it did so through a convention or an institution or a theory (i.e. it qualifies as a Work of Art under some shared notion of what that is, or it qualifies because some institution with invested authority has ratified it as such, or because it achieves ontological status as a Work of Art under some transcendent definition) is of little concern, unless , of course, the critic takes it upon herself to make this (semi)autonomy a point of inquiry. (More critics should.)

Ultimately the call for paying closer attention to what is “in” the work itself has less to do with the Work than it does with the position of the critic: to place full trust in the “aesthetic” experience of the critic is to miss the fact that the function of the critic has always been to leave behind aesthetics for discourse, which is also to leave behind the personal for the public, the social, even when the language is dressed up in the rhetoric of one’s own opinion and judgment. If Wittgenstein taught us anything, it’s that the language is never our own…

If this isn’t the best defense of Facebook, I don’t know what is:

Edge: GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS A Talk By Clay Shirky.

If there is a problem here it’s that the notion of the “cognitive surplus” that Shirky promotes privilege the idea of pure production over consumption or, more favorably in my view, observation. Shirky likes very much the idea of people doing and making as opposed to watching, and I think that’s a good point; but isn’t one of the issues that we run into the stratification of these kinds of making and doing? It’s a different kind of sociability, to be sure, but the original technology for that sociablity was the city itself, and we have yet to perfect it; in other words, gin might still have a place in the system, even if TV doesn’t.

As a fellow Parsons instructor I feel it necessary to help spread this: From Boing Boing: GRL’s James Powderly detained in Beijing for planning pro-Tibet “L.A.S.E.R. Stencil” art protest.

Whether it was a “smart” idea to provoke the Chinese, given the incredibly conciliatory and turn-the-other-cheek coverage of the Olympics, it seems reasonable that someone should push the boundaries. Kristof in the Times took a different tack, suggesting that the fact that Chinese officials are even paying lip service to the idea of protests is a step in the right direction, even if the persecution of dissenters of any stripe remains both tenacious and completely hidden from outside scrutiny.  Let’s hope that James finds his way home unharmed.

A senior executive in fine art and title insurance at one of the major insurance companies told me this morning that she has been contending this August with a flood of clients asking for revaluations of works and even of entire collections.

This is usually a step people take before consigning work to auction, but it can also signal potential estate plan restructuring. Either way, if there is a glut of good work trying to find its way onto the block, we can be sure that auction house egos will rise even further than they have. Let’s hope that American consigners can continue to find European, Indian and Asian buyers.

We’ve initiated a new series of discussions over at AWS called “Considerations.” The first one asks readers and commenters to consider Tino Sehgal’s work.

From my own perspective, there’s an interesting copyright issue–i.e. none of Sehgal’s work is fixed in a tangible medium in any way, either the work itself or documentation of it–which means that it stands solely as an idea. You can’t copyright an idea, of course, so Sehgal’s claim to authorship, or ownership, of any of his works, relies almost exclusively on the strength of his own personality, or identity, insofar as these are recognized by others. In fact, one could argue that that strength is a function of its recognition by others, which would seem to resonate nicely with his work–i.e. they pressure that moment of a viewer’s recognition that what they are seeing, or participating in, is not just some random encounter with other people in other places.

After his film Standard Operating Procedure, and its accompanying book, co-written with Philip Gourevitch, it’s quite possible that Errol Morris may be responsible for having initiated the next sustained meditation on the cultural status of photography and the photographic image. This dialog with Hany Farid certainly suggests that Morris may be next in line to inherit the legacy of Barthes, Sontag, Bourdieu, Solomon-Godeau and others who have addressed photography as a complex theoretical object with no insignificant political dimension (perhaps even one that outstrips its aesthetics).

Great behind the scenes look at how David Byrne’s Playing the Building was fabricated, courtesy of Rhizome and Justin Downs.

This short piece by George Dyson from Edge.org is one of the more interesting things I’ve read on the possibility of artificial intelligence and the troublesom metaphor of the brain as a massively parallel computer.

It may seem sacrilegious to say for someone who has invested so much time and energy in the academy, but this piece by Charles Murray in the WSJ, which argues for the replacement of the 4-year, BA-track college education with certification tests of every variety, makes no little bit of sense. One wonders what administrations will muster as a defense, undoubtedly something along the lines of: “College campuses foster communities of critical thought and creative production which certification testing could never possibly quantify.” True. But then again, that’s an argument of thinking for thinking’s sake, and though I’m sympathetic to the idea of finding realms of experience that cannot be instrumentalized by career or market forces, it would seem to me that “college,” especially at the undergraduate level, has already lost out on that front. Why else would so many people (myself included) find themselves returning to the academy for “advanced” degrees, and there finding the intellectual engagement they either missed or squandered over the course of that first four year try?

Check out Pablo Helguera’s new cartoon, and the ensuing dicussion, at Artworld Salon.