Object Lesson, II

Related to the topic of the prior post...

Of course, the pricing of an LP is – in theory, at least – based on the usual supply & demand principles, with the scarcity of a near-obsolete/technologically marginal format being the prime factor in the equation. Number of copies in circulation, etcetera.

Which brings us to the Wu-Tang Clan’s upcoming album The Wu – Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, of which there will be precisely one copy. A single copy, housed in a silver and nickle hand-carved box – presented as a unique objet d’art. The item will reportedly be sent on a tour of museums and galleries, where people will be allowed the one-off chance to bask in the glow of the album’s aura via headphones after paying an "entry fee," after which the thing’ll finally be put on an auction block to be sold to the highest bidder, the desired sum being in the seven-figure range.*

One might emphasize the word reportedly, because there’s a lot about the news item that suggests a media prank in the offing. If the enterprise seems a bit it preposterous, the accompanying proclamational text at the project's PR site hammers that impression home very squarely. At turns bombastic and apocalyptic, it makes a series of statements about the g music industry, all under the premise tap between popular music and “fine art” and the current state of the music industry, that the project in question would somehow tactically remedy or address anything connected with these situations. A bit droll, innit? Reuters finance contributor Felix Salmon argues that there’s the question of just much RZA and crew understand about how the artworld and its markets operate. Which would seem to be the case, but whether it’s a case worth arguing is another matter.

I’m not sure what subpercentage of the One-Percent might actually want to have the Wu as the “soundtrack of their life.” Strangely, the project is (once again, according to the website) the first in a series of such ventures by an entity calling itself – ugh – The Carmen Clandestine Experience, which purports to be "the world’s first private music service," about which there’s no further information to be found. By “private music,” one assumes this means: Music as luxury item sold to a sole deep-pocketed individuals or entities.

Perhaps the best comment I’ve read in relation to the Wu jawn is someone asking, “Maybe start a Kickstarter campaign to help ‘liberate’ the album?’”

Some would argue art’s ultimate value – or its greatest redeeming value -- is the role it plays in relation to the larger culture. A similar argument could be made music in relation to the social realm. In which instance, instead of debating if RZA & co. have completely misunderstood the nature of art; the better question would be if they've instead come to misunderstand the nature of popular music. Once again, providing this isn't all a joke/publicity stunt. Perhaps some barbed commentary about the inherent socio-economic contradiction of the one-time "music from the streets” getting too entangled with the exclusivist aspirations of gated community?**

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* Certain details lacking in all of this. For instance: Auctioned off how, or through what venue? Does the Anglo-Moroccan artist who carved the box get a cut of the auction, or was he offered a flat fee for his services? Whatever the case, I hope all the contracts are in order, and that the involved parties sought proper legal counsel in advance.

**Either that, or it's the product of smoking too much cheeb over the span of many years. Which would make the project the other type of "high-concept." You decide.

Object Lesson I

I have to hold my tongue a lot. Or I try to, but I'm often sure I don't do it nearly as much as I should. I'm sure people who know me these days can predict my responses to certain things, can rely one show me to forego saying anything positive; but instead deferring to some other restaurant meal, or some other band, or selection of goods on offer or whatever -- to something better I'd eaten or cooked or seen/heard before, elsewhere. Ever the jaded city sophisticate, having lived in a heart of civilization for some two decades, and who therefore has a broader frame of reference/experience. Not that I scoff or snort dismissively or shrug it off "meh"-ingly. Most often, I just pass on saying anything that remotely sounds like any sort of a judgment call and defer to prior experiences. Which is probably even more annoying than being firmly, brusquely opinionated.*

I only mention this because this past weekend I went to a record show this past weekend; one held in my new locale. Vendors from a number of places, one have come from as far away as Detroit. His selection was much like that of the other sellers -- lots of stuff from the last days of vinyl, meaning: crates full of shitty rock and r&b from the 1980s. Dross and dregs. Not that it mattered much to me. I have enough records, thank you. Enough so, that many of them are still boxed up in storage while my wife and I inhabit a small short-lease place as settle into the new environ. So I'm not in the market in the market to compulsively buy LPs like I used to. It wasn't even my idea to go to the event, it was – for reasons I still don't fully understand – my wife's. If anything, it was a good excuse to stroll around the historic district of downtown now that some spring weather has finally begun to teasingly set in. One seller starts a conversation with me over the merits of the Temptations' Psychedelic Shack. He's a nice enough guy, and it turns out he runs a music shop in a neighboring town. From him I learn that Simeon of Silver Apples currently lives in the neighboring town in question.

Anyway: The other reason it didn’t matter was because the prices – for records both crap or worthy – were absurd. On which you can maybe blame the increasing scarcity of the format in question, as well as showroom mark-up. I walked away with a copy of the item above, which was in very good condition and priced at about 10% its usual.

Which brings me back to my starting point: If I scoff at the pricing, it's mainly because of nearly two decades of experience spent thumbing through in used record shops on the south side of Chicago. Seeing things I was used to see going for a few dollars now being slapped with asking prices ranging from $20-40. Or at least tempted to scoff, but more often snickered. Because yeah, record shops on the southside were good for certain things. You could go downtown to the Jazz Record Mart where you’d see an old copy of Grachan Moncur III’s Some Other Stuff, a copy on which the prior owner’s offspring had totally gone to town on the front cover with red and purple crayons, but which would still (apparently) command an asking price of $50. Or you could stick to the southside, where you could stood the chance of walking out with a copy of something like the below for ten dollars or less...

Headcleaner Interlude

Right...time to blow away some cobwebs from the attic, to re-center. And some distractions what have kept me scarce around here, of late.

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{ Incidentally: Had been sporadically working on a couple of posts for the 70's edition of the decades blog in recent months -- long, sprawling, thematically hop-scotching pieces like I've occasionally tossed in over the past several years. But it occurs to me now that that none of the contributors has posted to the thing in a while. Which makes me wonder if I should even bother finishing the damn things. Or do so, and just post 'em here. Shrug. }

New Traditionalists

Or new retromantics, if you like. Teach your children well, and let the youth lead the way. Note the rhetorical interrogative posed as a cultural imperative, giving voice to the conflicted keening of the anxiously aspiring middlebrow set.

Not familiar with "Ob Art," but I'm pretty sure it was never -- y'know -- a thing. Unless it was, in which case it was even more of an invented, next-big-thing-that-wasn't non-thing; kind of like Op Art in the way it made yesterday's homes so different, so appealing for a brief five minutes, but was then even more easily and thankfully forgotten. (And if it never existed, then maybe it's time we invented it; seeing how you can go only so long by running on fumes & the like.)

Circa a 1966 issue of Redbook magazine, apparently, Via here, who via'd it from there.

Discuss.

Illocutionary Acts (Morton Feldman Says)

"An ordinary life; a dull life even, yet the polyphony of emotions and sensations is hallucinatory in its measured precision and accumulation of bliss: 'The lecturing voice was far away, irrelevant and unintelligible. Peace flooded her.' Why do we have to spatialise time, sound and thought, reducing all three to a manageable linearity and locus that has nothing to do with the way we think or hear? Because they are elusive, everywhere and nowhere. The pouring of thoughts, thoughts under thoughts and other inexplicable murmurings of consciousness may take place in a dark room of the imagination within the body as if a kind of ectoplasm gushing out of some hidden spring and dispersing into nothingness, into the blood or becoming a sound recognisable as audible words, the marks of writing or some other signs on or from the body."

- David Toop, with some of his own stray thoughts about the recent passing of Robert Ashley.

The Inaesthetic, II

Granted, it’s been a while since the artworld had a crit-theory "darling." The last big romance that looms in recent memory is the hot & heavy thing it had with Baudrillard back in the 1980s. Sure, there was the brief and casual flirtation (thanks to wingman Greil Marcus) with Debord in the early ‘90s, but Debord proved too unforgivingly dour, so the artworld opted for a frisky threesome with Deleuze & Guattari, instead. But as a piece in the latest Artforum confirms, the artworld – or some portion therereof – has lately found a new paramour in Jacques Rancière.

In a review that offers a brief overview of Alain Badiou’s Cinema and Rhapsody for the Theater, as well as Rancière’s own Aisthesis. In the course of which the review’s author Nico Baumbach makes passing reference to Hal Foster’s recent remarks about Rancière’s reception in the art community. Baumbach makes passing mention of Foster’s review of Aisthesis in the pages of the LRB, a rreview in which Foster writes:

“Another reason Rancière has an abundant following in the art world has to do with its fatigue with ‘criticality’ as a principal criterion of practice. It is not only that his account of the aesthetic regime plays down the critical dimension of the avant-gardes of the past; Rancière thinks criticality is undermined in the present too. In his view it is compromised, in the first instance, by its arrogant posture of demystification. ‘In its most general expression,’ Rancière writes in Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2004), ‘critical art is a type of art that sets out to build awareness of the mechanisms of domination to turn the spectator into a conscious agent of world transformation.’ He has several objections to this approach (which he caricatures here for his own purposes). First, not only is awareness not transformative per se, but ‘the exploited rarely require an explanation of the laws of exploitation.’ Second, critical art depends on its own projection of a passive audience that it then presumes to activate. Third, critical art ‘asks viewers to discover the signs of capital behind everyday objects and behaviours’, but in so doing only confirms the ‘transformation of things into signs’ that capitalism performs anyway. Finally, critical art is trapped in a vicious circle of its own making. ‘If there is a circulation that should be stopped at this point,’ he comments in an interview for Artforum in 2007, it’s this circulation of stereotypes that critique stereotypes, giant stuffed animals that denounce our infantilisation, media images that denounce the media, spectacular installations that denounce the spectacle etc. There is a whole series of forms of critical or activist art that are caught up in this police logic of the equivalence of the power of the market and the power of its denunciation.”

For Foster, the problem isn't Rancière, but a certain portion of the theorist's newfound audience. In a companion piece for The Brooklyn Rail, Foster dismisses the recent artworld embrace of Rancière’s notions of the “emancipated spectator” and of the “redistribution of the sensible” as a type of stop-gap “panacea” for contemporary critical malaise as little more than “wishful thinking.”

As Foster and others writing on the topic are quick to point out, we’re on the other side of the ‘Noughties; that decade having been a time when the critical impulse was largely put on an indefinite suspended leave. Central to all of this -- and frequently cited in instances such as this -- was Bruno Latour’s agonistic 2004 essay, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”, which upon publication quickly became the key text for a type of pervasive, soul-searching intellectual agnosticism that followed in the wake of September, 2001. If that weren’t sign enough that the 1990s were definitely over, around the same time we also began to witness the waning of the biggest curatorial trends of the preceding ten years – relational aesthetics as embodied in various high-profile “participatory art” projects in major art institutional settings. On the fate of the latter, Claire Bishop recently observed:

“There was the potential to discover the highest artistic intensity in the everyday and the banal, which would serve a larger project of equality and anti-elitism. Since the 1990s, participatory art has often asserted a connection between user-generated content and democracy, but the frequent predictability of its results seem to be the consequence of lacking both a social and an artistic target; in other words, participatory art today stands without a relation to an existing political project ...and presents itself as oppositional to visual art by trying to side-step the question of visuality. As a consequence, these artists have internalized a huge amount of pressure to bear the burden of devising new models of social and political organization — a task that they are not always best equipped to undertake.”

As far as relational aesthetic’s democratic and participatory purport, Bishop (via Rancière) argues that it usually ends up amounting to little more than an “allocated participation whose counter-power is dependent on the dominant order,” one in which participants are invited to “fill up the spaces left empty by power.” Which might be an example of what Foster(also after Rancière) desribes above when he alludes to the fate of some critical art winding up "trapped within the vicious circle of it own making."

It might also describe the misgivings that some people -- such as myself -- had about the curatorial fashionability of relational aesthetics some years ago; encountering various RA works in various galleries and museums, not being able to shrug off the impression that it amounted to little more an artworld analog to “casual Fridays." In other words: The sanctioned suspension of the standard protocols, but only for this occasion. Because the project -- no matter how noble (only connect!) its intentions -- is vastly subsumed by the context in which it appears, the same institution and hierarchies hold. Sure, this time you're allowed to touch the art, even "be a part of it"; but you're still in the same setting where normally there’d be someone there to remind you not to touch or lean in too closely when looking at the art, or to ask you to please pipe down if you get a little too heated while talking about what you’re looking at, as you can expect will be the case next time you visit.