Although often classified as a Marxist, Walter Benjamin is more of a poet than a theorist, although he uses philosophy as material for creating connections. Benjamin fit into a very inopportune moment in capitalism, where we have the rising literary aspirations of the children of successful petty bourgeois parents but lacking the connection (and maybe some of the talent too) needed to be recognized by the elites. Coming onto his own in the early 20th century, Benjamin witnessed the rise of modern globalization. He got to ponder the many different changing aspects of society, wrote about them, but ultimately fell prey to these same trends as he eventually committed suicide to escape the clutches of Nazis.
Benjamin was one of the few who refused to work, devoting his life to the arts and letters. Although he never made a big splash in his time, he did leave us some interesting work. I didn’t find much in these essays to be too instrumental for myself, but I understand that his meditations on art and the changing orientation of meaning to be of interest, Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction not withstanding.
apparently there’s a release of a new documentary called jiro dreams of sushi. have not seen it. was curious though — thought it was an anime about sushi. cuz on fb and twitter people watch the movie and then go eat sushi.
okay.
naw, it’s about a man who took sushi as an art to the next level. as a biography that’s kind of alright. but the movie seems to translate into go have sushi and appreciate it even more.
that’s okay too. its kind of duh. i mean if you know anything about japan, of course it’s an art. but at the same time, what isn’t anything anyone does an art?
stacking rocks is an art. breathing is an art (yoga). looking at something, standing. it’s all an art. so what!
If everything is art, then why should we care about art?
What is wrong with Art for Art’s sake?
i am not sure why i am on such a bent on thinking of connoisseurship. what’s wrong with it? i think art for art’s sake is stupid. i think art for a purpose is just as stupid.
art for art’s sake or collecting specific knowledges like collecting shot glasses. connoisseurship for personal development is a waste, a sign of our decadent society. behaving in this manner is like picking a random thing and making that thing central. that kind of imbalance isn’t really all that great for anyone. but taken seriously, it becomes a replacement for actual life.
i would like to make a distinction now, between knowing what you like and being a snob, an otaku or a fanatic about it… there too is a formal difference between being a connoisseur and being an addict, but i don’t think that in this context, addict vs connoisseur is a meaningful distinction as both seek to centralize a content area. what’s tragic about this content area is that the borders of the content area are often arbitrary, formed from external factors (market influenced, historical or personal, to name a few). EX: you can be a tennis connoisseur but why not soccer or racquetball? that’s a different sport? what about clay courts vs concrete or grass? what about right or left handed players? singles or doubles? mens or womens? you see my point.
in contrast to this decadence, is knowledge collected for the sake of solving a problem. for instance, being nitpicky about how a certain module is built can have an impact on the entire system for the purposes of a network server. that’s fine. or how a proposal is written. okay! but being nitpicky about how a wine is aired is some sense ridiculous.
so art is nebulous, a matter more of deployment and affect than of substance. this is because there’s no big picture for art. a big picture which preserves art as a concrete thing is a fantasy, because art like authenticity exist in the middle as a tactical endeavor. art as a material affect lacks authenticity. authenticity is about relations.
Authenticity and the Market place, What makes Hipsters Capitalists
so yes, all i do is talk about the big picture. but there is a difference between relationships and meaning/intention. certainly there is a correlation between things, even cause and effect. for instance, as i’ve complained before, hipsters have a notion that only non-market effects have authenticity.
this means that we (as hipsters) buy things that are local and personal. we despise corporate. but this really misses the point. the corporate (market) culture worships material. through branding, through product and design… the whole point is to get to the point of sale. so knowing this, hipsters avoid markets, and seek far flung corners of the globe to escape market realism.
but this is nonsense because by considering the non-market affects as alternatives to market products, hipsters actually bridge the gap between market and non-market. they introduce global capitalism by seeking supposed non-market areas and introducing rational choice theory and other market constructs. ive said it before; hipsters are very much the avant-gaarde of global capitalism by bringing fringe affects to the center.
so my point about authenticity is that hipsters like their corporate nemesises, miss the point:
Authenticity is found in relations, not Material.
you may complain that your boss treats you inhumanly, like a cog in the machine. but that treatment is authentic because when you are at work you are a cog in the machine. getting cut off on the freeway is definitely an authentic relationship, as is talking to the local barista for five minutes each day. in much the same way, hipsters mistake authenticity as a market construct — they think that having a human relationship means getting to know your local bum as your brother.
walter benjamin got it right with art in the age of mechanical reproduction. art as a market construct comes about when an item can be massed produced. the ‘original’ item then, becomes something more than mass produced. it becomes art, valuable and priceless because of its non-market origins. this is a different understanding of art than as a tactical maneuver.
when you think of non-market influenced art, like performance art.. but even more so like street art, graffiti art or transient earth art as real art (non-museum, non-institutionalized pieces) you are making a mistake about what art is. art as a produced item, even if it has non-market origins only enters the market as more market produced items.
graffiti art just happens to be the latest taste… performance art (which cannot be traditionally museumized due to its localized and temporalized nature) and earth art were previous forerunners in a series of attempts to experience non-market reality. but this too becomes just another item that is more prized as art once reproductions (albeit even imperfections) are passed on.
post-industrial capitalism as a whole is rightly a post-modern worldview, of signifiers divorced from having a penultimate signified. post-industrial capitalism encapsulates material within a decontextualised territory, of market place, passing on the content as the form. hipsters seeking to escape market influence only spread its affects further because they mistook the market place as a set of content not a logic of deployment. to grasp onto someone who was the first or who was the best (as with jiro) is just another expression of those elevating forces that define art and artistry as another market deployment. (this works, of course, the same way with music hipsters, who must hate a thing once it has obviously entered the market…)
so if you re-tool authenticity as relationships which originate from us as who we are, then we have to accept that authenticity is market-agnostic. so to go over human relationships as being authentic or not, wearing your mother’s sweater she got you is an authentic thing — not because she made it by hand (rather than old navy — because it might be from old navy) but because you note she loves you and you love her back is the thing. so in this i agree with zizek. the waiter who notes his role as waiter with a dose of cynicism is the man who actually is a waiter… he notes the expected rules and approaches them with the intention of being effective as a waiter is one who is authentic about his being a waiter… more so than the one who just does what he is supposed to with a pure heart… that kind of attitude means that the latter has not sacrificed all that he is into the role — he has not given up that which is not waiter yet, as he has not acknowledged it to give it up.
this is kind of a complex idea, but it comes from zizek’s background growing up in stalin eastern europe. one’s actual actions count, so that if one even carries with it the negativity about their duty and yet performs their duty — then one really is completely “into it” so to speak since one has made the choice to accept one’s fate… rather than one who mindlessly does it because it’s there (suggesting that the latter has yet to really make up their mind as they haven’t yet realized their mind).
in much the same way, one who is with their spouse despite their spouse’s flaws is one who is committed to the relationship. perhaps that is a more obvious way of speaking.
this of course, defines authenticity regardless of market influence. authenticity has to do with personal affect, if it touches you or not.
sad to note though: the most authentic relationships most people have in their daily lives are with their pets. we can imbue our pets with subjectivity so as to better relate to them — or we can take that subjectivity away, should it be inconvenient. what makes most people’s relationships inauthentic is our inability to really accept the other person, due to expectations, market forces, career pressures, emotional hang ups or whatever… (i don’t mean that one should blindly accept whatever your significant other dishes, i mean that your relationship should be defined on a personal basis before one plays the role of “wife”… not because one has to be a “wife” so that means you behave in a particular way regardless of how one feels or doesn’t feel)
So where does that leave us with Art and Jiro?
rather than pursuing art in terms of market, we should probably see it natively. that is, with the viewer’s (our own) sensibilities than any group focus. group objectivity is a theoretical position, one which is best fostered through art community consensus or market forces (enough people recognize, or it has been reproduced enough times to be famous). this means that art is a nebulous thing… and it is up to the artist to manage their audience’s expectations, should they wish to be an artist. i don’t think that art for arts sake should be how we see it, otherwise as a model of self expression, bad poets are the most artistic of all, since they speak directly from their emotions regardless of craft… and bad poetry is something most people will recognize as not being at all art.
so what we take from the movie is what we will, be it a biography, or a better appreciation. and if it be the latter, than we have achieved the most simple marker, haven’t we? and if watching a movie lets us be affected by sushi as art, then so be it.
what’s missing from corporate materialism is enchantment… and tactically, that is what art does.
so yeah, i did start somewhere, against something and i ended up in the same spot, with everything possibly, as an art. so what!
In Cabinet Magazine, issue 27, there is an article titled Readymade Remade about Pierre Pinoncelli who first made a big name for himself by pissing in Marcel Duchamp’s readymade urinal. The article examines Pinoncelli’s argument that he was bringing history and value to the urinal by doing so. While the French gov’t did not agree with Pinoncelli at all, especially after Pinoncelli pissed in the same urinal again in 2006 — the article decidedly agrees with Pinoncelli. The writer, Leland de la Durantaye, smartly cites Duchamp himself as the authority — Duchamp, after “defacing” the Mona Lisa, claims that his Mona Lisa is not a readymade. Rather this remade Mona Lisa is an “assisted readymade”. By taking mass produced art and introducing “a unique commentary”, Duchamp means to bring this item back into the spectrum of art. With this, Durantaye implies that Pinoncelli is right in his claim that the French gov’t is wrong — but then after fining Pinoncelli, should the French gov’t pay him the money? After all, Pinoncelli’s “unique commentary” has increased the value of this French treasure by taking a mass produced readymade which has “lost [its] readymade authenticity, [its] unique identity, and [. . .] dynamically infus[ing] one of the replicas with [authenticity]”.
Twice stained, thrice as valuable. Look up Pierre Pinoncelli on the internet. You'll see he's quite a pissant. HA HA HA!!
Besides the “unique critique” of Duchamp’s work (of which Pinoncelli is a decidedly excited fan) there are three possible directions for contradictions:
1) Durantaye takes for granted the implication that what is valuable in art is expressed monetarily.
2) Benjamin’s famous essay on Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction equates uniqueness with art — that mass produced copies only accentuate the value of “originals” which the elite can then possess as being art. By unifying Duchamp’s readymade and his assisted readymade, Durantaye implies that Duchamp is not producing art at all — if a readymade meant to be art can be in need of “assistance” to rejoin the status of art then Duchamp is not at all an artist for Duchamp is not producing art.
3) Simultaneously, as you can imagine, Pinoncelli’s urine was cleaned from the “defaced” readymade. Nonetheless, Pinoncelli left, in the language of Lacan, an unseen stain, on that particular readymade. The British have recognized this readymade as being more intrinsically valuable. One of the subtexts of this article is that what is valuable is not necessarily tangible… that art itself has moved beyond the realm of pretty pictures and skillful techniques (for what kind of technique has Pinoncelli, besides the admirable ability to urinate in public before the eyes of others? — no doubt a feat most of us could not accomplish).
Taken all at once, although somewhat contradictory, we come across a paradox. Art then, in the contemporary age, is what both unique, intangible and monetarily valuable. Of course no matter what the French gov’t thought, they could not allow anyone pissing on any art. Imagine if they awarded Pinoncelli? What kind of people would go to the museums in the hopes of making “readymade” money? At once we see that art cannot be what is tangible. Of course, tangibility may be our best claim to any sort of possession of it. We go to museums to see art, but in fact run abut something else. So is art tangible?
If it is only tangible then Duchamp is not an artist. If it is intangible, then Duchamp and Pinoncelli are both artists. Durantaye sides with Pinoncelli and Pinoncelli with Duchamp.
But if art is not material, then what is art? If Duchamp is not an artist but a “materialist contextualist” then how are we to approach material context? We all understand that art can be horribly elitist, but is it so only in order to promote/protect its own value? Does this then make the lives of our celebrities art? What about expensive, corporate, buildings? What then happens to punk and the D.I.Y. culture? Is that no longer art but just noise (since anyone can punk)?
Again the direction seems to lie more with Deleuze and Guattari’s how more than the what. While both of these thinkers equate art with concept, if we take this discussion seriously it seems that art lies more with social positioning than anything else: architecture must be valuable because of the resources taken to produce it, as are museum housed works — and the millions of punk fans world-wide.
This bodes woe for fans of Kristeva, and all the art lovers around… as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s book What is Philosophy. But that’s the one book of theirs that I do not like. So that’s fine by me. (Any “commentary” I would like to share on that book? I think not, at least, I can’t comment if you’re watching…)
Me, personally? I don’t believe in any of what I just wrote anyhow.
Is that tangible enough for ya?
Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
