Review of LOST EARTH, a biography of Paul Cezanne

[spino...@msn.com]

BOOK REVIEW: LOST EARTH, A Life of Cezanne, by Philip Callow. Chicago,
1995, Ivan R. Dee

There's been some discussion on Cezanne on RAF and for this reason here
is a review of a very illuminating artistic biography of this seminal
figure.

As an introduction to the life of Cezanne, this book is excellent, but
needs for the uninitiated to be supplemented by some good reproductions.
Callow discusses a number of works the book does not reproduce.

Born in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France in the earlier years of
the 19th century, Paul Cezanne was the son of an up and coming bourgeois
and a friend from childhood of the great Emile Zola. Both a part of and
apart from the Impressionist movement, Cezanne is the figure that links
High modernism with Impressionism.

This is because Cezanne's project was to dialectically resolve the focus
of Monet, Pissaro and the other Impressionists on transient visual
sensations with the more timeless visions of French art, notably Nicholas
Poussin, the first great French painter of the 17th century.

Cezanne learned how to handle color impressionistically, but he was not
interested in the rather atomistic way in which minor
post-Impressionists, notably Georges Seurat, devolved to constructing a
painting out of dots. Already foreseen in Monet's small and multicolored
brushstrokes, this mode of painting, known as "pointiliism", foreshadows
modern-day color printing and even modern analytic philosophy, for it
constructs complex color out of simple color and looks forward to the
"logical atomism" of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein,
philosophers convinced that complex ideas post-date, and are constructed
of, simple sensory impressions.

This Logical Atomism underlays in an unconscious and cultural mode the
modern day computer, which with greater or less success gives life to a
virtual reality that is constructed out of very simple elements.
Although the media conceals and mystifies computer technology, making it
appear as a series of grand wonders, all modern computers derive from the
very simple model of computation developed in 1938 by Alan Turing.
Software labor of a peculiarly intense sort creates what we see today.

Simple phenomenological experimentation that is inspired by the works of
Cezanne can show fissures in the Logical Atomist narrative. Consider a
wall in the clear light of the Midi that, Callow says, inspired Cezanne,
and consider that the left side of the white wall is in shadow whereas
the right side is in a noonday sun. There is no transition but a smooth
gradation between the bright and dark zone of the wall.

According to Logical Atomism, we can analyze this wall as a compound
visual sensation consisting of "simple" color patches, where the term of
art "simple" means, precisely, not having parts. Wittgenstein was
reticent on what these simple bits of information might be, possibly
because of the mystery they represent. But it is clear that the wall is
not itself simple, for we can say at least two things about it: its left
side is in shadow and its right side is in sun.

But of course the left and right sides, when described in this manner, do
not account for the wall. We can add that the middle is in a sort of
middle tone, that the three-quarter zone is in a high middle tone, that
the quarter zone is in a low middle tone, and so forth...ad infinitum.

And it is important to be clear on what sort of infinitum we are talking
about. At the time of the later career of Cezanne, the German
mathematician Cantor discovered that there are two types of mathematical
infinity. "Denumerable" infinity is represented by the series of natural
numbers 1,2,...m. This is probably the vernacular infinity: but Cantor
made the interesting discovery through his "diagonalization" process that
there is another sort of "higher" infinity, which he, interestingly
enough, represented using the mysterious and forbidding symbol Aleph-one
(the Hebrew letter subscripted by one.)

Aleph-one is the continuum of real numbers, such that quite unlike the
natural numbers, it is a "dense" continuum. Whereas there is no natural
number between 1 and 2, between the real numbers 1/2 and 3/4 there is an
infinite supply of reals.

There are astonishing transfers of Cantor's discovery to the humanities.
For one, it is clear that natural language, unlike computer language, is
nondenumerable, although we tend to think that it is not. The "proof"
that natural language is aleph-one is simple, for if number words such as
"1/2" are part of natural language (and there is no reason to think that
they are not) then because a set having a nondenumerable subset implies
the non-denumerability of the set, natural language is nondenumerable.
Moreover, this applies to WRITTEN natural language: although the set of
letters is not even denumerably infinite Cantor's diagonilization
procedure shows that it can generate a nondenumerable set.

This rather simple fact runs against a cultural scarcity model. We tend
to think that there shall be a time, to use the words of Rudyard Kipling,
"when Earth's last picture is painted." There are deep linkages between
the scarcity model and fundamentalist end-time thinking, and
computerization itself encourages the scarcity model. The growth in
"intellectual property", the expropriation of intellectual workers unable
or unwilling to make claims on symbolic terrain, and so forth, result
from the illusion of the scarcity model that there will not be enough
symbols to go around.

Returning to Cezanne's art, it is not immediately accessible because
Cezanne did not foreshadow twentieth century commercial art and eschewed
Pointiliism. Cezanne was interested in transmitting 3-dimensional
shapes, a literal impossibility on a canvas. That is, we experience the
world as a 3-d continuum but subject to 2-d vision. The pictorial canvas
thus becomes a zone of dialectial struggle between these experiences.
Commercial art, and pointiliism, simply models the 3-d on 2-d by a
geometric projection which could be assigned to a computer.

But in struggling for a re-presentation of the real, Cezanne, influenced
by Poussin, worked in a non-atomist form, using graded planes of color.
These planes break down the distinction found in Poussin between the line
and the color. Atomism does violence to this process, and whereas it
seems easy to reproduce Monet in an art book, art books with Cezanne
often do violence to him, simply because he used a different language.

We initially find Cezanne unpleasant and ugly, and for different reasons
than did his traditionalist contemporaries. Our very reaction is formed
by the deluge of images formed by digital, Pointillist means. We expect,
that is, to automatically build up an image from microscopic dots, and
Cezanne thwarts this process. He forces us to see that reality does not
come in the form of dots. Not only this: he forces us also to see that
the earlier painterly distinction between line and color is itself a
cultural artifact.

There are strong applications here of Theodore Adorno's ideas concerning
the effect of musical reproduction on taste, which were pessimistic in
the extreme. Adorno seems to have felt that technological reproduction
had a necessary loss of information such that it would debase musical
appreciation and this certainly seems to be the case. Adorno, for
example, would take gloomy satisfaction in the fact that there are Pop
radio stations that advertise their selection by saying "no r & b, no
blues, no soul, no Mariah Carey, just good old [white] rock and roll",
making an explicitly racist appeal.

Callow addresses, head-on, the red herring issue of Cezanne's "skill."
In particular, Cezanne's Bathers seem to be grand failures. Even
Cezanne's devotees, notably Roger Fry, felt they were ugly. This does
not, however, imply that Cezanne could not draw, that skill so important
to the anxious artist. As Callow points out, there are labored studies
extant by Cezanne of plaster casts which are of good academic quality.
But Cezanne's mission was not to paint like Ingres, and post-Ingres but
pre-Cezanne, the camera had already made this a futile gesture.

Cezanne could have painted like Cabanel, Meissonier or le Redoubtable
himself, Bouguereau, had he applied himself, day after day, in the manner
expected by l'Ecole des Beaux-Artes. And if it is replied that this mere
labor would not have shown a "mystical spark", this only makes clear how
the language of "talent and skill" does ideological work by contradicting
itself as needed.

For on the one hand the language tells the art student to labor, day
after day, in drawing, first plaster casts and then the human figure. On
the other hand it tells her that she must have a "calling" that will be
evident by natural drawing facility, exhibited BEFORE attending life
classes. That is, the ideological language, formed over time to reduce
revolutionary demands on the art education system, uses
self-contradiction to check those demands. In logic, self-contradiction
has the paradoxical power that "P and not-P" logically implies anything
we like. The critique that correct logic is a ruling class device does
not see how ideology separates logic as a signifier from its own
correctness: but in more fields than art the socially-induced desire to
close rather than open doors makes it very useful to force the student to
labor, but at the same time devalue this labor.

Cezanne chose not to pay dues that would have wasted his time, but
certainly labored at his own program. And it cannot be denied that there
is a mysterious "spark" in all his works. The colors of the earliest
works are magnificent: they work together in a way that is very difficult
to achieve, since as opposed to drawing, there are very few academic
guidelines for making colors work together. We cannot say why the blue
opening sky of Cezanne's ealy Orgy seems to breathe life into what would
have been a closed and claustrophobic harem in an academic study.

Recent work of the Columbia University literary theorist and Palestinean
moderate Edward Said on 19th century culture draws attention to the
influence of France's colonial adventures on its metropolitan culture.
This connection is never made by specialized art historians who are
unaware that the fissure between the pre-Impressionists Courbet and
Corot, and the Salon, appeared at the same time (the 1830s) France was
beginning to engage in colonial adventure. The French Foreign Legion was
founded at this time.

One reason why the Impressionists appeal to us is that they painted what
they knew. The Impressionists celebrate the sanity of daily life and the
simplicity of a day in the country. Cezanne's spiritual growth under the
tutelage of kindly Pissarro (a socialist) drained his work of the
exoticism of his early Orgy, and the later paintings are a homecoming in
that they gaze at Mte. St-Victoire, the Jas de Bouffan, and the other
places of childhood. The Salon artists tended to paint views of exotic
locales in Morocco and other places, reflecting the disturbance of the
haute bourgeois unable to deal with the real women of Renoir but
delighted by the slave-girl in the *hareem*.

To get actual access to such souks, such bazaars, such Casbahs and such
hareems, one would, literally speaking, need a couple of units of the
French Foreign Legion and a park of artillery. Despite the fact that the
Salon artists projected the erotic desires of the bourgeois onto dirty
Islamic foreigners, the actual Moslems were and are Godly family men who
objected, and objected strongly, and object today, to the colonial gaze,
and its projection of the erotic on the foreigner.

The men of Islam question the West's desire to transform all men into
money-mad Yuppies and all women into Playboy models. Their prohibition
of images is in part a critique of the way in which making a graven image
asserts power and control...not mere medieval obfuscation. In terms of
their critique, emerging as it did from the sands of Arabia as an
assertion of human dignity before God when the West was sunk in the Dark
Ages, Bouguereau is regression and Picasso is advance, for abstraction
advances away from blasphemous reproduction of God's handiwork. Muslim
art is calligraphic and abstract in reverence, and the reversion of the
Christian American public away from High modernism towards what may on
this account be accounted blasphemy (cf. any modern Hollywood film)lends
credence to the Muslim story.

French colonialism came to a bloody end at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and in
Algiers of 1960, and my own country's Vietnam venture (resulting in a
wall with 50,000 names of dead men) was a result of the desire of certain
segments of our society to preserve the colonial gaze, to Americanize the
French domination of Vietnam, and to make virtuous women the objects of
pleasure.

Consider that Poussin's 1658 Landscape with the Giant Orion is the
narrative of a giant who raped the daughter of the king of Chios and was
stricken blind as a condign punishment, and consider that the painting
acknowledges the possibility of a male spiritual rebirth, because it is
of the giant Orion in search of the morning sun. The giant Orion is
attended by Poussin's labored and unique figures and those mists which
conceal the sun.

Consider that Bouguereau's Birth of Venus is a pornographic theft and
that The Babes of Avignon is many things, but in no wise pornographic.

Consider that in inferior art one gets what one thinks what one wants,
whereas the highest art narrates lack. The Landscape with Orpheus and
Euridice narrates the beginning of a tale that ends in the death of
Eurydice, not her attainment. Cezanne's bathers are not attained.
Whereas the satisfaction of Bouguereau is bulimic in is presentation of
fulness. Jenny Holzer inscribes:

PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT

The way we look at the world today is informed by a flat and sad atomism
which denies the possibilities of transcendence. Whether or not the
early Wittgenstein and Russell are TRUE is an important question, but we
also need to think about the disenchantment inherent in the idea that
anything higher can be torn up and seen to have logical feet of clay. We
need to proceed quickly past simple- minded conspiracy theories in which
Bertrand Russell is to blame for the destruction of the environment (for
this is, in part, a refusal to see the natural environment as did the
natives of North America, a sacred continuum that should not be
sundered), but proceed to seeing how Russell's apparent truth emerged
from a cultural matrix. Callow relates Cezanne's presentations of the
sacred and the whole, the apple that goes round the world, to his
nostalgia for a Midi that was itself being torn up by early
industrialization.

The Internet, with its smooth and sadistic precision, does no violence to
Bouguereau, for Bouguereau is nothing more than the sum of its parts.
Cezanne, on the other hand, looks quite unpleasantly wrong on the
computer screen. For one thing, the fact that a cathode ray tube surface
has (I believe out of physical necessity) to be slightly curved ignores
the way in which Cezanne laboriously adjusted his forms to a flat
surface. And since Bouguereau never worried about precision of tone to
the extent that Cezanne did, the radical changes made on the best
monitors to tones do not alter the effect of Bouguereau's art, whereas
they make something different out of Cezanne.

Mani's presentation of Bouguereau's Birth of Venus and Picasso's Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon exploits the fact that we're looking at
reproductions, as Charles Eichler's recent response to my post makes
clear, that do violence to subtlety of color. The fact that Bouguereau
looks better at Mani's Web site results from his lack of subtlety, and
the construction of our view of Bouguereau by the way that Bougeuereau
inspired illustrators who formed...our view of Bouguereau.

As vicious children, corrupted just enough by the educational system, we
think of a blue sky as a simple given. On a computer, the sky can be a
single number, repeated several times. But the phenomenological reality
seems to be that we do not stare at the sky in a walleyed fashion. In
the Husserlian *lebenswelt* or world as actually lived, the sky is most
often peripheral to our attention and in the process of continual change.
Therefore, Cezanne's skies show a gradation missing, except in the most
simple-minded fashion, in the sky of Bouguereau. Rather than an academic
gradation from deep blue at the zenith to lighter blue at the horizon,
Cezanne's skies are an infinity of gradations that convey not only the
bald perception of the sky but the integrated emotion of perception.

We criticize Cezanne's Grandes Baigneuses even today as inaccurate
representations of the nude. Post-playboy, we forget the legend of
Acteon, who surprised Diana and her attendants bathing nude in a stream,
and was torn by beasts as a result. The tale may express the reversal of
the account of the middle ages: that exposure of one's body was a matter
of shame. The tale of Acteon puts the shame, in the manner of modern-day
feminism, on the viewer. It is my privilege, from mere Lockean accounts
of self-ownership, to swim nude. The shame belongs to the Peeping Tom.

As a practical matter, Callow makes clear, Cezanne wanted to pose and
paint from a modern-day Poussin, innocent bodies in sunlight, but the
puritanism of his community would have caused a great uproar. So
Cezanne's Grandes Baigneueses represent not so much a failure of talent
(for some of the same clumsiness is evident in Poussin's draftmanship
when he likewise does not draw from the live model) as a communication of
emotion. The very schematizations and distortions of Grandes Baigneuses
are a result of looking away.

Callow's work is post-feminist in that it is informed by an ability to
feel missing in Roger Fry and Anthony Blunt. Fry did not "get" the
Grandes Baigneuses because he, pre-feminist, took it as a male privilege
to reduce the 3-dimensional female body (indeed the n dimensions of
thought and reason in a female body) to a two-dimensional form. This has
devolved in our era to the exploitation of women in Playboy: Jenny
McCarthy took it as a given that she'd have to sign a release turning
over property rights (*pace* John Locke) to Hefner in order to "break
into" entertainment. Cezanne, because of the Catholicism of the Midi,
did not have this privilege and at the same time had the male sexual
energy which although focused in our day on specific commodified genitals
is actually part of a more general, and more sacred, energy, created
objects which did not exploit women. He failed, in other words, to be a
pornographer, and I think this is what Callow is seeing.

A misunderstood feminism can, quite simply, destroy male artists. A
simple-minded reversal of the artistic gaze means that any attempt on the
part of a man to create art, which very often involves representing
women, is violence against women. But I don't think Simone de Beauvoir
was hoping men would devolve, as they have devolved, into the sad, flat,
and violent creatures they are today, drunks acting out their rage at
soccer meets. I suggest that Cezanne's biography provides another way
back to Eden for the male in particular. His first paintings express a
checked rage. His last paintings remember this rage but integrate it in
the highest way with the Sacred.

-------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====-----------------------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet

[mdeli]

On Fri, 26 Dec 1997 10:32:17 -0600, spino...@msn.com wrote:

Read my rules for Artspeak at http://www.interlog.com/~hugod/

rule one for this guy: 'Always use two hundred words where you could
have used ten'.

He follows my rules to the letter. This was his most baroque message

The usual yawn snipped

>Simple phenomenological experimentation that is inspired by the works of
>Cezanne can show fissures in the Logical Atomist narrative. Consider a
>wall in the clear light of the Midi that, Callow says, inspired Cezanne,
>and consider that the left side of the white wall is in shadow whereas
>the right side is in a noonday sun. There is no transition but a smooth
>gradation between the bright and dark zone of the wall.
>

Nice artspeak.

> Logical Atomism,... Wittgenstein was

>But of course the left and right sides, when described in this manner, do
>not account for the wall. We can add that the middle is in a sort of
>middle tone, that the three-quarter zone is in a high middle tone, that
>the quarter zone is in a low middle tone, and so forth...ad infinitum.

blah blah

>
>And it is important to be clear on what sort of infinitum we are talking
>about. At the time of the later career of Cezanne, the German
>mathematician Cantor

indeed -what about Goldbach's conjecture?

>This rather simple fact runs against a cultural scarcity model. We tend
>to think that there shall be a time, to use the words of Rudyard Kipling,

etc
huge snip
>
>Returning to Cezanne's art

etc

>We initially find Cezanne unpleasant and ugly, and for different reasons
>than did his traditionalist contemporaries.

no kidding

>... Theodore Adorno's ideas concerning..

more blah blah snipped

>Callow addresses, head-on, the red herring issue of Cezanne's "skill."
>In particular, Cezanne's Bathers seem to be grand failures.

Cezanne had no skill.

> Even
>Cezanne's devotees, notably Roger Fry, felt they were ugly. This does
>not, however, imply that Cezanne could not draw, that skill so important
>to the anxious artist.

Everything Cezanne ever did implies that he couldn't draw.

>As Callow points out, there are labored studies
>extant by Cezanne of plaster casts which are of good academic quality.

Callow must have eye problems.

>But Cezanne's mission was not to paint like Ingres, and post-Ingres but
>pre-Cezanne, the camera had already made this a futile gesture.
>
>Cezanne could have painted like Cabanel, Meissonier or le Redoubtable
>himself, Bouguereau, had he applied himself, day after day,

Perhaps after fifty thousand years he could copy one of their toes.

more yak snipped

> In logic, self-contradiction
>has the paradoxical power that "P and not-P" logically implies anything
>we like.

>Cezanne chose not to pay dues that would have wasted his time, but

>certainly labored at his own program. And it cannot be denied that there
>is a mysterious "spark" in all his works. The colors of the earliest
>works are magnificent:

Try the portrait of his father for color- Yuck

> they work together in a way that is very difficult
>to achieve,

Its hard to get that bad

>Consider that Bouguereau's Birth of Venus is a pornographic theft and
>that The Babes of Avignon is many things, but in no wise pornographic.

Anyone who sees Bouguereau as pornographic is probably having sex
problems. For your information most of B"s paintings contain dressed
subjects.

The Picasso is very stupid and little else.

snip ... Wittgenstein and Russell ,,, yack yack

>Cezanne, on the other hand, looks quite unpleasantly wrong on the
>computer screen.

And far worse in the museum.

> The fact that Bouguereau
>looks better at Mani's Web site results from his lack of subtlety, and
>the construction of our view of Bouguereau by the way that Bougeuereau
>inspired illustrators who formed...our view of Bouguereau.
>

"inspired Ilustrators" Horrors.

> So
>Cezanne's Grandes Baigneueses represent not so much a failure of talent

..but a falure in all respects.

>Callow's work is post-feminist in that it is informed by an ability to
>feel missing in Roger Fry and Anthony Blunt.

Post femenist nonsense omitted

Mani DeLi
...no skill no art

[spino...@msn.com]

Subject: comment on Artspeak
From: hug...@interlog.com (mdeli)

>On Fri, 26 Dec 1997 10:32:17 -0600, spino...@msn.com wrote:

>rule one for this guy: 'Always use two hundred words where you could
>have used ten'.

Mani, the post in which I jammed with Karen Finley, I dreamed I had skill
and talent in my Maidenform bra, was intended to be more accessible:
perhaps you should restrict your attention to this style of post. And
this charge of excess verbiage, as I have said, is a typically Fascist
charge, and a way of mobilizing genuine anger in a bogus cause. There is
at least the possibility that the truth is nuanced to such a degree that
the most appropriate accounts are simillarly complex.

>>Simple phenomenological experimentation that is inspired by the works of
>>Cezanne can show fissures in the Logical Atomist narrative. Consider a
>>wall in the clear light of the Midi that, Callow says, inspired Cezanne,
>>and consider that the left side of the white wall is in shadow whereas
>>the right side is in a noonday sun. There is no transition but a smooth
>>gradation between the bright and dark zone of the wall.
>
>Nice artspeak.

Thank you.

I realize that it is unfashionable to write as if one knew anything
outside one's speciality, and it is possible that I misconstrue Cantorian
diagonlization. However, this problem of logical fuzziness is a genuine
philosophical problem, and one inspired by simultaneously working with
smooth gradations and airbrushes, and studying technical philosophy. By
referring to it as artspeak, you deny that workers per se can have any
insight into larger issues by working at their daily tasks. Hanging
drywall in an office building can suggest to the reflective worker any
number of philosophical issues, and the bogus elitism is to reject this
as doublespeak: it manufactures the idea that only members of the elite,
who, like George Bush, are unaware of the details of daily life, should
form opinions.

And it is important to deconstruct, and deconstruct without apology,
Mani's casual use of the term "artspeak." It is of course from the
occupation of a colleague the hero of 1984, Winston Smith, who was
charged with the fascinating task of developing a new language for Party
communications.

People who haven't read 1984, the modally half-educated and
fully-indoctrinated successful A-levels of our times, tend to call
complex writing that is not immediately understood "Newspeak", or here
"Artspeak." They miss Orwell's most important point. This is that
Newspeak is SIMPLIFIED language that eliminates words and phrases, not
overly complex language.

>> Logical Atomism,... Wittgenstein was

>>But of course the left and right sides, when described in this manner, do
>>not account for the wall. We can add that the middle is in a sort of
>>middle tone, that the three-quarter zone is in a high middle tone, that
>>the quarter zone is in a low middle tone, and so forth...ad infinitum.

>blah blah

Actually, dear boy, your work has one virtue in that it shows a nice eye
for gradation, as does that of your master Dali.

>>
>>And it is important to be clear on what sort of infinitum we are talking
>>about. At the time of the later career of Cezanne, the German
>>mathematician Cantor

>indeed -what about Goldbach's conjecture?

Fuck if I know. Zorn's lemma may be important.

>>We initially find Cezanne unpleasant and ugly, and for different reasons
>>than did his traditionalist contemporaries.

>no kidding

You'll be dipped in shit, huh.

>>Callow addresses, head-on, the red herring issue of Cezanne's "skill."
>>In particular, Cezanne's Bathers seem to be grand failures.

>Cezanne had no skill.

Whatevuh you say, man. I guess giving reasons and examples is now
prolixity which we must eschew.

>> Even
>>Cezanne's devotees, notably Roger Fry, felt they were ugly. This does
>>not, however, imply that Cezanne could not draw, that skill so important
>>to the anxious artist.

>Everything Cezanne ever did implies that he couldn't draw.

Dover has recently reprinted his sketchbooks and they like Callow show
that you're wrong.

>> In logic, self-contradiction
>>has the paradoxical power that "P and not-P" logically implies anything
>>we like.

>>Cezanne chose not to pay dues that would have wasted his time, but
>>certainly labored at his own program. And it cannot be denied that there
>>is a mysterious "spark" in all his works. The colors of the earliest
>>works are magnificent:

>Try the portrait of his father for color- Yuck

Mani, it appears to me that you live in some art-starved provincial city.
I speculate that it is Cincinnati. You have no right to make these
pronunciamentos on works you have not seen in a museum, for as Charles
Eichler has pointed out, computers make poor reproductions. If I am
wrong, prove me wrong.

Your favorite artist, Dali, is your favorite only because his industrial
finish reproduces well in a discounted art book, and because his work is
violence against women. Take for example, his painting roughly titled
Dream, Inspired by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate, Two Seconds
before Awakening. It is of a pair or unimaginatively executed tigers and
a rifle with a bayonet that it is about to pierce the flesh of a nude
woman. The reasons why Dali floats your boat lie outside art per se.

[mdeli]

spino...@msn.com wrote:

> And
>this charge of excess verbiage, as I have said, is a typically Fascist
>charge, and a way of mobilizing genuine anger in a bogus cause.

This paranoid seems to see fascism lurking everywhere.

>And it is important to deconstruct, and deconstruct without apology,
>Mani's casual use of the term "artspeak."

The following and more on Artspeak can be found at
http://www.interlog.com/~hugod/

Artspeak is the jargon of the 'in' critics, celebrities, academics,
historians, gallery owners, museum directors and artists. It is a
jargon which is unclear even to those who regularly use it. Critics
refer to it as the 'language of modern art', while constantly
lamenting that almost no one understands it. It is the lingo of
intellectual kitsch.

It is the job of the modern art critic by means of Artspeak to:

-make stupidity seem profound
-make incompetence seem philosophical
-excuse mediocrity by claiming it is something utterly new

The major rules for writing Artspeak are roughly speaking:

--use at least two hundred words where you could have used ten.
---use obscure terms especially when writing esoteric theory. 
---when stating your subjective opinion make it sound like it is
universally accepted as unquestionable truth.
---drop names of famous people wherever possible. This advertises that
you are well read.
--humor should sound obscure, even grave. (Later modern Artspeak does
contain a bit of humor.)
---when writing a long statement that means practically nothing,  use
your skills to construct it in such a way that it never occurs to 
your reader to analyze it.

>
>Mani, it appears to me that you live in some art-starved provincial city.
> I speculate that it is Cincinnati. You have no right to make these
>pronunciamentos on works you have not seen in a museum, for as Charles
>Eichler has pointed out, computers make poor reproductions. If I am
>wrong, prove me wrong.
>

I lived in NYC for 35 years and saw many shows of everyone you
mention. I was a member of the MOMA before you were old enough to get
it off on the pornographic aspects of Bouguereau. I also hung around
the Cedar Bar and Max's Kansas City and watched and listened to the
most important artzy fartzies in action. I have seen the major museums
of Europe where I spend time enjoying the benefits of my art
scholarship.

Mr. Eicher the Minister of Misinformation on this conference site is
as wrong as you are provincial.

>Your favorite artist, Dali, is your favorite only because his industrial
>finish reproduces well in a discounted art book, and because his work is
>violence against women.

"Violence against women?" Is that why you like Picasso?