oliver nelson's stolen moments

composer and arranger oliver nelson was so right to entitle this album the blues and the abstract truth (1961). for indeed the blues is pure abstraction of life into congealed suffering. TBAAT produces exquisite music & great improvisations. first, the brooding lyricism of hubbard on trumpet, followed by eric dolphy's highly imaginative intervention on flute. nelson's solo is a rare gem of modal lyricism within the jazz vocabulary of the early 1960's. bill evans' groovy short musical cerebration is as abstract as nelson would have wanted. the magic ends too soon.  

alain badiou's "three amigos"

atRifF

coming back to badiou's Logic of Worlds. i'm revising a number of badiou's redundancies. this post is forthcoming. i'd like to take a look at this one:

p 220.  under the heading "definition of an object", badiou declares (I):

Appearing is nothing else, for a being --initially conceived in its being as multiple-- than a becoming object.

let's suspend all the metaphysical problems in the history of recent philosophy associated with such a problematic term as "becoming," which badiou takes for granted here.

he writes: "But object is also a fully ontological category in that it only composes its atoms of appearing in accordance with the mathematical law of belonging, or pure presentation."

that's 1, 2, 3: the three amigos of appearance! "appearing" hangs on to "belonging," and both to "pure presentation" (keep in mind that "to belong," an atom, by definition, has to "appear" as a "part" of something else). as per "presentation" (let's leave "pure" aside for now), "to present" is a first cousin of "to (make) appear".  so, appearing features the three compadres. 

"appearing" is a "becoming" of, well, appearance. we're back to where we started. but for whom? badiou always addresses these conundrums from an axiomatic mathematical voice, which promulgates absolute truths from a platonic valhalla (the unspoken secret is that "the One," this mysterious cipher all over LoW, is none other than badiou himself).

do you buy it?

of the three amigos, "appearing" is the trademark of redundance, badiou's definition of object rest-ing on it. 

let's go back to (I):

appearing is... a becoming. and isn't "becoming" a form of "appearing"?

badiou has a way of getting out of the quicksands of ontological redundancy. @ the end of this section he writes with characteristic rodomontade:

The only inflexible truth regarding the intimate decomposition of the worldy fiction of being there is that of being-qua-being. The object objects to the transcendental fiction, which it nevertheless is, the 'fixion' od the One in being. 

badiou now puts the pleonastic hat on the ontological mannequin: the object objects! who would expect any less?

do you buy it?

peeping tom, 1897

women prefer men with full beards & heavy stubble over clean-shaven guys

atRiFf

beardedness or non-beardedness? a bit puzzling.

it seems that full beards and heavy stubble edged out light stubble and the clean-shaven look.

the conclusion is based on a study of women's judgments of attractiveness, health, masculinity and parenting abilities, from photographs of men who were clean-shaven, lightly or heavily stubbled and fully bearded.

how about non-beardedness?

surprisingly, men rated full beards and heavy stubble as most attractive, followed closely by clean-shaven and light stubble as least attractive. well, a dose of male narcicism is to be expected here.  

men and women agree on the subject of male beardedness, i.e., masculinity ratings increased linearly as facial hair increased.

i'm affraid there's a social side-effect the study is overlooking. keep in mind that our culture promotes and rewards a "clean" male image over its bearded counterpart (which may explain why beardedness is a less common trait than non-beardedness).

how does that prove the study's conclusions regarding female courtship behavior? shouldn't women reflect/influence cultural mores? western cultural androcentrism notwithstanding, one would expect beardedness to figure more prominently.

let's follow the study: suppose a bearded male gets many more females than a non-bearded one. shouldn't beardedness then, in time, become a preferred social male trait, which would, as a consequence, increase the population of bearded males? if so, would such a predominant trait remain a favorite amongst females? we don't know.  from the article it doesn't follow why beardedness conveys attractiveness, masculinity or parental abilities. only that it just happens. according to evolutionary theory, models of sexual selection suggest that there not need be any underlying selection advantage to a trait. females simply have to demonstrate an underlying sensory process favoring the stimulus. 

but we knew that sexual preference was redundant! 

are women's inclinations wired to our furry ancestors? it gets more nuanced.  researchers believe that a threshold of density and distribution may be necessary for beards to function as an attractive signal,

in other words, women by contrast, may balance...a competitive masculine partner against the costs of mating with a too-masculine partner. as such,

too masculine?

so, how to interpret the above statement?

a) as nietzsche declared, the west has become a non-bearded decadent culture
b) jews, muslims, rastafarians & sihks look sexier
c) we should prescribe more testosterone for our unbearded youth
d) wall street ceo's are unattractive people
e) all of the above  

you women & men (why not) be the judges. which is sexier?

the lincoln?

the marx?

the custer?

the thoreau?

the lemmy?

the castro?

the asimov?

a persuasive case can be made for the claim that conscientious art professionals suffer an unfair disadvantage in plying their craft because of the unfavorable connotations associated with the term "art market"

urs fischer, tongue, 2009?

the perfect balance of recreational consumption, intimacy, and associational life

non-arousal 

non-arousal as legitimate 

non-arousal as legitimate physiological response 

non-arousal as legitimate physiological response to a banal incoming stimulus

animals without faces

what's behind this face?

atRifF

my previous post brings forth a different conversation that needs to happen. after the cambridge declaration a carnivore/pet owner cannot say "i love animals" without a shade of moral tension.

what does it mean to love an animal? to love thyself: ego-projection! pet-rearing in america boils down to a social practice of ornamental narcissism (thus the resemblance between pet and owner).

how much the animal face resembles the human face becomes an important ingredient in our understanding of animal cogitatio. the metaphor is used by french philosopher emmanuel levinas: a face for levinas brings forth a more basic, essential connection: 1- the possibility of bridging a friendship, 2- an encounter, which opens up all sort of ethical possibilities.

the truth is that levinas didn't understand the animal face (more of this later). for now, i'd like to stretch levinas' idea to fit non-human animals.

the more human the animal looks, the easier the human projection. 

walt disney is against the grain. the legend goes that he loved animals & introduced a legion to the masses: goofy, donald, ronno, roger, minnie, goofy, bambi. (one could argue that mammal face-to-face is easier). but then there is jiminy cricket,  kaa (python), ursula (octopus), sebastian (crab) & aladar (dino).

what am i getting at? they all talk!

disney, not levinas, tackles the problem. language is the divide of human/animal face-to-face. since the animal cannot articulate a sentence, they become, as german philosopher martin heidegger put it "poor in world." this is why levinas doesn't walk the walk with bobby --the only animal in the prisoner camp where he spent the war years. jiminy cricket talks and acts smart. he's loyal & generous. of course, crickets don't talk, but by imagining they could, we cogitate a face all the way down to hexapoda.

the whole idea of face-to-face is that it should presuppose otherness unqualified. if i choose my other face all i'm doing is projecting myself-as-other.

jiminy has a cute face, only too human-like

on the other hand, disney's anthropocentrism reinforces animal bias: big bad wolf is, well, evil. his goal is to eat the three little pigs. now animal-empathy ends up building animal-prejudice. how?

we hate bad wolf because we're competing for the same food niche.

in disney's dinosaur the evil carnotaurus is a carnivore. aladar, the protagonist is an iguanadon (a hervibore). we get a paradoxical view of animal otherness. hervibores are good, carnivore (predators) are evil. as anthropocentric as it gets, we're still blind to the fact that we are the top carnivores (we'll come back to this blind spot).

let's improve disney thought experiment: being aware of the animal-as-other makes for an interesting hermeneutic circle. let's get rid of moral simplifications: animals are neither "good" nor "bad." animals are not moral beings in the sense we understand the term. the received idea is that animals are not moral because they lack freedom (too complicated a question to be pursued here). therefore, our -anthropocentric- exploration of human otherness remains redundantly human.   

is the systematization of suffering upon animals brought up by modern factory farming moral?  twentieth-century biotechnological revolution has turned against animals & the environment. is this breeding/killing production cycle really about food?  capitalist biotechnology produces cheap commodities for global trade, a dangerous trade off of environmental pollution and pandemics. 
 
meat-eating uses about three-fifths of the world's agricultural land yet produces less than 5% of its protein and less than 2% of its calories. meat production contributes to global warming through its effects on deforestation, both directly through pasture and indirectly through its use of feed and forage, and also because of the methane, which comes from the stomachs and manure of cattle.

the more animals we kill, the bigger the demand. in spite of the billions of animals killed each year, they never die. we end up having more of them.  (packaging does the trick)

design absorbs brutal suffering and waste & turns it into a clean artificial display. packaging reminds one of standard anatomical representations of the human body (with insets of the male or female reproductive system): a lactating breast, a vagina, ovaries. they appear isolated, fragmented, a sort of pornographic display of meat-fragments to be consumed a bit at a time.

the label details provenance, processing company, weight, price, cut, calories, fat, safe handling instructions, etc. the animal's life separated and distributed into arbitrary categories. we should ask a different question: is a life designed as mere consumption really a life? is life defined solely as meat grade, cut, flavor, tenderness, cooking method?

the animal's suffering is seldom a topic of discussion.

wolf man reinforces the unbridgeable duality of the "animal" in us. but we can turn the metaphor on its head: wolf man is the pressing to fact coming from the inside (the "other side", our truer? face): the expression of our self-destruction 

the moment the animal's face shows up we confront our bad faith. we cringe @ the idea that our meat comes from a vicious cycle of industrial suffering. but our pity is purely narcissistic. that is to say, us-as-them in the slaughterhouse -right before the 300 volt electric shock of the captive bolt pistol at the back of the head.

what we resent the most is our weakness at entertaining our "vicarious" suffering.  a defense mechanism suddenly kicks in. now we wish to have it both ways: as non-human animals eating each other in a state of necessity, and as humans, enjoying the taste of meat at a restaurant.

this is what best expresses why human language doesn't necessarily preclude a face: having language doesn't make us any better.

is there a way out of this impasse?

weaver of dreams: freddie hubbard

the "resurrection" of julian schnabel

alfredo triff

art/writing today can be compared to a social/metabolic phenomenon dithering between information/democratization and latent public apathy. in the early 2000's the art establishment prescribed a quick fix: the thinning of information, which didn't solve the problem: it only increased the atrophy.

though art/writing is a highly processed & diluted product people still crave it. this is not a contradiction --we have no clue as to what causes our craves & think of it ex post facto. which brings me to michael m. miller's the resurrection of julian schnabel, for Gallerist NY.  

let's take a closer look. the article's title already plays the portentous: the dead don't have powers of their own. to resurrect one needs grace's intervention. and grace dabs at everything:

1- the biographical (in wordy sentences ricocheting the factual)

In the early ’80s, his painting Notre Dame took in $93,500 at Sotheby’s. (“No, I’m not particularly pleased with the sale price,” Ms. Boone told a reporter from The Washington Post at the time, thinking it would break $100,000; some of his canvases now sell in the low seven figures.) Ms. Boone jointly represented him with Leo Castelli, the gallery of Warhol and Rauschenberg, and when Mr. Schnabel left both dealers for Pace Gallery in 1984, Mr. Castelli, in the pages of the Times, compared him to King Kong and, so the story goes, told Mr. Schnabel, “You have all my contempt.”

2- a bit of gossip,

He’d learned that I had called his first wife (didn’t pick up), David Salle (didn’t want to talk about the past because it “bores the pants off of me,” but sent me a statement saying “if a man likes to go about town wearing pajamas, I don’t see why that should bother anyone else”), Pace Gallery’s Arnold Glimcher (no comment), Mary Boone (didn’t return repeated requests for comment) and a number of other people Mr. Schnabel was close with in the ’80s.

3- plus live footage,

He went over to his son and asked what the cardboard sculpture was for. It was a project for an art class at Bard College. “I have to spell out my name somewhere on it,” Olmo Schnabel said. Mr. Schnabel picked up the sculpture. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, pointing to the square bottom of the piece, “you’ve got an ‘O’ right here.” He gestured to a crease running roughly through its center. “And that’s your L. You can use duct tape to put an M right here.” Olmo stared blankly. “I’m just worried that there are requirements—” “Listen,” Mr. Schnabel said. “Screw them. They don’t know what they want.”

all the right ingredients! 1- belongs in the typical narrative of late-19th century harper bazaar's novella. it worked: america was hooked. in 3- miller presses for a report & meets his subject's hubris. 2- is artsy-irresistible (& we all love it).

if he ever kept a countenance of neutrality, there are worrying signs of miller's early budging (as he lets go this veiled protest):

The press turned Mr. Schnabel into a caricature, the scapegoat for everything wrong with the art world and the archetype of narcissistic artists everywhere.

miller brings forth schnabel's body from the dead as we speak.

(...) He compared himself to Van Gogh and said to Morley Safer on 60 Minutes, “Would you ask Marlon Brando if he had a big ego? Do you have a big ego? I’m sure you do.” In the late ’90s, he began showing less frequently in America and became a critically acclaimed filmmaker, an industry in which hubris is not only expected but revered. He made Before Night Falls, the film that turned Javier Bardem into a movie star, and the highly stylized The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, for which he won Best Director at Cannes.

miller goes through the artist's biography as if adding relevant threads of causal evidence (you'd assume the past is connected to the present). but the problem is in the structure: reporting & opinion don't go together: one undoes the other.

we have "reporting" in red and "opinion" in blue:

Mr. Schnabel entered the room quietly, almost sheepishly, and everyone kept going about their business. He is 61 and on the short side, with a slight paunch, a patchy beard and slicked-back hair. He was wearing yellow-tinted glasses and a black jacket with an image printed on the back of one of his “Big Girl” paintings—a blond girl in a blue dress with a sinister smile and a slash of black paint obscuring her eyes. Mr. Schnabel has been known for walking around the city in paint-splattered silk pajamas, a gesture considered by some to be the pinnacle of 1980s hedonism, but that day he was in jeans and work boots.

are salma hayek or rihanna guilty of "1980s hedonism"? (i bring it up only to show how much  disconnected claims make up the axis of miller's overall argument). yet, we understand his point. the idea is to restore schnabel's art while keeping intact his post-romantic-bête aura. miller's (schnabel's) "resurrection" suggests the rediscovery of an epoch's misunderstood genius.

Olmo stared blankly. “I’m just worried that there are requirements—”
“Listen,” Mr. Schnabel said. “Screw them. They don’t know what they want.”

miller doesn't bracket his subject. it appears as if schnabel & olmo are alone. caught up already in a hall of mirrors, does the writer have a choice? isn't this what art/writing is supposed to do? a video-in-a-blurb? a sub-atomic novella?  

then suddenly,

Mr. Schnabel turned to me. “I’ve been making these portraits of the Brant children. Plate paintings. Would you like to see them?”

next, the writer is given a tour of schnabel's art corpus inside the palazzo chupi ("the greatest Julian Schnabel museum in the world").

the article ends with a narcissistic exposé shuffling fact & opinion: schnabel actually pulls a 50-page (recent) essay by dutch curator rudi fuchs, which reconsiders the latter's perception of schnabel's work through the 1980's. here are some highlights --as the artist reads to miller, who prefers to just quote schnabel quoting the essay: 

The objections against Schnabel were strong and sometimes bitter. Somehow they were right: Schnabel was the most outrageous painter of the three.(the other two are Basquiat & Salle) ...  The exuberant paintings of Schnabel were extremely unsettling. The misgivings of some of his older contemporaries were understandable. Even with all his glamorous renown, he was a dangerous outsider.

nothing looks better for rehabilitation purposes than a famous curator's mea culpa.

now miller takes back the rudder and reports. on the other hand, defending one's reputation (as schnabel does) by reading fuchs' retractation to a total stranger appears contrived --or plain naive.  miller doesn't want to appear biased, which only makes things worse.

He skimmed through the next 20 pages quickly, but he slowed down to read the last bit about himself.

in closing, schnabel talks through miller (or vice-versa?)  

“Schnabel is unrestrained and sentimental,” Mr. Schnabel said. “Whatever grandiose or complex images get into his head, in whatever emotional mode—he will try to make it: breaking every rule of style and decorum, bending art where it has to go.”

pure artblicity!  

iSn'T ThiS waY beTtEr tHAn tWilight?

Hi
My name is Livia and I wanted to tell you you are my air my life all my life and I believe in you! When I saw you the video that you bite the Tyra Banks I broke my computer and all my attacks (laughter) … I love you, and give you all my life to see you, but I live in Brazil and it is difficult, but one day I will see you, even if it is the last thing to do in life!
Rob you love is everything to me!
kisses!
I love you forever!!
(a fan letter to Rob Pattison)

tilda swinton's absolute advantage

alfredo triff

fresh from MoMA is tilda swinton's installation piece the maybe. the daily news takes it from here:

Her public napping is part of a performance art piece titled "The Maybe," which she debuted in 1995 at London's Serpentine Gallery. She later repeated the work in the Museo Barraco in Rome. Swinton will return to the glass case several times to appear in the installation, but the exhibition dates remain a mystery even to MoMA employees.

"public napping"? i doubt swinton was napping --not with that aroused crowd gawking through the glass box: she pretended to. it's irrelevant. the audience is in awe, for this is more that they bargained for. to  pay $25 for a MoMA ticket and get a glimpse of tilda swinton so vulnerable & close? this is better than the movies: swinton placidly napping inside a glass box, wearing soft bluish linen outfit. at last, one can look at this unique hollywood specimen without being dissed, called a f***, or punched in the face by a wild bodyguard.

yet, the proposition of the maybe, myself napping in public, is redundant, ho-hum. even abramovic doing it these days looks narcissistic. what artistic value (measured in part by the artist's work portfolio) entitles this piece to be at MoMA, one the the world's leading museums?

absolute advantage!

performance art is a new fad amongst hollywood stars in search of a respectability factor.

the maybe happens at MoMA because this is (NOT a movie, but) a performance of a superstar about a superstar taking "a nap" in a transparent armor glass (security guards + camera system notwithstanding). is swinton a performance artist? not really. she has toyed with performance before, but this is not what she does (again, she can always perform in any venue she chooses). swinton is a famous star (and a very good one at that), which is enough to make her a performance artist.

can you NOT tell the difference?

do you know how many well-known performance artists wished they could show themselves in a fish tank at MoMA and have people enraptured? 

symbolically, swinton's the maybe kills two birds with one stone: it presents a killer voyeuristic spectacle for MoMA's scopophiliac audience --let's admit we're all scopophiliacs to some degree-- while facilitating the objectifying pleasure of audiences basking in the glowing presence of the rich-and-famous. it's all artblicity.

 take a look a these people, they can't believe their own eyes.

yeah, the maybe has absolute advantage.  

history's paradoxical & sobering revenge

 atRifF

fresh from the new york times. looking back @ ten years of vain waste with new revelations & cogitations.

what a mess!

They wanted to confirm that Iraq had W.M.D., and the intelligence analysts were inclined to move in that direction anyway. Since it would be even worse if they predicted they didn’t have W.M.D. and it turned out they did.

this is the epistemic wager of our foreign policy pundits: hope for the worse scenario and bet on it, no matter the sacrifice (were there ever any worries for those involved in making the decisions? they're now happily retired, enjoying a second chance as "policy" consultants). war is of the essence! g.w. is not having war remorse while in retirement. on the contrary, he avers that he saved us from a tyrant (oh, how he treasured saddam's gold-plated gun).

but there is a danger here: that of presuming fiascos only happens to eggheads. the iraq war was a result of a vicious cycle of fear & power embedded in our DNA. there are three immediate lessons:

1- the irreducible: the enormous (& irrecuperable) waste of lives and public money,  2- the paradoxical: we actually helped the iranians --at no x-tra charge-- to achieve their long-held dream of getting rid of saddam hussein & tilted the balance of power in their favor, 3- the saddest: we prevented the iraqi people from having their own arab spring. 

in defense of an alternative artists economy

atRiFf

i just read a piece by anton vidokle for e-flux (thanks to amanda san filippo). this is part of his thesis:

What I mean is that if one is really looking to produce a different kind of art, it is necessary to step through the standardization and professionalization it promises, and discover a way to access whatever may be on the other side—even if what one finds does not resemble art as we currently understand it.

how does it get here is another thing. i'd like to contrast two paragraphs from the opening (1):

(...) some of the most influential modernist artists, from Paul Gauguin to Mondrian and Rodchenko, died in abject poverty, not because their work was unpopular but because the economy produced by the circulation and distribution of their work was entirely controlled by others, whether under capitalist or communist regimes.

which is out of marx's critique of political economy 101. then we get this (2): 

I am not particularly interested in the power relations between artists and the art market, a cyclical conversation that seems to dominate much of art writing today. Historically, art and artists have existed both with and without a market. Important art was produced in socialist countries for most of the twentieth century, in the absence of an art market. true. 

ok, suppose that (1) is true. how can vidokle argue [in (2)] that such-and-such artists "died in abject poverty..." because the economy produced by the circulation and distribution of their work was entirely controlled by others, and not be "particularly interested" [as he states in (2)] by the very dynamic that causes it? there are many uninfluential artists who died well off and well-off famous artists who later died in abject poverty (as -not surprisingly- did hundreds of unknown uninfluential artists).

"circulation" and "distribution" are well-known terms of classical economy, going back to cantillon & petty (one could make the case that marx's own critique of capitalist political economy is a close kin of the former). that is to say, the reason "power relations" are such a topic of discussion in much of art writing today is -precisely: artblicity reigns!

which explains vidokle's own ambiguity:

Art can clearly exist without a market, but artists fundamentally rely upon a certain economy in order to live and make art in the first place. Furthermore, it’s important to note that “economy” and “market” are not synonymous terms: a market is just one facet of the economic sphere, coexisting with many other forms of exchange, from barter, debt, and favors to a gift economy.

what does he means by "market"? a public gathering for selling merchandise -as in the guilds of 16th century europe? the mercantile protectionist markets of the renaissance, the monopolistic industrial market of 19th century england and early 20th century america, or the wall-street financial markets of today?

then, the artists and founder of e-flux brings up ruskin's essay on political economy (the given date wrong: ruskin essay wasn't published in 1857, but 1860 in the cornhill magazine, as unto this last, a treatise as grandiloquent as ruskin's personality).

keep in mind that ruskin intended to change the discipline as defended by the likes of smith, ricardo, malthus, even j. s. mill (whom he misinterprets in his essay). here are ruskin's bombastic essay titles: "The Roots of Honour,""The Veins of Wealth," "Qui judiratis Terram," & "Ad Valorem." the first sentence opens in ruskinian: 

Among the delusions which at different periods have possessed themselves of the minds of large masses of the human race, perhaps the most curious -- certainly the least creditable -- is the modern soi-disant science of political economy, based on the idea that an advantageous code of social action may be determined irrespectively of the influence of social affection.

which doesn't take away ruskin's good points in it. by his own admission, ruskin was redefining the scope of classical economy. a good part of what he seems to be saying is that there is no economy without the bigger picture of sociology --something comte & even mill had been saying for some time, but ruskin didn't know.

vidokle's conclusion is that,

Ruskin laments the confusion regarding the interpretation of the word “economy,” emphasizing that economy does not automatically imply money, frugality, or expenditures, but rather taking care of a household and managing labor.

so, one gets the impression that ruskin is doing microeconomics when in fact he is doing exactly the opposite! only then vidokle can find warhol's entrepreneurial spirit as a model:

Andy Warhol’s Factory is fascinating in this respect: both a murky, magical corner for misfits and eccentrics, and simultaneously the workplace of the first self-proclaimed Business Artist. Warhol’s artistic position is very interesting insofar as it combined stances that were thought to be diametrically opposed: he was at once a dandy, a bohemian, but also someone who did not disguise his interest in business and commerce. 

what is vidokle after? artist's independence!

But since his time, Warhol’s economic independence seems to have been misunderstood. The independence that came from his bridging of the bohemian sphere and the sphere of day-to-day commerce has been converted into a vast proliferation of so-called artistic practices that treat art as a profession. But art is not a profession.

"profession" is treated here as if it could be separated from its economic embeddedness (i don't think ruskin own social bent would've agreed with that). 

Warhol’s position was much more honest and productive than that of artists who pretend that the artist can or should stay innocent by delegating (or appearing to delegate) business-related activity to gallerists or other agents, and who maintain that this is the only condition in which critical or culturally significant art can be produced. 

warhol honest? why is that even relevant? how can vidokle miss leo castelli's brobdingnagian shadow?  having said that, none of this is so damaging to vidokle's more interesting sort of preraphaelite thesis:

By breaking from older artistic formations such as medieval artisan guilds, bohemian artists of the nineteenth century distanced themselves from the vulgar sphere of day-to-day commerce in favor of an idealized conception of art and authorship. While on the one hand this allowed for a certain rejection of normative bourgeois life, it also required that artists entrust their livelihoods to middlemen—to private agents or state organizations.

not that artists had too much choice. but this is better:

I think it’s perfectly acceptable to work in some other capacity in the arts, or in an entirely different field, and also to make art: sometimes this situation actually produces much more significant work than the “professional art” we see at art fairs and biennials. Ilya Kabakov supported himself for decades by being a children’s book illustrator. Marcel Duchamp worked as a librarian and later sold Brancusi’s work to make a living, while refusing to be dependent on sales of his own work.

this is a point that goes to the bottom of what "art," "artwork" & "professional" means. the problem is how to redefine art practice as such? don't expect vidokle to tackle that issue. at least to question actual relations of production is a start.

These days it’s becoming more and more difficult to imagine the production of significant art without a training system that educates future producers of art, its administrators and, to some extent, its consumers. However, until only a few decades ago, many if not most artists, curators, and critics, never attended masters programs or studied curatorship and critical writing in specialized training programs. The field of art is becoming professionalized in a very, very narrow way. There’s still the old problem that professionalization is really about a division of labor, and a division of labor produces alienation.

and this:

(...) MFA programs have become a tool of indoctrination that has had an unprecedented homogenizing effect on artistic practices worldwide, an effect that is now being replicated with curatorial and critical writing programs. At the center of the problem is the black plastic folder: at the school I attended, the folder itself became the goal of the program—both the framing and the ultimate content of graduate studies in art.

towards the end, vidokle even shifts his earlier stipulation a bit. i like its forwardness: 

The market of art is not merely a bunch of dealers and cigar-smoking connoisseurs trading exquisite objects for money behind closed doors. Rather, it is a vast and complex international industry of overlapping institutions which jointly produce artworks’ economic value and support a wide range of activities and occupations including training, research, development, production, display, documentation, criticism, marketing, promotion, financing, historicizing, publishing, and so forth. The standardization of art greatly simplifies all of these transactions. 

is art evolutionary?

in the new york times, an attractive cogitation on the origins of moral norms by iain de witt. here's an interesting conclusion:

A four-dimensional scheme for social behavior that is shaped by interlocking brain processes: (1) caring (rooted in attachment to kin and kith and care for their well-being), (2) recognition of others’ psychological states (rooted in the benefits of predicting the behavior of others), (3) problem-solving in a social context (e.g., how we should distribute scarce goods, settle land disputes; how we should punish the miscreants), and (4) learning social practices (by positive and negative reinforcement, by imitation, by trial and error, by various kinds of conditioning, and by analogy).

 philosopher patricia churchland does the logistry.

what i'd like to do is to extrapolate her conclusion above into the realm of art. i.e., what does this do?

eviscerated bison in lascaux caves

let's leave aside the notion of representation as meme. re-presentation is clearly symbolic. art, 1- identifies an action pattern for the ancient paleolithic human, 2- it condenses images as "magic" (an epistemic as well as cultural practice), 3- as art evolves, from 1 & 2, into cultural habits (religion is another example) that are passed on throughout generations, art becomes a self-evolutionary mechanism.

this conclusion better contextualizes contemporary aesthetics' received picture of kantian purposelessness, arthoodication, etc, by demoting art's value for the sake of art's needs.

the banality of evil

the picture is sad enough to make one's skin crawl. the young woman in safari attitude, waving the victory sign with shades & the empty smile is not the culprit (she was hired to pose on top of the rhino). the fallen survivor of geological history now sacrificed at the altar of human greed.

this is civilization posing as self-destruction.

of course, with each passing year there will be less rhino horns on the backshelves of chinese pharmacies. the stench of death being kept safe & withdrawn (a cultural idiosyncrasy flickering at the edge of the social contract) for the sake of our narcissistic anxieties. animal extinction becomes as trivial as re-allocation of stock.

why are we so insanely destructive?

Designing "shopping"

On the  NY Times, a candid look at how corporations learn from human behavior:

The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs (...) One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.

And how corporations get into the habit forming business? It turns by making you believe you make the choice! 

With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance. “And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.

Didn't you know this already?

I see it differently. Though they play the paternalistic game, corporations understand that we live in bad faith. They mine on it and, by default, get us in the end.

Being a "consumer" means pretending independence.

Let's look again at this cycle of consumer's bad faith: You know you are being spied on, so you choose to play a game of "consumer independence," falling for the pretense that this time it's your choice? (not the corporation's?). Bunk.

the prize of gullibility (for video enthusiasts)

the new york times exposes the the prize of gullibility.

the victims? via twitter followers:  Time Magazine, Ellen DeGeneres, NBC’s “Today” show,  “Nightly News,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” & Fox News, where the “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade said of it, “You couldn’t do this at Warner Brothers as a cartoon and make it seem more realistic.”

seem? the whole thing was a well-staged hokum.

the lesson?

(...) passions incline the generality of mankind to believe and report, with the greatest vehemence and assurance, all __________.

you fill in the blank (the quote in red above is by david hume in his enquiry).   

overtly human? partially removed from the human? atavistic regression to the evolutionarily primitive? or overtly distanced from the human?

fast-foodean felo-de-se or burgerian martyrdom?

heart attack grill unofficial spokesman dies of heart attack

the story of one of the best performances of the last ten years in america and the critic who put it on the map

alfredo triff

this post is about performance art and the power of words.

what's unique about a great performance is how well it fits its time.  

let's keep in mind that structurally speaking, performance art blurs its own presence. that is to say, a performance always "performs," a dynamic which also affects what is said or written about the performance.

last week, i stumbled across this article from the huffington post.

on june 13, 2009, the art guys married an oak tree in a performance entitled the art guys marry a plant.  600 people attended the ceremony sponsored by  the contemporary museum in houston.

the wedding (2009)

lawrence weschler introduces the social context:

Back in 2009, against a political backdrop in which local Texas politicians were ranting about how they couldn’t very well condone weddings between gay individuals because before you knew it they were going to be asked to condone weddings between people and their dogs, the Art Guys decided to marry a tree. Said wedding was not consummated at the time, however, because the tree was still underage (just what kind of deviates do you take our Guys for?) and also because the sapling had yet to find a permanent home. Then this past November, the tree having come of age (or at any rate grown taller than either of the two of them) and a permanent spot having been located, on the shady grounds of Houston’s prestigious Menil Collection, a dedicatory ceremony was announced, for which I was recruited.

three days before the "wedding" (on june 11), art critic douglas britt (who is gay) presented his appraisal for the houston chronicle, kind of odd, since performances happen in the present & you expect a critic to withhold judgement until it happens.  

britt regrets, 

(...) the fact that their wedding isn’t to each other. It’s to a live oak sapling."Welcome to The Art Guys Marry a Plant, the latest performance — or as they prefer to call it, the latest “behavior” work — by the Houston conceptual duo. And it has nothing to do with the country’s hottest civil rights issue, they say, although they both support the right of same-sex couples to marry.

on june 12, a day before the "wedding," we get a a second entry. britt is not "a huge fan of the concept,

(...) it bears comparison to last year’s New Yorker cover depicting the Obamas as terrorists — the one the editors had to explain was really making fun of the people who think they’re terrorists, not the Obamas themselves…

WTF??

not so fast. there are two levels going on here: logically speaking, britt's inference is hasty. performatively speaking, it works just fine. words play a part in this reception: britt presents a future performance as if it happens in the present. he understands he's breaching protocol and excuses himself: I’d be thrilled if their performance somehow overcomes the feeble concept behind it. time to revise  the ancient conceptual riddle: what's more important, the piece or the concept behind it?

he then quotes michael galbreth (the taller of the art guys) in an interview: 

(...) it doesn’t even warrant discussion. I’m happy that the issue is out there because it helps promotes us, in a crude sense, when the people mistakenly think that it’s a political gesture, which to my mind, it’s not.

a less-than-desirable response in britt's opinion. but why is he surprised? what the performer is saying makes sense: the critic takes the wedding to be political, and that's fine, but it's not really about that.

yes and no. galbreth, being one of the performers, should know what it is about, a point britt cannot dispute. yet, the "wedding" can be seen as "political" for the critic-as-audience. this is not a contradiction. it's the nature of the game, something galbreth wouldn't disagree with either. 

the performer brings up chris burden's famous shoot to problematize britt's charge, that is, The Art Guys’ piece raises — even exploits — the No. 1 civil rights issue of our time only to drop it like a hot potato). for galbreth performances are unpredictable events: Chris Burden has talked about his shooting himself as sculptural – as a form penetrating a form – but then he did it and it suddenly shifts the dialogue because the devil is in the details.

britt doesn't buy it:

And the idea that performing a ceremony, then taking the tree off to the woods comes even within light-years of the level of commitment it took Burden to do Shoot (no matter what you think of its merits as art) is just dumb. Not gloriously, deliriously dumb; just dumb.

galbreth insists: a performance's "richness" can be overshadowed by politics:

if you contextualize it in a certain way, than there are certain things that can’t be ignored. And I think this one is that way too. I think there’s a potential richness to this that doesn’t just stop on the surface of political discussions.

both critic and performer defend their half of the equation: 1- performances are intention- and reception-dependent, 2- as a process, reception takes time to unravel. as we'll see, the critic's whole argument hinges on the fact that marrying a tree in 2009 is politically opportunistic.

let's speculate a bit: what if same-sex marriage was legal in 2009? britt's argument wouldn't stand. so, there's  nothing essentially political in marrying a tree. another interesting angle is, did britt expect galbreth's answer to be "serious"? one gets that impression (here's the full paragraph so you can get the rhetorical presentation):

For their big fat not-so-gay wedding, the Art Guys are playing it straight. The vows and format will be as traditional as possible. An ordained minister will officiate, and he’ll only address the Art Guys, because trees can’t talk and the Lorax hasn’t been invited. After all, one “fairly simple read(ing)” of the piece that Massing suggests is that it’s “an acknowledgement of man’s existence and how it bumps up and interacts with nature.” But there won’t be a marriage license, because the Texas constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which voters passed overwhelmingly in 2005, leaves no wiggle room for quirky exceptions, spelling out that marriage “shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.”

isn't performance art a realm to blur boundaries between "straight" and "bent", "real" and "performative"? yes, the critic retorts, 

(...) but when it comes to the boundary between this artwork and the lives of gay and lesbian couples — even those in states where gay marriage is legal — the piece blurs it much more effectively. As far as Uncle Sam is concerned, their unions have no more legal standing than the Art Guys’ marriage to a tree. Of course, it also inadvertently reinforces the “slippery slope” argument that if we let gays wed, next we’ll allow people to marry animals, and so on.

i should point that denouncing the possibility of "inadvertently reinforcing the slippery slope argument," britt actually doubles on the fallacy. let's examine this "slippery slope" (GMSL from now on):

GMSL: marriage is traditionally defined between different-sex humans. if we allow marriage between same-sex humans, then we'll have to allow for marriage between humans and animals, humans and things, etc. 

the causal direction is this: if same-sex marriage happens ----> anything can happen.

but marrying a tree actually inverts GMSL's "warranted" direction (above), that is to say, humans are marrying trees before same-sex marriage happens, thus proving the received GMSL's "warranted" causal direction invalid. yeah, britt makes GMSL way too strong a player. can he see it? but who cares for logic now that the important issues are out there?  

here's britt's conclusion:

the Art Guys actually support gay marriage but are staging a piece that looks like it could have been commissioned by the National Organization for Marriage, if they pinned their hopes on conceptual art instead of deposed beauty queens.

this is britt at his most open-ended (my blue above shows he's aware of the intention/reception dichotomy). 

we get a third entry (june 13, the actual wedding day). britt now adds his own video entitled the critic takes no joy in being right. in it we see a man's hand (presumably britt's) looking through different JOY liquid-soap items on a supermarket isle. britt's article for the houston chronicle is a hybrid of words + video. britt is doing performance with words. clever and effective. 

coming back to the "wedding," this much attention already bodes well for the the art guys marry a plant performance (TAGMP hereon). success in art is marketable. marketable is desirable. if one believes galbreth's excerpt above, britt's attention has already fulfilled the art guys' goal of self-promotion.

on june 16 galbreth responds to britt's compulsive coverage:

If we say this event is not about the politics of gay marriage, nothing we say or do will convince anyone that this is the case if they choose to think otherwise. The facts are right there to observe under broad daylight and described succinctly in the title “The Art Guys Marry A Plant.” It is not about gay rights. It is not about rights of any kind. And as we have said, it’s not “about” anything. It is (as they say) what it is.

true, performance's reception is as unpredictable as a hurricane trajectory.

In your article you referenced an older work of ours, “Bucket Feet,” in which we walked around downtown Houston with buckets of water attached to our feet. Now, what if someone believed that the action of impeding our normal capabilities of walking somehow referenced walking disabilities? I suppose they would be free to do so, but we simply walked around with buckets on our feet. And that’s that.

this was minimalism's conceptual fight in the early 1960's with the old generation of new york critics who expected to infer meaning where there was none. suddenly, galbreth plays "serious,"

(...) many times, we’re not sure what it is that we’re doing. But we do it anyway. And it fact, we do it before the world with honesty, integrity, an enormous amount of thought and consideration, and, I would like to think, some panache. This is our thinking. This is our experiment. This is our art. We’re happy to leave it at that.

a perplexing ending: on galbreth's own account we had it that with performance art people can believe whatever they want. suddenly & conclusively, the performer avows "honesty" and "integrity" @ britt and his reading public. why? this betrays the spirit the art guys have buttressed so far to counter britt's -equally problematic- argument. as a result, self-congratulation becomes conceptually supererogatory. since rusell's paradox, one cannot say "i am honest" and win the day. what happened here? a slip of tongue? no. these are words doing their thing.

an exchange which takes "performativity" into the realm of psycholinguistics. here is britt's response:  

I didn’t write what I wrote because the piece “upsets (my) sensibilities about (my) own personal feelings about gay rights.” (For one thing, I didn’t know I had sensibilities about my own personal feelings.)

but of course you do! pragmatically speaking. besides, feeling-wise there's nothing weird about simultaneously having first and second order feelings. i can feel attracted to the smell of tobacco while repulsed at my own attraction. i sympathized with britt's intensity. this is what art criticism is all about.

in parenthesis, galbreth's bringing britt's "sensibility" issue (& prompting britt's visceral response) is a bit fallacious --even if it performatively succeeds into radicalizing britt's rhetoric. see that what's happening here is not scripted by a master rhetorician. words are sort of speaking through agents.

You gave me nothing else to work with. You started with a dull premise, and you didn’t add anything to it. And while you’re free to use the gay-marriage issue to draw attention to your “wedding” and use it as a “mechanism for (you and Jack) to piggyback on,” the fact that you’re oblivious to its resonance with what’s going on in the country doesn’t oblige me to stick my head in the sand along with you.

rhetoric & logic don't usually get along. britt is certain that the art guys use gay-marriage to draw attention to their wedding as a mechanism to piggyback on. do you agree? britt falls for the performative bait (it's hard not to). affirming that the art guys are "performatively" guilty of GMSL, plus using gay-marriage as a promotion tool (the art guys admitted they didn't mind it becoming a promotion tool since there's anything anyone can do to change that), and fighting to the death with it, britt pulls the rug under his own argument by ignoring his own bias.

performance is not math. reception is never a done deal. on the other hand, galbreth fails in his "honest" delivery.  logic gets buried under a black-and-white tectonic of rhetoric.

but who said words have to do logical things?

there is this cogitation by james surls. he's sympathetic to the art guys but his writing is a hodge-podge. this sentence wins for opacity: art is a paradox in all its manifestations, not real, but a symbol of and a metaphor for "a reality" that affects us. surls concludes that the art guy's performance marks a "a beginning for a new romantic era." to each its own.

care for one more? this piece by michael bise, an artist and contributor for glasstire:

My first reaction of wanting to discount the marriage not as bad art, but as a commitment that couldn’t possibly be sustained was overcome by a more intangible impulse to trust The Art Guys and believe that they were taking their vows to care for the tree and make sure it lives at least as long as they do seriously. This notion of trust relates not only to the ritual of marriage and the implicit trust that family members of the individuals being married place in those individuals, but also to the more artworld-relevant concern about how we are able to trust the motivations and intentions of artists. I trust The Art Guys.

bise is blind to his pleonastic cogitation: because you trust the art guys you trust the art guy's performance.

fast forward to 2011 & critic meredith deliso gives us a shocking list of nuptials: 

1- a woman getting married to an amusement park, 
2- a man takes his pillow for a wife,
3- a japanese guy marries his "videogame girlfriend" (he had to be japanese),
4- a german man marries his dying cat,

behold! the worst fears of the conservative right have come true. people now marry the non-human & the non-living, while same-sex marriage is still, for the most part, illegal.

there is no more GMSL to worry about. only britt didn't see it that way. 

the dedication (2011)

the news of a dedication of the tree from the 2009 piece TAGMP circulate through the art community. on november 19, the ceremony will be presided by lawrence weschler, director of the new york institute for the humanities.

AGMP @ the menil collection

in light of ineluctability, britt responds with a counter-marriage:

I need a bride, and time’s running out. I’m not picky about her looks, personality, upbringing or age, but the one trait I do require — that she, like me, write about art for a living, or part of one — is seriously narrowing my options. I’m pretty sure it’s the only reason they considered my proposal, which also included the promise of a swift, amicable divorce. Its brevity notwithstanding, the marriage would be a real one, complete with a license and all the rights and responsibilities that accompany the institution. The divorce, too, would be real. But they’d also comprise an artwork made in response to another artwork.

here's britt @ his most didactic:

(...) I didn’t hear about the accession until September, so I’ve had little time to execute a response before the dedication on Nov. 19. I ultimately settled on staging a piece called The Art Critics Marry Each Other. (Because the Art Guys’ brand of performance is largely meant to confound criticism, I thought readers — and perhaps the Menil — might find it helpful to see what really marrying for art, not pretending to, could look like. Besides, I can’t support the remedy some have suggested — that rogue elements harm the tree, which never had a say in the matter. Make art, not herbicide.)

britt's performative mistake here is to explain his motives & goals, which should be left open-ended to the reception end of the equation. meanwhile, words are spinning out of control: britt seeks a wife & proposes to art critic jen graves. it's contagious. she actually entertains her decision with the public: 

In my case, there were several factors, above all that I'm planning my actual wedding (happening in April). But I'm still torn. I despise the idea that art evades politics just because a couple of clueless (heartless?) artists say it does—and then that they're rewarded by a major museum. What do you say, Slog? Is The Art Critics Marry Each Other a compelling and effective enough protest to drop everything for? 

if graves goes through it, it would be out of conviction. she believes britt's argument and frames the issue as such: the art guys are both "clueless" (the wedding is not intentionally political) and "heartless" (the art guys don't care if it is). graves, as britt before, make the art guys' wedding -unequivocally- a political event. incidentally, she didn't follow through, which didn't stop britt's plans.

nov. 15, britt finds a wife and plans the wedding at a gay strip joint (reese darby is not exactly an art critic, but who cares).

nov. 19, dilso covers the dedication for the houston press.  

michael galbreth waters the plant in TAGMP

douglas britt, now britt-devon-darby (b-d-b hereon) marries reese derby.

douglas britt & reese darby

b-d-b is "released" from the houston chronicle (posted on b-d-b's new website reliable narratives).

nov. 16, deliso publishes a piece with this opening: "Words aren't enough for one Houston art critic to pan a performance art piece --he needs to stage a performance art piece of his own," missing the fact that words aren't enough because britt is doing something else. he's staging a wordformance, which is a performance anyway. as a side note, deliso closes with a quote by jack massing (the shorter guy): [Britt] is entitled to do whatever he wants to do, but it seems disingenuous to make a protest piece about something that wasn't a protest piece. what determines what makes a piece a "protest" or a "non-protest" piece? the author/performer? the critic/audience?    

here comes douglas britt's the art guy marries a woman. 

You're cordially invited to The Art Gay Marries a Woman, a wedding of art and activism to be held at 10:30 p.m. Friday night at Tony's Corner Pocket. Don't worry; we'll have the stage cleared in time for the 11 p.m. amateur strip contest.

in the meantime, d-b-d is on fire: this tree assault/performance on november 24 is as raw & exciting as it gets. this piece by b-d-b takes art criticism to a new level.

following these video/posts is the only way to understand b-d-b's life-as-performance in context:

on nov. 26, we get a feverish sequence of postings:
b-d-b thanks the houston chronicle to let him come out as a sex-worker.
b-d-b's "graffiti bombing."
bdb rants in his room (this one deserves attention):

@0.20: responding to TAGMP helps change its meaning.
@1.24: the here and now vs. the eternal view (a tree is a tree).
@21.48: 2011 is a boiling point in the civil rights struggle.
@2:53: the piece has improved, but it hasn't improved enough.

by now b-d-b's critique and life-as-performance series have effectively galvanized the  houston LGBT art community behind him. from here on a symbiotic dynamic should take place: TAGMP cannot be thought of without b-d-b's counterperformances, and viceversa.  

it's time to drop the bomb: lost in the media back-and-forth is the fact that there's actually no smoking gun. b-d-b is the one that piggybacks his agenda on TAGMP! which is not dishonest. b-d-b is right. same-sex marriage is the most important civil right issue of the now in america.      

nov. 30, d-b-d provides specific details of his earlier work as an gay escort! i love this line @ 5.12: "if there's one place that's not safe for a gay whore, former meth addict to be, it's probably alabama."

nov. 30, jen graves posts an update on d-b-d:

I interviewed The Art Guys, Jack Massing and Michael Galbreth, by phone from their Houston studio. Long story short: Massing and I had a really fascinating interview. He talked about resisting politics in art, about art as "the big set." He and I were getting somewhere, in terms of an understanding. I asked how the work would be different, or how he might see it differently, if he were gay. It felt like Britt-Darby's thought experiment was playing out just in our conversation alone.

graves brings the issue of bias to massing (remember britt denied bias as a motive behind his critique in his response to galbreth?). her sentence in red (above) puts the finger in the wound. had britt been a non-gay critic, would TAGMP's saga be the same? i think the answer is obvious.

graves doesn't get b-d-b's performative transformation.

As art, his actions have instead felt unfocused, self-absorbed, and frankly worrisome. "I get it—people are concerned," he says in his latest blog post. So I'll just reiterate here what I've told him privately: If you don't want people to worry, don't make them worry because, ultimately, this isn't about you, it's about the next Devons. You have supporters.

self-absorbed? definitely! performing one's life 24/7 one has to. worrisome? what if this is exactly what d-b-d (existentially) needs? hasn't b-d-b effectively blurred the known distinctions beyond that of regular performers? maybe that's why graves (an art critic) doesn't get it.   

the aftermath: vandalism

after all we've been through, what else could happen?

the art guys' controversial plant is attacked by vandals. 

b-d-b immediately condemns the action as a "taliban style response to a crappy work." @ this point, the TAGMP has become a media phenomenon with five articles covering the defacement at the menil gardens. the art guys nailed it. this is the kind of attention artists dream of.  

art people, even critics, get cold feet. sean morrisey carroll shares a litany of lamentations for the houston press:

Britt and the Art Guys have equaled each other in navel-gazing, demonstrating their inability to explain themselves clearly or to make art or art criticism accessible. They have alienated many people with their callous actions and set the Houston artworld further back from recognizing conceptual artwork as valid for years to come. Accusations of homophobia, witch hunting and professional incompetence are seeping out of the controversy which will inevitably leave a stain on Houston’s already soiled reputation. In the end, both Britt and the Art Guys are living out their own version of “art as life” by extending the metaphors made well-worn by Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman and abandoning the idea of “art for art’s sake.”

here is what morrisey-carroll overlooks:

1- no single explanation (or explanations) can solve this complex issue. performances happened. words did their job. people presented their case. what more do you want? isn't it clear ater two years that this controversy is bigger than b-d-b or the art guys?
2- art criticism needs to happen first to be accessible. there's no art criticism today, which is why this polemic is a very rare opportunity to witness art criticism in action.     
3- the valuable lesson here is that both the art guys and b-d-b have learned from each other's tense and uncomfortable interactions. 

tree removal

as the risk of ending this post with an implosion, check this huffington post update (january 13, 2013):

The Menil Collection director Josef Helfenstein issued a statement "to make clear that [The Menil Collection] has not de-accessioned the work, nor has it taken any steps toward de-accessioning the work, which continues to be a part of the institution’s collection." As for the controversy surrounding the missing tree, the Menil "has preferred to conduct these conversations in private."

we live in a world of arthoodication. did you really expect to see the tree improving its health and grow to be a hundred?

elain wolff, writing for plaza de armas (jan. 14) is right on target:

Here is what the Menil is going to say about this decision:

• They want to save the tree
.
•They’re worried about vandalism.
Here is the truth:

• They’re tired of the controversy around the artwork.

• They need to raise money for their drawing center and want this distraction to go away.
• They don’t believe in the artwork and are sorry they ever accepted it into their collection.

should we expect the tree removal from the menil gardens to (finally) bring to a close TAGMP's amazing sequence of events?

methinks not.