[BKARTS] Shit (was: Book Art Criticism)

[Richard Minsky <minsky@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jessica wrote:
> Does art criticism have some criteria we hold the work against...

Sally wrote:
> I know a great deal about calligraphy and illumination. ...
> I am competent to make a judgment in this area. ...
> There is a generally agreed upon perception of what constitutes beauty....
> Impressionists, so beloved today, were reviled when the movement was new....
>  ... Mozart....

WARNING: A RANT IS COMING.

Mozart was buried in a pauper's grave at the age of 35, leaving his 
family with no money and no source of income.

Van Gogh's brother bought a painting.

Questions about art and beauty have been asked for thousands of years 
in Western culture. No need to waste bits trying to reinvent Plato.

Before continuing with this message, I suggest that readers review at 
least the following three texts, so we have a foundation for the discussion:

Leo Tolstoy: What is Art?
Wassily Kandinsky: Concerning the Spiritual in Art
   available as free ebook download from Project Gutenberg:
   http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5321
Arthur Koestler: The Act of Creation


WATCH OUT! THE RANT IS GOING TO BEGIN SOON:

BUT FIRST (and you can skip this section is you're over 50):

So you know where I'm coming from on this subject:

In 1970 I studied the Philosophy of Art with Horace M. Kallen at the 
Graduate Faculty of The New School for Social Research.

In 2001 I sat on the Roundtable panel  "Art Criticism: Whose Truth?" 
with B.H. Friedman and Michael Kimmelman, moderated by Rose Slivka. 
If you don't know who they are, Google them.

For almost 30 years I have been teaching and practicing a methodology 
of critical analysis that can be applied by artists, critics and 
curators. If you want me to give a lecture and/or workshop on this at 
your institution, please contact me off list.

Some people on this list weren't born yet when I went through what 
James Pepper is dealing with here.  For those who don't know, I was 
told that my work was crude, that I didn't have the craft skills, 
that it wasn't bookbinding, that THEY knew better because they had 
studied bookbinding with so and so and had been doing it for 20 or 30 
or 40 years. There was only one person in the Guild of BookWorkers 
who was supportive of my approach and that was Polly Lada-Mocarski. 
If you don't know the Birds of North America story, it's at 
http://minsky.com/birdstxt.htm

The Guild had an exhibition at Yale and they pulled my book from the 
show. It was a big controversy. But that made people come to the show 
to see what it was all about. And that's just one example. I made a 
lot of books that showed an apparent disregard for craft technique, 
and when they went into group shows, those were the ones the 
newspapers printed photos of. That means books like 
http://minsky.com/biobomb.htm or http://minsky.com/5.htm

I tried my best to hide the craft technique. The problem with 
bookbinding at that time was that craft technique dominated the 
field, and the Pink Tea Ladies argued interminably about whether the 
French, German or English technique was the best. I changed the name 
to Book Art because the focus was on metaphor. Secretly I was earning 
my living through my storefront bookbindery, printshop and art 
gallery in Forest Hills, Queens, making blank books of handmade 
paper, guest books for weddings, printing and binding catalogs for 
private art collections, and repairing books. I had a few private 
clients for design bookbinding as well, who had things like the 
Vollard editions. This work required craft technique, which I had 
learned from Daniel Gibson Knowlton, the master bookbinder at Brown 
University. I also had been the binder to the Hirshhorn Museum before 
it moved to Washington. But I didn't exhibit that stuff in public. It 
would have destroyed my image as the "bad boy" of bookbinding. I 
didn't want my exhibited work to be examined for how I made a corner, 
but for its metaphoric impact. It wasn't until my 25 year 
retrospective in 1992 that a representative sample of all this was 
shown in public, both the high craft and the Book Art works. 
http://minsky.com/reviewta.htm

Since there was almost no market for my Book Art in 1974 I moved my 
operation from Queens to Manhattan,  incorporated as a 
not-for-profit, and opened The Center for Book Arts in a storefront 
at 15 Bleecker Street. That changed everything. The Yale Arts of the 
Book Collection now has my archive and I will be a speaker at the 
Guild of Bookworkers 100th Anniversary event this year.

NOW HERE'S THE RANT:

If it looks like shit, smells like shit, and tastes like shit, don't 
step in it.

I don't see why anyone has a problem about the criticism of James 
Pepper's work. They spelled his name right, and that's all that 
really matters. It's giving him more than 15 minutes of fame. He's 
not likely to stop working because of it.

Yes, there are a lot of incompetent fools out there making shit. And 
a piece of well made shit is still shit. If people want to bullshit 
about the shit it's piling shit on top of shit.

And that does not refer to the work of James Pepper. I'm not giving 
an opinion on Pepper's work because nobody has paid me for one.

I've had to look at thousands of pieces of "Book Art" during the last 
30 years, and there's so much crap that is poorly copied by the 
ignorant from originals they never saw that you'd need a garbage 
truck for most of it.  And it's not necessarily poor in Craft 
Technique--it's the lack of originality, metaphoric power, and 
content that is so appalling. I'd rather have a poorly made book with 
startlingly fresh and meaningful content that will deteriorate in 6 
moths due to the acid in the paper than have a piece of shit that 
will last forever.

What I really like to see is insightful art presented with skillful 
means. That does not mean that the craft technique should show itself 
off.  The best craft technique is invisible. You should see the 
content of the work and not be distracted by the technique, whether 
it is good or bad. If you look specifically for the technique, you 
might miss the content. That was the problem the Pink Tea Ladies had 
with my work in the 70's.

When viewed, the work should cause the space around it to vibrate. 
Like a Degas painting.

There are some brilliant artists in this field, who get it right more 
often than not. I've tried to showcase their work over the years in 
exhibitions that I curated. Juried exhibitions are another thing 
entirely. I love judging shows because I usually get to see one or 
two new artists' work that I like, and can buy for my collection. But 
you have to select enough of the submitted work to fill the gallery, 
so the show doesn't have "curatorial integrity."  That comes when you 
go out and choose the artists you think best exemplify whatever the 
subject of the exhibition is.

Everyone has their hocus-pocus about what art is and all that. 
There's a lot been written since Plato about art, beauty and 
creativity, and it's still being investigated. I participate as an 
invited member of the Guest Panel at the international 
interdisciplinary symposium on Art and Cognition: 
http://interdisciplines.org/artcognition

Nowadays neuroscientists are deeply involved in aesthetics, and are 
coming up with all sorts of crackpot theories, some of which may be 
correct. If you want to know more, read some of the discussion about 
it, or Google "mirror neurons" and think about how they may be 
involved in your notions about art.

But as far as criticizing people's work on Book_Arts-L goes, I remain 
thrilled to see that it's happening, and encourage everyone to do it, 
even if you're wrong.  Maybe we've heard enough about the particular 
work that began this thread, but the discussion has morphed into 
broader issues.

Perhaps you have someone else's work you think is crap and want to 
trash. Please be specific about what it is that revolts you about it, 
and if possible, give an example of a work that achieves what you 
find lacking in the selected crap.

--
 Richard
 http://minsky.com

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