Thanks for the interesting story about Jeff Koons. I was peripherally aware of some of that.
I went to high school with Julian Schnabel, who was two years behind me. He was a cute, vivacious, chubby kid with a good sense of humor and a natural at putting people on. The closest thing to a born showman I have ever personally known. One day I was at his house with another friend, playing Monopoly, and we were talking about Andy Warhol’s soup cans, and the seeming artistic absurdity thereof, and Julian said the he could get rich doing the same thing, as rich as Andy Warhol, because he could make people believe anything. This was when he was 15 or 16.
I enjoyed a laugh when I saw his face on the cover of Time magazine decades later.
If there is anything I have said in various posts earlier in this thread which have sounded to some as if I don’t appreciate art, or “hated the term”, those things have been misinterpreted. On the other hand, I have a very clear headed understanding about the nature of art criticism, and many of those who practice it, and are guilty of substantial overreach in the practice thereof, especially over the last five or six decades.
Criticism, here on this forum, of a photo’s technical qualities, lighting and so forth, can be very helpful. Criticism of it’s esthetic value is on much shakier intellectual ground, and, yes, that actually does come down to nothing more than “what you like”. The idea that there are solid objective criteria for that is delusional. If you can throw a lot of obscurantist verbiage at a work with an air of authority you can convince enough other people to form a “school” of criticism, and if your school is larger than other schools of critical thought you can take over the direction of a given field of art for many years. Clement Greenberg was correct until he wasn’t. But, it is still nothing more than what you like, reinforced by a gang, of lemmings in this case. Art, if it is art, speaks to human beings at their very deepest level. It directly short circuits and circumvents any attempt to describe it with language. Linguistic attempts can just as often lead people away as towards an understanding. The idea that “credentialing” creates authority in this area should be looked at as what it is, a power play, nothing more than a means of giving to those who seem to need it, a way to say, “what I like has more value than what you like, and you are probably a philistine”.
But, whatever. It’s a world which made my friend Julian very rich, and the nature of which he understood when he was 15. And, for a while, his friend Basquiat as well, before it destroyed him.
