Celebrating!!! My 3rd Book is Out Now
Newberry, Apollo Beach, Blue, Yellow, and Pink, pastel
Finishing Up My Chapter on Immanuel Kant, Evolution Through Art
Burke on The Sublime from my Upcoming Book, Evolution Through Art
TOMBS 5: A Pile of Crap at The Venice Biennale
TOMBS 3: Yale School of Art by Michael Newberry
TOMBS 2 — Harvard Visual Arts
Roger Scruton’s Why Beauty Matters; And Did I Have a Small Part in It?
Roger Scruton’s excellent presentation Why Beauty Matters, a BBC production, has seen a resurgence, over a million views on this embedded YouTube video. Several people have forwarded it to me and I remember seeing it ages ago. In re-watching it I was struck by the coincidence of the same four postmodern works in his presentation and in my article Pandora’s Box Part III. I was kind of horrified that I might have subconsciously lifted them from him without being aware of it. I didn’t.
I was relieved that my article Pandora’s Box Part III was published in the Free Radical (magazine and online) in 2002, while this Scruton publication was released almost 8 years later in November 2009. The four works are canned shit, Manzoni’s Merde d’artista; empty room, Creed’s The Lights Going On and Off; a urinal, Duchamp’s The Fountain; and bricks in a room at the Tate by Andre.
Scruton discusses them at 5:25 to 5:48 and he says: “It has been interrupted in another way by showing that anything can be art. Like a light going on and off, a can of excrement, or even a pile of bricks.”
In a section from my article which I discuss the postmodern works I write: “Kant’s concept of the formless nature of the sublime is the ideological birthplace of the postmodern aesthetic that art, visual art, doesn’t need to be expressed through the means of representational painting or sculpture. In practice, this aesthetic opened up the floodgates of a nihilistic revolution in the 20th Century in which postmodern artists deconstructed art and/or substituted any object but painting or sculpture for art, i.e. arranged rubbish, excrement, installations, etc.”
Bemusedly, I was wondering if my article was the source for “It has been interrupted…” I am just having a little fun figuratively flexing my muscles showing that I have been ahead of the curve. BTW, Pandora’s Box Part III is a wonderful article touching on a few of Kant’s concepts of the Sublime how they are connected to some horrible postmodern works, and I optimistically share some magnificent contemporary figurative works.
Michael Newberry, Idyllwild, 2/14/2020
A Victim’s Vindication: Pierre Huyghe at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens 12 February — 8 April 2001
(Authors note: This is one in a series of reviews of what is going on in contemporary museums of art. Like many of you I go to a contemporary art museum with an excited expectation that I am going to see today’s best living artists. Please keep that in mind after your read these reviews as it might seem that I purposefully sought out isolated freak shows–nope, just visiting the most respected museums of contemporary art and reporting what I see.)
The recently-established National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens gives us a look inside media manipulation with Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory. It is a documentary-like presentation about a notorious 1972 bank robbery in Brooklyn. The audio-visual installation, on loan from the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
The Third Memory contains side by side two synchronized video projections that last about ten minutes, and reference materials and clips. The video projections juxtapose Huyghe’s reenactment/documentary-like reconstruction of a bank robbery that took place in Brooklyn, New York in 1972, and footage from Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), a movie about that robbery. In Huyghe’s work the actual robber, John Wojtowicz, many years older and out of prison, retells, acts out, and analyzes the robbery on the sets used in Lumet’s movie. About The Third Memory Huyghe says it is “…the story of a man who was robbed, who was dispossessed, of his own image … the “author of an action” is given the opportunity to “speak up…in order to regain his place at the centre of the plot…”
Continue reading “A Victim’s Vindication: Pierre Huyghe at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens 12 February — 8 April 2001”Fun and Disturbing Postmodern Art News: Art Professor Charged with Attempted Murder
Fun disturbing Postmodern News. Art professor Rie Hachiyanagi at Mount Holyoke College was charged with the attempted murder of her colleague for unrequited love. Reportedly she bashed in the face of her victim with a “rock, garden shears and a fireplace poker” breaking several facial bones!
Of course, she is innocent until proven guilty. But it is interesting to contrast the vicious violence of the act with her gentle flowery poetic and humble artist’s statement:
“My work in performance and installation expresses both the concrete actuality and the ephemerality of life. Art is an experience set in a specific time and place.Such poetic occasions define the shape of my existence.
“The process of making paper by hand allows me to be humble,As plant fiber and its beauty must be generated from nature.Our hands have brought paper into being.In paper resides a communion of nature and humanity.”
Look at the creepshit of her artwork installations. This woman was the Professor of Art; Chair of Art Studio of a Massachusetts University teaching impressionable teenagers how art is made and how it works.
Postmodernists are a pathological cult of oblivion, they should never be allowed teaching art or near children, because their outlook is rotten to the core.
I do love it when art practice matches reality.
