Category Archives: aesthetics

For the Italian aesthetician Benedetto Croce

Under construction: trying to align some random thoughts regarding genre theory and how much difference and repetition we need in our lives.

“For the Italian aesthetician Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), an artistic work was always unique and there could be no artistic genres.” quotes Daniel Chandler in his excellent An Introduction to Genre Theory. I’ve always opposed this take on genre theory because I have a hard time with modernist concepts such as authenticity, the cult of originality, the great man theory and the resistance of things to be generalized. I like generalizations. I am a lumper, more than a splitter.

Last week however, I went through a small film experience that was analogous to blind wine tasting, which re-balanced my perception of genre theory. I saw the trailer to David Lynch’s new film INLAND EMPIRE without expecting it because I was in a mainstream cinema. As I thought to myself …. this is something special, I came to realize that this was Lynch. And it dawned on me that Lynch’s work does not belong to a genre but is unique or sui generis (of its own kind).

Other examples of genre-defying artists abound: take someone like mannerist painter Arcimboldo, reggae musician Lee Perry, novelist Céline, filmmaker Jacques Tati and most if not all eccentric artists.

Quotes sustaining the lumper view:

“It can be argued that all novels, no matter how “literary”, also fall within the bounds of one or more genres. Thus Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a romance; Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is a psychological thriller; and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a coming-of-age story. These novels would usually be stocked in the general or possibly the classics section of a bookstore. Indeed, many works now regarded as literary classics were originally written as genre novels.”

Quotes sustaining the splitter view:

“There is no great work of art which does not convey a new message to humanity; there is no great artist who fails in this respect. This is the code of honor of all the great in art, and consequently in all great works of the great we will find that newness which never perishes, whether it be of Josquin des Pres, of Bach or Haydn, or of any other great master. Because: Art means New Art” — Arnold Schoenberg

So I’m thinking about this interplay between genre on the one hand and uniqueness on the other. Has David Lynch’s uniqueness inspired a new genre or will his style of filmmaking die with him? What can be said about the cinema of Lynch? Where does one draw the line between the history of art and the sociology of art? Is there any way to develop a genre theory which includes both strains?

I thought of the concepts used by Ken Wilber (derived from Koestler) holon and holarchy and the concepts used by Deleuze difference and repetition. Also, Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance and the species problem, an analogy from biology ……………..

The cinematic Losfeld

Anatole Dauman: Argos films : souvenir-écran (1989) – Anatole Dauman, Jacques Gerber
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One aspect of the history of the art of filmmaking remains largely unwritten. The financial aspects of filmmaking, namely the history of producers and distributors of films. Compared to the book industry, the film industry is infinite times more capital intensive. So while it is easy, almost risk-free and relatively cheap to write a novel that satisfies minority tastes, to produce a film that caters to minority audiences requires much more money and is a much riskier undertaking. Tyler Cowen was the first to point out this rather obvious but often overlooked aspect of filmmaking in his book In Praise of Commercial Culture which deals with the economics of culture production and consumption.

But what is a film producer? A film producer’s job is analogous to that of a publisher in the book industry: he finances the final product, a cultural artifact. But what is a film distributor? A film distributor is someone who buys the rights to a certain film in order to distribute it in his own country or region. Typically, he will have to market the film, provide subtitles for it and find screening opportunities. The analogy in book publishing is the role of a foreign publishing house that translates a book and distributes/markets it in its own territory.

Both a producer and a distributor try to reconcile the art of commerce and taste. In matters of taste I always embrace the heady nobrow cocktail of high art, eroticism, horror, philosophy, experimentalism, counterculture, subversion and avant-garde. This mix is a minority taste, I am well aware of that but some people have tried to cater to people of my (but more importantly their) taste. In publishing, this person is best exemplified by French publisher Eric Losfeld.

So I wonder: who is the Eric Losfeld of cinema?

In search of Losfeld’s cinematic alter ego I want to highlight the careers of film producers and/or distributors such as Anatole Dauman in France; Antony Balch and Richard Gordon in the U. K.; Roger Corman, Ben Barenholtz and Radley Metzger in North America. These entrepreneurs ran businesses that have provided us with films that mix high and low culture or have financed their high art productions with the proceeds of their more commercial and exploitative ventures.

Consider then the entrepeneurs listed above as the beginning of an ongoing quest for the cinematic Losfeld which I hope to continue over the coming months. One name that comes to mind is Germany’s Bernd Eichinger, who has produced cinematical adaptations of literary fiction by well regarded authors such as Süskind, Umberto Eco, Ian Mc Ewan and Houellebecq as well as more exploitative films such as Christiane F. and Resident Evil. Eichinger has also announced he would be making a film about the left-wing terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF).

Please feel free to comment if you know of distributors/producers who fit the ‘cinematic Losfeld’ description.

We want to declare on all forms of bad taste

Danae (1907-08) – Gustav Klimt

“We want to declare war on sterile routine, on rigid Byzantinism, on all forms of bad taste… Our Secession is not a fight of modern artists against old ones, but a fight for the advancement of artists as against hawkers who call themselves artists and yet have a commercial interest in hindering the flowering of art.”

This declaration by Hermann Bahr, the spiritual father of the Secessionists, may serve as the motto for the foundation in 1897 of the Vienna Secession, with Klimt as its leading spirit and president. The artists of the younger generation were no longer willing to accept the tutelage imposed by Academicism; they demanded to exhibit their work in a fitting place, free from “market forces”. They wanted to end the cultural isolation of Vienna, to invite artists from abroad to the city and to make the works of their own members known in other countries. The Secession’s programme was clearly not only an “aesthetic” contest, but also a fight for the “fight to artistic creativity”, for art itself; it was a matter of combatting the distinction between “great art” and “subordinate genres”, between “art for the rich and art for the poor” in brief, between “Venus” and “Nini”. In painting and in the applied arts, the Vienna Secession had a central role in developing and disseminating Art Nouveau as a counter-force to official Academicism and bourgeois conservatism. –Gilles Néret, 1993

P. S. The concept of “Venus” and “Nini” are the most intriguing part of these last posts on the book by Néret on Klimt I’ve been reading, and I want to add that it is unjust and unfair to direct the Nini page to “prostitution in art”. The woman who is impartial to casual sex and/or wants to lead an independent life is not a prostitute but is easily perceived as one. Most generally this dichotomy is labeled the mother/whore or Madonna/whore complex. If anyone knows of a very good exploration of this theme (apart from The Mother and the Whore (1973) – Jean Eustache and the work by Camille Paglia), please let me know.

Of niceness and nastiness

In search of Kant’s theory of taste, I bid you good night with this tune.

We can sum things up like this: judgments of taste occupy a mid-point between judgments of niceness and nastiness, and empirical judgments about the external world. Judgments of taste are like empirical judgments in that they have universal validity; but, they are unlike empirical judgment in that they are made on the basis of an inner response. Conversely, judgments of taste are like judgments of niceness or nastiness in that they are made on the basis of an inner subjective response or experience; but they are unlike judgments of niceness and nastiness which makess no claim to universal validity. To cut the distinctions the other way: in respect of normativity, judgments of taste are like empirical judgments and unlike judgments of niceness or nastiness; but in respect of subjectivity, judgments of taste are unlike empirical judgments and like judgments of niceness or nastiness. So we have three-fold division: empirical judgments, judgments of taste, and judgments of niceness or nastiness. And judgments of taste have the two points of similarity and dissimilarity on each side just noted.

…

However, our hope thus far has been merely to get a little clearer about what it is that is under scrutiny in this debate. Once we are armed with a modest account of what a judgment of taste is, we can then proceed to more ambitious questions about whether or not judgments of taste represent real properties of beauty and ugliness. We can even consider whether or not our whole practice of making judgments of taste is defective and should be jettisoned. But first things first. — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The “cult of beauty” vs. the “cult of ugliness”

Frontispice des Amours jaunes, dessin par Tristan Corbière
image sourced here.

In his 1913 essay The Serious Artist, Pound discusses two types of art; The “cult of beauty” and the “cult of ugliness”. He compares the former with medical cure and the latter with medical diagnosis, and goes on to write “Villon, Baudelaire, Corbière, Beardsley are diagnosis.” – “beauty is difficult”: Cantos LXXIV, LXXX

The Pianist (2002) – Roman Polanski

I saw Roman Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist today. The story about a Jewish piano player and his time in the Warsaw Ghetto. I have never seen a bad film by Polanski, in my view he is one of the greatest post-war cineasts and this film is no exception. While I recently said that there can be no fictional narrative of Auschwitz (thinking of the faux realism of Schindler’s List black and white footage) this film sort of changed my mind. I thought that it was very realistic in its portrayal of the atrocities committed by the Germans and the gradual build-up of the dehuminazation of the Jews. The film is also a testament to the value of art and music, a bit contrary to Adorno’s famous statement that “there can be no art after Auschwitz.”

Searching for polanski+pianist+schindler+black and white+spielberg+verisimilitude brings up two good reviews, the first by Clive James and one by kamera.co.uk.

Trivia: I cried when the wheel-chaired bound man was thrown of the balcony and the men were shot and driven over by the Germans. I laughed when one of the brothers told the story of the surgeon who was brought to the ghetto to operate on someone, and was subsequently shot along with the anaesthetized patient.

See also: verisimilitude – realism in film – the Holocaust in art and fiction

There can be no fictional narrative of Auschwitz

It has often been said that the unique nature of the Holocaust “challenges our imagination with a nearly impossible task” (Lawrence Langer). “There can be no fictional narrative of Auschwitz,” Maurice Blanchot asserted. And Adorno: “After Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological one, that has any right unless it underwent a transformation.” I believe that these words — these transformed fictional narratives — exist, and that they already existed before Auschwitz. Artaud hallucinating his own death or Bataille his own dismemberment, Simone Weil embracing the abjection of assembly line work or Céline carried away by an insane racist rage — these writers were not acting on their own either. By making the unimaginable their very subject, these artists provided us with that fraction of truth which scholars of the Holocaust are vainly seeking. — Sylvère Lotringer, The Art of Evil in FAT Magazine, Vol. 1 No. 1, 1994, 1995 via http://www.thing.net/~fat/vol1no1/sylvere.htm

Sylvère Lotringer is professor of French literature and philosophy at Columbia University and general editor of Semiotext(e). He frequently lectures on art.

See also: the Holocaust in art and fiction

Carlo Mollino: Photographs 1956-1962

Carlo Mollino: Photographs 1956-1962 (2006) – Carlo Mollino
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This came out last August. It concerns the photography of Mollino before his polaroid period. While nowhere near cheap, these Mollino photography anthologies are a good investment. The 2002 polaroid edition now commands prices between 300 and 700 euros (although the Hammilton gallery claims to sell it for 37 British pounds).

Book Description
The Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino held photography dear–it was one of his great passions and favorite means of expression, and an excellent way to enjoy another great passion, women. The photographs gathered here were all set in one of Mollino’s private apartments, which he refurbished especially for this purpose. An advocate of retouching, as documented in his treatise The Message from the Dark Room, Mollino also painted on his photos or negatives. Most of what appears here has been revised, most bodies sculpted and reshaped, and visibly so now that time has altered the color of the prints, revealing his handiwork. This portfolio, spanning from 1956 to 1962, ends just before Mollino’s Polaroid work of the 60s. It was made using a Leica and color negative film, and has never been published before.

Digression: also check these Google galleries of the photography of Inez van Lamsweerde, Sze Tsung Leong and Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

Mediazation, experience and aura

Prompted by this post by The Reading Experience blog on John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) I started thinking about the concept of mediazation, a word to which one only finds 344 references on the web. A much more common word that denotes the same quality is mediated, of which there are 77 references on Jahsonic alone, most prominent of which are the references to mediated sex and mediated violence. Mediatedness and mediazation are key concepts in modernism and postmodernism. One might even argue that if modernity started after the Middle Ages and the arrival of print culture for the happy few, postmodernity started with the advent of the mediazation of mass society, with the replacement of aura and direct experience by the media (which coincides with the arrival of print culture for the masses). If one follows this through it would appear that the shift from modernity to postmodernity is only one of degree.

From the web:

For Shaviro, Cronenberg is not simply an illustration of postmodern media theory. Rather, “the brutally hilarious strategy of Videodrome is to take media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard completely at their word, to overliteralize their claims for the ubiquitous mediazation of the world.” Footnote But the difference between Cronenberg and (for example) Baudrillard is Cronenberg’s insistence on the palpability of mediated experience: –William Beard via  http://iceberg.arts.ualberta.ca/filmstudies/Videodrome.htm [Nov 2006]

Experience, quipped Oscar Wilde, is the name one gives to one’s mistakes. Does aesthetic experience then name the central blunder of modern aesthetics? Though long considered the most essential of aesthetic concepts, as including but also surpassing the realm of art, aesthetic experience has in the last half-century come under increasing critique. Not only its value but its very existence has been questioned. How has this once vital concept lost its appeal? Does it still offer anything of value? The ambiguous title, “the end of aesthetic experience,” suggests my two goals: a reasoned account of its demise, and an argument for reconceiving and thus redeeming its purpose.

[…] Modernization and technology, Benjamin likewise argued, have eroded aesthetic experience’s identification with the distinctive, transcendent autonomy of art. Such experience once had what Benjamin called aura, a cultic quality resulting from the artwork’s uniqueness and distance from the ordinary world. But with the advent of mechanical modes of reproduction like photography, art’s distinctive aura has been lost, and aesthetic experience comes to pervade the everyday world of popular culture and even politics. Aesthetic experience can no longer be used to define and delimit the realm of high art. Unlike Adorno, Benjamin saw this loss of aura and differentiation as potentially emancipatory (although he condemned its deadly results in the aesthetics of fascist politics). In any case, Benjamin’s critique does not deny the continuing importance of aesthetic experience, only its romantic conceptualization as pure immediacy of meaning and isolation from the rest of life. –Richard Shusterman via http://www.artsandletters.fau.edu/humanitieschair/end-aesth-exp.html [Nov 2006]

See also: aura – live and mediated popular culture – experience