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Saturday, October 17, 2009 Conceptual Art and Craft Denis Dutton, philosophy of art professor at the University of Canterbury, writes an interesting piece about conceptual art and its place in society. Clearly, he values craftsmanship: We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture. Evidence is all around us. Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship. The direct response to skill is what makes it possible to find beauty in many tribal arts even though we often know nothing about the beliefs of the people who created them. There is no place on earth where superlative technique in music and dance is not regarded as beautiful. However, he stops short of condemning the likes of Jeff Koons, whose oeuvre consists of concepts executed by others. I won't. I've seen an exhibition by Koons, whom I consider rather lazy from an artistic standpoint, but I'd mistakenly assumed that he did create much of his work, albeit with a large team. In Koons's work, I admit that there are a few interesting ideas and the pieces overall are made with some skill. (I will here discount the pornography that was included in his exhibition at the MCA - and I'm not exaggerating, there were nude photos of him having sex with his former wife, a porn star, complete with genitalia. You could not have considered this "artistic nude" by any stretch of the imagination. Porn is self-funding - it does not need to be subsidized by art museums.) However, Dutton mentions that Koons actually commissioned his famous porcelain Michael Jackson from an Italian manufacturer. In another Koons work, vacuum cleaners in Plexiglas cases, I'm fairly convinced that the designer who created the vacuums should get at least partial credit for the piece - after all, vacuum cleaners have to be designed by someone, or usually a team of someones who specialize in industrial design - and thus perhaps a share of the $11,801,000 sale price. (Yes, you read that number correctly.) If we were talking about snippets of music rather than vacuum cleaners, Koons would owe a significant portion of royalties. Copyright law has an overwhelming number of issues I won't go into here, but if you make millions using someone else's work, some compensation is not outrageous. While I dislike visual art that is too representative and technique isn't everything, it does seem like craftsmanship is mattering less and less in the art world, even if Dutton does not think this will be a lasting stage. For that matter, I wonder if craft is mattering less and less in the musical world. Little pop music could be considered finely crafted, lyrics in particular. Most musicians in the pop/rock realm have little training and less technique. Training doesn't necessarily make you a good artist, but ideally training will give you enough technique so that you have the freedom to express yourself more fully. I'll be the first to admit that my own technique often falls short - but if you recognize the gap between the art you want to make and the art you do make, and you keep creating, keep trying, your art gets better. Ira Glass says that it took many years of trying, years of being a professional and still continuing to hone his craft, before his storytelling was anywhere near what he would consider good. I'm obsessing over recording quality and track order on my new album, but realistically most of the music is probably going to be turned into MP3s and listened to on iPod headphones or laptop speakers in a track order that bears little resemblance to mine. I know this. But I can't help myself from spending hours mixing and fine-tuning musical details that few people would ever notice. Because to me, it matters. Even if it doesn't to anyone else. Labels: aesthetics, music industry ^ Top | 1:49 AM | | | 
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