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Mega-collector Agnes Gund on opportunities for artists

Agnes Gund is one of the most influential contemporary art collectors in the world.  She sits on the MOMA international council and donates many works to the museum.  She also takes an active interest in emerging artists.  Here are some of her thoughts on opportunities for artists today and in the near term.  Reprinted from Huffington Post.

Agnes Gund

President Emerita and Chairman, International Council of The Museum of Modern Art

Helping Artists Become Artists

One of the mysteries of the arts is how an artist becomes an artist. We know that very few trained and talented visual artists actually make careers in the arts. We know, heartbreakingly so, that even very dedicated and inspired artists fail to claim and hold attention for their work. The problem may be more acute for visual artists than for those in other fields perhaps because there are so many visual artists (compared to composers or choreographers, for example) and also because there is a commercial frame around the visual arts. The market sets a daunting standard for success. Many visual artists must believe, as one said to me recently, that “… there’s no real field to break into… every single artist is a different story.”

There are certainly initiatives that are meant to ease the emerging artist’s way. There are competitions, open calls for exhibitions, artist residencies, fellowships and apprenticeships which are arrayed (almost overwhelmingly) on web sites like NYFA Source, but they are hard to sort through and sometimes costly. There are some artist-run galleries and non-profit spaces that are open to less known artists. But making a match is hard and, if it does happen, making it matter is harder. For unacknowledged or under-acknowledged artists, young and older, art can be a lonely and difficult business.

And it is a business. Conscientious curators and collectors visit studios, keep their eyes open, encourage talent when they can. It is hard for them, too.

Seeing all of this for so long — for as long as I have been interested in art — I am becoming a little bit encouraged by some positive trends. Three movements in particular may provide some relief to our sprawled and underserved population of artists: 1) The growth of local or hometown opportunities for artists; 2) The rise of unexpected exhibition places; and 3) Artist-to-artist initiatives.

Local or Hometown Opportunities for Artists. I like the basic philosophy of Artadia, a competition that picks some artists each year to fund and feature. What makes Artadia a different competition, as it says of itself, is that it “… leaps beyond clichés of second-city angst.” It makes grants to artists within their home cities and ties them to the local major institutions, asserting in this way that to be an artist in Houston or Atlanta is as important as being an artist in New York or Los Angeles. Artadia’s basic principle is important in that it serves many more artists than those that actually get its grants.

Cleveland provides another wonderful example. Cleveland’s renowned and revered Museum of Art has joined with a donor/collector couple to refashion an old plant into a new museum “branch” in Ohio City, across the Cuyahoga River. This branch will address community needs and, importantly, encourage local artists. Working with local, living talent is a new mission for Cleveland’s major museum — a truly “contemporary” mission. Another example: the Portland Museum of Art runs a biennial for Maine artists, only. Every two years, the state’s lively art scene is recognized, professionalized, promoted by this major institution, lifting Maine art from a traditionally “amateur” category to a new place. At the Wassaic Project in upstate New York, the residency program has places reserved specifically for local artists who commute from their homes to the studios and join a cosmopolitan art community. The residents’ work is showcased in Wassaic’s summer festival, another unusual benefit.

In all these cases (and there are many others), artists are being claimed and acclaimed at home. It becomes a little less essential for artists to run away, to relocate, to become just one more artist on a crowded coast.

Unexpected Exhibition Places. Of course, museums and galleries and art spaces will continue to ground the art world. But certainly the public — as well as artists — also benefit when art is encountered in other everyday situations. The New York Times and USA Today have reported in recent articles that hotels across the country are mounting art as an amenity for their guests, providing a unique and stimulating environment. Individual hotels and hotel chains are commissioning art, running competitions, and collecting to get the work they want. Some hotels are defining themselves by finding local artists. At a historic hotel in rural Pennsylvania, for example, only local artists are on the walls and one of the major hotel chains has actually mandated that works by local artists are shown at each of its locations.

Hospitals and health institutions are increasingly buying art or encouraging donations of art to warm their corridors, giving both patients and visitors comfort. While major institutions lead the way, smaller, local hospitals and health centers are doing this as well. Restaurants and stores, recreation and health facilities, theater lobbies also do this, often looking widely and intelligently at the artists around them to find work they value either for purchase or for temporary exhibition.

Public art provides great opportunities for work to be seen and experienced. Sculpture in our parks and plazas is now a well entrenched public benefit in American places. According to Americans for the Arts, many of the 5,000 local arts agencies across the country help to encourage and organize art in public places. But new art forms are emerging that integrate the arts even more inescapably into the public consciousness and into public belief. For an Austin, Texas State Park, for instance, a local sculptor, Chris Levack, was commissioned to design ramps on which the skateboarders ride and do tricks and are watched by the public — Mr. Levack actually made skate-able sculpture. Suddenly, people in that park (skaters or not) know that art is around them and for them. In New York City, when the unused Governors Island (800-yards from Manhattan) became an historic redevelopment site, artists were given a major part in it. There are studio spaces for resident artists, art activities, exhibitions and celebrations, many opportunities for the city’s less known artists.

In these ways, more and more, public art is rooted into everyday life. Artists are designing play equipment, routing water ways, using environmental features, reimagining history, challenging passers-by to pause and think about their whereabouts. In such ways, artists encompass us — the public — becoming less avoidable, more essential.

I wish that an interesting practice of the George Gund Foundation would be picked up and imitated by other institutions. Every year for its annual report, the Gund Foundation commissions a photographer “… to highlight a Foundation priority or area of interest.” The artist produces true, enduring images of the Foundation’s interests and concerns in Northeast Ohio. Readers know the work of the Foundation better because of each artist’s images. Many other institutions could capture realities through art as Gund does and foster artists in the process. When art inhabits unusual spaces like reports or programs or calendars or ads, audiences and artists grow.

Artist-to-Artist Initiatives. A third growing trend I sense is that established artists are more often shouldering less-established artists. At the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City outside Manhattan, the sculptor Mark di Suvero has created a park in which other sculptors show their work; a place where park-goers, parents and children, community people, and the art establishment can get to know new artists. He also offers residencies, internships, and jobs for artists, giving them the tools they need to move ahead on their own.

Eric Fischl, another prominent artist, is mounting a national program that will put distinguished artists with emerging artists in typical American places outside the urban downtowns — places where people live and shop and play. These artists, distinguished and emerging, will get to know each other and cultivate new audiences at each site. Versions of this basic idea — banding big name artists and newcomers together to spread interest in the arts — are being developed in other cultural initiatives as well.

No one can say for sure that these initiatives will increase opportunities for striving art makers. But it is heartening to know that the art establishment is stretching, that a variety of institutional efforts are being made to put emerging artists into view. It is good to know that interest is increasing for artists in their home towns and communities. It is good to know that wise and rewarded artists are mounting innovative projects to find future talent. It is just possible that ideas like these will spread, offering fresh opportunity and hope and pathways to emerging artists.

A salute, then, to the institutions and the individuals, from hotels and museums to donors and artists, that are helping to put creative people in front of us, bringing their talent from wherever it is to wherever we are. We can hope that many many more such efforts take hold, expanding possibilities for artists and for the rest of us.

-end-

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By David A. Parker – December 20, 2011

What is College For?

Good thoughts from Notre Dame philosopher (and, yes, academic professor) on the value / meaning of a university education (in America, anyway).    Reproduced below, viewable at this link.

The New York Times, December 14, 2011

What Is College For?

By GARY GUTTING

The Stone is featuring occasional posts by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, that apply critical thinking to information and events that have appeared in the news.

Most American college students are wrapping up yet another semester this week. For many of them, and their families, the past months or years in school have likely involved considerable time, commitment, effort and expense. Was it worth it?

When practical skills outweigh theoretical understanding, we move beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education.

Some evidence suggests that it was.  A Pew Research survey this year found that 74 percent of graduates from four-year colleges say that their education was “very useful in helping them grow intellectually.” Sixty-nine percent said that “it was very useful in helping them grow and mature as a person” and 55 percent claimed that “it was very useful in helping prepare them for a job or career.”  Moreover, 86 percent of these graduates think “college has been a good investment for them personally.”

Nonetheless, there is incessant talk about the “failure” of higher education.  (Anthony Grafton at The New York Review of Books provides an excellent survey of recent discussions.)  Much of this has to do with access: it’s too expensive, admissions policies are unfair, the drop-out rate is too high.  There is also dismay at the exploitation of graduate students and part-time faculty members, the over-emphasis on frills such as semi-professional athletics or fancy dorms and student centers, and the proliferation of expensive and unneeded administrators.  As important as they are, these criticisms don’t contradict the Pew Survey’s favorable picture of the fundamental value of students’ core educational experience.

But, as Grafton’s discussion also makes clear, there are serious concerns about the quality of this experience.  In particular, the university curriculum leaves students disengaged from the material they are supposed to be learning.  They see most of their courses as intrinsically “boring,” of value only if they provide training relevant to future employment or if the teacher has a pleasing (amusing, exciting, “relevant”) way of presenting the material. As a result, students spend only as much time as they need to get what they see as acceptable grades (on average, about 12 to 14 hour a week for all courses combined).  Professors have ceased to expect genuine engagement from students and often give good grades (B or better) to work that is at best minimally adequate.

This lack of academic engagement is real, even among schools with the best students and the best teachers, and it increases dramatically as the quality of the school decreases.  But it results from a basic misunderstanding — by both students and teachers — of what colleges are for.

First of all, they are not simply for the education of students.  This is an essential function, but the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically.  In our society, this world is mainly populated by members of college faculties: scientists, humanists, social scientists (who straddle the humanities and the sciences properly speaking), and those who study the fine arts. Law, medicine and engineering are included to the extent that they are still understood as “learned professions,” deploying practical skills that are nonetheless deeply rooted in scientific knowledge or humanistic understanding.  When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education.

Our support for higher education makes sense only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential to our society.  Otherwise, we could provide job-training and basic social and moral formation for young adults far more efficiently and cheaply, through, say, a combination of professional and trade schools, and public service programs.  There would be no need to support, at great expense, the highly specialized interests of, for example, physicists, philosophers, anthropologists and art historians.  Colleges and universities have no point if we do not value the knowledge and understanding to which their faculties are dedicated.

This has important consequences for how we regard what goes on in college classrooms.  Teachers need to see themselves as, first of all, intellectuals, dedicated to understanding poetry, history, human psychology, physics, biology — or whatever is the focus of their discipline.  But they also need to realize that this dedication expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications.  This is why a discipline requires not just research but also teaching.  Non-experts need access to what experts have learned, and experts need to make sure that their research remains in contact with general human concerns. The classroom is the primary locus of such contact.

Students, in turn, need to recognize that their college education is above all a matter of opening themselves up to new dimensions of knowledge and understanding.  Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting.  It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have.   Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting.

Students readily accept the alleged wisdom that their most important learning at college takes place outside the classroom.  Many faculty members — thinking of their labs, libraries or studies — would agree.  But the truth is that, for both students and faculty members, the classroom is precisely where the most important learning occurs.

-end-

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By David A. Parker – December 20, 2011

Statue deployed by Korean Comfort Women

For those looking for an example of sculpture deeply relevant to people’s lives (I often am), here is a report on a bronze figure staring at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, still waiting for Japanese government reparations to women forced into sexual slavery during World War II.   Reposted below from the NY Times (and kudos to Choe Sang-hun for the excellent work that he has done as NYT Seoul Bureau Chief for so many years).

Statue Deepens Dispute Over Wartime Sexual Slavery

Jeon Heon-Kyun/European Pressphoto Agency

Korean women who were forced to be sex slaves for the Japanese in World War II were demonstrating, as they do weekly.

By
Published: December 15, 2011

SEOUL, South Korea — The unsmiling teenage girl in traditional Korean dress sits in a chair, her feet bare, her hands on her lap, her eyes fixed on the Japanese Embassy across a narrow street in central Seoul. Within a day, the life-size bronze statue had become the focal point of a simmering diplomatic dispute as President Lee Myung-bak prepared to visit Tokyo this weekend.

Jeon Heon-Kyun/European Pressphoto Agency

A statue across from the Japanese embassy in Seoul was installed as a reminder of sexual slavery during World War II.

The statue, named the Peace Monument, was financed with citizens’ donations and installed Wednesday, when five women in their 80s and 90s, who were among thousands forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during World War II, protested in front of the embassy, joined by their supporters. Such protests have been held weekly for almost 20 years.

For them and for many other Koreans, the statue — placed so that Japanese diplomats see it as they leave their embassy — carries a clear message: Japan should acknowledge what it did to as many as 200,000 Asian women, mostly Koreans, who historians say were forced or lured into working as prostitutes at frontline brothels for Japanese soldiers.

The Japanese government’s main spokesman, the chief cabinet secretary Osamu Fujimura, called the installation of the statue “extremely regrettable” and said that his government would ask that it be removed.

South Korean officials said Japan cited international treaties that required host governments to help protect the dignity of diplomatic missions. On Thursday, South Korea made it clear that it had no intention of forcing the protesters to remove the statue.

“The victims are over 80 years old and passing away, and the government is not in a position to tell them to remove the statue,” said Cho Byung-jae, a spokesman for South Korea’s Foreign Ministry. “Rather than insisting on the removal of the statue, the Japanese government should seriously ask itself why these victims have held their weekly rallies for 20 years, never missing a week, and whether it really cannot find a way to restore the honor these woman so earnestly want.”

A handful of elderly victims and their supporters — whose numbers have varied from a dozen to a few hundred — have rallied in front of the Japanese Embassy each Wednesday since Jan. 8, 1992.

The issue of “comfort women,” as they were called by the Japanese military, is among the most emotional disputes stemming from Japan’s colonial rule of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Japanese officials have apologized but insist that the issue was settled in the 1965 treaty that normalized relations between the two countries.

In 1995, Japan offered to set up a $1 billion fund for the victims. But the women rejected this plan, because the money would have come from private donations, not from the government. They have been insisting on government reparations to individuals.

During a two-day trip to Tokyo that starts on Saturday, Mr. Lee plans to raise the issue of compensation for former sex slaves with Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, South Korean officials said.

Time is running out. In the 1990s, there were 234 Korean women willing to break decades of silence on their history as sex slaves. Now only 63 remain.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 16, 2011, on page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: Korea’s Painful Reminder Of Japanese Occupation.

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By David A. Parker – December 17, 2011

Artists: how much art production is enough?

2012 will see a simultaneous show of Damien Hirst’s dot paintings, of which over 1000 exist.   The artist’s comments about his output:

“I’ve looked at the amount of artworks I’ve made in my life: 4,800, not including prints,” he told the Times. “I know Warhol did 10,000 not including prints, and Picasso did 40,000. So I have a way to go.”

Excerpted from an Artinfo.com article at this link, reproduced below.

Connecting the Dots: Details Emerge About Damien Hirst’s Insane Global “Spot” Painting Show

Photo courtesy Prudence Cumin Associates
Damien Hirst’s “2-Amino-5-Bromobenzotrifluoride,” (2011) at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art
by Julia Halperin
Published: December 12, 2011

Think Damien Hirst is overexposed now? Just wait for January 12, when a gargantuan exhibition of his “Spot” paintings opens at every Gagosian gallery in the world. Details have already emerged about the boundary-breaking show, and Hirst himself is getting the word out to the press — but he’s going off-message too, opining on artist’s resale rights and divulging details about private conversations with his dealer Larry Gagosian.

Hirst’s plan to dominate the world with his dotty art began more than 10 years ago, when he floated the idea to executives at the Tate Modern and Saatchi Gallery. Though the show didn’t come to fruition then, the artist broached the idea a few years ago with Gagosian, who leapt on opportunity. After more than six months of intensive searching, calling, and cataloguing all over the world, the dealer will unveil an survey of approximately 300 spot paintings at his 11 galleries worldwide. A spot painting catalogue raisonné will accompany the exhibition (try to contain your excitement). In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Hirst estimated that he has created about 1,400 of the paintings over the course of his career.

While a small portion of the works will be for sale, the vast majority are on loan, largely from private collectors. And since the gallery sought to exhibit the paintings at the gallery closest to where they live in the world, the show will offer a kind of map of where spot paintings have ended up. The process led to some interesting trends: “A lot of the controlled substance paintings — the irregularly shaped canvases — are in Europe and London,” Gagosian director Millicent Wilner told ARTINFO. “So those will be shown at the London gallery.” Similarly, many of the circular spot canvases ended up in the United States along the East Coast, so they will be featured at Gagosian’s New York space. The international search even led one collector to uncover a spot painting he didn’t know he had. “That kind of discovery is always exciting,” said Wilner, who declined to provide any additional details.

It is, perhaps, all too appropriate that Hirst’s spot paintings — a body of work made almost entirely by his machine-like army of assistants — will be shown at the world’s largest machine for selling art. Hirst told the L.A. Times that the series is “a battle between the machine made and man-made. From a distance they look machine made, and then on closer inspection you can see trace of the human hand, pencil lines, and [compass] holes.” The exhibition will include Hirst’s first spot painting (created on board in 1986) as well as more recent ones, like a 12 by 16-inch canvas featuring 18,000 spots that Hirst expects to have finished just in time for the opening.

According to Wilner, the artist has been very involved in the exhibition: “I have, in my office, scale models of all 11 galleries around the world with scaled-down images of the paintings, and we have meetings and move things around,” she said.

Presumably in an effort to drum up interest in the show, Hirst has been chatting with reporters about more than just spots. He recently opened up to Artlyst about his opinions of the U.K.’s recent expansion of its resale law, which offers artists and their families the right to collect a royalty on the resale of their work. He also gave a bizarre but intriguing anecdote to the L.A. Times about working with Larry: “I remember Larry once phoned me up, and he said he was worried about my production,” Hirst told the paper. “He said: You are making too many paintings. And then, at the end of the conversation, he said: We need more paintings.”

Hirst’s tale does touch on an important question about the upcoming show: what effect will this flood of spot paintings have on Hirst’s market? The artist doesn’t seem too concerned. “I’ve looked at the amount of artworks I’ve made in my life: 4,800, not including prints,” he told the Times. “I know Warhol did 10,000 not including prints, and Picasso did 40,000. So I have a way to go.”

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By David A. Parker – December 14, 2011

George Kateb: How to live a good life in a damaged world

Thinker George Kateb speaks in a brief interview about some big questions.  Reposted from the NY Times.

An Interview With George Kateb

By TYLER KRUPP and RACHEL STUART
The Stone

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

George Kateb is a Professor Emeritus in the political science department at Princeton University.

He is the author of several books and articles on political theory, including “Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil” (1984),  ”Patriotism and Other Mistakes” (2006) and most recently, “Human Dignity” (2011). Kateb describes himself as an oncologist or pathologist of politics. We interviewed him for his views on the pathologies of our political and social life and the possibilities of living a good — or even tolerable — life under current conditions.

Here is a link to the video.

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By David A. Parker – December 6, 2011

Art and the limits of neuroscience

This is a fascinating article from the New York Times (click here for the original article).

December 4, 2011, 5:30 pm

Art and the Limits of Neuroscience

By ALVA NOë
The Stone

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

What is art? What does art reveal about human nature? The trend these days is to approach such questions in the key of neuroscience.

“Neuroaesthetics” is a term that has been coined to refer to the project of studying art using the methods of neuroscience. It would be fair to say that neuroaesthetics has become a hot field. It is not unusual for leading scientists and distinguished theorists of art to collaborate on papers that find their way into top scientific journals.

Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist at University College London, likes to say that art is governed by the laws of the brain. It is brains, he says, that see art and it is brains that make art. Champions of the new brain-based approach to art sometimes think of themselves as fighting a battle with scholars in the humanities who may lack the courage (in the words of the art historian John Onians) to acknowledge the ways in which biology constrains cultural activity. Strikingly, it hasn’t been much of a battle. Students of culture, like so many of us, seem all too glad to join in the general enthusiasm for neural approaches to just about everything.

Leif Parsons

What is striking about neuroaesthetics is not so much the fact that it has failed to produce interesting or surprising results about art, but rather the fact that no one — not the scientists, and not the artists and art historians — seem to have minded, or even noticed. What stands in the way of success in this new field is, first, the fact that neuroscience has yet to frame anything like an adequate biological or “naturalistic” account of human experience — of thought, perception, or consciousness.

The idea that a person is a functioning assembly of brain cells and associated molecules is not something neuroscience has discovered. It is, rather, something it takes for granted. You are your brain. Francis Crick once called this “the astonishing hypothesis,” because, as he claimed, it is so remote from the way most people alive today think about themselves. But what is really astonishing about this supposedly astonishing hypothesis is how astonishing it is not! The idea that there is a thing inside us that thinks and feels — and that we are that thing — is an old one. Descartes thought that the thinking thing inside had to be immaterial; he couldn’t conceive how flesh could perform the job. Scientists today suppose that it is the brain that is the thing inside us that thinks and feels. But the basic idea is the same. And this is not an idle point. However surprising it may seem, the fact is we don’t actually have a better understanding how the brain might produce consciousness than Descartes did of how the immaterial soul would accomplish this feat; after all, at the present time we lack even the rudimentary outlines of a neural theory of consciousness.

Leif Parsons

What we do know is that a healthy brain is necessary for normal mental life, and indeed, for any life at all. But of course much else is necessary for mental life. We need roughly normal bodies and a roughly normal environment. We also need the presence and availability of other people if we are to have anything like the sorts of lives that we know and value. So we really ought to say that it is the normally embodied, environmentally- and socially-situated human animal that thinks, feels, decides and is conscious. But once we say this, it would be simpler, and more accurate, to allow that it is people, not their brains, who think and feel and decide. It is people, not their brains, that make and enjoy art. You are not your brain, you are a living human being.

We need finally to break with the dogma that you are something inside of you — whether we think of this as the brain or an immaterial soul — and we need finally take seriously the possibility that the conscious mind is achieved by persons and other animals thanks to their dynamic exchange with the world around them (a dynamic exchange that no doubt depends on the brain, among other things). Importantly, to break with the Cartesian dogmas of contemporary neuroscience would not be to cave in and give up on a commitment to understanding ourselves as natural. It would be rather to rethink what a biologically adequate conception of our nature would be.

But there is a second obstacle to progress in neuroaesthetics. Neural approaches to art have not yet been able to find a way to bring art into focus in the laboratory. As mentioned, theorists in this field like to say that art is constrained by the laws of the brain. But in practice what this is usually taken to come down to is the humble fact that the brain constrains the experience of art because it constrains all experience. Visual artists, for example, don’t work with ultraviolet light, as Zeki reminds us, because we can’t see ultraviolet light. They do work with shape and form and color because we can see them.

Leif Parsons

Now it is doubtless correct that visual artists confine themselves to materials and effects that are, well, visible. And likewise, it seems right that our perception of works of art, like our perception of anything, depends on the nature of our perceptual capacities, capacities which, in their turn, are constrained by the brain.

But there is a problem with this: An account of how the brain constrains our ability to perceive has no greater claim to being an account of our ability to perceive art than it has to being an account of how we perceive sports, or how we perceive the man across from us on the subway. In works about neuroaesthetics, art is discussed in the prefaces and touted on the book jackets, but never really manages to show up in the body of the works themselves!

Some of us might wonder whether the relevant question is how we perceive works of art, anyway. What we ought to be asking is: Why do we value some works as art? Why do they move us? Why does art matter? And here again, the closest neural scientists or psychologists come to saying anything about this kind of aesthetic evaluation is to say something about preference. But the class of things we like, or that we prefer as compared to other things, is much wider than the class of things we value as art. And the sorts of reasons we have for valuing one art work over another are not the same kind of reasons we would give for liking one person more than another, or one flavor more than another. And it is no help to appeal to beauty here. Beauty is both too wide and too narrow. Not all art works are beautiful (or pleasing for that matter, even if many are), and not everything we find beautiful (a person, say, or a sunset) is a work of art.

Again we find not that neuroaesthetics takes aim at our target and misses, but that it fails even to bring the target into focus.

Yet it’s early. Neuroaesthetics, like the neuroscience of consciousness itself, is still in its infancy. Is there any reason to doubt that progress will be made? Is there any principled reason to be skeptical that there can be a valuable study of art making use of the methods and tools of neuroscience? I think the answer to these questions must be yes, but not because there is no value in bringing art and empirical science into contact, and not because art does not reflect our human biology.

To begin to see this, consider: engagement with a work of art is a bit like engagement with another person in conversation; and a work of art itself can be usefully compared with a humorous gesture or a joke. Just as getting a joke requires sensitivity to a whole background context, to presuppositions and intended as well as unintended meanings, so “getting” a work of art requires an attunement to problems, questions, attitudes and expectations; it requires an engagement with the context in which the work of art has work to do. We might say that works of art pose questions and encountering a work of art meaningfully requires understanding the relevant questions and getting why they matter, or maybe even, why they don’t matter, or don’t matter any more, or why they would matter in one context but not another. In short, the work of art, whatever its local subject matter or specific concerns ― God, life, death, politics, the beautiful, art itself, perceptual consciousness ― and whatever its medium, is doing something like philosophical work.

One consequence of this is that it may belong to the very nature of art, as it belongs to the nature of philosophy, that there can be nothing like a settled, once-and-for-all account of what art is, just as there can be no all-purpose account of what happens when people communicate or when they laugh together. Art, even for those who make it and love it, is always a question, a problem for itself. What is art? The question must arise, but it allows no definitive answer.

For these reasons, neuroscience, which looks at events in the brains of individual people and can do no more than describe and analyze them, may just be the wrong kind of empirical science for understanding art.

Far from its being the case that we can apply neuroscience as an intellectual ready-made to understand art, it may be that art, by disclosing the ways in which human experience in general is something we enact together, in exchange, may provide new resources for shaping a more plausible, more empirically rigorous, account of our human nature.

Alva Noë

Alva Noë is a philosopher at CUNY’s Graduate Center. He is the author of “Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From The Biology of Consciousness.” He is now writing a book on art and human nature. Noë writes a weekly column for NPR’s science and culture blog. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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By David A. Parker – December 6, 2011

The Long View: take-aways on life reports from people over 70

This is really great, I’m glad to reproduce material from this New York Times link.

Op-Ed Columnist

The Life Reports II

By
Published: November 28, 2011

A few weeks ago, I asked people over 70 to send me “Life Reports” — essays about their own lives and what they’d done poorly and well. They make for fascinating and addictive reading, and I’ve tried to extract a few general life lessons:

Josh Haner/The New York Times

David Brooks

The Life Reports

In response to a previous column, readers shared how they had done and what they had learned over their 70-plus years. Read the reports »

Divide your life into chapters. The unhappiest of my correspondents saw time as an unbroken flow, with themselves as corks bobbing on top of it. A man named Neil lamented that he had been “an Eeyore not a Tigger; a pessimist, not an optimist; an aimless grasshopper, not a purposeful ant; a dreamer, not a doer; a nomad, not a settler; a voyager, not an adventurer; a spectator, not an actor, player or participant.” He concluded: “Neil never amounted to anything.”

The happier ones divided time into (somewhat artificial) phases. They wrote things like: There were six crucial decisions in my life. Then they organized their lives around those pivot points. By seeing time as something divisible into chunks, they could more easily stop and self-appraise. They had more control over their fate.

Beware rumination. There were many long, detailed essays by people who are experts at self-examination. They could finely calibrate each passing emotion. But these people often did not lead the happiest or most fulfilling lives. It’s not only that they were driven to introspection by bad events. Through self-obsession, they seemed to reinforce the very emotions, thoughts and habits they were trying to escape.

Many of the most impressive people, on the other hand, were strategic self-deceivers. When something bad was done to them, they forgot it, forgave it or were grateful for it. When it comes to self-narratives, honesty may not be the best policy.

You can’t control other people. David Leshan made an observation that was echoed by many: “It took me twenty years of my fifty-year marriage to discover how unwise it was to attempt to remake my wife. … I learned also that neither could I remake my friends or students.”

On the other hand, some of the most inspiring stories were about stepparents who came into families and wisely bided their time, accepting slights and insults until they were gradually accepted by their new children.

Lean toward risk. It’s trite, but apparently true. Many more seniors regret the risks they didn’t take than regret the ones they did.

Measure people by their growth rate, not by their talents. The best essays were by people who made steady progress each decade. Regina Titus grew up shy and sheltered on Long Island. She took demeaning clerical jobs, working with people who treated her poorly. Her first husband died after six months of marriage and her second committed suicide.

But she just kept growing. At 56, studying nights and weekends, she obtained a college degree, cum laude, from Marymount Manhattan College. She moved to Wilmington, Del., works as a docent, studies opera, hikes, volunteers and does a thousand other things. She acknowledges, “I did not have the joy of holding my baby in my arms. I did not have a long and happy marriage.” But hers is a story of relentless self-expansion. I wonder how we can measure that capacity.

Be aware of the generational bias. Many of the essayists have ambivalent attitudes toward their parents. Almost all have worshipful attitudes toward their children. I’m not sure how to explain this pattern, but I don’t think it’s pure egotism. Many writers mentioned that given their own flaws, they are astounded that their kids turned out so well.

Work within institutions or crafts, not outside them. For a time, our culture celebrated the rebel and the outsider. The most miserable of my correspondents fit this mold. They were forever in revolt against the world and ended up sourly achieving little.

There are other patterns running through the essays. I was struck by the fact that almost nobody mentioned whether or not they were good-looking, though this must have been an important factor, especially when they were young. Many people lament the fact that they had to make the most important decisions in their 20s, at the age when they were least qualified to make them.

People get better at the art of living. By their 60s many contributors found their zone. Metaphysics is dead; very few of the writers hewed to a specific theology or had any definite conception of a divine order, though vague but uplifting spiritual experiences pepper their reflections.

Finally, the essays present disturbing quandaries. For example, we are told to live for others. But one savvy retiree writes, “Don’t stay with people who, over time, grow apart from you. Move on. This means do what you think will make you feel okay — even if that makes others feel temporarily not okay.”

Is that selfishness or hard-earned realism? That one you’ll have to answer for yourself.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 29, 2011, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Life Reports II.

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By David A. Parker – November 30, 2011

Artists: how do performance artists make money?

A revealing article from ArtInfo.com, reposted from this link.

How Do Performance Artists Make Any Money? A Market Inquiry

Courtesy BFA
Marina Abramović
by Shane Ferro
Published: November 22, 2011

The art market is generally agreed to be illiquid, finicky, and a slave to the flavor of the moment. Nonetheless, the price of an artist’s work is one of the prevailing manners in which success is measured. The principle is the same for most types of art from painting to sculpture to video — but what if there is nothing to buy? As the performance art biennial Performa 11 wrapped up, ARTINFO delved into the market for performance artists and asked the question: how do artists with ephemeral work get paid?

The simplest answer is that they usually don’t. The key to a lucrative art career is — no surprises here — to produce something that has some sort of material worth. Most performances have negligible market value because they are not easily corralled into a permanent object. There is no canvas to hang on a gallery wall, nothing to take home, nothing to own but the memory of the moment. That is not to say that material objects cannot be created by performance artists. Generally, there are two ways to pay the rent as a performance artist: produce work in an immutable medium separate from performance, or become so successful as a performance artist that you can profit from the secondary materials capturing, recreating, or stemming from the performative moment. It could be argued that Matthew Barney, one of the most successful artists working today, has engineered his market entirely from these aesthetic epiphenomena, with the films documenting his performances, the props persisting as sculpture, and sketches being sold as art objects. Then there is the relatively new phenomenon — arising, in part, from gala culture — of the performance commission, where the most famous practitioners are paid to create spectacles for elite crowds.

Marina Abramovic, the current gala darling, is another rare artist able to make a living from her live productions. The art dealer Sean Kelly, who has long represented the artist, admits that Abramovic is a special case. She isn’t just any artist, Kelly told ARTINFO, she is the “preeminent performance artist in the world,” which makes her an outlier — but at the same time there has been a concerted effort to build her market. “If you want to discuss it in purely market terms – which sounds sort of vulgar – I think what has been spectacularly successful in Marina’s case is we built her market as a brand, like Damien Hirst. Marina is a very, very successful brand.” He added that having a successful retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York doesn’t hurt, either. The show at MoMA, according to Kelly, allowed the gallery and Abramovic to expand her reach and “build her brand globally.”

But even as a major international star, Abramovic does not necessarily generate cash from her performances. Rather, the market for her work is made up of the objects related to her acts that give them permanence: DVDs, photographs, and catalogues that capture her performance. She also doesn’t make money from everything she does. According to Kelly, it depends on the individual work and what it is meant to achieve. “She makes performances,” explained Kelly. “In some cases there is nothing from that performance. It will be deemed through conversation with us [the gallery] with her, that the performance needs to exist in the imagination and not really be documented in any way.”

On very rare occasions, it is possible to acquire a performance work. In 2008, MoMA acquired German artist Tino Sehgal’s performance “The Kiss,” but it proved to be difficult (director Glenn Lowry called it “one of the most elaborate and difficult acquisitions we’ve ever made”). When the Pompidou Center in Paris tried to acquire another of Sehgal’s works, “The Situation,” French video artist Fred Forest questioned the legality of the acquisition.

However, the difficulty of making money with performance art is sometimes the point. In an interview with ARTINFO before the opening of Performa 11, founder RoseLee Goldberg said that she started the event in 2004 because of the vast market pressures put on artists as prices continued to soar. “It’s hard enough to be an artist anyway, but in 2004 and everything was being measured by such a dramatic scale of success. I think performance allowed everybody to get back to talking about ideas again,” she said.

The artists who perform during the biennial don’t make money from their work, aside from those who receive official commissions. Now in its fourth iteration, Performa is as popular as ever, but it isn’t a money-making business. The show is run as a nonprofit and the ticket sales go toward the cost of putting on the project. “We raise money to make the artists’ dreams come true. Nobody’s going to make any money after it. We raise money to pay for the cost of the project,” said Goldberg in a separate interview.

-end-

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By David A. Parker – November 23, 2011

Artists: sponsored residency in Taiwan! Deadline 12/23/2011

Well worth checking out.  Click here or link below.

http://www.kdmofa.tnua.edu.tw/en/index.php?REQUEST_ID=bW9kPW5ld3MmcGFnZT1kZXRhaWwmWVk9MjAxMSZOZXdzSUQ9MTI%3D

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By David A. Parker – November 22, 2011

The Long View: old people evaluate their lives

Reprinted from a column in the New York Times by David Brooks, at this link.

November 11, 2011, 6:56 am

The Life Report: Noah Inbody

The following Life Report was submitted in response to my column of Oct. 28, in which I asked readers over 70 to write autobiographical essays evaluating their own lives.

I believe that my life story is well worth noting and sharing.

Part I.  Grade F+  Throughout this period I was depressed and angry, the result of living with non-parenting parents, alcoholic, violent, and yet basically good people.  The + (plus) came at age 13 when I was forced to join a church, but not them, and this sad boy found a family.

Part II.  Grade C+.  I supported myself through college and entered a seminary.  I was an active pastor, creative and committed to adult education and social justice.  I recruited others to join me in the March on Washington DC and Selma, AL.  With other pastors I worked for integrated housing and integrated schools in a wealthy Chicago suburb.  I was then asked to create a non-traditional church.  This led to suspicion, resentment and controversy and my inevitable disillusionment with church leaders and with the church itself.  Later I recognized how unhappy I was even as an active, well respected pastor.  This effected my ability to father my children properly, but I chalked it up to “being busy for the Lord.”

Part III.  Grade A+   With no marketable skills I went back to school full-time and earned another MA and a Doctorate in counseling  For 23 years I helped adults learn to counsel through the controversial “Learn by Doing” experiential approach.  I loved my professional and interpersonal relationships with students as well as with State and National professional organizations.  I began research on the relationship of the brain to addictive behavior, and soon experienced what I taught:  the brain demands satisfying stimulation and without it descends into destructive addictive behaviors.  These years were the high point of my professional and personal life.  Finally I became a “parent.”

Part VI.  Grade B    Retirement at 67.  Nothing wrong with a B.  I developed new interests: ceramics, sketching, painting, photography, writing, opera, travel, and a more kindly spirit.

Thanks for asking.

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By David A. Parker – November 13, 2011