Ugly music -- or: What Looks Like an Avant-garde Work of Art

 

 

We have been at this for a while. 

Here, for example, in a blog post from 2011:

 

"Let me explain."

That was the post, the caption is ours. 

You get it? You feel the bar-stool rocking under you? You're shocked? Like the police commissioner in Casablanca, when he's informed that illegal gambling is going on in Harry's Rick's bar? Or like the average reader of the NYT, when they are informed that Trump is leading in the polls? 

Were we insinuating anything? With our post?

Yes. We did. And we didn't let go. 

Like here, in our third, yet unfinished part of our Green Eyes franchise (see side bar). It has the legendary art critic, Souren Souleikan, appearing on the very first page of said novel (the narrator here is John Lee, the antihero of the franchise). 

Quote:

“Who are you?” I ask.
“I’m Souren Souleikan,” he says, “the art critic.” He allows for a few wordless seconds, then adds, “I’ve come at the right moment, I see. There’s some art that requires my critique. May I come in?”
“I’m busy,” I say, raising my smudge-painted hand, but he’s already stepped into the den where he positions himself in front of my easel.
“You are the artist?” he asks, pointing at the canvas with an abstracted gesture. “Interesting.”
I’m slow-witted under duress but manage to utter, “Don’t you see?”
“Interesting,” he reiterates. “The composition. White dots on a white background, shan’t we say?” He cocks his head and squints his eyes at my thin, hasty brush strokes. “Three dots, is it not…no, two. I count two dots. Why two dots Mister…?”
“John,” I say.
“Mr. John. Why two?”
“It’s contemporary art,” I reply, and then, thinking of Alex—what Alex would say, just for fun, or to play one of his tricks—I add: “About the epistemology of contemporary art.”
“Oouh, oouh,” Souleikan goes. “E-pi-ste…e-pi-ste... Say that again.”
“E-pi-ste-mo-lo-gy,” I enunciate.
“You passed the test, Mr. John. But contemporary art it is not. It’s modern art, at best. Contemporary art is when pissoirs are fixed to museum walls, or sharks swim in formaldehyde, or a surfeit of candies idles in the corner of a fashionable Park Avenue address where the hostess fears nothing more than passing sweet tooth.”  

Unquote.

You get it? You need another hint? here it is:

"Ugly music".

It's a term from an essay of Susan Sontag about her having an affair tea with Thomas Mann.

The "ugly music" is not about visual art but about tonal -- or, more precisely -- atonal music, but you get the message.

And it's not only you...somebody else got the message as well, namely a certain Orlando Whitfield, who's publishing a book about his former boss, Inigo Philbrick. Some years ago, Inigo had been one of London's up-and-coming contemporary art dealers. Quote from a preview of Orlando's  book in the last edition of The Economist:

At stake, beyond the million-dollar deals, are some bigger questions, like why people assign value to objects depending on who created them. [Mr Philbrick was paid to intermediate in the aquisition of an artwork called “Untitled (Welcome)” for an Israeli-Canadian billionaire.] The artwork by Félix González-Torres was a sculpture of sorts, involving door mats. But the art had gone missing when the buyer’s representative came to London, so Mr Philbrick tried to recreate it. He bought 100 plastic mats from a hardware store and laid them on his gallery’s floor. No amount of Diptyque room spray or frantic wafting of auction catalogues would fully banish the smell of the new rubber, Mr Whitfield recalls in his book, but it did not matter. The the buyers representative saw what looked like the avant-garde work and bought it.

Unquote. Is this what contemporary art is all about?

You say. (If more than 100 of you promise to buy the third part of my Green Eyes series (tentatively titled "Artful Murder"), I promise I'll finish it. Let the bar-stool rock some more.