The Teachings of Donnie B.

Here's an amazing argument in the most recent copy of the New Yorker, taken from an article about Donald Barthelme's place in the postmodernist canon:

What killed that distinction [between high and commercial art] wasn't defining pop art up [to the level of high art]. It was defining high art down. It was the recognition that serious art, too, is produced and consumed in a marketplace. The point of [Andy] Warhol's Campbell's soup-can paintings was not that a soup can is like a work of art. It was that a work of art is like a soup can: they are both commodities.

This was courtesy of Louis Menand, and it blew my fucking mind. Not for the observation of it, which is a trivial distinction. What mindfucked me was the way it put so succinctly an essential complaint I have had with a mood permeating the circles I've been around.

What does this really mean? Essentially, Warhol's soup cans brought the world to its logical summation. It's kitsch. Cultural criticism mistaken as artistic relevance. It's not constructive but nihilistic. And that's not the world want to live in. It's a dead outlook.

If art is not striving to find at least the odd, the weird dissonances associated with everyday life and find some type of tether between them, then all it really is is a pretty little trifle. We don't feel it, we don't need it. It isn't essential in the way that food, fucking and -- for some -- religion is. Maybe for all -- I've always held that Modernists biggest failure was the path they took to make art the new religion, and therefore as essential as Sunday Mass was to the 1300s.

With its push to emphasis on titillation and the superficial, the contemporary era essentially pulled high art and art in general to the levels of porn, minus the stache or what have you. It's all superficial -- and not even satisfactorially animalistic -- fucking. It's not attempting to be anything else.

So here's my ultimate manifesto:

If you're looking at a piece of street art, ask the fundamental question "So what?" With any gallery opening or new track of music: "So what?" Any film: "So what?" What else did the work bring to the table? What was this looking to do to me or change or mold or push or punch or spit on me?

Not everything is going to be effective here, but shit if you're not going to find -- if the artist is taking his audience seriously and not just completely absorbed in his- or herself -- that incrementally you have changed. Your life, whatever. Your outlook, your world view has been altered in such a way that you eventually look at yourself and say "I can't go back now." Even if it's not apparent what the "what" is, there's still a "what" that has already happened. And it's unsettling, in a good way.

Faithful readers, I promise not to talk your head off in the next one. I'll find some toilet humor for next time.