Artsy Fartsy

Peter Bagge thinks that Shakepeare wrote "hokey, unintelligible 400-year old situation comedies," and I'm going to have to agree with that sentiment. The Tragedies and the Histories, I think, still have the power to excite and to stir, but the comedies are lame. It's hard to think that a work is funny when every joke needs an explanation. Heck, even the explanations don't help. What's all that about cuckolds and their horns? I even took a Shakespeare class and no one was able to explain it. (aside: I wonder if Ulysees (which I find funny still) will continue to age well. Maybe in 400 years it'll be an unintelligible mess. Maybe it is now.)

Anyway, that's not the point of the essay, and it's only a small part of what I agree with here. I disagree on small points, but I'm on board with the whole.

Art= commerce. It's easy for snobbish hipsteres to forget thhat the pop song ("oops, I did it again"), the blockbuster movie, and the vacuum cleaner are all art. All art done for a paycheck and with evident resultant compromises, but art. NB: Less money doesn't mean less compromises (correlation != causation and all that), it means different compromises. Poor movie maker can't make rad explosion, but can do what he wants. Rich movie maker makes rad explosion but it must please people so there is a ROI. The tricky thing is: would important art not get made without state funding? Is state funding more liekly to generate self-indulgent crap? If an artist will not create his/her art without a grant should we care?
Bach and Bethoven got state funding. huh.

The other thing I liked was about art that is supposed to "make us question our assumptions about...blah blah blah," or "blurs the lines between gender and butter..." or whatever. This art is fucking coercive man! Which is an inherently modernistic (dare I say reactoinary?) viewpoint masquerading (in the form of an unintelligible mess) as a post-modern redefinition or recontextualization (NB: these things do exist in non-hollow shell form). Good art would contain both an intended message, and plenty of room for interpretation. Or it could just be beautiful. That's still allowed, right? What? No?

I was also reminded of a great exhibit on Modernism (the art movement, not the worldview) that I saw at the Minneapolis Institue of Arts. They had an Electrolux vacuum cleaner sharing gallery space with Target's new Michael Graves products. Target is big in MN, and was a big funder of the exhibit. The romanticism of modernism, the starry-eyed promise of technology as better living gave us well-designed, cool-looking kitchen appliances. This is great, and I think that we're seeing a swing back to this aesthetic. Your blender can be art. It's OK.

Where I disagree is that I get the impression that Bagge thinks there is no room for the navel gazing installation and performance art. I, on the other hand, would just like to see a whole lot less of it.

Fun with context.

When Technical Documentation goes bad.

I particularly love #1 and #24.

#1 is pure hilarity. Can't any product be used by one kid to hit another kid? What makes this one so special? Why was it thought necessary to show this? Well, because of the rage.

#24 suffers from a huge context problem. Don't put a helicopter in this box? just a general "no helicopters?" What?

Of course the lesson from most of these is that the encoders were assuming that certain information would be had by the decoders. When a fool like me sees the helicopter box without any other information, I get confused. Can you guarantee that no serviceman would be similarly confused?