Easterlin Paradox etc.

In a now famous 1974 paper entitled "Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence," economist Richard Easterlin suggests that, counterintuitively, happiness on a national level does not increase with wealth----that is, once what are deemed to be 'basic needs' are met. Known as the "Easterlin paradox", this proposes that government policy should not focus on GDP or economic growth but rather on other indices of quality of life (such as Nicolas Sarkozy's initiave to add happiness to measurements of French economic growth) .

Now a new study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the Wharton business school at the U. Penn, claims that based on the analysis of data spanning over half-a-century and 132 countries, richer countries do tend to be happier...

Writing on the responses to the current Whitney Biennial, AFC's Paddy Johnson gives a nod to the series of exhibitions---Dice Thrown, Aspects, Forms & Figures, and In Defense of Ardor---I curated at Bellwether last year:

The question Lacayo and many others have on their lips is whether the unofficial Biennial theme of “lessness” amounts to much in the end. Not that this is necessarily the case of nay sayers, but I’ll admit that if the only thing I’d seen taking this approach was The New Museum’s Unmonumental and The Whitney’s Biennial, I’d probably have a fairly grim outlook on the prospects for art. Certainly these shows have given me pause, neither effectively displaying the work or necessarily even finding the best of it. By contrast, New York’s commercial galleries have been more successful this year launching unmonumental-esque shows. While the large size of the Biennial undoubtedly makes the job a little more difficult, Bellwether’s brilliantly organized three part exhibition series curated by Becky Smith and Joao Ribas could be no better testament to the success seen within the commercial world, as was Gagosian’s Beneath the Underdog, curated by artists Nate Lowman and Adam McEwen last spring. Notably New York Times critic Holland Cotter named this show one of the best gallery shows of the year. (Read more)

Sterling Ruby: Chron in The New York Times/New Yorker

Sterling Ruby:Chron currently on view at The Drawing Center is reviewed by Roberta Smith in The New York Times today:

Sterling Ruby is one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century. That’s only eight years, of course, but the claim may stick. He makes obstreperous, richly glazed ceramic vessels that suggest charred remains; totemic sculptures webbed with mucousy, macramélike drips of resin; large, dark collages dotted with constellations of tiny images of artifacts; and drawings, photographs and short videos. Read more

And from this week's New Yorker:

STERLING RUBY
Artists like Ruby, whose art shifts from sculpture to photography to collage, drawing, and painting (in materials like spray paint and nail polish), can be difficult to pin down. This survey does the trick by focussing on Ruby’s use of line during the past five years. Themes range from the political to the social to the abstract—but the fulcrum is drawing. Photographs of words carved on trees rhyme visually with etched Formica benches. Ruby remains a cipher, but the show makes a strong case for considering his work as a coherent whole. A concurrent exhibition of Ruby’s ceramic works, which bridge the gap between fairy tale and science fair, are on view at Metro Pictures. Through March 27. (The Drawing Room, 40 Wooster St. 212-219-2166.)

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings in Artforum

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings, which I curated at The Drawing Center, is reviewed in the current issue of Artforum. (Click on image to read)

"None of the alternatives to the gallery can reach a sizeable audience. Yet, given today's homogenized world, there has never been a deeper, more immediate need for wide-spread sowing of relevant new ideas. So there are two ways to go: if the artist would work the long revolutionary tail and address the working-class only, never mind the galleries, get out in the streets and do it. If, on the other hand, all possible creatures are worth your trouble, use the galleries and never mind: the row to hoe should be rooted-in your 'radical' works not their 'radical' system, for our muddled 'radical' critics have confounded buyers' terms with sellers' standards." Jo Baer, Radical Attitudes to the Gallery, 1977

Civilization represents itself in a storeroom of objects, memorized obstacles to function. Favorite object of the bourgeois: SELF. In communism the disappearance of the self and the destruction of the object go hand in hand. SELF: a fallacy a posteriori; at the moment of action the self disappears completely. It resurfaces during unproductive states of repose, an occasion for the luxurious recuperation from function. Just like the object. The self  is the pension and savings of the undynamic rentier. Both self and object are supposedly capable of guaranteeing certainty, immutability. The world as tautology...

Carl Einstein, 1921

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings on Artforum.com

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings is a Critics' Pick on Artforum.com

Alan Saret:Gang Drawings in The New York Sun

Alan Saret, Three Circles Rules & Free Sweep, 1967. Colored pencil on paper. Photo by Cathy Carver.

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings is reviewed in The New York Sun.

Click here for previous reviews in The New York Times, Time Out, and The New Yorker

Raymond Tallis writes on the "intellectual revolution" sparked by the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides [the subject of his forthcoming book] in Prospect:

One attraction of Parmenides is that you can read his complete surviving works in 15 minutes. His arguments are set out in On Nature, a rather prosaic poem of which only 150 lines survive. The heart of his case is in Fragments 3, 6 and 8, where he sets out a worldview that even by the standards of philosophy is, as Aristotle said, "near to madness." His central argument is so quick that if you blink, you will miss it.

It goes as follows. That which is not, is not. "What-is-not" does not exist. Since anything that comes into being must arise out of what-is-not, objects, states of affairs and so on cannot come into being. Likewise, they cannot pass away, because in order to do so they would have to enter the realm of what-is-not. Since it does not exist, what-is-not cannot be the womb of generation, or the tomb of that which perishes. The no-longer and the not-yet are variants of what-is-not, and so the past and future do not exist either. Change, then, is impossible. Equally, multiplicity is unreal. The empty space necessary to separate one object from another would be another example of what-is-not. And since things cannot be anything to a greater or lesser degree—this would require what-is to be mixed with the diluting effect of what-is-not—the universe must be homogeneous.
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Pascal Dusapin discusses his sixth opera Faustus, The Last Night on the occasion of its production in Lyon last year.

One of the first things most visitors to the Museum of Modern Art confront is the grand onanistic spectacle of Auguste Rodin’s Balzac. A bronze slab of inchoate emotion---one contemporary reviewer called it a “huge, shapeless, uncouth mass”--- the towering figure of the novelist, hands tucked under a massive robe, is less about verisimilitude or resemblance than sheer vitality, a tribute to what Rodin termed Balzac’s “intense labor”. It explains the high-headed posture of defiance, the figure’s phallic, almost ecstatic lean.

This monument to creative virility takes on added emphasis with the passing of another grand onanist, this one of American letters, the late Norman Mailer. True, that title seems more apt for the masturbatory egoists of the novels of Philip Roth, but these have, as of late, gone from the oddly-timed and largely infantile erections of the past [Portnoy’s Complaint] to pathetic incontinence [Exit Ghost], through the murky waters of some clichéd middle-aged decline. But Roth’s fiction brilliantly mines the tension between Eros and Thanatos, as that of between eroticism and ethics, while Mailer turned his own virile expressivity into a kind of obnoxious self-love---the most masterbatory and malignant of all love affairs.

That Mailer sometimes looked to drugs, and often to personal bravado, in order to reach the heights of Hemingway-esque authenticity is merely to be ignored; that he wrote about it is exhausting. Above all, Mailer has become, unwittingly, an emblem of the post-60’s liberated self, a figurehead of the culture of narcissism. Imbedded in this saccharine, therapeutic ideology is the illusion of art as a solipsistic product of subjective experience, and thus something seemingly autonomous and sui generis [from this it gains its beloved authenticity]. And ultimately its self-reflexive obsession: it was Mailer’s conceit to often link his self-declared ambition---made of equal parts immodest assurance and the chastened sense of gaining it alone—with his own self-indulgence as self-analysis. Often the two went hand in hand. Let us not speak ill of the dead any longer, but Mailer was primarily a chronicler of the self, an egoist perhaps on par with Wordsworth, the most sublime egoist of all by Keats' assessment.

The idea is of course particularly pervasive in our culture, even if not perennial: it can be dated to the Renaissance emergence of individual creativity, in the form of the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, and the fetishized idiosyncrasies attributed to Leonardo in particular [and eventually culminating in the Beethoven cult of the 19th century]. Not surprisingly, the artist’s well-known follies and eccentricities---the Italian term for them was "pazzia"---served as the impetus for one of Freud’s most contentious psychoanalytic case studies [into Da Vinci’s homosexual inclinations.] The grandfather of the radical self and its foremost interpreter, who largely equated onanism with homosexuality, seem perfect bedfellows.

But in Mailer’s era we’ve moved from the utopia of collective politics to the age of spurious self-examination, arriving at the artist as a crumpled mess of narcissistic satisfaction and superego anxiety. If the New York art world is suffering from anything at the moment---and some say it’s simply from too much money---it’s from the theatrics of the ego. This pervades late capitalism throughout, this prominence of a performed self that turns self-expression into ‘lifestyle’. Let’s not speak ill of the living any longer either, but a lot of ‘art’ at the moment seems to be too easily, and simplistically, equated with the pseudo-authentic expression of a self.

This expressive self is tyrannical. Freed from its Victorian shadows by the Freudian revolution, it quickly became the consumptive center of social life. The ‘self’ came to dominate the twentieth century, from the birth of psychoanalysis to the apotheosis of mass-consumer society: the selling of ways to express individuality. More insidiously, the liberated self became equated with the very idea of democracy. As capitalism directed products to the innermost desires of this newly liberated self, so democracy, in its infinite possibility of choice, is supposed to give the self its foremost expression.

It has even been formalized and objectified, culminating with what Yves-Alain Bois called “the autographic brushstroke that had marked the birth of the modernist tradition beginning with Impressionism.” The mark thus becomes a visual analogue for the “fluxes and refluxes of the mind,” to borrow from Wordsworth.

But have there ever been so many outlets for the expression of the self than in today’s democratization of voices [YouTube, blogs, MySpace, Flickr)? Then why should the artistic self be any more relevant than the mass of other expressive monads? Perhaps because they are more ‘authentic’---that is, more virile, more intense, more selfish, more filled with ardor?

It proves an enticing fantasy. One perfect example of its manifestation is the persistent need to bring biographical narrative into discussions about the work of female artists. This insipid habit of revealing the self consists of reverting to a produced mythology in place of serious critical discussion—a kind of ad hominem critique imbued with condescension. It plagues female artists in particular. Think of the way Eva Hesse and Isa Genzken entrain pejorative gossip. That is one of the perils of our incessant fascination with the self, and with the correlative idea of creative madness as the concomitant of genius. Do we really believe, as Proust claimed, that “everything great in the world comes from neurotics”?

Also at MoMA is an example of a rejection of this all-consuming, expressive self, however. In 1913, Duchamp took three pieces of thread, each exactly one meter in length, and dropped them freely onto the surface of three separate pieces of canvas. The resulting artwork, 3 Standard Stoppages, "opened the way," Duchamp claimed, "to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art."

Or put it another way, to end on a quote from Gabriel Josipovici writing about Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus":

"Why is that a composer such as Haydn could write a hundred symphonies and only a few years later Beethoven, no less industrious a composer, could only write nine? Quite simply because Haydn did not feel he had to start from scratch. What he had to do was fill a form, a mould. That he filled it supremely well, far better than any of his contemporaries except for Mozart, is neither here nor there......What happens with Beethoven is that the development section [of a sonata] grows out of all proportion to the rest, till it overwhelms the whole, its growth synonymous with the expression of the composer's demonic creativity. Even today Beethoven's symphonies stand in the public imagination for the most powerful expression of an individuality we posess but few have it in us to express. Unfortunately, after Beethoven composers were left with nothing to hold on to except their individuality, and, without Beethoven's dynamism and optimism, this gradually led, in the course of the nineteenth century, to an art less and less time-driven, more and more prone to stasis, dreamines and disintregation. The composer at the start of the twentieth century, an Adrian Leverkuhn or an Arnold Schoenberg, was thus caught between repeating forms he could no longer believe in and trusting a subjectivity which was growing daily more problematic."