UD‘s been writing about an exhibit, in Austria, of North Korean propaganda paintings.
A New York Times reporter has described the event, and it turns out that UD‘s initial assumption about the art for art’s sake attitude of the organizers (Don’t know, don’t care, about politics; this is about art.) was ill-founded.
[The] catalog essay lament[s] that “our Western ideological lenses cloud, if not entirely distort, the view of other realities” and urg[es] museumgoers to “bid farewell once and for all to Eurocentric and culturally imperialistic attitudes.” The show … “proves that cultural differences can be bridged with mutual respect.”
Listen to this prose. Read it out loud.
It comes from the bellowing mouth of a beribboned teenager at a Pyongyang youth rally. BID FAREWELL ONCE AND FOR ALL TO CULTURALLY IMPERIALIST ATTITUDES.
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UD is about to teach a course called Aesthetics at George Washington University.
She has been collecting a file of current events in America and elsewhere that have a bearing on beauty and art and politics and morality. Stuff like the Italian Vogue oil thing …
Along these lines, the New York Times piece on the North Korean exhibit quotes the German paper, Die Welt, calling the show “obscene.”
[I]n a “terror regime” like North Korea there is “no perceptible visual art according to an acceptable understanding of any sort.”
In a sense, that’s the whole burden of my aesthetics course – maybe of any serious thinking about aesthetics. What sort of acceptable understandings are we talking about? Where does Die Welt get the confidence to call any public exhibit of created images obscene? How is it able both to declare this work not art, and to claim that a terror regime like North Korea’s cannot produce art?
I mean, let’s imagine a Western spectator of these big blow-up cartoon North Korean propaganda images who finds them a pleasing accompaniment to the very similar cartoon images – Asian and otherwise – she spends all of her time looking at, on screens, and in comic books. Her aesthetic life is entirely about moving from one hypertrophic set of cartoon images to another; the North Korean images are more of the same…
Or think of the character Molina in Kiss of the Spiderwoman, adoring the romance of his fascist propaganda tales.
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One thing to say about all of these examples – the Vogue oil images, the Nazi love stories, the North Korean paintings – is that they cast the aura of art over their content. They glamorize – aestheticize – make beautiful – ugly things, thereby both diverting our attention from the ugly things in their political and social actuality, and making the ugly things charismatic, alluring, chic, offbeat.
In the case of the Korean objects, exhibits like the one in Austria help make them sought-after consumer items as well. There’s already a hot market, among sophisticated European collectors, for Korean propaganda art; exhibits like this one, that honor and mainstream the work, strengthen the market for it. Similarly, the Vogue oil images are accompanied by ads for grunge chic, the look that goes with the Roseate Spoonbill corpse you carry with you.
August 13th, 2010 at 10:33AM
I dunno, I think Die Welt, ironically, is on to something. Walter Benjamin criticized fascist art for the similar reasons, in “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The DPRK propaganda is “the anesthetization of politics” to a T.
What is obscene is the way the art world set has turned something that could offer a meaningful critique of the DPRK and the limits of artistic expression under an authoritarian regime into another opportunity for conspicuous consumption.
August 13th, 2010 at 10:51AM
Yes. When I think of the set of attitudes that would lead someone to pay lots of money for one of these things, and then put it on her wall, I get a bit sick to my stomach.
August 13th, 2010 at 3:16PM
35 years ago, Susan Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/
August 14th, 2010 at 3:17PM
I am reminded of Mussolini’s son, flying bombing missions over Ethiopia, saying that from the air the bomb bursts looked like flowers blooming. And in a way, they do. Was the fault the saying of it, the aestheticizing? Does that mean it is wrong to even *think* such a thing?
August 14th, 2010 at 3:33PM
Chas – Also Stockhausen’s notorious (and possibly misquoted) statement on 9/11: “[The attacks of September 11 were] the greatest work of art in the cosmos … compared to that, we composers are nothing.”
Of course it can’t be wrong to think or to notice that abominable events can be visually compelling – even in some sense beautiful. Though I suspect in most of these cases, it’s not really beauty the spectator is registering — the enormity of the visual effect, plus one’s awareness of the massive, incalculable damage it’s doing (think of unfolding mushroom clouds as objects of weird visual delectation), probably creates a rush of negative sublime, let’s call it…
I think our sense that some of these statements are degenerate comes from the bracketing of the moral reality of the event on the part of the speaker. Some of these statements read as though the speaker is actually unaware of or indifferent toward the atrocity itself.