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A student once likened me to a cheerleader for the arts, commenting upon my enthusiasm I suppose in the crit and classroom spheres. That was a few years ago and perhaps some of my mojo—so to speak—has been lost since that time, but I am finding that some of the so-called battles waged against, between, and among the arts have been awfully tiresome recently, and almost make me want to live in a cave. I recently posted on the Seven Sharp no-brain faux-journalistic attack on Bill Culbert’s work for example. And around the same time news came that my colleague Mark Amery’s arts coverage in the Dominion Post was slashed. It’s not an especially good look for the news source for NZ’s purported “cultural capital.” It was thus heartening at least that the paper printed a lively piece countering many of the recent “anti-art” claims by curator and current head of Massey’s School of Art Heather Galbraith. In the essay, Galbraith calls attention to such actual facts as: “In the last election year Creative New Zealand held a survey that showed 85 per cent of people engaged with the arts either by attending or being actively involved in the previous 12 months.” Thus belying in part the ridiculous pseudo-controversies of late which lend the uninformed perception that New Zealanders do not care about art and culture. Heather continues, “the ‘is it art’ or ‘contemporary art is rubbish’ arguments are all too common. Surely we have a maturity to ask more interesting and in-depth questions of our art, artists and audiences?” And with shrinking arts coverage there will be fewer public platforms to ask such significant questions, as Amery points out in a piece recently posted online at The Big Idea site: “at the very time the media are increasingly treating visual art as irrelevant, artists are increasingly creating work that draws many threaded inspiration from the world around it, is increasingly engaging in extending the social and documentary. There’s never been a better time for the press to start to explore these connections.” Meanwhile, back in my batcave, I was relishing re-reading Oscar Wilde’s comments on art from the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray: “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.”
It's been a somewhat surreal week so far, and yesterday I felt as if I'd woken up with an queasy hangover feeling (this time not a real one) after agreeing to appear on a NZ infotainment program entitled SevenSharp which is catching heaps of non-stories and puffing them up so you don't have to... At any rate, I agreed to dash down to TePapa to speak with presenter Heather du Plessis Allan who proceeded to ask boldly uninformed (and factually dubious) questions regarding the work now on view of veteran NZ artist (and 2013 Venice Biennale representative) Bill Culbert. No contextual information was really allowed into the satirical hatchet job non-story configured to mostly get out the tired old complaint that art shouldn't be publicly funded for large sums (that such funding is decreasing sharply and that such sums are not very large proportionally was not discussed at all.) Yet another example of slipshod, disdainful coverage of art. On a positive note, perhaps there is so much anger marshalled against (even outwardly poetic, heavily abstracted) art because it still harbours a genuinely radical potential to disrupt expectations.
While the new film on iconic singer Alice Cooper (neé Vincent Furnier in the cultural breeding ground of Phoenix, Arizona) entitled Super Duper Alice Cooper is pretty much your standard documentary by the numbers, it's supremely entertaining Sunday afternoon viewing. Heaps of fun stuff, especially the early days as the flamboyantly dressed Alice Cooper (once the name of the band, not the singer) toured around to intense disinterest until finally playing Detroit with Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5, in my estimation much better bands, but similarly crazed performers. The resultant standing ovation appeared to be one of the formative steps in their unsteady ascent towards heavy metal-pop-kitsch infamy. Second only to Kiss in my pre-pubescent pantheon of rock and roll heroes, a most enjoyable trip down memory lane. You can read the fine critic Simon Reynolds' recent interview/profile of Cooper in the Guardian here. Trailer posted below:
