Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

Opinion
Who Will Teach Us How to Feel?
When art shrinks to the size of politics.

My colleagues at T Magazine had a very good idea. They gathered some artists and museum curators and asked them to name the artworks that define the contemporary age — pieces created anywhere in the world since 1970.

I can’t stop thinking about the results. The first thing you notice is that of the 25 works they chose, very few are paintings or sculptures.

Most of the pieces selected are intellectual concepts or political attitudes expressed through video, photographs, installations or words. In 1982, for example, Jenny Holzer put the words “Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise” on a digital billboard in Times Square. In 1985, Barbara Kruger took an image of a ventriloquist’s dummy and printed “When I Hear the Word Culture, I Take Out My Checkbook” across its face.

Of the 27 artists recognized, 20 were born in the U.S.

The next thing you notice is that most of these artists haven’t captured or maybe even appealed to a mass audience. If asked to name the era-defining artists from the 49 years prior to 1970, most of us would come up with world-famous artists: Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, etc. The artists listed here, from the 49 years after 1970, are generally not well known outside the art world: for instance, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lutz Bacher and Michael Asher.

Most of the artists have adopted a similar pose: political provocateur. The works are less beautiful creations to be experienced and more often political statements to be decoded. In 1989, for example, Cady Noland made a silk-screen of the famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot. There are eight large bullet holes across his body and there’s an American flag stuffed in his mouth.

The most provocative pieces are in the realm of sexual politics, where the art world has had its biggest influence. Jeff Koons is recognized here for “Ilona on Top,” a painting showing him having sex with the porn star who would become his wife.

Several works redefine female power. In 1974, the artist Lynda Benglis posed naked with a dildo between her legs. In 1972, Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and others created “Womanhouse,” a living feminist manifesto. In 1993, Catherine Opie created “Self-Portrait/Cutting,” in which someone has carved two stick figures and a house into her back with a knife or razor. The figures depict an idyllic domestic dream that was hard for lesbians to realize at the time.

The general attitude is: Let’s smash injustice with a sledgehammer. What you see when all these works are brought together is how the aesthetic has given way to the political, how the inner life has given way to the protest gesture.

Artists have always taken political stands, but in some eras there’s more of a conviction that beauty yields larger truths about the human condition that are not accessible through politics alone — and these are the truths that keep us sane. Now one gets the sense that not only is the personal political, but that the political has eclipsed the personal. What’s missing from most of these pieces is human contact and emotional range.

Among these 25 pieces, 20 are impersonal and only five allow you to see what life is like for another human being, including works by Nan Goldin and Judy Chicago. Only a few explore relationships and emotional connection. There almost seems to be a taboo now against capturing states like joy, temptation, gratitude, exaltation, betrayal, forgiveness and longing.

The absence of that emotional range reminds you that one of the things art has traditionally done is educate the emotions. Lisa Feldman Barrett and other neuroscientists argue that emotions aren’t baked into our nature as things all humans share. They are constructed by culture — art and music, and relationships. When we see the depth of psychological expression in a Rembrandt portrait, or experience the intimacy of a mother and daughter in a Mary Cassatt, we’re not gaining a new fact, but we’re experiencing a new emotion. We’re widening the repertoire of ways we can feel and can communicate feelings to others.

Barrett uses the phrase “emotional granularity” to capture the reality that some people — and some eras — experience a wider range and specificity of emotions than others. People with highly educated emotions can be astonished by the complexity of other people without feeling the need to judge them immediately as good or bad according to some political logic.

This list fascinated me because it comes at a moment when everything is political — and our politics has brutalized the nation’s emotional life.

One of the pieces that stands out is Arthur Jafa’s 2016 video montage “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.” It’s an intense compilation of the African-American experience — love, celebration, police shootings, religious frenzy, racism, dance, struggle. There are so many powerful emotions in a short burst, an overflowing of relationship. It’s a political work that transcends politics and reminds us: This is how life looks with human particularity left in.

A comment:

@Tyler Williams
I am an old white guy, an actor, and Shakespeare lover, Van Gogh fanatic and daily classical music listener...I frequently have your response to Brook's writings. But I must admit that these modern artistic expressions do leave me cold. I suppose because, like Brooks, I'm looking for comfort, solace in art. Anger frightens me (why I hate trump and the GOP). I know, I need to have courage, determination and resist...I wish modern art helped me. I feel lost.

Fucking white people and their fucking lostness.

Fucking Van Gogh fanatics

so... it's an essay about an essay in T Magazine huh

ok boomer

people who are frightened by anger make me mad

to be clear, that's not what i'm saying.

I mostly don't like anger as an aesthetic but yeah fuck privileged longing for politeness

Not you treesh, the article and a section of the commentariat

it's true that i learned how to feel emotion from jackson pollock

Brooks conflates an aggregate list from chosen contributors with the total body of work that was produced during the era, then cherry-picks a list of artists that he seems to imply are counter to the contemporary trends he's mentioned without context. I'd be more interested in what a list produced in 1970 about the prior decades would look like compared to his list, because the implication is that he's using the same criteria as opposed to making a 1921 - 1970 list that fits his narrative.

blah blah Pollock blah blah CIA propaganda blah blah apolitical

but what does he think about marvel films

it's true that the contemporary art world -- the world of the major museums and the major galleries -- is captured by this highly arid type of language and like way of framing stuff. i like some of the work on that list, but i think it's symptomatic that these were the pieces that were determined as the most "important." people love njideka akunyili crosby, peter doig, yayoi kusama, a hundred million others, but they are left out in favor of people like sturtevant, marcel broodthaers , hans haacke and these other artists who are mostly engaged in institutional critique.

the art world is obsessed with itself and especially with critiquing itself.

I think we know. They help him learn to (cop a) feel.

xpost

the dumb blood-stained Bushes

btw

ppl who believe trump is worse than gwb have tds

say what you will about the tenets of neoconservatism but at least it's an ethos

we should do a ballot poll of the best presidents

wm shabazz would win obv

I liked their early stuff before they were presidents

Ornaldo Bloompz

from a historical perspective I actually don't know whether Alfred would send Reagan to The Hague or if he's safely Sound, Solid Entertainments

i don't know anything about the Art World so i am obv lazily tempted to believe it is all a bunch of highly specialized scamming at the expense of some of the least sympathetic marks on the planet, but who knows. however

In 1989, for example, Cady Noland made a silk-screen of the famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot. There are eight large bullet holes across his body and there’s an American flag stuffed in his mouth.

obv the problem with this is not that it's "political" but that it's so pale and shallow in comparison to the wealth of oswald-related art in other, masser media-- libra, oswald's tale, jfk, the original photograph itself-- that it's not political enough, and a democrat like me's inclined to suspect it is its very masslessness that has made it so

i don't rly trust david brooks to accurately describe anything to me tho.

I jes' hate to think they're blaming it on some silly fuckin' Oswald who didn't know shit anyway!

it is my face, but my face has been superimposed! i have done a lot of photographic work!

Fucking white people and their fucking lostness.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, November 19, 2019 4:23 PM bookmarkflaglink

people who are frightened by anger make me mad

― tantric societal collapse (rushomancy), Tuesday, November 19, 2019 4:29 PM bookmarkflaglink

yeah idgi either. for instance, I never watched the Charlottesville video, and then I went and saw BlackKKKlansman and naturally it's what concludes the movie. the context of how it was included in the movie fired me up and motivated me in a way that no other bit of world news had in a hot minute.

If Spike Lee films were included in that T Magazine article I would have liked it way more—fyi

seems like people who don't think he's had an out of ordinary effect don't really care about the people/things he's had an out of ordinary effect on.

― Peaceful Warrior I Poser (Karl Malone), Tuesday, November 19, 2019 10:17 AM (yesterday)

otm!!

however ...

3) Tax policy has been terrible for all but the wealthy under Trump

That actually isn't true ... granted, it has been pretty fucking great for the wealthy. My practice expanded this year so now I have over 200 clients, maybe only one or two I would consider "wealthy," and I can tell you:
there were plenty of people for whom things weren't any worse than in previous years.
There were some that were spared the time on tracking various expenses.
There were some that benefited from the creation of the QBI deduction
There were some that ended up owing who "never owe" because the changes were so last-minute and wide-ranging that the entities that create the withholding tables and rate calculations were scrambling to figure out how to adjust their formulas (which had pretty much been the same since at least 1986) so people who were employees with incomes within certain ranges (generally middle, not low income people) ended up with less tax taken out of their paychecks than should have been.
The biggest impact I saw was the big "fuck you" to the "blue states" (California, New York, Massachussetts) that have higher costs of living as well as state income taxes. ... The "SALT" thing that was in the news for like about a week a while back. The clients this had the most effect on: the wealthier ones.
The most heartbreaking change: the elimination of casualty/theft loss deductions except for in the case of an officially declared disaster.

i don't think ZS's comment is otm. you could say this about any president - that for the ppl who are negatively impacted it's cold comfort to say that it's business as usual. okay. but that doesn't mean it's an out of ordinary effect. like maybe GWB was better for immigration from latin american countries. so if you happen to be a latin american immigrant maybe you'd prefer GWB to trump. but what if you were an iraqi or a prisoner being tortured, or etc etc by the extreme subjectivity standard of "for some ppl he's much worse" i'm sure you could ppl for whom obama was much worse than trump (i know some orthodox jews who seem to believe this). i don't think it's a useful standard.

does quantifying the ppl make it useful??? Like, say, 10k people for whom obama was worse, vs. 100k people for whom trump was worse?

trump has probably straight-up killed fewer people than many of his predecessors, which is a point in his favor

he's also been incredibly destructive to the governing institutions of the united states in a fashion that will never go away. if you are black, gay, purple etc. you may never have had much faith in those institutions, but a lot of people did. there is no returning to a time before the country elected a wildly unqualified game-show host and saw one of its parties fall in line to support all of his extremely obvious lies. the window of what is possible in america and the legitimacy of its government and its standing in the world have changed in ways that can't be undone

trump didn't do all of this on his own, of course, but he's both the culmination and the exemplar

Clinton's trade and crime policies may have Trump beat if it's a numbers game

i recognize i'm in a losing position in this debate, in part because i believe a lot of the negative impact of trump is psychological, which is not going to be easily quantified and compared to other presidents. i don't know how you quantify the fear that many millions of immigrants viscerally feel. if you try to quantify the number of people deported or detained etc and compare it, you're still not getting the full picture because the damage from trump is so much larger than that to immigrants. knowing that a good 45-50% of the country willingly supports a president who sees immigrants as subhuman is something that is "negative", in my book. or depression. i can't quantify how depressing seeing millions of people support the dumbest person in world history feels, but i do know that on a lot of days i just want to die and i don't give a fuck. but i used to feel like that during the obama years too! maybe i feel like that 1.24x more than i did before? it's just pointless to try to measure it. but i know it's real. (and i can't prove it! lol! great argument, self!)

Nah you did good. Yr otm. Feel better and accept the otm

but i stand by my assessment that people who are cruising through this presidency like any other and don't see much difference are people who just don't care much about the people who are negatively affected. i guess that's understandable. like mordy says, in the bush years, uh, we tortured the fuck out of a bunch of people in the middle east. was i psychologically traumatized by that to the same degree? isn't that all subjective, too?

i guess personally speaking, the difference is that the many conservatives in my life kind of conspicuously avoided talking about all that and seemed embarrassed, whereas now they are all vocally racist about immigrants and proud about it (for example). or just the idea that trump is such an incredible dumb fuck and they still like him. trump really has torn a lot of families in two over the last 3 years, in a way that bush/iraq didn't, for better or worse. but again, i can't quantify that or prove it, so

xp

lol, thanks sarahell

Karl otm

This is his only possible move, obviously, but it’s also so exhausting to have the leader of the free world just hammer his people with lie after lie every day. It’s taking such a toll on the American psyche. https://t.co/eHJQ3i4yMk

— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) November 20, 2019

to take this a bit further, sorry

if you try to quantify the number of people deported or detained etc and compare it, you're still not getting the full picture because the damage from trump is so much larger than that to immigrants. knowing that a good 45-50% of the country willingly supports a president who sees immigrants as subhuman is something that is "negative", in my book

this is true with other things too, including white supremacy. i can see a criticism of my point being that people of color already knew that so many people were racist, so it's nothing new or damaging. i can't speak to that. but i do think the trump era is like a _confirmation_ of their racism. it was largely implied and concealed, earlier, through indirect things like republicans constant disdain for programs that helped low-income communities and people of color, or their constant attack on voting rights. but there was still enough indirectness for people like me to look at their parents and think "yeah, they support racist policies, but they wouldn't support george bush if he, say, constantly compared back people to dogs, even after being called out on it over and over". but now, it's a _confirmation_ of that reality. which i should have known, earlier. white people like me caught some heat, justifiably, after the election, for being so surprised at racism of other white people. personally, i was surprised at the intensity of the racism, and how openly it was embraced by people i know. in the bush years, their support for the war and for neoconservatism disgusted me. but it's different now. now they're fucking dead to me, for seeing what he supports and still pulling the goddamn lever. i don't think i'm the only one who has experienced this acceleration of disgust for people who used to be close.

actually, last minute tone shift - if you don't see the psychological damage or the affect on people's lives, just stay where you are! it sounds awesome there!

Feels like a lot of this hinges on how you feel about or value postwar institutions and US cold war policy with respect to Europe.

If you believe that on balance these institutions—the UN, NATO, the west's absorption of former Soviet blocs, Russia's containment, etc.—was basically stabilizing and facilitated 75 years of relative peace in Europe (notwithstanding civil strife, balkanization, etc) then FUCKING HELL NO—Donald Trump is in a category all by himself. It's not even remotely close. This president unlike his immoral predecessors, is wholly amoral. It's a qualitative difference and unchecked will have lasting consequences Reagan Bush Obama Clinton can only dream of.

BTW, China responded to totally arbitrary senseless US Paris withdrawal by ramping up coal consumption:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-china-coal/china-coal-fired-power-capacity-still-rising-bucking-global-trend-study-idUSKBN1XU07Y

it sounds like you're saying that the psychological impact is greater on people who had a certain idealism about the united states and the people who live here that has been crushed. it could be so! but this might be inconsistent with your assertion that if you think trump is business as usual then you're blasé to the negative impact he's had. now i'm not sure who is arguing the uncool conservative belief anymore however to make it easier i'll just state another presumably uncool conservative belief which is that you have a measure of control over your psychological response to trump, especially if you're not a part of a group being targeted (but even if you are). fwiw i've suffered most of my life from depression + anxiety and only recently have reached a certain level of internal stability so this message is as much to me as anyone else but ppl have been in far more direr + forlorn circumstances than any of us and maintained an equilibrium and found meaning and purpose and kept their chin up etc and so certainly we, who mostly are impacted by trump lying on twitter i guess, can find a way forward as well.

xp

If you believe that on balance these institutions—the UN, NATO, the west's absorption of former Soviet blocs, Russia's containment, etc.—was basically stabilizing and facilitated 75 years of relative peace in Europe (notwithstanding civil strife, balkanization, etc)

I think this is too speculative to say for sure either way (either that these institutions are the reason for stabilization or were a product of other forces - like burnout from WW2, globalization, etc, or that trump has irrevocably damaged them).

I think that's fair, my point is this president has no position on the matter, it comes down to how these instituitions dovetail with his own self (as opposed to national) interest.

I for one wasn't sure in 2016 that "no principles, non-ideological" could really be worse than "ideological, compromised principles."

It is. Keeping score by body count now isn't gonna tell the story. Wait five or ten years and see where all this chaos lands us.

remember that brexit vote happened months before the 2016 US election under obama's watch so it seems questionable to blame fracturing of EU on trump

it sounds like you're saying that the psychological impact is greater on people who had a certain idealism about the united states and the people who live here that has been crushed. it could be so! but this might be inconsistent with your assertion that if you think trump is business as usual then you're blasé to the negative impact he's had.

hmmm, i don't think so! i still disagree with the premise that trump is BAU. the whole open embrace of white supremacism thing isn't business as usual to me. like i rambled above, it has precedents, but not to this degree. nothing is implied now, it's raw racism, and it's the feature, not a bug. his supporters love it. do you not notice that? not to make too many assumptions, but have you been to a flyover state recently? it's gotten creepier since 2016

xp I'm not—I think Trump was lifted by the same global far-right wave that has injured europe. I also think any one of Trump's predecessors (not for altrustic reasons!) would maintain a bulwark agaist it, whereas with this guy forget about it.

also (and finally, promise) i admit that i can't unsee what i clearly see in front of my face very day, which is the increasing polarization of the country, the purposeful muddying of "truth" or "news" or "facts", the demise of institutions to keep these things in check (i know you and i disagree on that), etc