Pretentiousness: Why It Matters by Dan Fox

Author:Dan Fox [Fox, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, Criticism & Theory, Popular Culture, Literary Collections, Essays, Philosophy, Aesthetics
ISBN: 9781566894289
Google: lGtCjgEACAAJ
Amazon: B01BO2ITA0
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2016-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

The antipathy to style is always the antipathy to a given style.

—Susan Sontag, On Style (1966)

Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole, not like you.

—The Modern Lovers, “Pablo Picasso” (1976)

One sweltering afternoon in July 2013, rapper Jay Z shot a video for his song Picasso Baby at New York’s Pace Gallery. The concept for the shoot was borrowed from artist Marina Abramović’s marathon performance piece The Artist Is Present. For a total of 736 hours, Abramović sat in silence in the Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA) atrium as members of the public took turns to sit opposite her and gaze into her eyes, as if visiting a holy sage. It was pseudo-religious theater whipped up by media coverage, creating a hysteria that reduced some participants to tears and induced others to make impulsive proposals of marriage. For Picasso Baby, it was art world power players and celebrities who got an audience with Jay Z, watched behind cordons around the edges of the gallery by a handful of kids dressed to the nines, expensively moisturized young art collectors, and a smattering of critics. In his song, Jay Z name-dropped artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Warhol. He mentioned Christie’s auction house and showed off about “balling twin Bugattis outside the Art Basel” art fair in Switzerland. His song was a hymn to the material worth of modern and contemporary art, only interesting when seen through the lens of class and race, of a successful black musician and businessman working the mostly white art world.

In March 2015, MOMA opened an exhibition of costumes, design, and videos charting the career of Icelandic musician Björk. It published a catalog explaining how the exhibition “aimed to broaden the canon of what contemporary museums exhibit and collect, while also raising questions about the longevity of pop music, a genre that is evolving and has not proven its classic timelessness.” Klaus Biesenbach, the exhibition’s curator, asked: “Can a work of popular culture achieve ‘eternal truth and beauty’ when it is independent and removed from its broader cultural context?” Pop music has produced some of the most serious cultural works of the past seventy years—a number of them older than canonical works of modernist art in MOMA’s collection—but old hierarchies die hard, “eternal truth and beauty” reserved only for those with the correct identity papers.

What Björk’s and Jay Z’s art world appearances revealed were two forms of artistic status anxiety. For Björk, MOMA wanted to have its cake and eat it; to draw in the crowds but maintain a scholarly aloofness, a reserve, as if to say “you run along and have your fun while we talk about serious art with the grown-ups.” At the Picasso Baby video shoot, Jay Z’s superstardom played a dance with the art world’s theater of understated but specialized aesthetic authority. Neither Jay Z nor Björk needed art world approval, and the argot of the museum can tell us little about their work that isn’t already legible. But these musicians have been caught in the long and torrid affair between pop music and modern and contemporary art.

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