The role of the critic in culture: guardian/gatekeeper of the gift. 

Bright Star: She cuts like a knife with the eyes of her words.

We sat down, my attention was on mixing the salad. John was talking, then he wasn’t. At one point between the minutes or seconds he stopped talking, he’d asked me if I’d used single or malt scotch for his second drink. I said no, I’d used the same scotch I’d used for his first drink. Good, he had said, I don’t know why but I don’t think you should mix them.

Transcribed from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. The book is unpacked by Terry Gross’ interview with the writer, available for listening pleasure if you click here.

Mark Rothko- Red on Maroon, Mural, Section 4, 1959

Hearing this, Joe was reassured. Beauties have their weaknesses. Buildings have their flaws. He’d seek out the lonely between walls of imposing buildings. He’d come down with no fire to light and hope there was another brave enough to ignite some roll, some feeling of inclusion. He wanted to live beyond the weight of his memory. He wanted to step outside to talk to the strong, beautiful ones, even if this meant finding out they were weak and fragile as anyone else. They were as weak as him; but they were here. That has to count for something, now doesn’t it. And it wasn’t a question.

- Mary Elizabeth Borkowski, Cold Turkey (2008)

On the Virtues of Ingratitude

(via hristos) 

“[G]ratitude hurts our critical capacities by forbidding dissatisfaction with a scale that tilts, albeit by chance, in one’s favor.”

By Atossa Abrahamian

We could not have learned the hard way. We were raised in the midst of booms and bubbles and unsustainable prosperity; we didn’t realize how lucky we were, our parents would say. If we scowled at the broccoli on our plate, we would predictably be reminded about the starving orphans in Africa. If we whined about blisters, we were told we were fortunate to own shoes at all. Our parents, who came of age with televised Vietnams and Soviet repression, still love to invoke gratitude when confronting us about our bad attitudes. We were taught to be grateful for our homework, for our itchy sweaters, for the unhappy greens and fishes on our plates; we were, after all, among the privileged few to have such luxuries.  

“Ingrate” became parental abracadabra for enforcing guilt-driven compliance. It still brings out an almost religious state of bad conscience, and we respond accordingly: Trash is taken out; dry turkey is chewed and swallowed with anxious fervor; grace is uttered and sins of gluttony, sloth, greed, and pride are absolved. We are grateful for what we have, so long as we are the ones who have it.  

The importance of gratitude has been emphasized for centuries. Cicero proclaimed that gratitude was “not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” Gratitude is also a cornerstone of Judeo-Christian thought. Men must thank the giver of all gifts for the blessings he has bestowed upon them, whether they realize their value (Psalms, Hebrews) or not (Job), and most important, he must do so unconditionally (Thessalonians).

Unlike feelings of love, envy, despair, annoyance, greed, optimism, pessimism, and even happiness, gratitude is seldom presented as having a downside. Harmless at worst, it is a sign of conscience, of a certain down-to-earthness, even maturity. Whatever the cause of our gratitude, the emotion is experienced in a uniform way — we feel elated, relieved, content, and perhaps a little guilty. But there are important differences between “horizontal” gratitude — being grateful that parents worked hard to put us in good schools, for example — and a fuzzier, metaphysical “vertical” gratitude for, say, not having been born in a Palestinian refugee camp. Horizontal gratitude is primarily directed towards our fellow man, when thanking friends for help, receiving a gift, or even appreciating food or art. But vertical gratitude is bottom-up: quite literally thanking God (or an equivalent) for one’s lot in life. 

That the world needs horizontal gratitude — that we ought to respect one another, try to appreciate people and return favors — goes without saying. But to systematically praise the heavens that our lives have turned out so fortunately has less desirable ramifications, too. Dorothy Parker was likely referring to the vertical variety when she wrote that gratitude was “the meanest and most sniveling attribute in the world.” Though vertical gratitude does not necessarily arise out of malice or spite, it is a mistake to consider it a positive attribute. Vertical gratitude permits us to emote, rather than act, as a way to reconcile our privilege with flagrant global injustice. To be unconditionally grateful for one’s privileged status in a world with limited, unequally distributed resources, is to be grateful that such injustice exists at all. 

*  *  *

Typically, vertical gratitude grows from a sense of Geburtsglück, or birth-luck: “I was born X — thank God I was born X!” This is nothing like the luck one feels when winning the lottery or escaping a close brush with a speeding vehicle; there’s no urgency, no adrenaline, no pointed awareness of what non-luck is like. By virtue of being born with a certain privilege, you will likely never have to experience life otherwise. But if, through some serious misfortune, you are forced to join the ranks of the less fortunate, would still you feel grateful for having once been so rich? Probably not; you may even curse your former luck for having set you up for such disappointment and making it necessary for some, like you, to live in squalor. Perhaps your former gratitude would then be exposed as just a gentler expression of what you felt as a birthright, a sense of entitlement.

Vertical gratitude also hurts our critical capacities by forbidding dissatisfaction with a scale that tilts, albeit by chance, in one’s favor. It is no coincidence it was so often evoked by the conservative political groups I encountered when studying at Columbia. Every time a protest was organized to demand changes – a less Eurocentric reading list, more financial aid for minorities, and so on – protesters were told they should count themselves lucky for being a student there at all, and that if Columbia did not meet their exceedingly high standards, they should not have applied in the first place. Moreover, the conservatives would argue, the existing standards –  inequality, Eurocentrism and all – are exactly what made it possible for Columbia to become a first-rate university. Why jeopardize its (and your!) prestige by pressing for unneeded changes?

The cyclical backlashes against nondiscrimination activists – feminists or otherwise – rely too on the idea that a given group should be happy with their position, which, while imperfect, could be much worse and is a marked improvement on the past. This is a dangerous impulse. Was there not a time in American history when slaves were advised to be grateful for the “protection” of their masters, and white abolitionists told to be glad they were not born slaves. Where would we be if such gratitude – and its requisite complacency - had prevailed?

The generation now reaching its mid-20s in the West is arguably the first to inherit that oft-described sense of global connectedness that the media began proclaiming after the Berlin Wall fell and that has become exacerbated by the Internet and 24-hour news cycles. This illusion of networked cosmopolitanism provides round-the-clock access to a multitude of opinions, images and lifestyles, as well as the foreign, constricted contours of lives we cannot begin to imagine living. Our gratitude for having equal rights as women, for not having to use an outhouse, for eating and drinking as we please, and for walking down the street without the threat of bullets or landmines, results in relief and pity as we retreat from digital dystopia to our protective cocoon of privilege. We see enough to decide that we want our lives to stay the way they are, and react to the manifest and overwhelming unfairness of globalization not with indignation but with a weary complicity. Instead of growing angry about the fact that we have so much more than others – that is, that others have so much less than us — we put a smile on our faces and accept that we truly do live in the best of worlds.

We wouldn’t want to seem unappreciative, now, would we?

Escapism & Art for Lonely Kids

By Helena Fitzgerald

“…but it seemed to Joe that none of these—Faustian hubris least of all—were among the true reasons that impelled men, time and time again, to hazard the making of Golems. The shaping of a Golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something—one poor, dumb, powerful thing—exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like The Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Hippodromes and Palladiums of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly painted flats and hokum, animated all the while only by this same desire, never fulfilled; truly to escape, if only for one instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the mysterious spirit world that lay beyond. The newspaper articles Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited ‘escapism’ among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying their desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.”

—Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

‘Escapism’ sounds immediately frivolous. We talk about escapism when we talk about useless and destructive behaviors—escaping into drugs or shopping or drinking, into reckless, pointless consumption. It’s the addict, the overeater, the misanthrope with television-glazed eyes. It’s the last drink when everything you’ve ever done seems perfectly right and good and then you can’t remember how to stand up and walk home. However, according Chabon’s vaulting figuration, it’s the most ‘noble and neccessary service’ of art.

In this paragraph the Golem, comic books, and Houdini become a metaphor for every kind of art, a thesis on the most essential reason we make things. Mythologizing the issue in a way rooted in his particular heritage, Chabon figures all art as a Golem. He then relates art to comic books by positing the Golem as the first comic book superhero. We construct superheroes; we attempt to transform ourselves into them. The basic action of art, the ‘noble and necessary purpose’ is to in some measure fulfill the yearning of the kid who reads about superheroes and longs for magical powers that would allow him vengeance against the classmates who beat him up each day.

Escapism is about loneliness, and loneliness is always somehow about childhood, which is why Chabon roots this thesis in childish mediums. We begin our relationships to literature or art, if we begin them in childhood, with escapism. A little kid stares at a bookshelf, a teenager goes to the library instead of the cafeteria. These choices are not so different, in their goal, from those of the drunk, the drug addict or the compulsive spender. Nor are they different from those of the kid who still believes in superheroes and magic. All of these choices share the same hope of merciful removal, by way of fantasy, from present circumstance.

On some level, probably the first and most immediate level, all art is fantasy. No matter how dry or academic, all art serves a function exemplified best in pornography, in which fantasy is offered, bought, and sold. Any depiction of over there rather than right here is a fantasy, and even the most mimetic work always takes place over there. Art is transportation. Writing, even argumentative criticism, picks us up and carries us away to elsewhere.

Escapism is adult because it is childish. When we escape into booze or drugs or spending money, what we are actually trying to do is to get back to childhood, or more accurately the idea of a childhood most of us never had. Childhood, understood as a longing imaginary, is a time when there were no consequences to drinking, eating, or spending money. There were no consequences to decisions because someone made decisions for you. There was no regret because there had as yet been no past. Being a kid is being able to look out back window of a car without feeling sad.

We can’t get back there; it didn’t exist anyway. But we can attempt something so engaging, so transportatively correct (a paragraph, for instance, as brilliantly constructed Chabon’s excerpted above), that it lifts us briefly out of the awareness of what we’ve lost, what we regret, what we have to do tomorrow, and where we’ve ended up in relation to where we were going to be. Art compels us elsewhere, as merciful and as useful as drugs. It permits us to step out of “the borders of this world, with its harsh psychics.” Escape into a cleaner and more perfect elsewhere (or even an equally sullied but less actual next-door world) renews hope. If we do not or cannot go to imaginary places, we are far less likely to go to new real places, or in fact to go anywhere at all. Without escapism we rot, static and unsatisfied, ambitionless.

19B

“Strawberry Jello,” 1959

catalogue 31

from “Success is a job in New York…”: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol

from Chapter 20, Book II. George Eliot. Middlemarch. (via mebbee)

The Dark Shadow of Amazon.com’s Long Tail

> Amazon.com warehouse. Image via Businessweek

We recommend to our readers Colin Robinson’s recent essay in The Nation, “The Trouble with Amazon.” 

As Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, explains, “When the choice set is larger, people tend to make worse choices. They choose on the basis of what’s easiest to evaluate, rather than what’s important to evaluate…the safe, highly marketed option usually comes out on top.”

This apparent anomaly of greater choice resulting in a narrower selection finds a corollary in Amazon’s use of metrics to recommend titles based on previous purchases. The algorithms at work here are highly sophisticated and are widely credited with expanding consumer choice. Yet such metric-based systems can simultaneously increase the variety of books purchased by individual customers while decreasing the overall variety of books bought by everyone. 

[…]

The loss of serendipity that comes with not knowing exactly what one is looking for is lamented by ex-Amazon editor James Marcus: “Personalization strikes me as a mixed blessing. While it gives people what they want—or what they think they want—it also engineers spontaneity out of the picture. The happy accident, the freakish discovery, ceases to exist. And that’s a problem.”

That sentiment is underscored by Charlie Winton, CEO of Counterpoint Press: “Shopping on Amazon is a directed experience—it works best when you know what you’re looking for. But how does that help with, for instance, a first novel? When independent bookstores were in a healthier state, staff picks and hand selling could bring attention to great books people didn’t know they wanted. Now that’s much harder.” 

Our thoughts exactly. Read it all here.

Excerpts from a conversation with David Foster Wallace during the last leg of his Infinite Jest book tour in 1996. From Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky.

I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It’s a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn’t require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can’t see me. And that they’re there for me, and I can, I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive.

The problem is it’s also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I’ve gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there’s also, there’s something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we’ve all got to figure out how to be together in the same room.

[…] And that as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like—I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail, and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, at a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? but if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die. 

But you developed some defenses?

No. This is the great thing about it, is that probably each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War Two. You know? For us, it’s gonna be that at, at a certain point, that we’re either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being? And if we don’t do that, then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt.

[…]

[What about] the Web, the “Interlace” in [Infinite Jest]—in fifteen years? 

Yep. And the big thing, if you’re doin’ movies and packaging any sort of thing, is to get in on the Interlace grid. That Interlace will be this enormous gatekeeper. It will be like sort of the one publishing house from hell. They decide what you get and what you don’t. 

Because this idea that the Internet’s gonna become incredibly democratic? I mean, if you’ve spent any time on the Web, you know that it’s not gonna be, because that’s completely overwhelming. There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99 percent of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide. 

So, it’s very clearly, very soon there’s gonna be an economic niche opening up for gatekeepers. You know? Or, what do you call them, Wells, or various nexes. Not just of interest but of quality. And then things get real interesting. And we will beg for those things to be there. Because otherwise we’re gonna spend 95 percent of our time body-surfing through shit that every joker in his basement—who’s not a pro, like you were talking about last night. I tell you, there’s no single more interesting time to be alive on the planet Earth than in the next twenty years. It’s gonna be—you’re gonna get to watch all of human history played out again real quickly.

Eds: One take on the evolution of (so-called) beauty; “Women in Art,” a YouTube meme circa 2007. See an index of the featured images here.

Demoting Beauty

by Rob Horning

I’m skeptical about transcendental beauty, if only because what is held to be beautiful seems to drift with time. Of course, that itself may just be an illusion. That all I can see is unceasing change in beauty could be the consequence of having been socialized as a consumer, trained to recognize value primarily in novelty. Beauty descends to the level of fashion, and though timeless is a commonplace in fashion-industry marketing copy, fashion cycles themselves usually seem much more salient than the specifics of anything they happen to celebrate. Fashion is no proxy for beauty; it aspires to supplant it.

But fashion cycles make explicit the logic that has long underwritten the cultural power of what has gone under the name of beauty. The power to dictate fashion as a series of apparent discoveries is akin to the authority to credibly announce beauty, thereby shape the contours of social perception and define the aesthetic. Beauty is more an ideological effect than an intrinsic quality of things, a residue of the process of power that decides who should reap beauty’s associated benefits. In The Ideology of the Aesthetic Terry Eagleton, extrapolating from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, claims that for the capitalist society that was then just taking shape,

the beautiful is just political order lived out on the body, the way it strikes the eye and stirs the heart. If it is inexplicable, beyond all rational debate, it is because our fellowship with others is likewise beyond all reason, as gloriously pointless as a poem. The socially disruptive, by contrast, is as instantly offensive as a foul smell. The unity of social life sustains itself, requiring no further legitimation.

The particular usefulness of beauty lies in its positing an eternal, elemental value. It connotes transcendence and veils its own practical advantages, so its privileges and the social hierarchy it stabilizes seem unquestionable. It expresses a fixed distribution of cultural capital with immediacy, as though it were a natural intuition. Our response to beauty is our heart volunteering us for the gentlest form of domination.

But what happens when the beautiful is compelled to continually change, as in a consumer economy which requires a steady stream of new desires? Does the social order itself become fundamentally speculative? Ashley Mears, in this essay for 3 Quarks Daily, suggests as much. She begins by examining why certain fashion models become ubiquitous and iconic when, for all practical purposes, they are interchangeable. Using Canadian supermodel Coco Rocha as an example, Mears asks, “how, among the thousands of wannabe models worldwide, is any one 14-year-old able to rise from the pack? What makes Coco Rocha more valuable than the thousands of similar contestants?” Mears argues that “there is very little intrinsic value in Coco’s physique that would set her apart from any number of other similarly-built teens,” suggesting that her beauty-value is instead “bequeathed” to her by nature of the “unstable market” in which that value is realized.

The experts responsible for elevating models to elite status “don’t know what makes one model a better choice than another,” Mears notes; the process is ruled by the inarticulate whims of fashion’s managerial class:

Like dozens of fashion producers I spoke with, Russell doesn’t really know what it is about a kid like Coco Rocha that excites him. He “just knows” if a model is right for him, and further, he “knows it when he sees it.”

Here again we see the legitimizing force of the inexplicable played out as aesthetics. What Russell “just knows” is not some ineffable movement of his own sensitive spirit but a collective understanding of what image his industry has authenticated, something not set down explicitly but communicated through reciprocal patterns of protective imitation.

Mears points out the importance of the social network to this project: “producers talk. They hang out throughout the week at lunches, dinners, parties…. They talk constantly, facebooking, texting, and drinking; they even date each other. They share social and cultural space, and they pick up on the gossip, or ‘the buzz,’ this way.” This social network produces an ideal of beauty for a particular moment that is reconstituted as the height of fashion. Its efficacy in turn authenticates the exclusivity of the network, whose members conserve the power of naming the beautiful. Within the network, the data regarding what is suspected to be beautiful circulates, and that urgent process of circulation, the cultural stakes it presupposes, constitutes those suspicions of beauty as manifest reality.

As Mears explains, this sort of information cascade generates value in finance as well as fashion, and the parallels allow each to become a metaphor for the other. Fashion is the financialization of the aesthetic; finance is the quest to create fashionable assets. But Mears is troubled by the void at the heart of both practices: “A finance market, like a fashion market, consists of speculators chasing each other’s tails in disregard for what things are really worth.”

This presumes that the “real worth” of things can be deduced in some other way that we irrationally choose to neglect. But it may indicate instead that “real value” — transcendent beauty — is inherently mysterious, unknowable. In its place is ideology, seeking to explain the void, bridge us across that gap to the transcendent, to value, to the thing itself.

Because it is ideological, because it refers to no eternal verities, beauty us allows to grasp power in a glance as pleasure. The hard, protracted work — the information hoarding; the craven herding; the endless rounds of promotion that went into establishing a particular hegemonic ideal — vanishes into the instant, leaving behind only a sense of compulsory approval and attraction. We feel as though we are glimpsing both what we want to have and want to be, or what we are supposed to, at any rate, but also something far more insidious. In that moment of perceiving consumerist beauty, being and having are inseparably blended so that identity can seem a matter of owning things and seeing becomes a mode of possession. Lost is a different way to commune with the beautiful, the mode of surrender, of giving ourselves away for good.

___

Rob Horning writes Marginal Utility, a blog about culture and economics.

The Art of Promotion (1)

The below press packet was discovered in a box at WKCR 89.9FM by The New Inquiry. It may or may not have been officially authorized or affiliated with James Brown. We do not know; but somehow doubt it. 

Dear Station Owner, DJ, Music/Program Director:

We here at James Brown Enterprises are deeply concerned about our youth. We are not only concerned with them doing the right things but also making the right decisions in life. 

The time has now come for us to clean up our air waves. We need to wipe our the profanity and violence portrayed in music that is greatly influencing our youth. Our young people are being drawn to drugs, gangs, and other illicit behavior by the music they listen to. As a result they emulate what is heard in very graphic lyrics. 

We as Radio Station owners, Program/Music Directors, DJ’s and Artists, have to stop this plague. In an effort to shed some light on a dark situation, I have release a new single from the Universal James album entitled, “HOW LONG.” This single focuses on the dilemmas facing our youth such as gangs, teen pregnancy and joblessness. This song makes a plea not only to youth, but to all people to respect themselves as well as others, to have faith in a better tomorrow, and to come together as a people to work these problems out. 

I am personally encouraging all Radio stations to join in the struggle to save our children by playing my new single “HOW LONG”. Remember, it’s up to us to make a better tomorrow for our children by providing education. Because if they don’t know it, they can’t do it…..

Sincerely, 

James Brown