Lost girls and the shock of the new

Shock, it has to be admitted, is not chic. It is so often seen as juvenile, meretricious, boring. Even in 1865, shock was passé.

---The Guardian.

This was from an awfully written article but it did at least remind you of a point Robert Hughes raised in 'The Shock of the New': what happens when we're not shocked any more?

To think that the images (the ones that were released, anyway) of the abuse at Gitmo and other dark sites didn't really shock anyone. Or Steiner's question: what happens when there are no more limits to push up against? Against a background frat and porn culture are there any images that would truly disturb? What counts as extreme nowadays? You can bet your bottom dollar there's already a niche market for it out there.

To always revolt, to always seek out the other path seems, to me, to be less a matter of genuine choice and more a mechanical act, at best; at worst it is an approach that dovetails with, or is manipulated by, the forces of late capitalism.

The death of so many children in Gaza? Turn your face away (out of boredom, not out of horror). In the blink of any eye it will be replaced anyway, since no image is allowed to inhere in our lack-of-attention economy. 

Guenon, years ago, posed the question: in an age where the carnival is the norm what is the meaning of the carnival? 

Duchamps or Serrano: you're taking the piss!

But the question remains: when there are no settled convictions to dislodge what, exactly, is the point of the shocking, abrasive image? Does deviation make any sense without any norms? Does mockery count when the real power-today-is one that encourages us to "blacken all that shines"? And you can't but help connect this desire to shock, to tear up the past, with capitalism's need to turn the tables, uproot everyone and everything: "all that is solid..."

Grayson Perry:

I mean art in many ways, contemporary art, is almost synonymous with the idea of novelty..

By about the mid-60s, early 70s, you know most things have been at least sort of tried or suggested, and now we’re in a state where anything can be...But revolution and rebellion and this idea of upheaval is no longer what I would think of as a defining idea. You know if you’d have gone back a hundred years, art was almost synonymous with this idea...

And the art world sort of looks down and sort of goes oh yeah, nice rebellion! Welcome in!

We’ve accepted a lot of the things that were weird now are normal. 

And if you think about it, all the things that were once seen as subversive and dangerous like tattoos and piercings and drugs and interracial sex, fetishism, all these things - they sort of crop up on X Factor now on a Saturday night on family viewing..

And the creative rebel - they like to think they’re sticking it to the man, they’re sticking it to the capitalist system,.. But of course what they don’t realise - by being all inventive and creative, they’re actually playing into the capitalism’s hands because the lifeblood of capitalism is new ideas. They need new stuff to sell!  

But realness is a thing, you know that has a high currency.

~~~

Rebel Sell.

Of course, in our own way the university's "cutting edge" falls into the same paradigm. Not just in the way that research is now tailored to, or used by corporate interests, but in the more day-to-day or prosaic way in which the idea of research is largely drawn to the fake thrill of debunking or tweaking what had for large periods of time seemed quite obvious. 

One must start with the presupposition that all those who came before you were either wrong, limited in their analytic skills or plain buffoons. Then through a series of marginal notes which are trumped up as a "groundbreaking" analysis, it is hoped that the whole bleedin' Establishment will topple down-except there isn't much of an Establishment beyond the institutionalized need to keep the ball rolling in order to convince ourselves that we are, at least in some sense, free.

~~~

What struck you in the Grayson lecture was how, on the one hand, there's a craving for what's real (not: the Real or even 'the Real') and yet how on the other hand that realism soon becomes a commodity, true grit against the showy fabrications of prime time t.v. and all the fake "reality t.v."

~~~

Grayson also claims that in one of the cave paintings two horses were painted in very similar styles but that the carbon dating indicated that the paintings were done separately over a 5,000 year gap.

Now, if that is true that raises a number of questions. Firstly, ability: did they have the same technical ability to repeat the original style? Secondly, why would they want to actually do that, for what purpose? This desire to stay close to the original, the first image, the first word, what, exactly, is that?

~~~

Lost girls: