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The most important thing, revisited.

display, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

What is more absurd than a sports car? It is usually limited in seating capacity, more expensive to buy, to service, to insure, and to run. It has an engine that is oversize, and is built for speeds that are usually illegal. Yet such a thing is highly prized and often is an object of desire. Like swimming pools in Arizona. Supply and demand you say? Yes, in a strange way, in a way where utility is not a factor. Buying groceries with a sports car happens, and so does cooling off in swimming pools on hot days. But just saying these lines sounds drab, pedestrian and quaintly humorous, not to mention pretentious and stilted. Indicators that something is off, way off.

So if it is not supply and demand for utility, what is it?

Display maybe, like huge elk horns or very red bums on baboons? Yes, but that is a bit obvious is it not? What if sports cars were inexpensive? Would they still be desirable? Dune buggies were a type of response to this question, back in the fifties and sixties. One was advertising a life style rather than wealth. Ability, possibility, culture. There is a sports car culture, there are gatherings, and there are cults. However, beyond those activities, there is a signifier. Someone driving a convertible fast red thing signifies leisure, some wealth, and a fit to western culture. A link to all the others that have a name, that did the same in films or TV shows.

So, this on-the-surface-absurd artifact becomes more desirable, and more must be charged for it to remain so. It has value. It is important, more important than utility, wealth, or the things it signifies. It becomes a goal in itself, a life aspiration for some.

We all have external memories in the form of data, notes, pictures; external power and strength in the bank and in our wallets; and external body displays in the closet, the garage and on our heads. These are very important things. Are they the goal, the end, or is the end security, pleasure, environmental modification to suit ourselves? You tell me, I have to go get a haircut now.

Are you more important than your money?

From my flickr

A short time ago Leonard Cohen lost much of his money. He published a book of poetry and seems to be doing OK again. I think he is more important than his money. He has a name.

Donald Trump, in the 1980’s was purported to have said that a panhandler on the street was worth more than he was. Yes and no. Donald had his name to trade on.

Aristotle Onassis gave advice about how to get rich: buy an expensive suit and hang around posh parties. Make a name.

You can tell when money is more important than you are if it controls you. Hemingway said the rich were different, and he meant that the money was what guided their lives. Money can make you act in ways that are inhuman, simply to protect it, the abstraction of a number in the bank, that is not allowed to decrease, but must always increase. This is the danger. Making a name in something other than money, like Bill with software (maybe not a great example), is liberating, because the money will follow, not lead.

Soros is becoming a humanitarian, yet his name is associated with currency trading. He is trying to liberate himself. Bill too, with humanitarianism, and Warren Buffett of course. So rich guys sense that the money is more important than they are and try to use it to change that. It helps to have name recognition, for talent rather than for wealth, but the game is to make wealth accumulation look like talent, which is not always easy, since much of it depends on luck, leverage and ruthlessness. It is much more like being a general than an artist, and the field is full of opponents You can always be a patron of the arts and get it by proxy, but that is like being a john. No real love there.

Closer to home, there are the real-estate agents who convert heritage and land into abstract profit, and who are slowly eroding the material fabric of the city six percent at a time. The malaise of our town is that money is more important than anything. We do art on Sundays, but the meetings at the museum or at the library have more to do with operating expenses than with creation. And the old folks die, leaving their abstract numbers to their kids who leave to live in the bigger cities, and who sometimes come back to settle, buying old houses, tearing them down, or covering them with maintenance-free siding and giving six-percent to the real-estate agents who cover the town with their signs.

The most important thing

(picture by mistermeta)

Jammed last night, recorded a couple of rough originals. We rarely miss a weekly jam, even when the rest of our lives are chaotic and priorities pile up.

Why?

I think it is because creation is the most important thing we can aspire to. Everything else is a means to this end. We are wired to create.

Is it an exaggeration to say that that is the purpose of life?

So being in a band, making paintings, making something, even money, is a basic urge, like sex. Cultures use music to consecrate political ideas and rituals, using the beauty of real creation in an attempt to associate it with an agenda.

Ultimately it is the music and the art that are sacred, and the other stuff just borrows from it.

A big aside....
Above, I mention that making money can be one of the possible results of the creative impulse. It is, but it can also lead to cancerous destructive growth, as we know, since the creation of wealth can often be the destruction of structure to the benefit of some abstract currency, for example mergers and acquisitions, junk bond trading, leveraging, and other means of translating work back into the abstract minimal concept of cash. Accumulation of abstract wealth is naturally checked by the so-called market forces. There is a point of balance, since creative urges of many individuals compete. But this competition, when not criminal, is a complex thing. A positive, creative accumulation of wealth needs to be ultimately a cultural rather than an individual pursuit. It is no wonder that the conquest of cultures is often accompanied by the desecration of art - think of the Aztec.

Individual wealth requires a covenant with the culture to honour and protect it, it needs to contribute to the entity or organism we call a culture. Cultural (real) wealth implies collaboration. Something that (neo)conservatives forget or ignore.

Growth, unchecked becomes cancerous of course. At some level, the wealth can translate to power, and we end up with a situation where individuals try to declare “l’etat c’est moi” - I am the state.

Jane Jacobs, in one of her lesser know works Systems of Survival, addresses the issue. She observes that viable cultures need to have a tension between two opposing interests to survive. One is the monetary creative urge, or the “commercial” impulse, and the other is the “guardian”; one that protects the established traditions. In artistic terms, we are talking about producer and director, or in political terms, the legislative and the judicial, or in legal terms, the barristers and solicitors, and in business terms, the dealer and the regulator.

So for creativity (and I mean it in the largest possible sense, including the commercial) to be positive, it needs to be embedded in a cultural context so that it can be naturally checked.

Artistic creativity, as it stems from the individual is usually limited because it is not industrialized, at least not in the Western tradition. The new is valued, since it provides avenues for cultural growth. When art becomes commoditized and mass produced, we call it "traditional", or "the entertainment industry", and sometimes, as Milan Kundera observed: "kitsch".

Commerce is usually checked by market and legislate forces, but industrialization can make it overtake the natural balances of the environment, to a level where the checks become environmental, where we exhaust resources and ultimately force the planet to provide the final check.

Technology strives to optimize this process and maintain its viability, so it is creative, but the experiment is hubristic.

I think that political systems that try to embed the humanistic checks and balances are well-intentioned, but rules are no substitute for real constraints and tensions. This is the argument against socialism and communism. In the end, art gains its importance by illuminating the tension between this need to create, to climb up the entropic curve, with the need to balance it with the survival of others - the need for “goodness”.

Buddhism and especially Zen recognizes this harmony in tension. It serves as a guidebook and signal mechanism rather than a set of rules.

Art illuminates the creative urge and exposes the destructive and constructive aspects of the creative urge, but art must not encourage or participate in the destructive industrialization of creativity. This is why I love the Andy Warhol factory conceit and despise Jeff Koons’ ambiguous game.

Wim Wenders' Notebook on Cities and Clothes

(picture by mistermeta)

To follow-up on yesterday's post about criticism, here is my critique of Wim Wenders' 1990 documentary on fashion.

He was commissioned by Le Centre Pompidou to do a film about the fashion industry, and he initially thought it too shallow a subject, but went ahead, and found depth. In fact there are so many layers here that it opens up all kinds of cultural avenues for exploration.

On one level, he covers the Paris show of Yohji Yamamoto's fashion design firm, from his workshop in Tokyo to the courtyard of the Louvre where the runway is set up. On another level, he explores the ephemerality of video versus film, the film uses both media, sometimes simultaneously. On another level, he does a character study of Yohji through interview and observation. He draws out his attitude towards women, his father, the 2nd War, creativity, death, aging, cities, and most importantly identity.

The theme of the movie is Identity. Clothes are one way to begin to address the subject, but it goes far beyond this, into history and the moment of design, and why we strive to capture things that are in decay - as in film. Wenders makes analogies between film making and fashion design as well, and throughout, this jamming with ideas resonates into a coherent whole.

Wenders has said that he is not an intellectual, and I think this means that he is concerned with the surface of things, uses them to draw out emotion. He is sensual, and the themes, although abstract, are not part of the rational discourse we associate with intellectual thought. I have a feeling he said that as a subtle boast.

Wenders seeks harmony. This makes this subject - Yohji - particularly suitable for his vision. He draws out the deep value of doing with the senses, using material and images to make identity. In the end, he captures a place in the imagination, a stake of humanity.

His idea emerged while making the film I think, and the editing is subtle. The DVD I have shows outtakes, and he left out some central stuff, like Yohji's mother, who plays an important thematic role in the interviews. The omissions are not gaps, because the rest of the film makes these ideas emerge more powerfully than if they were explicit.

There is a sense of melancholy mixed-in with deep harmony and longing in this film, a present that cannot be captured, but that is somehow being put into the clothes and vision of this designer, in a subtle and gentle way. His history as a war orphan, his urge to recapture the comfort of his childhood surrounded by women, his perfectionism all merge and are captured in one of the scenes where we see the models' shoes walking along the runway, back and forth, and in the obsessive cutting and drawing of patterns before the show.


The rapport established is Wenders' achievement, his usual seeking of harmony, like a comfortable couch that he is compared to by Yohji.

The Critics

(Image by Mistermeta)

I recently read a comment by Doris Lessing where she criticises critics. She notes that the creative process is about developing an idea and expressing it through the filter of the artist's vision, whereas a critic is usually there to break things down into the components that the culture can understand, an inherently destructive process.

So what about critics who are artists? There are many, like John Updike who reviews books for the New Yorker, and the invited writers in the Guardian, what about their approach? Is it necessarily a destructive process when one tries to re-interpret another's work? Here is what my ideal critical approach would be:

1. Begin by deciding whether the work in question is a development of an idea, or an exploitation. By that I mean try to make a distinction between a formula and an inspiration. If it is a formula, then review it accordingly, does it bring anything to the genre, how does it relate to its antecedents etc. This would avoid the kind of lopsided blindside that people complain about when, say, Nicholas Lezard reviews Harry Potter books as if they were literature.
2. If the work is deemed a development of an inspired idea, then let's run with it. Let's try to dig out that idea and reconstruct the process through its results, and gauge its success that way. This is what the much maligned deconstructivists talk about I think. The questions to ask become: "Is the idea developed in a way that can transcend the vision of the one artist?", "Does the work add anything new to the idea, anything that most of us could not have added after 3 minutes of thought?".

You get my drift, criticise constructively by deconstructing.

The centre

Copyright 2011 A. Barake

A picture has two centres, the viewer and the focus of the image. This tension is at the root of the art. We are removed from within our eyes, to imagine being transported into the centre of the picture. Objectification, abstraction, and a sense of possibility.

Art transports through this trick that approximates the ideal of telepathy, that the Greeks called empathy. There is a resonance from the individual vision to the collective cultural one, sometimes... not always. It can become cliche when it becomes too much of a shorthand, when it has been done so many times before that the tension is gone because we already have taken the feeling and tacked it on to the image and stored them away.