{"id":994,"date":"2016-07-25T19:50:13","date_gmt":"2016-07-25T19:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/staging\/?p=994"},"modified":"2026-05-28T23:04:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T23:04:13","slug":"miklos-legrady","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue22\/miklos-legrady\/","title":{"rendered":"Miklos Legrady"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/em><\/strong>On the Corruption of Canadian Art<\/strong><\/h3>\n
 <\/strong>Notes Before a Revolution<\/strong><\/h6>\n

In 1947 statistician R.A. Fischer was invited to give a series of talks on BBC radio about the nature of science and scientific investigation.  His words are as relevant to the arts today. \u201cA scientific career is peculiar in some ways.  Its reason d\u2019\u00eatre is the increase in natural knowledge and on occasion an increase in natural knowledge does occur.  But this is tactless and feelings are hurt.<\/p>\n

For in some small degree it is inevitable that views previously expounded are shown to be either obsolete or false.  Most people, I think, can recognize this and take it in good part if what they have been teaching for ten years or so needs a little revision but some will undoubtedly take it hard, as a blow to their amour propre, or even an invasion of the territory they have come to think of as exclusively their own, and they must react with the same ferocity as animals (whose territory is invaded).  I do not think anything can be done about it\u2026 but we should be warned and even advised that when one has a jewel to offer for the enrichment of mankind, some people will certainly wish to discredit that person and shred them to bits.\u201d<\/p>\n

H.G. Wells in his A Short History of the World<\/em> described the papacy of Innocent III (1160-1216), as if it were the art world today.  \u201cAnd it was just because many of them probably doubted secretly of the entire soundness of their vast and elaborate doctrinal fabric that they would brook no discussion of it.  They were intolerant of questions or dissent, not because they were sure of their faith, but because they were not.\u201d  And someone on Facebook wrote that when we can no longer explore and express ideas that are troubling and even transgressive, we are limited to approved doses of information in community-sanctioned packets.<\/p>\n

Shades of Galen haunt the halls of academia, yet Margaret Heffernan in \u201cDare to disagree”<\/em> insists on the importance of speaking out.  \u201cThe fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we’ve witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to, because we can’t handle, don’t want to handle, the conflict that it provokes. But when we dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, and we create conflict, we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the 1970s to the Future of Art<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

In 1969 Harold Rosenberg of The New Yorker<\/em> wrote that \u201cThe function of the university is to impart knowledge, but art is not solely knowledge and the problems proposed by knowledge; art is also ignorance and the eager consciousness of the unknown that impels creation. No matter how cultivated he is, every creator is in some degree a na\u00eff, a primitive, and relies on his particular gift of ignorance.\u201d Obviously knowledge satisfies but it is ignorance that compels exploration. It’s important to keep that in mind; cognitive certainty in art is a dead end.<\/p>\n

During the 1970s we found the magic of art was ripe for deconstruction. Semiotics revealed that signs and symbols were the building blocks of images, which were themselves socio-political constructs. The intellectualization of art had begun, casting a light of reason in shadowy corners and clearing away that haze and fog typical of an art community where feelings and intuition were functional values.<\/p>\n

Years later Rob Storr (MOMA, Yale) said in an interview on Yale radio that he \u201cdoesn\u2019t think the American version of French theory or a Frankfurt school of contemporary art criticism is of much use to anybody\u201d.  Be that as it may, in this scientific reorganization of academic fine art, an intellectual description of art replaced those personal idiosyncrasies that would never pass peer review such as the na\u00efve, the primitive, the ignorance that impels creation.<\/p>\n

Back then it was with a sense of relief that artists learned to think, both because the unexamined life is not worth living, and this newfound ability to conceptualize our culture gave us a wider perspectives than any previous generation. It also provided jobs when educated cohorts pursued advanced degrees. Any talented young artist could now be hired to teach, read and grade essays, find time to organize, schedule, and promote new courses, fundraise for their department, attend conference meetings, consul with colleagues, meet with students, promote best administrative practices, not forgetting to publish or perish. It would be logical to say this leaves little time for an art practice.<\/p>\n

As an added irritant, Malcolm Gladwell\u2019s ten thousand hours to mastery include a caveat; you need to keep up your chops, if you don\u2019t use it you lose it.   There is a magic in art that develops through repetition and practice, the mind being a muscle that grows with use. Eastern philosophy tells of meditation to Enlightment, and western psychology talks of untapped potentials within ourselves, potentials that can only be realized through long hours of hard work, those hours now outside our grasp. Mastery in the arts being desirable yet unattainable, a diplomatic solution was sorely needed.<\/p>\n

For an academic the answer was obviously academic. Rob Storr had described the transformation of the art world from the “Cedar Tavern to the seminar room\u2026 It was a transformation that created a class of critics and artists, a class that invented a cult of difficulty based on jargon – the words used like pieces in an erector set to reference their own theories to other theories rather than to works of art.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an environment where art was academic, a description of art was believed equivalent to an actual work of art. The enormous difference was in the emotions and feelings which the art awakened, a feeling missing in the job description. But to a brilliant mind, no problem is insoluble and Sol Lewitt provided the required equation. As Duchamp made art intellectual, ideas became works of art. Duchamp projected this concept into the ready-made, a new paradigm that made skill and technique pass\u00e9 and also dispensed with aesthetics. Anything that an artist decided was art thereby became art; any thinking about art by an artist was now a work of art.<\/p>\n

John Cage\u2019s musical composition 4\u201933<\/em> is silent. Not a single note is played. I myself would sacrifice four and a half minutes to attend the event as a singularity. I would object if silence replaced music and dominated the aural arts. It would be repetitive for every concert to consist of a musical score handed the audience, so the public could imagine what the music would sound like if performed by musicians. It’s noteworthy that the intellect likewise has little place on the stage, in dance, in sports; your theatre director, choreographer, or coach, will insist you\u2019re not to think but practice till it\u2019s second nature, intuitive, till you know it in your bones. There are functions in the mind that are hampered rather than helped by the intellect. Some are rather obvious such as instincts; the creative unconscious is such a function. 
\n<\/p>\n

Duchamp spoke of destroying art as a Dadaist imperative (Cabane), by taking away the practice and making us think, by making art intellectual. The academic environment has advanced that model through the standardization of thinking, and now we read that great minds of the past would never have passed peer review.<\/p>\n

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase found in the work of the Roman poet Juvenal from his Satires<\/em> (Satire VI, lines 347\u20138). It is literally translated as \u201cWho will guard the guards themselves\u201d? Michel Foucault in The Archeology of Knowledge<\/em> writes that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and distributed; in his 1982 book Art Worlds<\/em>, Howard Becker developed a concept that is essential for understanding how art is controlled. He coined the term \u201cgatekeepers\u201d to describe those who control the dissemination of art, the curators, editors, professors and artists who are networked into a global peer paradigm. They limit participation to those sharing the same outlook and language, restricting the game to believers in a cerebral practice and stifling the arts till the poor thing is nearly dead. Will art perish? Can we finally dispense with the art object and be just\u2026 you know\u2026 smart?<\/p>\n

Most fine arts producers graduate from similar schools and share the same values, and these are reflected in their association, production, and the systems created thereby\u2026 surely a cultural blindness results from such group judgments.<\/p>\n

Anti-Aesthetic, Unsparing, or Incomprehensible <\/strong><\/p>\n

Post-Dadaist art is difficult, conceptual, tough, unsparing… often strategically incomprehensible and purposefully irrelevant.  When a cultural object is incomprehensible or irrelevant, we\u2019re expected to be humble. Our judgment might be wrong which puts the work beyond criticism; it is art only because an artist said so and this can be qualified only by the artist, who gains praise for working the rules. What is rewarded is not brilliant art, nor understanding or technique, but a gift for marketing. The artist is now the actor reading the script and playing the role.<\/p>\n

Obviously the meaningless, and irrelevant, the boring, tough, and unsparing do more than just shock the art world. Curators encourage the banal and boring as a counter-aesthetic strategy, and increasingly exercise their power as a curator to out-banal the next guy. This inspeak of the overlords helps shame the public with how little we know, how behind the times we are\u2026 unless one supports what few understand and fewer care about.  George Soros presenting an art award said “I don’t understand what you’re doing but my experts tell me you’re the best in your field”. Susan Sontag warned of this hypertrophy of the intellect that she called the revenge of intellectuals on the artist. Voil\u00e0 l’inf\u00e2me qu’il faut \u00e9craser.<\/p>\n

Does the Art World need an Aspirin?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Science says that art, beauty, and aesthetics are vital to mental health. In the 1970s Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake analyzed links between beauty, information processing, and information theory. Physicist Paul Dirac is quoted saying \u201cif one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress\u201d. Denis Dutton was a philosophy professor and the editor of Arts & Letters Daily. In The Art Instinct<\/em>, he suggested that humans are hard-wired to seek beauty. \u201cThere is evidence that perceptions of beauty are evolutionarily determined, that things, aspects of people and landscapes considered beautiful are typically found in situations likely to give enhanced survival of the perceiving human’s genes.\u201d <\/p>\n

What consequence awaits an art world that denies aesthetics? What form would a self-destructive collective mental illness take? I imagine it similar to the banking system in 2007. Were you to tell a bank executive that sub prime loans lead to disaster… they would explain that their yearly bonus depends on selling more of those loans. Bankers were in a fog of denial as we are today.  <\/p>\n

I have been tempted to tell a cultural worker they were soap bubble, but of course that will not do. There\u2019s an academic language for that.  Bad art is not going to kill anyone but it did produce an entire profession suffering from Dunning\u2013Kruger effect. That\u2019s a cognitive bias in which individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive incapacity to recognize one’s ineptitude and evaluate one’s own competence accurately.  In the arts the theories that contemporary practice follows are so flawed, so erroneous, so ill considered or badly thought out, that our highest minds are reduced to a sacrificium intellectus. <\/p>\n

They Call it Slow Art.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A slowly emerging movement is best described as languid art<\/em>.  Four bricks bear the shame of a thin coat of paint. A large sheet of drawing paper is embarrassed by faint charcoal streaks that fail to make much of a mark. Languid art. The work quacks like a duck, looks by the book, but doesn\u2019t draw a discerning eye. An indiscriminate practice is the realm of Thanatos, daemon of non-violent death. His touch was gentle, likened to that of his twin brother Hypnos (Sleep).  This counter-aesthetic ideology discouraged talented artists from a personal creative practice, to focus on dry photographs of the dust on their bookshelves. The more one’s reputation rises in the arts the less important the work, until… (I kid you not) you can cut pictures out of art books and be hailed as a genius. Canada\u2019s best is busy cutting out paper dolls. This being the art world, it\u2019s his assistants cutting out the paper dolls for him.   The optics are terrible; that’s why we can’t have nice things.<\/p>\n

Why We Can\u2019t Have Nice Things.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a 1986 BBC interview with Joan Blackwell, Duchamp claimed the conceptual mantle when he said that until his time painting was retinal, what you could see\u2026 that he made it intellectual.  He also said his aim as a Dadaist was to destroy art.  In a 1998 panel discussion titled \u201cVision and Visuality<\/em>\u201d sponsored by the Dia Art Foundation, Rosalind Kraus mentioned that (except for Manet) Duchamp despised optical art  and disliked artisanal work. We would be surprised to read that Shakespeare despised grammar, or that Stravinsky loathed musical notes.  Optical art requires years of skill, artisanal work is done with concern; these are things to respect, not to despise. <\/p>\n

Marcel Duchamp created his brand as a Dadaist by rejecting the Impressionists, aesthetic beauty, and artisanal technique. While he said that he wanted to destroy art, he destroyed his own ability to make art. The ready-made assumes that a factory-made or found object is as good as any work by the artist. If you say that art is not worth making and you say it often, you eventually lose interest in making art. He encouraged the mythology around that \u2018stopping\u2019, \u201cbut it was not like that\u2026 it was a broken leg\u201d, he said, and retired to play chess.   Duchamp\u2019s philosophy is dominant today, we\u2019re awash in paper dolls. <\/p>\n

At the start of the 20th century new technologies displaced the old and Dadaists danced on the rubble of art. Why are we still trying to shock the bourgeoisie?  What level of cultural maturity are we stuck at? We all own art but how many have a urinal hanging in their living room?  Picabia wrote: \u201cArt is a pharmaceutical product for idiots.\u201d Art replies; “speak for yourself”.  We don\u2019t have to gawk in awe at everything we’re told, and we do need to reassess the values we inherit from Dada. Cleverness and toilet humor get tiresome after a while and those who truly believe art is to piss in should now leave the field to those with higher values. Dada is past its shelf life and a hypertrophy of the intellect is throttling the arts.<\/p>\n

Deconstructing Walter Benjamin<\/strong><\/p>\n

Recently an adjunct professor of art history was referencing The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction<\/em>. \u201cFor Walter Benjamin\u201d, he said, \u201cwhat makes certain authentic works of art great is that they contain an inexplicable \u2018aura\u2019, an element of mystery\u201d.  Benjamin actually said the opposite, that the art of the proletariat sweeps away illusions like aura and authenticity.<\/p>\n

Benjamin writes \u201cThe art of the proletariat, the art of the working class\u2026brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery<\/em>\u201d. He asserts the purpose of art is to reproduce reality, film and photography do a better job of it, and the only meaningful goal of art is political propaganda since aesthetics is for pussies. Among other misconceptions Benjamin wrote that  \u201cfrom a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints;<\/em> to ask for the \u2018authentic\u2019 print makes no sense<\/em>.\u201d 80 years later an authentic Ansel Adams or Edward Weston, printed by the artist, sells for over $80,000.  Walter Benjamin failed his reality check; as a Marxist he had to believe and assert the Party line. We should now update our history.<\/p>\n

At the core of Benjamin\u2019s argument is \u201cthat which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art<\/em>.\u201d<\/em> Books are made by mechanical reproduction, yet stories and authors retain their aura as much as any work of art. For example Munch’s The Scream<\/em> is known from reproduction yet remains haunting, as haunting as any Raven perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door. Without its aura, an image is an illustration, not a work of art. Benjamin’s error comes from a materialism which says the only meaning of art lies in an accurate rendition of reality, the essence of art is pictorial reproduction. In fact art consists of hinting there’s more than the obvious.<\/p>\n

Some find Benjamin complex and difficult; there\u2019s reason for that but not what we’d expect.  When we read something that contradicts our expectations we generally skip that sentence; here we eventually find ourselves with shreds of doubts and hanging chads.  The difficulty in reading Benjamin is not intellectual comprehension, it is in matching what we read to what he\u2019s supposed to have said; we must censor the text to meet our expectations. Many of us stop reading when unable to reconcile such contradictions between fact and fiction, and so we leave Benjamin behind as “difficult”. It is near impossible to interpret Benjamin according to the mythology woven in his name.<\/p>\n

Walter Benjamin has been praised as an early Marshal McLuhan, a social scientist able to discern objectively the cultural effects of media. Yet on reading the text we find a political message that strays from the truth and then ignores it. Where we thought “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction<\/em>” was pure research similar to today’s academic scholarship, it is in fact Marxist propaganda. History reminds us that Marxists saw truth and accuracy as useful when convenient; we cannot read Benjamin innocently when the work has political priorities.<\/p>\n

John Berger’s Ways of Seeing<\/em> was my introduction to analytic thought yet when he bases his writing on Benjamin he repeats the same mistakes. We remember that both were Marxists. Georgy Pyatakov, who was twice expelled from the Party and eventually shot, wrote that a true Bolshevik is \u201cready to believe [not just assert] that black was white and white was black if the Party required it.\u201d In George Orwell’s book 1984, O\u2019Brien proclaims this very doctrine – two plus two is really five if the Party says it is – which he calls \u201ccollective solipsism.\u201d <\/p>\n

A communist writer who later left the party disillusioned was Arthur Koestler. In The God That Failed<\/em> and The Invisible Writing<\/em> he describes the logical contradictions and resulting sacrificium intellectus that Communist writers suffered. The resulting emotional damage may well explain Benjamin’s catastrophic failure of morale and his consequential suicide in a moment of crisis.<\/p>\n

Arthur Koestler writes of meeting Benjamin in 1940, France. “Just before we left, I ran into an old friend, the German writer Walter Benjamin. He was making preparations for his own escape to England. He has thirty tablets of a morphia-compound, which he intended to swallow if caught: he said they were enough to kill a horse, and gave me half the tablets, just in case. The day after the final refusal of my visa, I learned that Walter Benjamin, having managed to cross the Pyrenees, had been arrested on the Spanish side, and threatened with being sent back to France the next morning. The next morning the Spanish gendarmes had changed their mind, but by that time Benjamin had swallowed his remaining half of the pills and was dead.\u201d
\n<\/p>\n

The irony is that adjunct-professor who thought Benjamin believed in the aura and mystery of art did so because Benjamin\u2019s writing itself is beautiful, mysterious, aurora drawn.  Benjamin was a brilliant writer, a poet, a genius, but entangled in politics that stifled his thinking and led to his death.  We should read his Arcades, <\/em>appreciate his talent, and forgive his ideology.<\/p>\n

Is Art Mainly the Idea?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIdeas alone can be works of art<\/em>,” Sol Lewitt proposed in his epic “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” a primer on the ins and outs of postmodern art making. Ideas “need not be made physical<\/em>,” he continued. “A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist\u2019s mind to the viewer\u2019s. There’s the possibility that the idea may never reach the viewer, or that the idea may never leave the artist\u2019s mind. But all ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

The contradiction is obvious; if art is a conductor then any idea that remains in one\u2019s mind and never reaches the viewer cannot by that proposition be art. From practice we know that art is not a conductor; the medium is the conductor, art is a product.<\/p>\n

Sol Lewitt said that an idea was art but that’s wrong; an idea is science. Wikipedia tells us that “science is systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.<\/em>” These are ideas. Wiki then says that art is “a diverse range of human activities in creatin<\/em>g”. That is production and effort in the real world. Art requires a reality check and a higher standard than a professional product. Art then is a product… of conscious and unconscious production, will and intuition. It’s evident \u201cthe art\u201d of anything means more than just thinking about it. An idea needs to be realized to be art, it’s in the phrase origin. This means an idea that believes itself to be art is mistaken and cannot be science either; it\u2019s simply a mistake. It\u2019s a wonder no one has thought this through\u2026 our respect for tradition is the enemy of inquiry.<\/p>\n

Sol LeWitt laid out the terms for conceptual art in his seminal \u201cParagraphs on Conceptual Art,\u201d published in the June 1967 issue of Artforum. \u201cIn conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work<\/em>,\u201d LeWitt wrote. \u201cWhen an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the execution of anything is a perfunctory affair the results are always bad\u2026  Another objection to the perfunctory execution of art is that the word “art” has an etymology; it is in production that creative changes occur, that a pragmatic creativity transforms both the idea and the material into something greater than the sum of their parts. The “art of woodcarving” implies an individual of exceptional achievement, as Oscar Wilde was renowned for the art of conversation.<\/p>\n

There’s also an argument for struggle and effort in making anything of value. Tennessee Williams wrote in the introduction to The Glass Menagerie<\/em> that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door. Once this thing called success happens to you, security dulls conflict and dissolves your inspiration. Humans were made to wrestle with life but when work is an idea there’s no need for effort\u2026 which is production, not idea. Without struggle and effort we have bad art.<\/p>\n

In \u201cSentences on Conceptual Art\u201d Lewitt again contradicts himself; \u201cThe artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.<\/em>\u201d But this is illogical, conflicting with a previous statement of his that an idea can be a work of art. Obviously if an artist cannot imagine his art then one cannot have an idea that is art (whose performance is then perfunctory), since ideas are imagined in language and words at the moment they are thought of.<\/p>\n

Lewitt retorts that \u201cConceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.<\/em>\u201d When Lewitt writes of being a mystic who overleaps logic, he means that he sincerely says things that he wishes were true.<\/p>\n

Until now a work of art meant an exceptional and meaningful accomplishment. Duchamp made it senseless by stripping away the senses and making art intellectual. Lewitt makes art senseless by saying it is nonsense, illogical, impossible. Sol Lewitt is an amazing visual artist, a genius… although Walter Benjamin insists that geniuses do not exist. Benjamin is a great writer but a terrible political scientist, Lewitt is a great artist but fails at theory. Their words do not make sense and are debunked by simple reasoning. And yet no one dares judge and contradict these art gods. The most influential art theories of our time are flawed. That’s like when the garage mechanic says your brakes are shot, but people still go for a drive.<\/p>\n

To know what Art Is<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a reading of history we look back to forecast.  Most of us lack a global perspective so it\u2019s with relief that art history reveals the exact nature of our time.  Since the late 1960s we’ve been living in an era that will be known as the corruption of art, and our time will likely hold a cautionary tale for future generations. As aesthetics were a driving force in human evolution and a necessity for mental health, it\u2019s evident the counter-aesthetic, anti-aesthetic paradigm of the past decades would be toxic. Psychiatrists will affirm that to study and imitate the behavior of insane people can seriously harm one\u2019s sanity, since practice makes perfect\u2026 or imperfect, in this case.  Our problem is that the toxic change was gradual; we acclimatized and failed to notice the problems of our time.<\/p>\n

Dario Gamboni’s The Destruction of Art<\/em> talks about a Swiss sculpture Biennial where the normally staid townspeople vandalized some works of art made from garbage. Gamboni admitted the work was actually made of garbage taken from the trash, but it had been declared art by experts. He could not understand how the townspeople still thought it was garbage and did not value it as art. <\/p>\n

Recently a top-tier curator wrote that nobody knows what art is anymore and I was, like, facepalm! If you don’t know what art is, why don’t you ask? In no other profession do the gatekeepers admit they don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing. It\u2019s your job! If you<\/em> don’t know what art is, who does?  If no one knows then step up to the plate and take a shot\u2026 at defining something so obvious; the etymology of art means exceptional achievements, not a brilliant mistake or a clever idea.<\/p>\n

Art means excellence. But typically someone creates a banality to which we all bow in praise, following a counter-aesthetic saying the mundane is great art. Having standards means rejecting such stupid assertions. What made the arts the mess we face today were toxic ideas posing as the latest hot trend. As a quick fix, here’s an idea to decimate contemporary art; no more garbage, artists stop using garbage to make art. If I see another piece of trash posing as Art in a white box I will scream.  Emily Carr described the creative experience of one genuinely inspired, an account to teach us all a lesson;<\/p>\n

Oh, God, what have I seen? Where have I been? Something has spoken to the very soul of me, wonderful, mighty, not of this world. Chords way down in my being have been touched. Dumb notes have struck chords of wonderful tone. Something has called out of somewhere. Something in me is trying to answer. It is surging through my whole being, the wonder of it all, like a great river rushing on, dark and turbulent, and rushing and unresisting, carrying me away on it\u2019s wild swirl like a helpless bundle of wreckage.<\/em><\/p>\n

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On the Corruption of Canadian Art<\/strong>
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