For me, the problem of the Anti-aesthetic cannot be emphasized enough, especially as it relates to collectability and the defusing of the project of épatisme, which is rendered quite innocent through its co-optation. With this thought in mind, Gianni and Donatella Versace’s use of punk and street style are one place I turn. I also recall Slavoj Zizek’s comment in “The Fragile Absolute” that after Courbet’s “L’Origine du Monde,” that perverted gaze identified in the work of Mulvey (and even more vividly, in Linda Williams’ pornology) has had its fill, and art is free to enshrine the trash object it had previously disavowed, displacing it toward the sublime. Through the anti-aesthetic, it can de-sublimate, and so can we: no wonder it makes for such good buying!

The Smith/Mapplethorpe nexus, a thoroughly queer place, indeed, seems just the place to end this exposition, as it is here that gender, sexuality, currency and aesthetics intertwine most beautifully and inextricably. I don’t want to untie this knot, just enjoy its tautness and coarse revelation that history is a series of spacetime clots warping a fabric I am mysteriously asked to wear.

That being said, there are three thoughts I delighted in reading!

Page 197. “It was impossible to know if this new art was good, because,
mostly, good art had been defined by its endurance over time. But even though this new art had not yet faced that jury, collectively it had a significant effect: it made art of Tally’s generation seem old and stodgy.”

Page 190. “Oh please,no! Have you ever heard an artist talk about their
art? It’s Chinese! What they describe in their work is absolutely not there. And it’s guaranteed that what you think is their worst picture, they
think is their best picture.”

Page 106. When visitors came, if they didn’t admire the picture – or worse, didn’t notice it – she would think them stupid or confused, and they
were moved to the bottom of her list of worthwhile people.

So I am “thinking” of giving Cunningham’s book a shot…but am more eager
to go directly to Patti Smith’s book! And, if you don’t mind, I will order
YOUR book….A World Art History and It’s Objects! I like your way with words. They have weight.

(And in any of these recent art documentaries, like “Radiant Child” for instance, this fact is immediately apparent whenever we see a gallerist on screen, the way they talk about their amazement of this man is completely through this lens of a painting being solely an art object, a commercial thing, and not just the painting but the artist who makes it. But of course, it’s not just them, but the entire world of scenesters and so-called-friends that he invited to cannibalize him. (Though to be fair, it was not just them, but also the flimsy ideas he invited in and his need for the acceptance by the art world, of those who lived a world he despised, that devoured him from the inside.) For them, he too was just a commodity and not quite a man. Rather, a place to find a party, someone they could use, an object of fascination, etc . . .)

So isn’t it quite fitting that they wouldn’t find any deep spiritual, emotional, psychic capitol, even in De Kooning? If that’s the point of these books, than at least there, it seems apt. So in that case is your disappointment really with the books or with the commercial art world? And might that disappointment also have something to do with the fact that this world, like almost any other micro-world we find in this country, and ever more in the world beyond, is indeed commercial? What the hell, are we all morticians?

But it’s not like this is some great big change, and not even going all the way back to Marx. Even in the time of Smith and Mapplethorpe. Or you wouldn’t have that wonderful Colette Roberts interview of Peter Agostini in 1968 with this fantastic exchange, though it is only one of many such exchanges:

PA You know when they are selling slaves. He [ie. the gallerist] was the gatherer of the slaves so that they could pick which slaves they wanted for their harem.

CR It’s a nice image. But you don’t think that [artists] are enslaved, though, by their galleries?

PA Of course they are. They are enslaved to their own enjoyment. Because otherwise they would just be useless human beings running around from one place to another. Nine tenths of the artists want to be ensalved to something- the only reason they are working is for the enslavement. Enslaved by the things they are given, enslaved by popularity and the publicity they get. That’s another thing that has happened today: this beautiful sense of being ensalved by a social order.

Boy, that guy could talk! And yes, perhaps we should be disappointed by the state of things, by how willingly, and not just willingly, but with a sense of gladness, we let ourselves be enslaved. But if these books are getting at that point, then i suppose i’m much more likely to read them today than i was before.

Or perhaps the two writers just don’t have the necessary machinery to feel their lives in a work of art? Or at least to write about it. After all, to come face to face with such a work is to be confronted by a sacred moment. And such a moment is of course unsayable, except perhaps with sacred speech, and what’s more, it is beyond-all-things dangerous, though as Holderlin says, “Where there is danger, there grows what saves.”