The New Criterion
America’s leading review of the arts and intellectual life
- Harry Mount, the London Telegraph
Notes & CommentsMay 2008 Art & ethics at Yale On the Aliza Shvarts affair. One of the chief lessons of contemporary “avant-garde” art, especially that which pullulates in an academic setting, is that the unutterably tedious can cohabit seamlessly with the repellent. That may seem counterintuitive. After all, wasn’t the main point of “transgressive” art to rescue us from banality, to lift us out of the tedious, taken-for-granted way of looking at things in which all of us philistine, middle-class bourgeois folks have been absorbed since childhood? That’s certainly a large part of the rhetoric. It is curious, though, how rarely that happens. Why? Once upon a time “academic art” meant boring stuff that might be technically proficient but which lacked any spark of genuine feeling or vital contact with reality. Academic art was rote art, art that merely went through the motions. Its decorousness was not so much mannerly as a species of mannerism: something stale, d ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 May 2008, on page 1 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Art---ethics-at-Yale-3828
rate this article for your user profile
E-mail to friend
|
On The New York Times's love letter to the Weather Underground member Judy Clark. Helen Frankenthaler, 1928–2011 On the passing of the painter. Do the British still have backbone?
Webcasts
Anthony Daniels on the Euro Crisis
Andrew C. McCarthy: The Muslim Threat
Roger Kimball: The Grim Future of Statism Weblog 
|
add a comment
you must have an account to post a comment. {register now}