Althouse: "Of course all this dorky revolutionary-aesthete chatter about tearing down barriers and storming citadels is meant to get museum-goers’ pulses racing."

November 20, 2013

"Of course all this dorky revolutionary-aesthete chatter about tearing down barriers and storming citadels is meant to get museum-goers’ pulses racing."

"After which everybody will be too revved up to notice that Art Spiegelman is constitutionally incapable of making a single mark with any power."

TNR's Jed Perl is very jazzed up about trashing Art Spiegelman.

7 comments:

lemondog said...: Never heard of Art Spiegelman prior, but doesn't this effort at so-called pop art cultural 'bridging' have an element of Andy Warhol-ish redux?; 11/20/13, 10:33 AM
YoungHegelian said...: Man, Perl's really in a lather over there at TNR!

Did Spiegelman accidentally boink Perl's girlfriend or something? I don't find Spiegelman's art work particularly riveting either, but if I went ballistic over every overhyped art show in NYC, I would have popped a blood vessel long ago.; 11/20/13, 10:44 AM
Mitch H. said...: "Middlebrow" sneer? Check! What a walking critical cliche this guy is, really. And while I don't find Spiegelman particularly innovative or proficient - he's basically a Wil Eisner tag-along - Maus is an honestly engaging and legitimate work of art. To shit on it as safe and rote is to be reveal yourself to be a contrarian schmuck.

I suppose those of us in the sticks shouldn't get involved when the BoBos get into a slapfight over who's *too* pretentious, and who's "middlebrow", but really. How can you be middlebrow, avant-garde pretentious, and "draftsmanlike" all at once?; 11/20/13, 11:09 AM
William said...: I can't get too worked up over the relative merits of R. Crumb versus Art Spiegelman. I can't even understand why they're artists and Greg Larson isn't.; 11/20/13, 12:22 PM
Sigivald said...: "confesses that Spiegelman is only a “workmanlike draftsman” and that his “drawing may lack Crumb’s virtuoso fluency or the charmingly stilted primitivism of a Kim Deitch.” Spiegelman’s draftsmanship is dead on arrival, an embarrassment when measured against the work of R. Crumb, the founder of the trippy comic, whose drawings, love ’em or hate ‘em, can never be denied their rococo-grunge velocity"

On the one hand, I do kind of see his point - like Mitch said, Spiegelman's art isn't really impressive in and of itself. And Maus is almost definitionally overrated - not because it's not very good, but because it was so intensely pushed as 'justifying comics as Real Art'.

On the other hand, R. Crumb wasn't all that, either - no matter what 60s detritus thinks about him - and "workmanlike draftsman" is only an insult from people who don't know what the hell they're talking about.; 11/20/13, 12:23 PM
Sam L. said...: Faux outrage in TNR? Oh, noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo,; 11/20/13, 12:54 PM
eddie willers said...: For the first time in history, Ted Rall and I agree.; 11/20/13, 5:19 PM