Though the debate about art versus pornography has never been settled, a case can be made that quarantine nude selfies are art.Yes, but is it high art, as the headline asserts. This issue strikes me as nonsense. I don't even accept that nudes are pornography...
... nor do I accept that something is either pornography or art and can't be both. And I don't accept that something becomes more artistic because it's "an act of resilience in isolation." Routine masturbation could be called "an act of resilience in isolation."
Some of us finally have time to make art, and this is the art we are making: carefully posed, cast in shadows, expertly filtered. These aren’t garish below-the-belt shots under fluorescent lighting, a half-used roll of toilet paper in the background....Wait. I think the edgy, gritty quality is more artistic. I think using a lot of bullshit — "carefully posed, cast in shadows, expertly filtered" — is banal and sentimental and less likely to qualify as art. It sounds as though Spechler is talking about people who are making a special effort to look pretty and using computer tools to flatter themselves. That's low art, at best. The headline promised high art.
I'm skipping over a lot of material, including talk of great painters (Goya, Van Gogh), because ultimately Spechler's own words undercut the argument. The naked selfies of the lockdown don't deserve (or need) elevation to the status of "high art." She says:
Though it might require a bit of squinting to see pandemic-era nude selfie-snapping on a par with Basquiat, geniuses hold no monopoly on the instinct to self-preserve. Or on the yearning to be witnessed. Sending a nude selfie is a request to be witnessed — not objectively, but through rose-tinted (or smooth-filtered) lenses....That's just saying everyone has feelings and does some things that express those feelings. When is the evidence of an expression of feeling art? Is the product of routine masturbation — done as an act of resilience in isolation — an artwork?
Plenty of people are lonely, frustrated, and burdened with extra time. That's actually not the most profound feeling in the world. And "Look at me!!" is even less profound. It's not saying anything interesting or original. It's an expression. Fine.
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60 comments:
"a special effort to look pretty and using computer tools to flatter themselves. That's low art."
Pretty = low. Got it.
What selfies are is form of narcissism. When your selfies are nudes, they're also exhibitionism. Are they art? That would depend on whether they're creative and imaginative. Art is supposed to stir emotion or be appreciated for its beauty. Were Anthony Weiner's selfies art? I'm sure he thought so.
I’m missing a fundamental aspect of this that appears to be going unsaid. How does this person know that there are more nude selfies now, and what their quality or attributes are? Aren’t they by default private? And if she has somehow collected a bunch (how?) doesn’t that make the ones she’s collected outliers by definition?
Be careful not to let your masturbation fall into a routine. Gwyneth Paltrow must have some ways to make it special.
I once dated a girl that had lots of nude selfies and would send them to me all the time. This was of course very welcome but I had this creeping sensation of a) she was narcissistic (it was often in the way she looked in the camera...not at me, at herself) and b) she DID THIS WAY TOO OFTEN.
Did some digging and found that she sent these to everybody. Old boyfriends. Ex-boyfriends. Girlfriends. Her mom. Even herself to a seperate account (that way they could be on both phones...I'll get to this later).
The point? It lost all meaning and eroticism. It wasn't special. She was simply obsessed with her naked body....which was nice but not enough to be that mental over.
However, the experience was prescient because that world of 10 years ago is now the world in which we live. A world filled with every woman having nudes on her or a bunch of other people's phones and dudes that send dick pics. It's the world of 'I've seen that before whoopie-fuckin-do'. Not special. Not erotic. Meat.
Reread it. I guess the real story is, as a writer, this person has collected some friends over the years, mostly gay men or atypically slutty women, who do fairly typical urban artsy bullshit. In the age of coronavirus, the friends are continuing to do that urban artsy bullshit, and the writer is writing about it as though it is somehow a significant social trend.
In other words, it’s a fairly typical piece one would find in the NYTimes or New Yorker or New York on any given day of any given year.
One person's art is another person's trashy, slutty display of self indulgence.
Nudes may or may not be pornography, but they are not seduction. Seduction implies some subtlety.
Or on the yearning to be witnessed.
Ricky Gervais should steal that line.
This got me to google "van gogh nudes" as I couldn't recall any. Surprise, there were a few, though I would be inclined to class them as studies.
The modern view of art:
1. Creation of art does not require the difficult and time consuming acquisition of any skill or technique.
2. The quality of a work of art depends on whether the idea or opinion it expresses is acceptable to other "artists".
I'm not exactly sure what the idea or opinion is here (perhaps others can distill it from the turgid prose), but it is probably some combination of (a) exhibitionists are heroes, and (b) Orange Man Bad.
"Art" in this country is a joke. Remember "Christ in Piss" or whatever it was. Its just a liberal bourgeois circle jerk.
Is the product of routine masturbation — done as an act of resilience in isolation — an artwork?
If that's the case, I got an old gym sock under my bed I'd love to show you.
IT keeps women and Gays busy, so there's that.
Large numbers of people want to be artists. Almost none of them create art. they lack lack one thing - talent.
what was it that Supreme Court Justice said: I'll know when i see it?
It's an act of resilience wrapped in a wankfest, inside a circle-jerk.
Given that people can marry trees and dogs and have sex with chandeliers and roller coasters, doesn't that make every picture pornography for somebody?
Kevin confusingly said...
Aren’t they by default private?
NO! by definition;
a selfie is a pic you take to show other people on social media, so they can be jealous
You think people take pix of themselves, holding a 26", 8 lb Brown Trout to NOT show it off?
You think people take pix of themselves, holding their 38"DD plastic tits to NOT show them off?
seriously
our personal private lives are DEFINED by the number of likes (and shares!) on social media
Are you NOT from around here?
Selfies can be public sure, not nude selfies as a rule.
I've been wondering for a long time if seduction always implies subtlety? Isn't grabbing them by the pussy seduction?
The Art of Deal
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/24/trump-biden-china-debt-205475
Anthony Weiner peaked 4 years too soon.
From the Politico link:
"After the first version of this article was published, the Bank of China issued a statement Friday evening stating that it sold its debt on the building weeks after the 2012 loan on the property. Vornado Realty Trust owns 70 percent of the building.
“On November 7, 2012 several financial institutions including the Bank of China participated in a commercial mortgage loan of $950 million to Vornado Realty Trust,” said Peter Reisman, managing director and chief communications officer of Bank of China U.S.A. “Within 22 days, the loan was securitized and sold into the [commercial mortgage-backed securities] market, as is a common practice in the industry. Bank of China has not had any ownership interest in that loan since late November 2012.”
I'm not from around here. The past is a foreign country, and that's where I live.....I don't understand the concept of nude selfies, but here's some speculative bullshit. Only connect. If you want to connect with someone a nude selfie will have a lot of impact, especially if you're a young, good looking woman.
Media hacks are all covering for Biden family graft
To recap that case Hunter accompanied his father on a 2013 trip to Beijing catching a ride on Air Force 2. Days later a private equity firm called BHR Equity Investments raised $1 billion, later raised to $1.5 billion, in funding from the Chinese government. The company's largest shareholder is literally the bank of China. Hunter at the time sat on the board of BHR Holdings.
While in China, Joe Biden shook hands with the future CEO of BHR Holdings and he also met with Hunter Biden on a so called "social call." Hunter by his own admission continues to own 10% of the company, even though he assures us all he's yet to make any money for it?
What the hell is The New York Times talking about? There is evidence in their own paper I just laid out that Hunter Biden made untold sums profiting off his father's Vice Presidency.
New evidence for Drudge and the Hack-D corrupt press to squish.
It's nice to see how China is covered their tracks.
Quit teasing me bleach bits.
Trump is in the hotel and real estate business, Howie.
Large business loans are all part of that.
Do explain, Howie - how it's NOT OK for private biz, but it is OK for the Bidens and the Clintons to use their power to enrich themselves with Chi-com funding funneled to Hunter.
on Politico website ----
This article and headline were updated to include comment from the Bank of China and additional reporting.
_________________===============
so they changed it from ?"owes"? to owed. That is commendably honest
"I'm skipping over a lot of material, ..."
I think you're on the right track there.
"Plenty of people are lonely, frustrated, and burdened with extra time."
Umm, yeah, that's one way to say it. Another way would be:
"Plenty of people are lonely, scared and worried about being told to stay home, not work, not pay their bills, and not feed their families."
I'd call it advertising. Is advertising art? Or is art part of the art of advertising?
"Look at me!!" is even less profound. It's not saying anything interesting or original.
"Plenty of people are lonely, scared and worried about being told to stay home, not work, not pay their bills, and not feed their families."
But we have been told that freedom doesn't include freedom to kill people.
Dave and Matthew are definitely gay.
Not enough subtlety? Also the images are missing signatures or some way to identify the artist. I thought artists were supposed to have big egos? But I guess narcissism can involve this sort of exhibitionism...
The Naked and the Nude
by Robert Graves
For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.
Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.
The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman's trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.
The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometimes nude!
From the generation taught that anything called 'activism' is good. Anything. So even if it's not actual activism, or not directing any sense of an activist cause or action against an oppressive or wrong idea of organization or person, it has to be called 'an act of resilience' in todays good-speak. Very close to 'act of resistance', don't you think? And you know who we are all resisting in this day and age of the VIRUS? Not our Chinese overlords, no. We're resisting Trump. Even though he wants us to inject ourselves with bleach, we're going to stay home and do self-nude photos, and repackage them as highly creative, bordering-on-intellectual art. Then we'll send them around to show we're resisting. We're resilient and will not be taken in by false claims that ingesting bleach will clean out our innards.
We know better. We smart. We in NY Times. This is how it done.
how was it the late lewis grizzard said, nude is without clothes, nakked is without clothes and up to something,
I'm on a couple of mobile phone social networking apps (one gay, one ostensibly straight). More than a couple times a week, I get unsolicited dick pics. Sometimes these are from guys who say they are straight. (Apparently there is something about my looks that excites Latino and Pinoy guys. I can't figure it out. Oh well.) I used to immediately block those who did this. But in this crisis, I'm being a little more indulgent. One of my admirers videoed himself whacking off while looking at me fully clothed. If I helped him obtain a little relief from the isolation and boredom of social distancing, then I'm doing God's work.
We live in a time of instant, effortless reproduction. Hence we are surrounded by art, can manufacture it on a whim with a cell phone. Not surprisingly it is mostly bad art. Sturgeon's law is outdated. Not 90%, but 99% or more is bullshit.
how was it the late lewis grizzard said, nude is without clothes, nakked is without clothes and up to something,
Ha. Naked vs Nekkid.
Grizzard appeared in an episode of Designing Women playing two of the characters' brother, whose personality is clearly based on Grizzard.
Graves seems to have come to a different conclusion as Mr. Clark regarding the distinction between naked and nude.
Somewhere around here is my copy of Kenneth Clark’s The Nude: A Study of Ideal Form, which The Guardian at least considers one of the hundred greatest works of nonfiction.
In high art “the nude had been used to express fundamental human needs, for instance, the need for harmony and order (Apollo) versus the need to sublimate sexual desire (Venus).”
My sense is that “edgy, gritty quality is more artistic” is a twentieth-century anti-bourgeois concept that sounds particularly bourgeois today.
Unfortunately, Clark’s no longer around to tell us what artistic role the nude might play in a pandemic, though we may glean what he might say here:
“After the chaos and barbarism of the two world wars through which he had lived, the art historian was at pains to renew the classical contract between order, coherence and the human imagination. He concludes his narrative with the suggestion that ‘The Greeks perfected the nude in order that man might feel like a god, and in a sense this is still its function, for although we no longer suppose that God is like a beautiful man, we still feel close to divinity in those flashes of self-identification when, through our own bodies, we seem to be aware of a universal order.’”
Do nudes wear 6" stiletto shoes? Or is it only naked girls that do?
Selfie-ish behavior.
"a special effort to look pretty and using computer tools to flatter themselves. That's low art."
Pretty = low. Got it.
Yes, because the point of that self-portrait is an idealized version of you instead of the most interesting version. It's like the difference between going to Glamor Shots vs. getting Annie Leibovitz to take your picture.
We have 50,000 dead and a million sick. the economy is trashed, and we'll be up to our eyeballs in government and personal debt for years to come. And the NYT proves its erudition with an historically informed meditation on the "art" of pandemic selfies.
Maybe readers grew tired of first-person meditations on "What it's like to work from home" or "Teaching my child because schools are closed." Have I missed the reports from of ride-alongs with cops busting criminals in icky, scary, empty Penn Station? Or accompanying grocery pickers/delivery agents doing piece work for Insta-Cart?
Yes, because the point of that self-portrait is an idealized version of you instead of the most interesting version. It's like the difference between going to Glamor Shots vs. getting Annie Leibovitz to take your picture.
Idealism vs Realism
Definition of art: what I like (or can be scammed into liking)
Definition of trash: what I don't like. (or have been told by my betters not to like)
John Henry
So are the people in that porno pic you posted nude or nekkid?
Nude - no clothes on
Nekkid - no clothes on and getting up to shenanigans
I for one miss lewis grizzard
John Henry
Shoulda read the comments all the way through before posting.
I see narciso and farmer beat me to grizzard.
All I can say is GMTA
John Henry
Maybe readers grew tired of first-person meditations on "What it's like to work from home" or "Teaching my child because schools are closed." Have I missed the reports from of ride-alongs with cops busting criminals in icky, scary, empty Penn Station? Or accompanying grocery pickers/delivery agents doing piece work for Insta-Cart?
**********
Can anyone remember the media (new and old) being more banal? Every mundane thing being cast as worthy of an article because - pandemic. "What is it like to fold your laundry during a pandemic?" "Musing while pushing a really stiff poo - hey now I've got more time for my constipated digestive system."
We follow a number of YouTubers that must go out and about to film their thing. Most of them are holed up trying to do videos on any possible thing they can get up to in their apartment. Lots and lots of videos on "learning to cook crap food with random crap in your kitchen". Or what I call "pandemic shopping porn" aka "My recent trip to Costco." The guy that lives in Russia in the middle of nowhere barely notices (Survival Russia). Really isolated location in small town Russia - living large like he usually does. "Home-based" YouTubers are holding on much better.
On a more positive note - I follow many artists on Instagram and some of them are just KILLING it in their respective mediums being all holed up with their art supplies. Its been a positive thing for some artists.
So are the people in that porno pic you posted nude or nekkid?
Naked, no clothing to protect their privacy. Nude, an aesthetic impression.
Art, no functional, invasive, or debasing depictions.
"an idealized version of you instead of the most interesting version"
So Albrecht Dürer = low.
Got it.
For art criticism, I come to the Althouse blog.
The NY TIMES, desperate for readers, goes full clickbait with promise of nudes.
This should be an example of how the Times has zero self awareness and less shame.
I think they should be offered both, by the truckload.
"Yes, but is it high art, as the headline asserts. This issue strikes me as nonsense."
Nonsense, indeed. The whole discussion is so bizarre today. It was reminiscent of Arthur Danto's efforts to come up with a definition of art for his theory of aesthetics. His earlier work looked for some acceptable definition of the usual 'high art' variety, but ended up rejecting all of that. He had a lot of trouble fitting Duchamp and his ready-mades into any coherent account, but what really did it for him was the huge success of Warhol and his Brillo boxes, indistinguishable as they were from every other Brillo box, followed by the success of the conceptual artists. He ended up concluding that it's impossible to define art by reference to any quality of the object itself (essentialism), since no one could identify any such quality. He tried offering 'aboutness' and 'embodiment' as useful criteria, but finally concluded that there was nothing about the object itself that distinguished art from non-art. Anything could be deemed art -- it was just a matter of the response to and reception of the particular object.
I hope high art is not something people do because they are bored and have nothing better to do, so they pose and push a button. That's just lame, no matter what you call it. Besides, is it high art if anybody can do it, and millions are doing it everyday?
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