The Illuminated Donkey

For your enjoyment, a selection of three recent articles about art.

When Art Becomes Inhuman, by Karl Zinsmeister, from The American Enterprise.

Many of today’s avant-garde artists, I’ve decided, have modeled themselves on that well-known societal fixture, the snot-nosed teenager. Since the 1960s, the hippest modern art has aspired to exactly what every garden-variety 13-year-old brat aims for: maximum opportunities to shock, flout, insult, and otherwise chuck rocks at polite society. And so “artists” spread American flags on the floor and invited gallery and museum patrons to walk on them. “Sculptors” stacked bricks in low heaps and convinced collectors to pay bags of money for something they could have made themselves after a shopping trip to Home Depot. Damien Hirst piled up empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, and other garbage at a party and it was instantly proclaimed a valuable sculpture. Fraternity brothers everywhere, you have a future!

I See Lowbrow People by Doug Harvey, from L.A. Weekly.

While the squabbling factions of the academic/gallery/museum/critical nexus known as "The Art World" argue about who’s on top this week, an entire spectrum of parallel systems of production and distribution is operating outside TAW’s rapidly eroding authority. Whole subcultures devoted to folk and outsider art, landscape painting, public art commissions, "crafts," nature photography, and cowboy art thrive in spite of the sometimes open derision of the entrenched arbiters of "historically significant" art practice. The most ornery of these alternate realities is the globally widespread movement often called "Lowbrow," whose roots go back to California custom-car and surfing culture, particularly the cartoonish grotesqueries of the late hot-rod surrealist Ed "Big Daddy" Roth.

The Follies of Modern Art: a Bilious Harangue by James Lileks.

Nowadays, art that prompts "controversy" usually has one thing in common: it’s bad. Bad in conception or bad in execution, and frequently bad in both. Many in the arts world believe it is necessary to defend bad art , just like it is necessary to defend unpopular speech. On the contrary: it is necessary to attack bad art in the interests of raising the general level of quality in art. These, of course, are nasty code words - "bad" and "quality" are subjective judgments, and cannot be uniformly defined. Well, let me make a start: a. If art contains shit, we should take it at its word.