The End of the Art World (Aesthetics Today Series)

Rating:
Summary: Do It For Kicks
Review: "To deal with serious art requires a certain preparation of the mind, a relaxed synthesis whereby the mind comes into contact with the body, where there is a rejuvenation of seeing, and where thought is required to pull the act of seeing into the sensorium of feeling..." - R.C.M.

It could hardly be better stated that body, head and heart must be up to the game of both making and perceiving art. Like Jed Perl's "Eyewitness", this book asks for a more personal art and art world, where the invisible threads of theoreticians no longer bind imagination, where art is done for kicks.

A sticky discussion of meta-critics (almost, but not quite, art philosophers) ends with the hope that criticism can help the quality of art by intervening between art and market/fashion manipulation. Morgan's guess for the future of art is more kitsch, but hopefully revealing rather than reinforcing market culture.

Rating:
Summary: Insightful
Review: Would that it were so - that artists today understood, or at least vaguely approached, the metaphysical impetus that spurred artists through the centuries, up to and including the first modernists such as Kandinsky, Malevich, Klee, and Brancusi. Only a rare few artists today remain on track and seem to know what being an artist entails -- Martin, Steir, Colomar, Laib, Marden.... The vast majority are occupying themselves in meaningless egomania. Art is focused on, at best, a quick, zippy, kitschy riff on popular culture, no more or less engaging that a mildly clever advertizing billboard. Robert C. Morgan is on target in his diagnosis that art has lost its way, that it no longer even knows enough to seek to strike a deep and lasting internal cord, and that the establishment of curators and critics generally are clueless to find and present weighty art.