popcult

marcus westbury, a friend of mine has a three-part series on the abc called not quite art. over on marcus’ facebook he’s published a review by giles auty:

Portrait of an artist as a young critic – TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16
By Giles Auty

Not Quite Art
10pm, ABC

DO agreed rules, knowledge or education have any constructive role to play in the visual arts? Or should we just trust our feelings?

This, in a nutshell, is the vital question raised by Marcus Westbury in his three-part series Not Quite Art.

Few of us get the chance to play the part of a disillusioned teenager on television, especially when our spottier years lie comfortably behind us. Westbury therefore deserves our congratulations for being granted 90 minutes of good TV time to explore his grievances against the adult world.

I more than suspect Not Quite Art will divide its audience rigidly by age group, not because its presenter lacks charm but because most of his assumptions remain so resolutely juvenile. As a Year 9 student said on ABC radio last month when wagging school to protest against the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum conference in Sydney: “I’m not old enough to vote so I have to express my feelings some other way.”

Unsurprisingly, Westbury’s professional history has involved participation in several youth festivals.

In episode one of the present series, he questions why we spend more money building sterile palaces to dead artists and their artefacts than supporting living ones. Here, as occurs elsewhere in the series, the degree of generalisation in the question renders it effectively meaningless. Which dead artists is he talking about and which living ones?

Westbury grew up and attended university in Newcastle, where he studied communications and developed a taste for anarchic culture. The costly expansion of Newcastle’s regional art gallery clearly irks him and he feels such money would be better spent supporting that city’s art bars, which “incubate possibilities”.

Westbury is made bored and uncomfortable by the formal ambience of art galleries such as Sydney’s Art Gallery of NSW and Museum of Contemporary Art.

We catch him travelling to Glasgow, where a vibrant alternative art culture apparently flourishes, but one may wish his wanderings could have also taken in world-class museums such as Madrid’s Prado and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. There he could have explained, in the face of their art, why he deems supporting dead artists such as Velazquez, Goya and Rembrandt such a waste of time and money.

In next week’s episode, Westbury takes us to the urban laneways of Melbourne where graffiti, the new folk art, has spread like lantana and apparently pulls in tramloads of Japanese tourists.

From there we progress to the important part that computer games with Australian themes ought to be playing in our future cultural lives.

In turn, this prompts me to progress to the important cultural role a glass of pinot noir can play in my particular cultural life.

—

and my response:

portrait of a boring, old right-wing art critic
by elliott bledsoe

do you think we should all just agree with the tired and conservative views of a boring old man still bitter with his move to the land down under?

i wouldn’t be too concerned marcus. this critique comes from a man who slags off foucault and laments critical literacy. because we all know rote learning ’still is the best way to teach.’ right?

not to mention the fact that the man declares “some art just too obscure for words”:

“forty years after the advent of conceptual art, some may feel it has not made much of a dent – let alone shot many holes into – the consciousness of the wider public. conceptualism belongs to a realm of activities described generally today as “challenging art”. indeed, because such “challenging art” has made so little apparent impact on public consciousness it now often demands – and receives – public subsidy on the paradoxical grounds the public would never voluntarily support it.”

no bias in this art critic’s preferences.

in an article in quadrant he says:

“so what is postmodernism? one easy answer is that it is radical relativism gone rampant. but the answer i prefer is that it represents an attempt to usher in a new kind of left-wing totalitarianism via the unlocked back doors of democracies. postmodernism represents the neo-marxist conquest of western cultures by stealth.”

not to mention the fact that he used an entire article in quadrant to talk about how bitter he is. first he bitches about the other cultural journalists not liking him and his disgust at the age publishing “an enraged assault … on my professional abilities.” he carries on with a declaration of the inferiority of australian publications compared to his beloved spectator then openly complains:

…in six years of writing on cultural matters for the Australian, my appearances on cultural programs on ABC radio or television have been limited to one per year. Even within the parameters of my own paper, I have never been asked to contribute to the pages of the Australian’s Review of Books by any of its three editors.

boo hoo! and he then rounds it all off with:

Please do not imagine for a moment that I cannot handle abuse. It is only when the hurling of largely meaningless rhetorical insults supplants any pretence at intelligent debate and becomes instead almost the sole manifestation of cultural and political life that there becomes cause for worry.

marcus, your “assumptions remain so resolutely juvenile,” and his are so resolutely boring. you are “made bored and uncomfortable by the formal ambience of art,” and i am made bored by auty’s continually fogey approach to art criticism. not to mention that he has some fetishised obsession with institutional art spaces, probably because he gets asked to talk in them regularly. sterile palaces to should-be-dead art critics if you ask me!

is it any wonder the man works for news corp and gets on so well with chris mitchell?

REFLECTION: shit, did i just use critical literacy to deconstruct auty? i guess i’d better quite the law/arts degree and go back to primary school.