About this post on Gala Bent, Louis Torres quoted from and queried:
“No matter how she crowds her space, nobody’s home…. Her drawings
appear to be waiting for you to leave, in order to disappear.”Please translate.
I responded:
There’s a mute, recessive quality to her drawings that comes close to threatening her form.
Because I realized I wasn’t connecting with him at all, I added:
I think of it as a good thing.
I was going for an improvisation rather than a review, a moment instead of a full-dress regalia. Torres, co-editor of Aristos, disapproves. Aristos passes out awards for art writing each year.
Briefly stated, (the Aristos awards) are given for objectivity in arts
criticism, scholarship, or
commentary. Such objectivity involves the recognition (usually
implicit) that art has a particular nature, and that the art of the
present necessarily bears a fundamental similarity to the art of the
past. Often, the resulting conclusion is that a work
regarded as art by experts is not art at all. The fullest explication
of the point of view underlying the awards is found in What
Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand.
Ah, Ayn Rand. The high priestess of unregulated capitalism, the celebrant of selfishness, the enemy of community. I am delighted to disappoint you, Mr. Torres.
As it happens, the flaws in Rand’s work don’t redeem that cryptic sentence of yours. Better luck justifying yourself next time.
I’m still hoping to remember the name of the person who wrote “whenever you hear somebody say ‘That isn’t art!’, they’re almost always talking about something that couldn’t be anything else but art.”
Of course the work regarded as art by experts (presumably people who have spent years looking at, studying, thinking about, reading about and writing about art) is art. What else would it be? Civil engineering? Optometry? Fried chicken?