The idea of Art in our times is changing radically. All of the desperate defining and containing that is much mocked in this blog is the vain effort to medicate the metaphysical nausea we experience upon finding ourselves on a shifting funhouse floor. This brilliant interview with Cory Doctorow by Joel Turnipseed pins down a few of the facts we need to accept: (read the whole thing, but by its nature I shouldn't feel guilty about stealing a large chunk)

We live in a century in which copying is only going to get easier. It's the 21st century, there's not going to be a year in which it's harder to copy than this year; there's not going to be a day in which it's harder to copy than this day; from now on. Right? If copying gets harder, it's because of a nuclear holocaust. There's nothing else that's going to make copying harder from now on. And so, if your business model and your aesthetic effect in your literature and your work is intended not to be copied, you're fundamentally not making art for the 21st century. It might be quaint, it might be interesting, but it's not particularly contemporary to produce art that demands these constraints from a bygone era. You might as well be writing 15-hour Ring Cycle knock-offs and hoping that they'll be performed at the local opera. I mean, yes, there's a tiny market for that, but it's hardly what you'd call contemporary art.

So that's the artistic reason. Finally, there's the ethical reason. And the ethical reason is that the alternative is that we chide, criminalize, sue, damn our readers for doing what readers have always done, which is sharing books they love—only now they're doing it electronically. You know, there's no solution that arises from telling people to stop using computers in the way that computers were intended to be used. They're copying machines. So telling the audience for art, telling 70 million American file-sharers that they're all crooks, and none of them have the right to due process, none of them have the right to privacy, we need to wire-tap all of them, we need to shut down their network connections without notice in order to preserve the anti-copying business model: that's a deeply unethical position. It puts us in a world in which we are criminalizing average people for participating in their culture.

(Link via Journalista)

"What else are we missing?"

Michael Evans sends me this thought for the day:
"Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists."- Ezra Pound
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I missed this from last month's Washington Post. They had the idea of placing one of America's finest violinists as a busker in the morning rush and gauging the reaction.
Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.
By Gene Weingarten. Washington Post Staff Writer. April 8
"In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L'Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said -- not because people didn't have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.
"This is about having the wrong priorities," Lane said.
If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?"
(via Bob Morales)
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I'm reading Chabon's new book, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and enjoying reading his finely chiseled prose as much as he appears to have enjoyed writing it, though of course it is generally wise for one to avoid the presumption that a writer got any kind of similar pleasure from the writing of a work as one got from reading it.
"And just last week, amid the panic and feathers of a kosher slaughterhouse on Zhilovsky Avenus, a chicken turned on the scochet as he raised his ritual knife and announced, in Aramaic, the imminent advent of Messiah... the miraculous chicken offered a number of startling predictions, though it neglected to mention the soup in which, having once more fallen silent as God Himself, it afterward featured. Even the most casual study of the record, Landsman thinks, would show that strange times to be a Jew have almost always been, as well, strange times to be a chicken."
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If you've never seen Alan Moore's drawings of Glycon and Asmodeus, John Coulthart shows them here, and you can enlarge them enough to appreciate the detail.
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Neil Gaiman has the photos of the wedding of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. I saved that till the end knowing that if you went there first you'd forget to come back here.

The state of reading.

Steve Block, in comments for march 7, linked to this article in the Guardian in which Milan Kundera asks if literature is 'under threat from mediocrity and pointless proliferation.'
"Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional - thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious - is contemptible. ...
When, one day, the novel's history will have ended, what fate will await the great novels left after that? Some are unrecountable, and thus inadaptable (like Pantagruel, like Tristram Shandy, like Jacques the Fatalist, like Ulysses). They will either survive or disappear as they are. Others, thanks to the "story" they contain, do seem recountable (like Anna Karenina, The Idiot, The Trial) and therefore adaptable to film, to television, to theatre, to cartoon strip. But that "immortality" is a chimera! For turning a novel into a theatre piece or a film requires first decomposing the composition; reducing it to just its "story"; renouncing its form. But what is left of a work of art once it's stripped of its form? One means to prolong a great novel's life through an adaptation and only builds a mausoleum, with just a small marble plaque recalling the name of a person who is not there." ...
"...For the history of art is perishable. The babble of art is eternal."

Kundera refers to so many Great Books in the piece that I find myself glancing at my shelf and noticing all that literature up there I've been hoping to get around to. For years. Perhaps it's time to admit I'll never read Cellini from the start and will only ever dip into his life, and then only once every five years. The Proust still sits hopefully at the front, But Pope and Boswell are barely visible under dust. Finnegan's Wake was begun enthusiatically, and may get begun again. There is just too much to read in the world and perhaps we all must be satisfied with knowing our specialized area. I guess mine might be described as the philosophy of art. I have many books relating to my particular enthusiasm which were devoured within days of coming into the house.

Leaving aside the 'Great Books' for a minute, and noting that I got Kundera's piece on the 'net, Umberto Eco has said that there are too many books in the world anyway. This was in a talk at a 1994 symposium in San Marino:
" People desire to communicate with one another. In ancient communities they did it orally; in a more complex society they tried to do it by printing. Most of the books which are displayed in a bookstore should be defined as products of vanity presses, even if they are published by a university press. As Landow suggests we are entering a new samizdat era. People can communicate directly without the intermediation of publishing houses. A great many people do not want to publish; they simply want to communicate with each other. The fact that in the future they will do it by E-mail or over the Internet will be a great boon for books and for the culture and the market of the book. Look at a bookstore. There are too many books. I receive too many books every week. If the computer network succeeds in reducing the quantity of published books, this would be a paramount cultural improvement."

It goes without saying that newspapers get short shrift here. My father-in-law thinks I don't know what's going on in the world because he has never seen me with a newspaper. Of course I get the headlines down the cable here and click on anything that looks earthshatteringly important. But like so many nowadays I depend on others to link me to the things I need to know about. Here's one in from my pal Mick Evans: a lightweight look at the blogging phenomenon in the Australian:
Blogged down in a swamp of other people's opinions
"Joel Stein, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, yearns for the good ol' days. Tongue firmly in cheek (I think!) he says the email (or blog) address published at the foot of his columns is "the pathetic, confused death knell of a once-proud newspaper industry".
"Here's what my internet-fearing editors have failed to understand," he writes. "I don't want to talk to you; I want to talk at you."
Mick's read the whole thing for me and I scanned it quickly, so you don't need to read it at all. We saved you having to get down off your horse.

Hayley Campbell polices a different area of interest, and she sends this one from the Internet movie database: Man Cleared Of Murder By 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' Wins Damages
"A man cleared of murder after he was spotted in the background of outtake footage of TV comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm has been awarded damages of $320,000."
All you need to know is that a guy's alibi is that he was in the crowd filmed at a game between the Dodgers and the Atlanta Braves and that the Larry David comedy was being shot at the stadium on the same day. Hayley says " it's like a plot point right outta curb your enthusiasm!"
Now, you don't need to go over there to read the whole thing, which is very short, but I just did in order to make sure the link works, and found the story above it to be much more interesting:
"Pope Benedict XVI has criticized his late predecessor Pope John Paul II's decision to share the stage with American rocker Bob Dylan. The current pontiff, who took over as head of the Roman Catholic Church following John Paul II's death in 2005, believes rock music is the work of Satan and cancelled the annual Christmas pop concert at The Vatican last year."
Okay, I've taken care of that one for you, let's move on...

Heidi MacDonald links to this one in the Uk Telegraph (imagine the trouble necessary to look inside so many different newpapers from different countries in the days before the internet) , and my respect for Frank Miller as a writer just increased. The Eisner-Miller book from Dark Horse should have been this interesting. I can't find it again but there's a moment where Eisner describes Miller's work in very simplistic terms and Miller seems at a loss to argue differently. He puts things right here:
"Heroic sacrifice is the essence of civilisation," claims Miller, "which is in many ways a series of compromises that we make. For example, while growing up, I always hated the phrase 'crime doesn't pay'. Because it was clearly visible that it pays like crazy, and yet that's not really the reason not to do it. The reason is that we have a contract among ourselves not to do certain things, and to do certain other things, because that is what makes society possible."
These noble ideas were formed at an early age. Miller was born in Maryland and enjoyed a comfortable, middle-class upbringing in Vermont, his childhood spent running through the woods and visiting the cinema. "This was the era of Ben-Hur and that really captured the country's imagination. I saw Jason and the Argonauts and the Hercules movies and that sort of thing, and then one weekend my parents took my brother and me to the latest, which was The 300 Spartans."
And actually, the real reason my respect increased is that he correctly said 'my brother and me' in that last sentence (I get so pissed off at the incorrect 'I' in the object position.)

An inherent problem with blogging and the internet and the speed at which information is being ingested is that a lot of readers aren't attending to the details. I checked a few of the responses to my post "In thrall to cinematic principle."
Derik Badman wrote in his blog:
"Campbell argues against the use of cinematic terms in comics. I’m of two minds on this matter. On the one hand, I think it is important that comics have their own terminology…”

I responded in his comments box to point out that I wasn't talking about terminology at all:
" My argument essentially was that in thinking only cinematically an artist loses a sense of the picture and what the picture is supposed to do and what it is supposed to be about. When I used to read comics to my son, those Batman Adventures should have been ideal, but I found to my dismay that the 4 year old lad couldn't 'read' the pictures because of the way they were fragmented. There weren't enough complete pictures for him to relate the fragments to. I exempt Templeton's version from that criticism, he knew how to do it properly, but other than that we were all the way back to Gottfredson's Mickey mouse (then coming out from Gladstone) for our reading material."

Charles Yoakum, on the other hand, saw what I meant and offered this anecdote on his blog:
“I recall someone who was editing a version of the Marvel Universe guide discussing how hard it was to find a shot of Cyclops using his eye beams with the effect of the beams being shown in the same panel. He had to go all the way back to Kirby’s layouts in X-Men 13 or so to get the shot.”
The hypothetical artist takes it as a given that the reader knows what is supposed to be happening. After a few years and a few generations of this, we find that the artist 'speaks' in phrases, syllables, half sentences, which are indecipherable to somebody who is not in on the secret language. Kirby, hypothetically, was the last guy who bothered to show the whole picture. The hypothetical later artist just 'refers' to his example instead of recreating the experience anew for the reader.
Thus my rule, 'The entire drama of a given situation must be contained within each panel of the sequence of that situation', is a way of reminding the artist that no matter how familiar the 'experience ' may be to himself, the reader may be having it for the first time.

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I've written about the much maligned thought bubble before. I must say I like the use of it in the Nora Jones video for 'Thinking about you.' An infinite universe of thoughts within thoughts.

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My pal Brad Weber mentioned Raymond Scott in comments for march 8. There's a great site dedicated to Scott, his 1930s-40s orchestra and and his later pioneering work with electronic instruments with sound files, exhaustive listings of all the animated cartoons that used his music, and a short biographical comic by Justin Green. Is there anything that is not at our fingertips?.

On the autonomy of art.

It’s terrifying to think my drunken ramblings might be held up against me one day. “The geckos are coming! We’re all doomed! We might as well stay in and shag our grandmothers!” I said what? When? “Last night, Dad. Don’t you remember?”
A comment that came in a few days back has sent me off reading a bunch of essays by the great twentieth century art critic Clement Greenberg. I’m quite fond of the old geezer and today I will offer a few words on matters of aesthetic interest as an antidote to all the foolish blather of the last week about the Evil Gecko Emperor. Things appear to have gone quiet on the battle front anyway.

It started with my post of 21 feb In thrall to the cinematic principle. Rod McKie remarked upon it on the Comics Journal board where he presumed I was demanding autonomy for comics as an art.
Rod wrote:" It seems like such an attempt to make comic art autonomous... that it seeks to exclude the involvement of the reader... I personally think autonomy is overrated and thanks to Clement Greenberg's later drunken, rambling, confessions that he championed Clive Bell's ideas simply 'for copy', I think it is somewhat discredited."

I had my say on 22 feb in BIG HANDS & little geezers. Rod saw that and came back in the comments box on 3 march in a way that demands a decent reply.
"Hi Eddie, I may have garbled what I was getting at (wouldn't be the first time). I was thinking of Clive Bell and the elite, and privileged, little Bloomsbury Group's insistence on the autonomy of painting, ridding it of all techniques of photography and cinema and the foregrounding instead of the means of production, of the technique (always over substance),
so that the painterly qualities of a painting, are all that matters and any discussion of the work should focus only on its self-referential qualities.
The reason the foregrounding of technique disquiets me is that Clement Greenberg used Bell's arguments to champion Abstract Expressionism and he was undoubtedly a tool of the CIA's promotion of Abstract Expressionism, during the Cold War.
It was not, as he was later to admit, something he believed in. He later excused himself by saying that nobody should have taken him seriously and that he was 'only making copy'. But as a highly influential art critic he destroyed a lot of careers.
Whilst I wouldn't argue about rules being necessary, I would object to a definition that strips comics of all outside references; if it were ever possible, and subjects comics to nothing but self-referential signifiers. “

Firstly, I like to think that drunken ramblings are inadmissible as evidence. In the same way that Voltaire's supposed recanting of his atheism on his deathbed must be inadmissible. It’s one of those things that if it didn’t happen somebody would have said that it did anyway. For the sake of argument let’s say that he wrote it in an essay. In that case it would simply be a new text in opposition to his older ones. Once an idea has gone out into the world, gotten mixed up with other stuff and established its own sphere of influence, you can’t just delete it by saying you’ve changed your mind.

I detect in your words a tendency to join the legion of 'Clembashers’ "THOSE WHO ATTACK Greenberg broadly first get him wrong and then flog their own misunderstanding". (Darby Bannard). The reach and depth of his work can be measured by reading three compilations of his talks and/or writings: Art and Culture (1961), Clement Greenberg: the Collected Essays and Criticism (1986-93) and Homemade Esthetics (1999). Any serious attempt at a just estimation of his place in the history of art and art criticism will need to focus on these books." (Peter Harris).

Perhaps we are nostalgic for a time when it was okay to believe in absolutes. Somebody else’s ideas could be seen as objects taking up all the space, that need to be pushed aside so we can get ours in. I personally have no problem with embracing a dozen mutually exclusive ideas in one lunch time. Like my rules for instance. If somebody else has a bunch of rules that helps them get their work done then they’re good rules. They are abstractions. There is no reason for somebody to elimimate one of mine in order to have a different idea of their own.
There exist many beautiful ideas that the world no longer has any practical use for, such as the ancient Greeks' belief that there was a special god who patronized wine, or the seventeenth century idea that each key in musical harmony represented a different ‘affect’, a state of mind and spirit and emotion. The autonomy of art is one of those beautiful ideas, and one that was espoused by Greenberg:
"What I'm getting at, in a way I hope isn't so roundabout, is the fact that art and the history of art can be approached and discussed illuminatingly all by themselves, as though taking place in an area of experience that's autonomous, a place that doesn't have to be connected with any other area of experience in order to have sense made of it."
His 1961 monograph on Hans Hofmann is a lovely example of this kind of writing. In 5,700 words he writes about nothing that is not contained on the surfaces of the paintings or on those of the works of earlier or later artists. It is a pleaure to read, and I am mystified as to why you feel it necessary to spoil such a pleasure for me, as though the existence of my aesthetic enjoyment could have any negative effect on yours which is taking place elsewhere, which attitude I deduce from the triumph you feel in reading that it ('autonomy' in art) is 'discredited'

But note this:
"Greenberg held that speculation about "content" in art was idle, that in successful art content was bound up inextricably with form and that form could essentially be pointed to and described in individual works of art but couldn't be interpreted or explicated as content in any meaningful way. This led to a widespread assumption that he didn't believe in content (which he quite rightly denied)" (Terry Fenton)

I confess I can’t completely figure out your point of view, since I encounter a few old school reactionaries in my links hither and yon, but you do use that very postmodern phrase in your last line 'self-referential signifiers'. The site I've been linking to above has quite a collection of Greenberg's writings. There's an essay on postmodernism in which Clem’s befuddlement and discomfort is plain to see. He can’t quite figure out how it can be the next thing. He doesn’t realize yet that it means the end of ‘next things’, and of all the other notions by which poor old Clem set his clock, such as the idea of the motor of art history being driven by individual geniuses passing a baton one to the next; the notion that art is an ongoing narrative.

We do things differently now and thus we can’t talk about American Abstract Expressionism without bringing the CIA into it:
UNPOPULAR FRONT: American art and the Cold War. by LOUIS MENAND
My favourite passage of that article you linked to is this, which makes a peace between the old and new ways of interpreting:
"Still, no work reduces to a single context. When you stand before Pollock’s “Lavender Mist,” you do not think about “artistic free enterprise” or the C.I.A. or the cultural politics of Partisan Review. You think about how a painter could have taken all he had experienced across a creative threshold that no one had crossed before, and produced this particular thing. The painting’s importance for a certain strand of Cold War cultural politics is part of the story of how it got to us, a generation or more later, and that history is worth knowing, because bits and pieces of it—the existentialist encounter, the “American” indifference to painterly decorum—still cling to it. After all, other ways of understanding Abstract Expressionist paintings were once possible, for images are highly malleable (one of the reasons they make poor instruments for propaganda). It might easily have been argued that Abstract Expressionist works are hostile to the spirit of liberal democracy, that they reflect a totalitarian aesthetics—monumental, peremptory constructions that make us feel our insignificance."

IN The Fate of the Artist I opine that the scholarship of an art becomes as much a part of art history as the art it interprets. One of my favorite books is Adolf Furtwangler's colossal 1891(?) tome in which he recreates the history of ancient Greek Sculpture, bringing the personalities of the artists vividly back to life through an analysis of the assorted rubble that we have at our disposal, joining this to that with extraordinary confidence, using speculative attributions as the basis for other speculative attributions. Virtually all of it is now dismissed, but I love to go back and read passages from it. (I spent a couple of weeks with it and photocopied a great deal). Aesthetically it is a treasure. There was a moment in 1891 when the history of Greek Sculpture went just so. Today it goes differently. Now we prefer to admit a lack of knowledge than to make things up. Our antique galleries are full of broken things in preference to old things mended by modern hands. Times change. We dismiss fictitious histories while acknowledging that all history is more or less fictive.

Pass the baton, dear.

Mark Siegel at First Second is the first to link to Sunday's NY Times article by David Hadju, reviewing the Ivan Brunetti edited Graphic Fiction. Hadju wants to boost comics to some level of cultural import. So far so good. That's all very routine to our way of thinking.
But I'm much more interested in this aspect of the situation. Hadju quotes Time book critic Lev Grossman's article of July 10, 'Who's the voice of this generation?." Grossman describes a century of literary baton-passing (as this theory of artistic historiography has been described elsewhere), from Fitzgerald to Hemingway to Salinger to Kerouac to Heller to Vonnegut to McInerney to Ellis, but laments that the baton seems to have got dropped and lost around sixteen years ago. Hadju says he's looking for it in the wrong place. But this model of artistic development, this passing of some kind of legacy, is regarded with suspicion in our postmodern environment, and for that matter I think the notion of looking for it in any one place is also to be seriously questioned.
The interest for me lies in certain similarities to an article by Barry Gewen in the NY Times of dec 11 2005: The State of Art, in which he examines six books of Art criticism which all appear to have arrived at the conclusion that art is in a serious crisis: "One critic stands at the center of this "worldwide crisis." Clement Greenberg sensed there was an anything-goes problem long before it had reached the stage of decapitated chickens..."
What I love about it all is the spectacle of intelligent critics in a state of terminal bewilderment. Somebody has palmed the baton! It makes me Laff.
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Andrew wrote in yesterday's comments: "One set of panels I would love you to post? I read somewhere once that there was a page in the script of From Hell which had Gull and Netley driving over London Bridge, which hadn't been built at the time, so you sketched the page anyway essentially with Gull stopping mid-sentence to scream as his carriage hurtled into the Thames. I think I read that somewhere. Does that exist?"
That would have been Tower Bridge. It was built in late Victorian times, but styled to chime with the medieval architecture of the Tower of London itself. Thus many sightseers don't realise it is in fact just over one century old. But of course they didn't have the means to make a big mechanical rising bridge like that away back in the middle ages, so obviously it must be relatively recent. What happened: I didn't draw the script as written but sent Gull down to the next bridge and just stretched the dialogue over more panels than Alan intended. In the meantime I scribbled a gag on a photocopy of a 19th century photo of the bridge under construction and sent it to Alan, so I no longer have it. However, for an article in the final issue of Bacchus (#60) I made a new version of the same thing, more or less identical. I no longer have that either, but here it is scanned from the article: (click to enlarge) I haven't looked at the big bulging box of photo reference for From Hell in a long time, but I'm sure there are many more treasures contained therein, including Alan standing in front of some of the London monuments for which he sent pictures. If enough people ask I could go root around in there and see what I find. Would make interesting posting on slow news days.
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mr j thinks I made him look 'obsessive compulsive' (yesterday's comments) so I'll remind you that he's also brilliant. Here's a recent strip.(click to enlarge) Readers of Angry Cook in The Fate of the Artist are anticipating the possiblity that one day Hayley Campbell may notice that the other great beauties of history inspired poetry, while she has tended to inspire comic strips.

HA! just in my inbox:
Dave Gibbons has left a new comment on your post Old block off the chip: "Met Hayley in the pub on Saturday. Much was spoken of. Forgot to mention the dishwashing rota, though..."