September 2013

D. A. Pennebaker's film Town Bloody Hall has surfaced on YouTube -- catch it while it's up, you never know when someone's going to demand a takedown.
The film captures a raucous 1971 panel discussion with three writers (Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, and Diana Trilling), an activist (N.O.W.'s Jacqueline Ceballos), and moderator Norman Mailer (!).
The packed auditorium has heckling, cheering, booing, walkouts, and celebrity questioners (including Cynthia Ozick, Susan Sontag, and Elizabeth Hardwick). The event, with its boisterous spirit never quite leaving the zone of collegiality, makes today's professionalized and "surveilled" world of arts discussion seem very, very, very dull. (The film came to mind during the awful, Paddy Johnson-moderated "are there too many dudecentric net art shows" thread.)
Mailer is funny and slightly clowning throughout, yet the takeaway moment is Greer's stirring speech questioning the value of capital-A art, both for its cult of male genius and disproportionate valuation in society. Rather than the professional ego-strivers who cause all this imbalance, she concludes, we should perhaps aspire to be the faceless artisans who built the cathedrals.
This speech inspired me back in the day and it's still very moving even though feminism in the arts never lives up to its aspirations.
The feminist art critic's answer to the question "how do you avoid making icky Greenbergian critical judgments?" is "show everything" but they rarely do.
The curator's cutoff between "good artist/in the show" and "bad artist/not in the show" may have been raised from 10 to 30 under feminism but it's seldom if ever increased to "all applicants" -- where would be the fun in that? Quotas are even worse -- that's phallocentrism writ large and throbbing. The only thing that changes is the nature of the "other."