general

1980s art magazines, following French theorists, often described art as a "play of signifiers." In the present era, politics requires that play be minimized and that signifiers be clear and unambiguous. An example is Ryder Ripps' painting show at Postmasters Gallery, titled "Ho." The show plays with the tradition of the male artist and female model, and questions the relationship between sexual and commercial prostitution. The "Ho" in question is Adrianne Ho, who became Instagram-famous posting attractive photos of herself advertising various brands. Welcome to the third rail of current art world discourse.
Some writers have interpreted the show as unambiguously misogynist. Yet the artist has parodied himself in the show's documentation as a macho painter, with back to back photos of a very butch Willem De Kooning in his 1950s apartment and Ripps dressed in muscle T and rolled-up jeans, painting Ho on his iPhone touchscreen. The touchscreen paintings, outsourced to third party oil-on-canvas contractors, de-sexualize Adrianne Ho's unambiguously sexy self-images by means of funhouse mirror distortions that make her appear absurd or grotesque. This could be slut shaming or it could be repurposing soulless capitalism as a surrealist nightmare.
In an earlier, more open minded era, the gallery would be a free speech zone where the yin and yang of such ideas could be considered. That's not the era we're living in.

Mean internet commenters are piling on Brian Williams, now that there's some proof he's an airhead. This one from Salon is good:

averow45 It was another hot day in Iraq. Hotter than Hades in the Chinook copter that the Brian was flying in. So very boring because He knew that there was unreported news occurring down there in the desert. Wasting no time Brian grabbed a chute from the loadmaster and jumped out of the chopper, drifting straight into the insurgents' command camp. He brazenly strode up to the insurgents' leader and demanded a cease fire. Despite not speaking a word of their language he simply got it done through sheer force of personality. Then he heard that one of the dastardly insurgents had disobeyed the cease fire by firing an RPG at the very chopper he had just been in! The Brian wasted no time. He jogged directly to the crash site, rendered first aid to the wounded and fixed the broken hydraulic lines using his bare hands. After returning stateside the President awarded him the Medal of Freedom in a secret Rose Garden Ceremony.

Mark Ames, who along with Matt Taibbi ran the satirical newspaper The Exile in Russia, moved back to the US in 2008 and comments this week in Pando Daily about what he calls the "horizontal censorship" practiced here (as opposed to Putin's vertical, top-down variety). The social media and blog environment that initially promised a break from elite-managed discourse, Ames argues, has become an intellectual dystopia of earnest "outrage addicts" mobbing up on comedians and satirists.* It's a form of censorship because it doesn't respect satire or comedy as a bounded, socially useful activity, and applies the standards of political responsibility to a type of work that is inherently anarchic and disruptive. A comedian, satirist, or, let's add, performance or conceptual artist, concerned about a loss of reputation or livelihood, has an incentive to self-censor to avoid a personal smear based on deliberate or ignorant misconstruing of work.

Art F City's recent campaign to blemish the reputation of an artist, Ryder Ripps, with the help of Rhizome.org and anonymous Facebook groups, perfectly exemplifies what Ames describes. That campaign came to a head last week with a tweet and a headline crowing that Ripps' current show was his "death knell." Besides the complete loss of critical objectivity in Paddy Johnson citing her own predictions about a show as evidence of its failure, the campaign depended on misreading two separate projects, which were both humorous in context, as unethical and "offensive," and linking them together with a kind of running innuendo about their alleged "misogyny."

Ripps has attempted to correct some of the factual inaccuracies and wrong assumptions in Paddy Johnson's review of his Postmasters show. No artist should have to do this. Thousands more people will see Johnson's attack pieces than will ever see the defense.

*or in Ames' case, a muckracking journalist whose past satirical works were treated as scandalous truth by his detractors

Does the work help others?

Is it friendly?

Does it have some technical stuff?

Can the work be explained in a paragraph?

If the artist has made unfriendly or unhelpful works in the past, have they been apologized for?

Does the artist work well with others?

Have any major artists vouched for the artist, or this particular work?

Has the artist won a grant or award?

Is the artist physically presentable?

These are meant only as guidelines but if the answer is Yes to all of the above questions you can expect a positive review for your work in the near future.

A couple of years ago a friend had an idea of making e-books of music theory and asked for proposals. The idea seems to have died on the vine but in a way I'm glad because am not sure I have the stamina to write the essay proposed below. Am posting it here as a rough manifesto for my own work as a musician.

The essay explores a tension in music since the early 20th Century between what I'll call "teaching" and "lying," that is, between the need to explain new techniques and processes and the perverse desire of the artist to indulge in misdirection, fiction, and untruths.
I'll start with an Auden lyric asserting that music -- in contrast to words -- can't lie. Daniel Albright, in his book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature and the Other Arts, argues that French composers from Les Six group, often described as musical surrealists, were able to lie with music by "shifting its semantic plane," that is, playing with context and listener expectations to alter music's "true" or original meaning. See notes at http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2008/03/26/daniel-albright-on-poulenc-and-surrealist-music/
Other composers of that era explored a more responsible, pedagogical approach. I'll talk about Carl Orff's Musik für Kinder (music for children) which was made simple for teaching purposes but survives as intriguing modern music in its own right, and has been used by filmmakers such as Terence Malick (in Badlands).
Somewhere in the middle is Erik Satie and his notion of interchangeable "furniture" music. I'll discuss his score for Entr'acte Cinematographique, Rene Clair's film that ran between the two acts of the Relâche ballet, as an example of modularity, anticipating DJ and techno music.
With the twin poles of dissembling and pedagogy in mind, I'll discuss more recent developments beginning with sampling in the late '80s. An example of lying or Albright's "shifting the semantic plane" would be the Beastie Boys' use of the '70s David Bromberg song "Sharon" in their song "Johnny Ryall," or De La Soul's use of a Turtles string sample in "Live Transmission from Mars," in both cases turning "authentic" or innocent expression to the dark side of absurdist irony -- even though it's exactly the same music.
Working counter to these tendencies is a strong pedagogical streak in present-day electronic music. I'll discuss how techno-ambient techniques are taught "from without" (via instrument demos) and also "from within" (classic Detroit-style techno that reveals and hides its structure during its run time).
These arguments will be mostly intuitive and based on close readings of some old and new works. Other than Albright (whose ideas I think need to be better known) I plan to talk less about music theory (say, Adorno) than music itself. Ultimately I support the need for pedagogy in an evolving technological landscape but at the same time recognize the need for dissembling in a society of surveillance and "unitary identity" initiatives.

My working title is "Teaching vs Lying, from the Modernist Composers to the Techno Era." I may not use that, since it will take 30 pages to dope out a dichotomy that in a title just sounds baffling.
Anyway, such is my drift.
Tom Moody, December 2012