Tuesday July 15, 2003

CALM DOWN. Terry Teachout asks, "Am I the only person to have spotted the social significance of Roz Chast’s Cremaster-bashing back-page cartoon in the June 9 issue of the New Yorker?" I daresay he is. He goes on: "I do think there is something quite genuinely subversive about the fact that Roz Chast, of all people, felt free to make fun of Matthew Barney in the New Yorker, of all places."

If you type "art" into the search field at the New Yorker's Cartoon Bank, you will find plenty of panels lampooning artistic pretensions of all sorts. (Good example: one dog telling another, "What I do as an artist is take an ordinary object -- say, a lamppost -- and, by urinating on it, transform it into something that is uniquely my own.")

Teachout seems not have noticed. "Back in the days of Harold Ross, the New Yorker wasn’t above publishing cartoons that made fun of abstract expressionism," he reports, "but ever since Jackson Pollock became God, they’ve been careful not to make that kind of mistake again -- until now."

Well, I haven't seen any biting satires on Jackson Pollock, lately, but I imagine that's because he's been well beside the point for a long, long time.

There are a whole nest of critics who, like Teachout, seem to get a charge out of the idea that art scenes are all mobbed up to the advantage of certain deleterious movements and dogma. (Actually they are mobbed up, but to the advantage of certain individuals who are admired by the powerful -- and, of course, those thought to be bankable -- and 'twas ever thus.) I guess this makes such critics feel like rebels or something. If the magazine's management, acting as a sinister and monolithic force, roams the hallways muscling writers and artists (Mister Remnick wants you should say something nice about the Cremaster Cycle!), then to speak against Matthew Barney is something more than one man's opinion; it is an act of courageous political incorrectness.

Why Teachout, who writes and thinks well and whose present edition is otherwise a delight, needs to perpetuate this kind of juvenile fantasy is genuinely puzzling.

(Found via the Castel-Dodges)