criticality

quotes from seven days in the art world by sarah thornton

"despite its self-regard, and much like a society of devout followers, the art world relies on consensus as heavily as it depends on individual analysis or critical thinking. although the art world reveres the unconventional, it is rife with conformity. artists make work that 'looks like art' and behave in ways that enhance stereotypes. curators pander to the expectations of their peers and their museum boards. collectors run in herds to buy work by a handful of fashionable painters. critics stick their finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing so as to 'get it right.' originality is not always rewarded, but some people take real risks and innovate, which gives a raison d'etre to the rest."

"i took the opportunity to probe the jargon i'd heard on campus. criticality was at the top of my list. 'it shouldn't be confused with being harsh or hostile, because you can be unthinkingly negative,' said a young photographer slumped on the couch. 'it's a deep inquiry so as to expose a dialectic,' explained an mfa student keen on doing a phd. 'if you're on autopilot, you're not critical.' said a performance artist, with a nod from her boyfriend. during our conversation, an african-american man of about sixty emerged from one of the offices. he turned out to be the conceptual artist charles gaines. the students flagged him over to pose the question on my behalf. 'criticality is a strategy for the production of knowledge,' he said plainly. 'our view is that art should interrogate the social and cultural ideas of its time. other places might want a work to produce pleasure or feelings.' of course! conceptualism arose in the 1960s in part as a reaction to abstract expressionism. criticality is the code word for a model of art-making that foregrounds research and analysis rather than instincts and intuition."

"burden distrusts institutions, because they lack accountability and hide behind bureaucratic ways of thinking."

migration

by cathy tagnak rexford from effigies

i am a cedar mask, devouring my own tongue,
i close the space between my teeth with permafrost.
from this i will heave forth the brooks range,
leech my ears into the shape of whale flukes,
mount my face to the white wall
of a gallery.

outside, a cab driver with a cigarette drooping
from his lip, swerves as you stand
in the middle of the street, your left foot
on the painted white line, your right
on the edge of a melting polar icecap
as a thousand black and white kissing scenes
project on the skin of a deceased bowhead.

together, we pain the grooves of our mouths
with radio static and black shale.
     we opened our eyes this morning,
     the air was blue.
we carved bare-breasted women into
coastal bluffs of the chukchi sea,
they are beaten every autumn as
wind passes its hand over the waves.
we run into the city, into concrete nightmares;
we fault ourselves into the glass hallway where we stand.

logotherapy

quotes from man's search for meaning by viktor frankl

"success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it."

"there is something which seems to me to be even an even more erroneous and dangerous assumption [than pan-sexualism], namely, that which i call 'pan-determinism.' by that i mean the view of man which disregards his capacity to take a stand toward any conditions whatsoever. man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. in other words, man is ultimately self-determining."

"fifty years ago, i published a study devoted to a specific type of depression i had diagnosed in cases of young patients suffering from what i called 'unemployment neurosis.' and i could show that this neurosis really originated in a twofold erroneous identification: being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life. consequently, whenever i succeeded in persuading the patients to volunteer in youth organizations, adult education, public libraries and the like -- in other words, as soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity -- their depression disappeared although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same."

"as logotherapy teaches, there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. the first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. the second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love. edith weisskopf-joelson observed in this context that the logotherapeutic 'notion that experiencing an be as valuable as achieving is therapeuitc because it compensates for our one-sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the expense of the internal world of experience.'

most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. he may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph. again it was edith weisskopf-joelson who. . . once expressed the hope that logotherapy 'may help counteract certain unhealthy trends in the present-day culture of the united states, where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading' so that 'he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.'"

"just as life remains potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are the most miserable, so too does the value of each and every person stay with him or her, and it does so because it is based on the values that he or she has realized in the past, and is not contingent on the usefulness that he or she may or may not retain in the present.

more specifically, this usefully is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. but today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. it virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in doing so blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. if one is not cognizant of this difference and hold that an individual's value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of hitler's program, that is to say, 'mercy' killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they suffer.

confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from a conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch. even in the setting of training analyses such an indoctrination may take place. nihilism does not contend that there is nothing, but it states that everything is meaningless. and george a. sargent was right when he promulgated the concept of 'learned meaninglessness.' he himself remembered a therapist who said, 'george, you must realize that the world is a joke. there is no justice, everything is random. only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. there is no grand purpose in the universe. it just is. there's no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act.'

one must not generalize such a criticism. in principle, training is indispensable, but if so, therapists should see their task in immunizing the trainee against nihilism rather than inoculating him with the cynicism that is a defense mechanism against their own nihilism."