Art too Easy

Here's a contoversial article by Raphael Bendahan in Toronto's Now Magazine about the malaise of contemporary art. Bendahan's chapbook, Sit Up, has recently been published by Sky of Ink Press -- more about that later.  My own take?  I agree with both RB as well as most of the critical comments pasted below the article.  The article is intended as a polemic, to provoke readers (and artists) out of today's complacent and overly polite malaise into a (hopefully) constructive and consciousness-raising conversation.  (Now actually asked for a rant.) RB is fully aware (I've talked with him about it) that there are exciting exceptions to his thesis about contemporary art -- and that what is exciting is always exceptional, even rare. I've also told him that the same article with slight variations could have been written in the 50's or the 20's.  As Stephen Pinker points out, though, it is our bias is to react to general observations as if they are meant to apply to every last case -- and, of course, to over-react as a consequence.  

Goethe: Symbolism vs. Allegory

There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it.

Allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept, the concept into an image, but in such a way that the concept always remains bounded in the image, and is entirely to be kept and held in it, and to be expressed by it.

Symbolism . . . transforms the phenomenon into idea, the idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea remains always infinitely active and unapproachable in the image, and even if expressed in all languages, still would remain inexpressible.

--Goethe, Maxims and Reflections