Thinking Retrospectively About the Jeff Koons Retrospective

Jeff Koons has two things in common with the great Renaissance painters like Rembrandt and Titian. He maintained a studio filled with helpers and he produced self-portraits. Where Koons differs from a Renaissance painter is in his use of the assembly line approach to both painting and sculpture in which individual artists are only involved in a small part of the final product. Marx wrote about alienation resulting from this kind of division of labor and it is hard to figure out of if many of Koons readymade sculptures can be classified as commodities of the type that are produced en masse in a factory or artistic works that are reflective of a brooding sensibility characterized by a singular vision of the world. This is, in fact, what separates them from Duchampian readymades which never quite seem to attain the status of commodities. However, just when you're about to dismiss Koons, you begin to realize this very dichotomy between commerce and art poses itself as one of the aims or dialectics of the work and you're somewhat calmed into an acceptance verging on pleasure. It’s easy to say that neither the early vacuum cleaners nor the famous "Play-Doh" sculpture are art, but then you become fascinated by the production of a piece which looks like plastic, but is actually heavy metal. One of the guards manning the recent Whitney retrospective of Koons’s work fenced off with a spectator who insisted on her right to touch and test one of the sculptures to make sure that indeed what she was seeing was not what it seemed to be. Koons elicits this kind of theater. “Made in Heaven” is the pornographic series featuring his former wife the Italian actress and politican La Cicciolina (aka Ilona Staller) and comprising paintings like “Exaltation,” (1991) where Koons comes on her face and another “Ilona’s Asshole,” which is self-explanatory. Koons says about the series, “It’s not porn. Made in Heaven dealt with the shame of masturbation in our society. It was a metaphor for cultural guilt. I wanted to reproduce the Garden of Eden, and sexual penetration like a hummingbird encounters a flower.” The series is introduced by poster for the film that Koons was originally going to make with his former wife. She’s in his arms, but he’s staring out at his audience. Again you are caught up short. Could it be that the artist is saying that he cares more about himself than his lover and that the imminence of a potential product trumps emotion? The answer is undoubtedly yes. Narcissism is a much bandied about word, but can we say that for good or bad Koons is caught in the narcissistic delusion that the world is indeed real?

Cracked!

First Issue Cracked (cover art, Bill Everett)

Saying that there would have been no ISIS if the US hadn’t invaded Iraq is little like claiming that Ray Rice wouldn’t have gotten into his current difficulties if he and his wife hadn’t taken the elevator or gone to Atlantic City. The Saddam Hussein regime was tantamount in brutality to Bashar al-Assad’s in Syria and if the US had never intervened it might well have run into problems soon after Arab spring with another revolutionary force that the dialectics of history produced. The opposition might have been Shiite rather than Sunni but Newton’s Third Law, “every action creates an equal and opposite reaction,” is as applicable to politics as it is to science. The fodder for despots and terrorists is chaos and hopelessness and there's enough of that in the Mideast without the United States having to raise a finger in the name of oil or democracy or both. This isn’t the first time in history that we've seen social cohesion and purpose coming out of violence. The rise of fascism in Germany can almost directly be tied to the onerous effects of the Versailles Treaty—which crippled the German economy. Marx said “religion...is the opiate of the masses" and Raymond Aron famously titled his critique of Marxism as The Opium of the Intellectuals. But the fact is that the history of the civilization records the search for varying kinds of anodynes for despair. Some are benign delusions such as the notion there is a meaning and purpose in the universe. But some addictive substances and beliefs can turn people into monsters, as the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov demonstrates. Terrorism is civilization’s crack.

Labor Day or Judgement Day?

A holiday honoring labor is a bittersweet form of recognition considering our current economic realities. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the sleeper of the season, but it provides cold comfort, underlying as it does the growing disparity in wealth that characterizes modern capitalist economies (and apparently hearkening back to the eponymous Das Kapital). As events in Ferguson and elsewhere indicate apartheid is still alive, but economic disparities cut an even broader swath with the rich growing exponentially richer while those on the lower end of the food chain (of all races and colors) struggling to see salary increases that cover inflation. Economic disparities in turn translate into educational ones in which a small class of students coming from affluent backgrounds are educated at a level in which their less fortunate peers can hardly compete.  “Generation Later, Poor are Still Rare at Elite Colleges,” (NYT, 8/25/14) read a recent Times headline. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,  Marx dealt with the nefarious effects of industrialization. Economy of scale created the need for division of labor that alienated the worker from the product he or she was creating. The monotony of the assembly line epitomizes this condition. But the characteristic of the our new society is the dichotomy between those who work and those who profit from other people's work, with the rewards of the latter becomingly increasingly out of sync with those who labor by the sweat of their brow. Yes it’s a free market, but how does one justify hedge fund managers and venture capitalists who make millions, even billions by hitting a button, while doctors, lawyers, accountants constitute a professional class which is increasingly hard put to pay tuitions for their children at the self-same elite colleges they once attended. As alumni their children’s applications may have been favored, but the privilege is a two-edged sword when the tuition bills arrive. In the l950’s educated professionals were still at the top of the heap, but in our current economy many highly educated people spend years paying off their college and graduate school debt only to be faced with the reality of decreased buying power and even further debt. And this doesn’t even take into consideration the problems of blue collar workers who are threatened with the potential insolvency of the safety net provided by the social security system. Retirement is increasingly becoming a luxury that fewer blue or white collar workers can readily afford.

Social Darwinism Redux

Herbert Spencer

Jerry Z. Muller’s essay “Capitalism and Inequality” (Foreign Affairs, March/April 2013) addresses a central issue our time: “the rise of economic inequality.” The disparity in educational opportunity and achievement is also addressed in the piece. Marx’s Das Kapital and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations are two of the great modern primers on capitalism. But Muller is no slouch in analyzing the rise of “market mechanisms to control the production and distribution of... goods and services” in the “seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “Throughout history, most households had consumed most the things that they produced and produced most of what they consumed,” he remarks. “Only at this point did a majority of the population of some countries begin to buy most of the things they consumed and do so with the proceeds gained from selling most of what they produced.” It’s like like e=mc2, a simple equation whose implications hit you right between the eyes. “Commodification—the transformation of activities performed for private use into activities performed for sale on the open market—allowed people to use their time more efficiently, specializing in what they were relatively good at and buying other things from other people.” Though increasing political freedom may have lowered the bars preventing some classes previously excluded from participating in such commodification, Muller concludes “that the inequality that exists today….derives less from the unequal availability of opportunity than it does from the unequal ability to exploit opportunity.” Here is where Darwin comes into play or is Herbert Spencer who coined the term social Darwinism more apropos? Why do some people succeed while others don’t? And why should some activities be rewarded so handsomely while others aren’t? Teachers receive low pay while a small group of global venture capitalists make fortunes that are greater then the GNP of certain countries. Further, how many of those who chose less remunerative work do so because they like it rather than out of fear that they would not succeed in a more competitive arena? Globalization has exacerbated these inequities since those elites that have attained knowledge and power tend to dominate an ever larger marketplace (whose transactions take place in the cybersphere, where social media increase opportunities for exploitation at an exponential pace). From a trickle down economic perspective, one might say, so what? But what are the ramifications culturally and psychologically--which inevitably brings us back to the question of education. A small percentage of the population around the world is receiving a increasingly higher level of education while the rest of the world’s population just gets enough to make them marginally employable. Muller’s analysis of economic inequality is thus a paradigm of the inequities of education both here and abroad. Muller concludes by quoting Marx and Engels to the effect that “what distinguishes capitalism from other social and economic systems is its 'constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, {and} everlasting uncertainty and agitation.'” However the loss of the incentive to grow and produce is the price that must be paid by societies that attempt to seriously ameliorate the inequitable conditions in which they formerly thrived. If this is dysfunctional sounding, it’s, at the same time, a state of affairs that has its own, albeit inhumane, logic  n’est pas?

Yea or Nay (Sayers)

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (ur yeasayer)

There are many oppositions in nature and society. Cold, hot, Marx, Smith, Jung, Freud and then combinations of the two which occur in the pragmatic manifestations of human personality. One of these is the famous dichotomy between those who fold their toilet paper and those who crumple. Sometimes these oppositions complement each other as in the case of the passive aggressive who finds an uneasy truce—in love/and or marriage-- with their purely aggressive counterpart. Then there are the yeasayers and the naysayers. You know the yeasayer. He or she constantly nods approval at everything you say. The naysayer does just the reverse. The naysayer always has a quizzical look on his or her face. Nothing you're saying makes sense. The yeasayer movers his or head vertically up and down while the naysayer moves horizontally from side to side. Both have the same thing in common. The cynicism of the naysayer may be more annoying, but neither the naysayer nor the yeasayer are truly listening. The naysayer is a constant gadfly who's opposed to literally everything. It’s the only way they can avoid being sucked in by the abyss of the other. On the other side of fence, the yeasayer can’t bear being lost and forgotten forever. He or she is a survivor hanging on to his or her positive affect for fear of drowning or separation from the mother ship. He or she will even nod in agreement as you declare that all yea-sayers should be dropped into pots of boiling oil.