New Alain Locke Biography + Richard T. Greener Honored at University of South Carolina

When most people think of the Harlem Renaissance, they probably summon the names of its major literary and visual atists--Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Aaron Douglas, etc.--and even may note figures who were linked to but critical of some of its aspects, like W. E. B. DuBois. They also may recall the cultural shift under which it unfolded, "The New Negro Movement." But they may not know the name of the man who popularized the term "The New Negro," in a famous essay and in, perhaps most lastingly, in the title of his 1925 famous anthology, and who provided the intellectual foundation, and cultivated the networks out of which the Harlem Renaissance developed.

That man was Alain Leroy Locke (1885-1954), a Philadelphia native who attended Harvard College (AB 1907), became the first African American Rhodes Scholar, studied at the University of Berlin, and subsequently returned to Harvard to receive his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1918. Black, gay, physically unimposing, an adherent of the Bahá'í faith, and a gifted and productive thinker and writer, Locke not only provided the intellectual framework for the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance, through his championing of Black art and culture, and the idea of the Diaspora and its links to Africa, but he taught at Howard University from 1918 to 1925, when he was temporarily dismissed for teaching a course on race relations, and then, after reinstatement in 1928, until 1953, training generations of students, including Toni Morrison.

Jeffrey C. Stewart, a professor in the Department of Black Studies at University of California-Santa Barbara has just published a new, thorough biography of Locke, a scholar, critic, and cultural worker, situating him with the intellectual, social, political, and cultural contexts in which he lived. Titled The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford University Press, 2018), Stewart's study draws upon previously unavailable primary source material and interviews with Locke's colleagues, friends and associates. Divided into three sections, the first focusing on Locke's youth and eduction, the second on Locke's involvement with the Harlem Renaissance and his advancement of ideas of Black beauty and aesthetics, and the third exploring the latter portion of Locke's rich and fascinating life, Stewart's exploration of Locke's life and mind looks like it also will provide a richer illumination of the intellectual foundations of and complex relationships among members of the Harlem Renaissance and its many cultural legacies.

I have ordered a copy of Stewart's biography, which has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist and a laudatory review in The New York Times, and am looking forward to reading it. (If I can, I may post a review on here.) I especially enjoyed listening to Professor Stewart discuss it on Midday in New York; you can hear that podcast here. You can also read Eugene Holley's excellent overview of Stewart's book on Publishers Weekly's website. Stewart's previous work includes several edited volumes about Locke, as well as the biography Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen and 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African American History, a text that, like the Locke biography, strikes me as particularly appropriate for our current moment.

***

The unveiling of the Richard T. Greener
statue, University of South Carolina
(TheState.com © Tracy Glantz tglantz@thestate.com)

Nearly half a century before Alain Locke graduated from Harvard, the first African American to enroll and successful receive a Harvard College degree left his name on the university's rolls, and proceeded to a remarkable life that, like Locke's, is now almost completely forgotten. Richard T. Greener, whom I'd previously blogged about when a contractor discovered a trunk of his belongings in a run-down Chicago home, was that first graduate (A.B. 1870), and, as part of his extraordinary journey, received a law degree from the University of South Carolina in 1876, during that brief period of post-Civil War Reconstruction, which meant a brief interlude of integration. From 1873 to 1877, Greener served as a professor at South Carolina, becoming the first African American professor there, and, once Reconstruction ended and white retrenchment and segregation resumed their hold, he moved to Howard University, where he would serve as the dean of the law school, before eventually entering government service as an agent in Vladivostok, Russia.

Democratic Congressman James Clyburn, at the unveiling
(TheState.com © Tracy Glantz tglantz@thestate.com)

Yesterday, the University of South Carolina unveiled a 9-foot tall statue honoring Greener as one its pioneering figures. Speakers, including Democratic Congressman and Minority Whip James Clyburn, praised his numerous contributions during his brief stay at the university, which included serving as professor of philosophy, while also teaching the classics, mathematics, and constitutional history and serving as USC's first librarian. The statue, by Jon Hair, stands next to the Thomas Cooper Library, which he led. While teaching Greener simultaneously enrolled in South Carolina's law school, graduating with honors, and was admitted to South Carolina's bar in 1876 and the DC bar in 1877. An advocate for racial equality, journalist, and secondary school educator as well, Greener later moved to DC, beginning his career at Howard in 1879, where he taught until 1881.

Evelyn Bausman, a grand-daughter
of Richard T. Greener, poses with
a statue of Greener that was
unveiled at The University of South Carolina.(TheState.com © Tracy Glantz tglantz@thestate.com)

He would go on to open his own law practice, and later, after serving as US Consul to Bombay, India, became the first black US diplomat to a predominantly white country and the first American to hold his Russian post. Throughout, Greener kept writing and advocating on behalf of African Americans; ironically, his daughter, Belle da Costa Greene, would pass as a white woman in New York, and gained the confidence of and great influence with banker J. P. Morgan, becoming his chief manuscript advisor and eventually the first director of the Morgan Library. At a time when US municipalities, public and private institutions, and corporations are rethinking monuments to problematic historical figures and eras, like the Confederacy, the USC unveiling offers and enshrines a powerful and necessary counternarrative.

Richard T. Greener
(photo courtesy of Harvard
University Library)

In 2001, while celebrating its centenary, USC commissioned and staged a play, The White Problem, by Jon Tuttle, about Greener's time on campus. Then in 2013, the centenary of Greener's arrival at South Carolina, the university honored him by reintroducing him to the campus, complete with a ceremony (see below) on his behalf. Among the events to celebrate him, there was an official presentation of his law diploma and law license, which USC purchased from the Chicago trove. As for his first alma mater, Harvard installed a portrait of Greener in   its Annenberg Hall, located in its famous Memorial Hall (opened the year of Greener's graduation). In addition, the Cambridge Historical Commission mounted a plaque commemorating him on College House, in Harvard Square, at 1430 Massachusetts Avenue. You can learn more about Greener's life in Katherine Reynolds Chaddock's biography Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard College (Johns Hopkins, 2017).

Classes Have Begun + The LIU Brooklyn Lockout (UPDATED)

Rutgers-Newark

Labor Day has come and gone, and in its wake the school year is off and racing. In addition to chairing African American and African Studies again this year, I have a graduate English seminar on my slate. Last Thursday I taught my first class meeting for this course, which runs under the rubric "Topics in Literature," with the subtitle "Postmodern: Beauty, Ideology, Power." What I'd envisioned was a course exploring key aesthetic concepts, both old and new, as means of apply critical pressure to a wide array of late 20th and 21st century works, in the genres of poetry, fiction and drama, that fall broadly underneath the category of post-modern.

Some of these will be by writers visiting Rutgers-Newark's Writers at Newark reading series this fall: Rickey Laurentis, Robin Coste Lewis, Eileen Myles, Chinelo Okparanta, Kristin Váldez Quade, and Ocean Vuong. Other works include texts that I have taught before, like Adrienne Kennedy's Alexander Play The Ohio State Murders (I love this work!) and poetry by Kenneth Koch, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, as well as books I have never taught before but long wanted to, including Peter Weiss's (in)famous play Marat/Sade, Cormac McCarthy's award-winning and popular dystopia The Road, Bret Easton Ellis's masterpiece of visionary satire, American Psycho, and Nnedi Okorafor's stunning novella Binti.

Of course for every text I chose there were many handfuls I had to forgo, but I am teaching an undergraduate African Diasporic fiction class this upcoming spring, so I am going to be aim to include some of the works I could not use this fall in that class--while also being mindful not to overload those students. I hope to post a bit more about the in-class discussions as the semester progresses.

***

UPDATE:
As the New York Times reports, LIU Brooklyn's faculty lockout has finally ended, after 12 days, on September 14. The university's administration and its faculty union agreed to extend the existing contract, which had expired on August 31, to May 31, 2017, or the end of the current academic year. During this period administrators and union officials will negotiate a new contract and the faculty union will not authorize a strike. The end of the lockout averts what was quickly becoming a fiasco for LIU Brooklyn's hardline president and the university, as students staged walkouts and public demonstrations against the policy. Chalk up one loss, however temporary, for the ongoing neoliberal corporatization of American colleges and universities.

While Rutgers-Newark faculty and most of our colleagues are back in classrooms or will shortly be, unionized faculty at Long Island University-Brooklyn find themselves locked out by their current administration. Since their contract expired on August 31, LIU president Kimberly Cline has kept all 400 members of the faculty union off campus. In addition to cutting their pay, Cline and the university have also cut blocked their campus email accounts, dropped their health insurance, and replaced them with temporary scab teachers. Although Cline pledged to students that the lockout would not cause disruptions, it has allegedly transformed LIU-Brooklyn into a site of chaos, with some classes being led by faculty members lacking expertise in their assigned subjects and other classes barely being taught, if at all. In one particularly egregious case, Democracy Now reported, LIU's Chief Operating Officer, Gale Haynes, a political scientist, was slated to teach a yoga class; the university has since called this an "error."

The chief point of contention centers on LIU's new proposed contract for its Brooklyn unionized faculty, which would not only lower their pay and benefits relative to their colleagues at LIU's C. W. Post satellite campus on Long Island, but also gut pay for adjuncts. Once their contract expired, LIU-Brooklyn's unionized faculty barely had time to read and vote on the contract, and probably would have struck for better terms, as they had in the past, but Cline preemptively locked them out when the contract expired. When they voted roughly a week later to reject the contract, Cline did not reopen dialogue, and has given no signal that she or the administration plan to back down, leaving LIU-Brooklyn students, who pay anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 per year confused and enraged. COO Haynes claims that the university is negotiating in good faith, though neither she nor anyone else in the administration has yet officially proposed more equitable terms. The Long Island University Faculty Federation has filed a complaint over unfair labor practices with the National Labor Relations Board, and, according to a report in Common Dreams, the LIU Faculty Senate has issued a no-confidence vote for Cline.

Were the faculty to accept the current contract, they would be ratifying a two-tier system not just for themselves in relation to their colleagues at C. W. Post, but especially for new Brooklyn faculty members, and in particular, adjuncts. Cline, however, has yet to sign a labor contract with any of the unions at LIU, and rejected outright the possibility of extending the previous contract for five weeks while the university and union negotiated the new one. Instead, as publications such as Common Dreams, The Nation and The Atlantic have pointed out, Cline's goal since becoming president appears  slashing costs at any cost, and cementing neoliberal, anti-labor policies to improve the school's financial picture and credit rating in the short term. The danger for the institution is manifold: its reputation is taking a serious hit; it will be hard, even at a time of academic job scarcity and precarity, to field quality faculty in the future; and it may be driving away current and future students, and alienating alumni. Two hundred LIU students protested yesterday, and there have been rolling protests since the lockout began. Perhaps Cline's goal is to shut the campus down for good in favor of the wealthier Long Island branch, which would be loss for Brooklyn and New York's academic ecology. Right now, though, that doesn't seem such a far-fetched idea.

Democracy Now: "Everything Was Immediately Cut at LIU"

Amazon to Pay by Page Turn + WORD Jersey City Reading

The behemoth strikes again. By behemoth, I mean Amazon, the global retailing corporation that also is the world's largest bookstore, and a major force in contemporary (American) publishing. According to a Monday report in The Guardian, the most recent big news in the annals of Amazon's publishing ventures involves its decision to start paying writers based on page turns. Page turns! This policy won't, however, affect all authors whose ebooks are available on Amazon. Yet. Right now it applies only to self-published authors whose books appear in Amazon's Kindle Owner's Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited services. But it portends a shift in publishing that writers may want to pay attention to.

Amazon, as a book publisher, originally paid self-published authors royalties once a customer read 10% of an ebook. This unfairly penalized authors of longer works (compare a 600 page novel to a 60 page novella, or long form essay), who got nothing if readers stopped reading before the royalty trigger. Some authors then decided to start dividing up works into shorter pieces to ensure their royalties, leading to a potential flood of material--or more than already exists--on Amazon's site. So Amazon came up with a new plan to address the problem, as well as a system to normalize the meaning of "page" in ebooks and what counts as "reading it"; think time spent on the page, standardized fonts, and so on.

In The Guardian, Amazon says of its rationale,

We’re making this switch in response to great feedback we received from authors who asked us to better align payout with the length of books and how much customers read. Under the new payment method, you’ll be paid for each page individual customers read of your book, the first time they read it.

In other words, if you write that 600 page novel and someone reads it all the way through, you'll be paid more than the author of a 60 page novella. But if a reader gives up 10% of the way through the longer book (i.e., 60 pages), both of you will earn the same. It should also be noted that the payments will come from a limited, dedicated pool of money Amazon calculates on a monthly basis--based on total sales?--so authors will be competing against each other directly for royalties.

As I noted previously in a February post on ebooks and surveillance, this is part of the advancing corporate intrusion into what had previously been for centuries a private experience; since the advent of silent reading of codex books, no one truly knew how much or in what ways you read. With e-reader tracking, this information is readily accessible by all e-book publishers. E-devices, however, can now track you down to how far you get into a book, what you reread, and where you stop reading, as many readers do with many books. These activities are being commodified and financialized, quietly in the cases of the e-reader companies themselves, but overtly now with Amazon's new move.

In my earlier post I also suggested, following the lead of Francine Prose, who wrote about e-reader tracking in The New York Review of Books, that this surveillance and the data resulting from it would begin to reshape how some authors imagined their work, which is to say, their aesthetics. It's a direct line from anticipating, based on data, what will draw readers, to feeling pressure to write based on what will generate page views--and turns--and then from there to publishers' demands to do so. Longer books with each element shaped by data about what keeps readers turning pages...of course this is something some authors may grasp intuitively, and some books that fit this criterion are very well written, and true works of art.

But the write-by-the-numbers approach could also have disastrous effects on literary production, while also further breaking down the already shaky publishing system's financial base. This may sound like dystopian view of things, but we have, as I pointed out, the example of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking. If no one ever reads a book to the end or stops halfway through most books, most authors will earn even less than they already do. And as the examples of the journalistic and music industries show, will any but a very few earn a fair and liveable amount for their creative labor?  The lure of market-based thinking is a strong one these days. Amazon is a apex predator corporation, and other publishers, especially the bigger ones, will feel the need to follow Amazon's lead.

Put the two together...well, let's write that horror film another time.

***

Many thanks to everyone who came out to last night's reading at WORD Bookstore in Jersey City! Thanks also to everyone at WORD, especially Caitlin and Zach, for making the reading possible. It was energizing to see a healthy crowd, filled with so many familiar faces, and to be able to share with a live audience something I hadn't yet read aloud--the final pages of "Rivers"--from Counternarratives.  

Also, thanks to WORD for having a good number of copies of Counternarratives in stock, and to everyone who bought a copy. I have one more New York area reading, on July 1, before heading off to Ithaca for Image Text Ithaca, so please come out to McNally-Jackson Bookstore, where I'll be reading and participating in a conversation with Christine Smallwood!

If you are in Jersey City, make sure to stop by WORD, which is at 123 Newark Ave., just steps away from the Grove Street PATH station. A few photos:

eBooks, Surveillance and a New Aesthetics?

(Source: Instagram user hotdudesreading,
from PopSugar)

Perhaps five year ago when, at hiring and committee meetings, readings, or during the rare non-literary performance (as in the crazy Raymond Roussel play John Beer directed with such aplomb in Chicago), I would pull out my iPad and read from it, my use of this technology would spark comments and queries. I seldom saw people reading from an iPad, let alone another e-Reader, in public spaces, including on the MTA subway trains, and even less so on the El, though I did spot a number of early adopters on my flights commuting between Jersey City and the Windy City. My status as a tablet/e-book harbinger, however, did not result from any innovative thinking on my part; it was the direct result of living with an app developer who had bought two machines to test his work on, and I ended up with the more basic one. There was little likelihood that I would have gotten one so quickly otherwise.

Nowadays almost everyone I know has a tablet computer or an e-Reader, and many have both. "Sent from my iPad" pops up at the bottom of perhaps every fourth email. As a present a few years ago I received an updated iPad from C, and I do use it but far less frequently than I once did, for reading, drawing, animation, or anything else. I have not purchased an e-book or downloaded a free one in a while. Instead if I'm reading anything online, I primarily turn to my laptop (which I recently had to have replaced, because the prior one's logic board fried), or my iPhone (which I had to replace because I left the previous one in a US post office near Chelsea Market, and when I rushed back to find it, it was, unsurprisingly, gone). One of my animations (cf. below) expressed in a few images my thoughts about the e-reading experience, which I find far less enjoyable than codex (printed) books, but for many people today, these handheld computers are becoming the default. (I found it telling that at least one recent survey of college students suggests they prefer print books, which tracks my classroom experiences, a small group of phone-centric student readers notwithstanding.)

Still, convenience, physiological comfort, and to some degree costs, make strong arguments on behalf of e-books and e-devices. Rather than having to carry about heavy hardcover or even lighter but still bulky paperback books, as I have done for most of my life, you can store hundreds (thousands?) of books on many e-reading devices, which have increasingly shrunk in their physical dimensions to the point that some are not much bigger than the largest smartphones. (Compare an iPad Mini or smaller Kindle reader to one of the larger Android phones, or Apple's news gigantic iPhone.) On most e-readers you can enlarge print with a swipe or a button, obviating the need, as your eyes age, for squinting at tiny print. E-books also tend to be less expensive (as they should be) than codex books, and with most--all?--e-reading devices you can also easily read .pdfs of anything you can transform into that format, which today is anything you find on a laptop or tablet screen. A vast array of literature can be found free of charge on the web, such that an enterprising person could--and some have--cobble together from existing materials an ever-changing, personalized e-anthology.

Recently, Francine Prose published a short article, "They're Watching You Read," in the New York Review of Books, in which she describes reading William Makepeace Thackeray on her e-reader, and while doing so, she came across an article in the Guardian, "Ebooks can tell which novels you didn't finish," that shares something many readers may be aware of but probably are not thinking about too much, which is that some e-devices are carefully tracking their readers' habits, down to where they break off in reading before resuming, which passages they reread, and how far they get in terms of a book's full length. (Do all e-reading programs do this?) According to e-bookseller Kobo's stats, "less than half of British readers" or 44.4%, of Donna Tartt's immense Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Goldfinch, finished the 800-page tome. With Solomon Northup's shorter memoir Twelve Years a Slave, returned to public notice by Steve McQueen's Academy Award-garnering film, only 22.8% managed to complete it. On the the other hand, according to Kobo, the most completed book, at 83%, was self-published author Casey Kelleher's Rotten to the Core. Although it did not make the Kobo Bestseller list, it held four-fifths of its readers to the final period. Kelleher has gone to "win a book deal with Amazon's UK publishing imprint." In fact, as Kobo's stats show, its bestseller lists (books purchased) and most completed books (read to the end) are quite distinct, as are the national reading trends it tracked (though the percentages aren't broken down according to gender, age or other readership categories):

Kobo also revealed that the people of Britain were most likely to finish a romance novel, with 62% completion, followed by crime and thrillers (61%) and fantasy (60%). Italians were also most engaged by romance (74% completion), while the French preferred mysteries, with 70% completion.

I wonder what American readers tend to finish the most. Fantasy? Nonfiction books? Something not listed above?

Even raising such questions underlines the basic fact that the collection of data is a form of surveillance. Neither Prose nor the Guardian report says whether the data collection is voluntary, but I imagine it is similar to most online data collection today, which is to say, you have to opt out, sometimes with great difficulty. But then it isn't just online sites that are collecting data. A few years ago on these pages, I raised an uproar over the warrantless wiretapping George W. Bush's government was engaging in, but as Wikileaks and other whistleblowers, including most importantly, I'd argue, Edward Snowden have certified, the surveillance of everyone, via a variety of increasingly networked means, is widespread. To put it another way, every networked device, as well as every data point collected by any means possible, becomes the means to follow, track, quantify, and monetize our existences. Everything we do that can be tracked can be commoditized, among other things. The most sinister aspects of this panoptic society remain to be reckoned with.

But back to Kobo: as the Guardian report and Prose both point out, e-devices allow publishers to know not only which books readers are purchasing but how slowly or quickly we move through them, whether we finish, and where we bog down. Prose goes on to talk about how this knowledge about readers might become public, but then, assuming the perspective of the published writer that she is, wonders about whether publishers may start using these data when to shape the writing the publish. She writes:

Since Kobo is apparently sharing its data with publishers, writers (and their editors) could soon be facing meetings in which the marketing department informs them that 82 percent of readers lost interest in their memoir on page 272. And if they want to be published in the future, whatever happens on that page should never be repeated. 

Will authors be urged to write the sorts of books that the highest percentage of readers read to the end? Or shorter books? Are readers less likely to finish longer books? We’ll definitely know that. Will mystery writers be scolded (and perhaps dropped from their publishers’ lists) because a third of their fans didn’t even stick around long to enough to learn who committed the murder? Or, given the apparent lack of correlation between books that are bought and books that are finished, will this information ultimately fail to interest publishers, whose profits have, it seems, been ultimately unaffected by whether or not readers persevere to the final pages? 

Other than Kobo, it appears most publishers are not (yet) willing to share the full data they have been collecting, but an earlier article along these lines made me wonder about not only about how publishers and readers might respond, which is the ultimate focus of Prose's article, but rather, within a specular regime of surveillance of writers' aesthetic choices how writers ourselves might start to respond as the data haul increases and we have an ever clearer picture of how readers are moving through books. (This also may be of great interest to the big data researchers now active in literary studies.) Publishers, agents and editors already push fiction and nonfiction writers toward certain themes and topics, as well as towards certain styles of writing that have proved, at least by empirical standards, to result in books that readers will purchase, whether they read them all the way through or not. With this new data, analogous to how we modify our behavior (or don't) based on the expectation of widespread surveillance, might some of us start to make even more specific aesthetic decisions based on the data, aware that it's always being collected and will be shared with us?

As things already stand most authors, whose work draws upon the prevailing discourses, frameworks, ideas, and rules of the era in which we are writing, already grasp the parameters for readership and publication, but this is often intuitive, with some recourse to empiricism. For example, most writers know an 800-page novel is going to be harder to sell than one that's 400 pages, though the example of Tartt, Foster Wallace, Catton, and others suggests that it's not impossible. Also, most writers know that language that is too baroque, too ornate, too lyrical, to subtle, and so no, will repel most, though not all, readers off, although the example of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, to give one fairly recent example, suggests that the right writer can write in a prose as finely wrought as that found in the Bible or Shakespeare's plays, and still sell books. (And that McCarthy novel is, I would argue, significantly more simple in its language than an earlier book of his, like Blood Meridian.) Most writers know that certain genres, and the conventions embedded within them--romance, mystery,  horror, science fiction, speculative fiction and fantasy, etc.--sell far more than realist literary fiction, though there are authors who successfully, in aesthetic and market terms, blend and bend all of these genres.

If an emerging or even established fiction writer, to take one example, not only wants to get her work into print, but to have readers engage with it and finish it, however, awareness of these data, let alone the specific data points assembled in descriptive--or prescriptive and proscriptive form--might begin to function like a template or paint-by-numbers guide. How to write? Shorter sentences and paragraphs; stock characters (young, upper middle class, physically abled, white) with certain winning descriptors (the default "blond(e)" or "sun-kissed"); prose so simple and shorn of rhetorical devices a second grader could read it without breaking a sweat; rigid Aristotelianism in terms of form; faster pacing; muted, middle-of-the-road politics; boilerplate, normative sexualities; and so forth. You could call this "e-data aesthetics," I suppose, and in some cases a writer may feel it benefits her work aesthetically. For others, of course, it could prove problematic, on multiple levels. If you know readers in general do not like complex syntax, to much figuration, and complex characters, but you are drawn to write such things, will you change to please (and gain?) readers?

These days such questions may appear farfetched, but you need only look at the increasingly rigid, money-driven template Hollywood employs with regard to mainstream filmmaking to recognize that once enough writers proceed from such premises, it will change writing dramatically. It may help certain writers reach a level of competency, but it may harm the talents and aims of others. This is not to say that won't be other mechanisms, including forms of technology, social and cultural attitudes, as well as economic criteria, and so forth, at play, that determine what people are writing, but "e-data aesthetics" are something we might want to start thinking a bit more about, since the data are only growing and the means to aggregate them are steadily growing too.

On Jeff Koons at the Whitney Museum

What is art? What is "good" art? What do we mean by "good" when we speak of art? Does "good" here equate with quality, if we consider the roots of the concept of art in the West lying in the concept of techne? Is this even a relevant question any more, in 2014? Who determines what is good and not good? Or beautiful, or resonant, or sublime, or, conversely, bad, horrible, not worth expending even an epithet on? Are these characterizations a matter of a work of art's holistic aesthetics? Sociopolitical relevance? Technical virtuosity and mastery? Does the fact that a particular institution or an institutional field assigns such values make them valid? Does it matter that their decisions may be based not only on personal views drawn from expertise in the history of and criticism about art, but other institutional values, broader historically, politically, economically, and socially discourses about art, and contemporary market values? How much should any viewer know or factor in that there are immense financial stakes for collectors and connoisseurs?Is that what we mean today by the sensus communis? Does such a term have any meaning at all in the wake of the multiple stratifications and atomizations of the society in which we live? Does the sensus communis perhaps primarily and most aptly apply today to the artistry of Beyoncé Knowles, say, or Seinfeld during its heyday, or the current HBO hit Orange Is The New Black, rather than anything produced by some of the artists who now occupy the upper reaches of the contemporary US and global artworlds?  How important are these issues in thinking about art, about beauty, about aesthetic value?

What is it "good" art for? What makes it worth viewing? Is there any correlation between its aesthetic value and its market value? What do we even mean by "aesthetic value" today? Or use value for that matter? Do any of the additional aesthetic qualities proposed by critics like Sianne Ngai in books like Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard University Press, 2012), such as "zaniness" or "cuteness" or "interestingness" factor in at all in terms of this idea of "goodness" and its purpose? Does purposiveness? Does placing a work of art or multiple ones, by the same artist or different ones, within a given context like a gallery or museum, especially one of the major ones in the world, (not) legitimate an artwork and its author? Does it validate them and her? Are legitimation and validation the same thing? Can market value, which is now the primary value in contemporary art, be the only significant value an artwork possesses? What is or are relations between the acceptance of aesthetic and personal commodification and works of art's non-financial values? What do we say about artists who view themselves and their artwork not simply as commodities, which could be said to every degree about every artist creating today who is conscious of the world in which she lives, but as financial instruments? Can such artists ever again be said to approach their art with disinterest, and thus isn't that a category which might be jettisoned today? Which is to say beyond a basic barter system, can a painting or a sculpture also be considered as form of currency, or a derivative? What happens when we speak of works of art as derivatives or financial instruments? What does one call exchange value that is now so inflected? Is there a new name for this contemporary state of aesthetics, and would be be an(ti)aesthetics, commodesthetics, financesthetics, or something else?

Does such value (do such values or non-values) invalidate at a basic level the question of aesthetic, political, social or any other form of "goodness," "beauty," and so on? What is the relationship between this way of thinking, and Duchamp's readymades? Should we assign the the start of this thinking at the doorstep of Duchamp--or perhaps in more recent decades, Andy Warhol--or go back to Plato's ideas about second and third orders of artmaking, or Kant's formalism, as well as the aesthetic writings of Karl Marx? Does it unfairly raise the significance of a work of art and its author that I or anyone invokes such names? Is there a danger in doing so, and how does this relate to legitimation and validation? Does doing so also help to increase the "values" of certain works of art, even if I think they do not deserve it? Does it matter that an artist may or may not be aware of such questions? Or that, even if aware, she neither understands them or even cares?

Can't an artist focused primarily on making money make good art? Why does Jeff Koons make art other than to make money and make things? Does Jeff Koons know what "good" art is? Does Jeff Koons care? Should Jeff Koons care if a museum like the Whitney apparently does not? Does Jeff Koons' background as a Wall Street commodities broker as well as a graduate of an art school factor to a greater degree in the way in which his work appears often to be primarily a financial instrument or derivative? Isn't it fair to use the term "derivative" in relation to Jeff Koons's work, given that he was a broker, and, based on his show at the Whitney Museum, he, like many other artists, "derived" his early practice heavily from the work of Marcel Duchamp? Is it fair to say that Jeff Koons had a significant or noteworthy conceptual understanding of art, and of Duchamp's work, even at the start of his career? Has he had one since? Why does so much of Jeff Koons' work, its technical mastery excepted, look like something that might merit a harsh critique at an art school? Is technical mastery enough?

How do we speak of art that is at one level hard to look at and at another to turn away from, like Koons'? Does the monumentality of so much of Koons' work endow it with a significance it might lack if it were smaller in scale? Would we want to look at a golden balloon dog in cast metal if it were the size of one might find at a children's party rather than larger than a Cadillac Escalade? What about a heap of Play-Dough? What about a room or six or five floors of such work? Do such questions even matter? Would Jeff Koons have the career he has if he were not an educated white man from a middle-class middle-American background? Would such artwork be possible for someone not from such a background? What does this say about the roles of power, privilege and possibility in the contemporary art world, or in our society in general? Does it matter that in asking these questions so far I have not even broached questions of labor, production, and who in fact produces this art that has garned Jeff Koons such incredible fame and wealth?

Has the shift to a digital world of images, a world not of artworks but of platforms, as David Joselit has noted in his book After Art (Princeton, 2012), rendered Jeff Koons's work, especially his pornographic images with his ex-wife*, Ilona Staller, La Cicciolina, say, more or less valid? Are there words in the English language to capture my unpleasant physical response to see Jeff Koons naked and simulating or having sex? Is it not, however, a virtue, that works of art can make a viewer like me laugh out loud repeatedly, though not with the artwork's intended meanings, but in spite of and against them? Can an artwork, even in the age of mechanical and now digital reproducibility and infinite expansion and transformation, be said, when viewed either in person or online, to have no aura, and why does this seem to hold for so many (most?) of Jeff Koons' works?

Conversely, does not the possibility of infinite digital reproducibility render certain Koons' works even more auratic? Isn't it perhaps better, to put it another way, to see them on the Internet or some other digital space, as opposed to up close? Isn't there an aura of ratchetness (wretchedness) in contemporary American life to which more than a few aspire? Isn't this a negative aesthetics but a very different one from what Theodor Adorno proposed? Isn't this ratchet auratics a poetics that suffuses so much current popular culture and American culture more broadly? In identifying it am I not also implicating myself in my enjoyment in certain forms (such as reality shows, say) and examples (Mediatakeout.com) of it? What happens when one places Real Housewives of New Jersey alongside Jeff Koons? Hasn't someone already done this? Why did the Whitney choose Jeff Koons' as its final show in its Marcel Breuer space, and what does this say about the Whitney Museum and its role and place in contemporary American and global art? Can any fields but cultural criticism and the history of art account for such an occurrence? Is Jeff Koons not the perfect artist for contemporary America, and if the answer is affirmative, doesn't this answer all the preceding questions?

___

* Many thanks to Andrew Blackley for correcting this error; Ilona Staller was Jeff Koons' wife, not just his girlfriend, which raises a number of related issues that Andrew also pointed out, such as: 

The degree and orientation of both of their agencies shifts within their marriage - regardless of personal respect(s) or equality of sorts or means individually in that there is a more or less an ideological "fair use" clause to the body of the other, and the inability (or difficulty) of protesting against or working counter to the other or the union as a whole ( say, in court.)

Is she the porn star girlfriend (working, or knowing how to work with and through her body) or is she the wife "at work," under an established consent between the two of them as people or "at work" under and as part of an institutional allowance?

And, if the above: what does that say about Jeff Koons and the rest of his "collaborations" with any number of cultur

Banksy in NY (October 2013)

UPDATE: October 23, 2013: It appears the police, no fans of Banksy, may have shut him down, even if temporarily. Today on his Better Out than In blog, he notes that his art piece has been "cancelled due to police activity." Oh boy....

Once upon a time the artist known as Banksy was an unknown graffitist and tagger whose visual-verbal social and political commentaries, popping up in unexpected places, thrilled fans, sparked furious speculation about his identity among fellow taggers and artworld cognoscenti, and enraged police (and some of his peers). That was then. These days, Banksy is a renowned and acclaimed money-making commodity, the star of several documentaries, an artworld fixture, and so mainstream that earlier this year he publicly announced a monthlong "artists [sic] residency" in New York City, titled "Better Out Than In." His stay has included his expected graffiti pieces as well as work in other media, including a multimedia, sonic traveling caravan called the "The Sirens of Lambs" (a van driving through the streets of New York, featuring stuffed animals bleating); conceptual art and performance (a Banksy art table along the art vendors' strip outside Central Park, where he had a vendor sold all his works anonymously for $60 each); and traditional paintings-on-canvas, like the ones below, a collaboration with the Brazilian graffiti artists Os Gemeos, which are hanging outdoors beneath a High Line Park train trestle on W. 24th Street, until the end of today, adjacent to the main Chelsea art gallery district.

The guard and both paintings

Initially I was a bit agnostic about Banksy's visit, because while on the one hand I have followed his work for years, I also felt like these pieces would--and they have--involve a bit of chain-pulling, forcing people interested in the work to traipse around the city's five boroughs to find his offerings (or miss them, as with the Central Park art show) before building owners, art patrons, other artists, or the cops destroyed them. That's exactly what has happened. Some pieces have been painted or sanded over. Some have been defaced. And many have been mobbed, as was the case at the public installation at W 24th Street. In anticipation of this, Banksy stationed guards--I heard that initially there was just one, but I couldn't get any of the guards there, who were polite but not especially friendly, to confirm this--to facilitate crowd control and ensure that the paintings not only were not damaged, but also not carted off. I saw on Gothamist that by midday, when Banksy had posted images of the installation online, the area already was drawing sizable throngs, but I wanted to see this piece in particular since it was a collaboration with artists I also admire, and it wouldn't involve too much of a journey, so I decided to wait until the early evening, when the dinner hour might thin viewers out. It was a good choice; there was a crowd, and I had to wait for about 15 minutes until a group of about 40 people in front of me were allowed past the yellow tape, but after that, I was able to enter, view and photograph the two pieces, and leave. 

The painting on the left was mostly Banksy, enriched and tagged by Os Gemeos, while the right was the inverse. I liked the ironies of each graffitist's additions to the canvases, which visually conveyed the idea of standing out in a crowd, but also signified a gesture toward (in terms of contiguity and medium, as well as the semi-private gesture of the guards and yellow tape) and against (a public, outdoor, free display, open to the elements) the multi-billion dollar élite artworld just steps away (or rather, all around). That they also appeared to serve more as backdrops for Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and similar social media sites goes without saying; I noted several people not really even looking at the paintings, but rather quickly posing themselves in front of them and once they had their shareable shot, they were gone. This exhibit, perhaps more so than some of the others so far, also represented in material form the trajectory of Banksy's career: a politically oriented public artist working in a medium now embraced and celebrated by many of the very people, institutions and systems that once ignored or scorned it and him. Not everyone is a Banksy fan, though; the New York Police Department is allegedly still trying to find and arrest him. Good luck with that!

The crowd outside the Banksy-Os Gemeos exhibit

Looking into the space

Posing near related graffiti

Before the next wave of spectators enters the space

One of the guards

Another guard, in front of one of the paintings

Graffiti on one of the walls

A nearby mural (across 24th St.)

Quote: Alphonso Lingis

"When the scale of a human presence scattered across vast spaces seems unconceptualizable, as also the utter simplicity of certain gestures and movements seems undiagrammable, we have before a human body a sense of the sublime. The sublimity of a body departing into the unmeasurable spaces make the ideas we form of the superhuman and the divine seem like second-rate fictions. The sentiment of the sublime is a disarray in the vision, a turmoil in the touch that seeks to hold it, a vortex in our sensibility that makes us ecstatically crave to sacrifice all that we have and are to it.

"Human warmth in the winds, tears and sweat left in our hands, carnal colors that glow briefly before the day fades, dreams in the night, patterns decomposing in memory, sending our way momentary illuminations: bodies of others that touch us by dismembering. The unconceptualizable forces that break up the pleasing forms of human beauty and break into the pain and exultation of the sublime are also delirium and decomposition. Not sublimity in the midst of abjection: sublime disintegration, sickness, madness. The exultation before the sublime is also contamination. Porous bodies exhaling microbes, spasmodically spreading deliriums, viruses, pollutions, toxins."
--from "After the Sambódromo," in Alphonso Lingis, Abuses, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, pp. 138-139.

(This book and a handful more e-books are available free as digital files at the University of California Press's website)

(More on Alphonso Lingis, who is not without controversy....)

Regresado

"More soon" turned into "nearly a month later." (Maybe I should retitle this blog "Notes from the Underground" or "Another Frequency".) I think this is the longest I've paused in my blogging since I began other than during this past summer, when I was ill, but that involved multiple surgeries and pain medication, while this hiatus has been the result of one of the rougher academic years I've had in a while. Winter quarter classes did officially end on Friday, and I already miss teaching the two I had, though the upcoming raft of revised short stories and final papers will ensure that I'll be in contact with the students at least for the next few weeks. But classes are never the issue....

***

For my literature class this quarter, I asked students to send me short commentaries from the critical journals they have been keeping. I posted these commentaries to a blog, Thinking Aesthetics (on Wordpress).

If any J's Theater readers have the time, please do browse through these short entries, and offer any short responses that you can. The students have posted on perception, Kant, Hegel, Winckelmann, horror, sentimentality, and pornography, with more to be posted soon.

I've tried the class blog format once before, but it's still a work in progress for me. Please note that the leap in topics is a result of the class's foci, not an desultoriness on the part of the students.

***

Back around February 20, right after my "More Soon" post, I'd planned to jot down some thoughts about the first month of President Barack Obama's tenure, but there was so much else to do, and...the result was silence. (I couldn't even manage to post quotes or poems or photos, things I've done in the past--my brain was just shutting down.) As we are approaching the two-month mark, however, I felt I ought to offer some thoughts before I looked up and half a year had passed.

It strikes me that Barack Obama has been consistently pragmatic, with moments of boldness and of caution coming in alternating fashion; on some issues, such as the immediate halting of the Bush administration's last minute environmental rule changes and his upcoming 2010-11 ten-year-budget scenario, which hews to his campaign promises in many ways (on health care, on taxes, etc.), and decelerating the discursive battle with Russia, he's show true progressiveness. On the successful but inadequate stimulus bill, his administration's move to try some of the Guantánamo and other "terrorist" detainees in federal courts while still holding on to some of the Bush policies that created these problems, and the piecemeal approach to releasing the Bush administration's outrageous "legal" memoranda that legimated torture, illegal spying and other unconstitutional lawlessness, and the draw-down of US troops from Iraq, he's proved to be cautious and Clintonian. On the relentless denial of the necessity of "nationalizing" the giant failed banks and his financial team's overall approach, his adherence to Bush's "state secrets" policies, and his failure to speak out forcefully for some nominees (like Hilda Solís or Charles Freeman), he's demonstrated not only a lack of will, but a bit of cravenness as well. On other issues, such as the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the US's relations with Cuba and more broadly with other hemispheric neighbors, and the "drug war," the verdict is out.

Although Obama's chosen avatar is Abraham Lincoln, and the daily tide of news underlines how badly we need a contemporary version of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, so far he has operated like a combination of John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton. The youthfulness, vigor and clarity is Kennedyesque; the watered-down progressivism is Eisenhowerian; and the occasional double-talk and accommodation of GOP frames and talking-points verges on being Clintonian. In other words, he is tacking most closely, at least as I see it, to Ronald Reagan (though in reverse in terms of partisanship). This isn't the worst we could expect, but seriously, the president has got to take bold steps when necessary, despite GOP/MSM criticism, the timidity of Democrats in Congress and the party apparatus, and even public opposition when it arises.

On a symbolic level, his tenure so far has been exciting and energizing. In addition to the country being able to wake up every day and realize that we have a black president, we also can note Obama's seriousness, his engaging manner, and his candor, which we haven't witnessed in decades. He also comes across as real, especially whenever he leaves the White House, and fairly sincere. Someone enamored of his own ego, but also willing to admit his faults when he must. He isn't play-acting in the way that we had to endure from his predecessor; no fake ranches, no pseudo-cowboy swagger, and no lies wrapped as linguistic rebuses that only right-wing fanatics could resolve. Also energizing is his ability to change his plans as the circumstances demand; this fact, which he has demonstrated repeatedly so far, should encourage anyone that no matter how the next few years turn out, he and we will not stagger down we had. But there is a stubbornness, or inertia that appears at times to creep into the picture. Take the ongoing resistance of his chief financial officers, Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, to change course. Their repeated shopping of a flawed plan as the economy devolves can only dismay, even if you aren't regularly reading the informed pleas from Paul Krugman and the dire prognostications of Nouriel Roubini. Yes, we could have predicted some intransigence given that Geithner is tied to Wall Street and was a party to its failed policies, and Summers's previous Treasury tenure exemplied a deregulatory approach whose assumptions have proved disastrous. But they work for someone who, as I noted above, is not rigid. So WE really have to make sure he hears that a change of course is necessary, right away--and it must come from us, the people who voted for him, since the mainstream media show they're incapable even of grasping basic tax policy, let alone the mathematics of a spending bill ($7.7 billion out of $410 billion is less than 2%, yet how often have you heard even a single talking head note this, and the ones who babble on Sunday morning talk shows are the worst). But this is nothing new. At least now we have someone in office who, with adequate pressure, will listen. But the pressure must be there, because it's becoming clear that the voices whispering and yelling into his and his administration's ears unfortunately do not have the country's--that is, the vast majority of the country's, and world's--best interests at heart.

***

I watched the Oscars a few weeks ago, the entire broadcast, despite having seen only one of the films--The Visitor--that received a nomination. I still haven't seen Milk, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, Resurrection Road, Doubt, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, or most of the other films that merited some academy recognition, though I do hope to catch Milk and The Wrestler, along with a few other films like Madea Goes to Prison and The Watchmen soon. But I did catch Laurent Cantet's The Class--which was nominated for an Oscar and didn't win one--the other night, and will try to post a review of it in the next few days. I highly recommend it.

***

On a lighter note, I watched the World Baseball Classic matchup between the Dominican Republic and the Netherlands. In addition to being a beauty fest, it initially appeared as if, despite two first in errors by Dominican shortstop and Tampa Bay Rays star Hanley Ramírez, it would be a romp by Quisqueya. It turned out, however, to be a closely fought game that the Netherlands team, made up mostly of Caribbean players from Curacao, Aruba, and the rest of the Dutch Antilles, won, 3-2 over the Dominicans, who came back the next day to wallop Panama 9-0. I still think DR is the team to beat in Pool D, which also includes Puerto Rico. The USA won its first two games, a squeaker 6-5 over Canada (which lost to a Major League-packed team of Italian Americans, i.e., Italy, in its second game) and then a romp over Venezuela 15-6, and appears to be the team to beat in Pool C. Japan appeared to be the team to beat in Pool A, defeating China 14-0 and Korea 14-2, but Korea won the second contest and thus the pool, by a 1-0 score. In the final pool, B, Cuba and Australia look like the likely winners, though Mexico could pull out a qualification, but its team lost 17-7 to Australia, not a good sign.


Team USA after their victory over Canada (Frank Gunn/AP)

José Reyes and Nelson Cruz celebrating after their win over Panama (Fernando Llano/AP)

Korea's Kyung Oan Park hitting against Japan (Andrew Malana/MLB.com)

As Coisas A Esmo (Random Things)

Several quick notes: today is C's birthday; as I had the pleasure of wishing him personally, Happy Birthday!

At Firedoglake, there's a Book Salon featuring Digby (who presides over one of my favorite blogs) and Robert Frank, the author of Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class. (And everyone else who's not obscenely rich, especially people who work for wages everyday.) You can participate in the comments section. I have 1,000 thoughts on this topic, but none are coherent right now, so instead, please visit Firedoglake.

For weeks I've been meaning to link to Audiologo's followup post on the vicissitudes of Black American literary fictionists, which she launches through a discussion of Helen Oyeyemi's The Opposite House, but there is so much great stuff on her blog, from a review of the Shainman Gallery's Color Line show to a link to a post on the Black Documentary Collective's screening of Woodie King's The Segregation of the Greatest Generation at Film Forum, muchos recados sobre Black Rock, and a beautiful riff on Black LGBT theater that invokes the PoMo Afro Homos and finishes by noting the August dates of the Fire! Plays in Development that Matter! And that's just July's posts! Drop in and catch some science!

Once upon a time I took an economics course. Or muddled my way through it. The highlight was listening, alongside 200 or so other students, to the legendary John Kenneth Galbraith dilate on the flawed economic assumptions of the Reagan administration, while the low points were too numerous to stick in my memory. (Well, maybe they weren't so bad, but after reading the words "opportunity cost" and "marginal utility" too many times and struggling to decode the various mathematical graphs, I breathed a hugh sigh of relief when I'd taken the final exam and the winter break arrived.) I learned so little that back in the early 1990s, I was unable to concisely explain junk bonds to my mother, despite the fact that I'd worked at a commercial bank and written economic reports! It's a good thing I got out of that business. Anyways, one of the economists whose work I've been reading of late is George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen, who may be the first member of his profession (along with Alex Taborrok) that I've read comprehensibly explain and graph in economic terms the relationship between artists' production of popular, mass-market artworks and those of a formally avant-garde nature. (Cf. the output of the late filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, for example). Cowen writes quite a bit about the economics of culture, globalization, and related topics. His ideological perspective tends, if I can describe it simply, towards the moderate, pro-capitalist libertarian (he has called himself a pluralist and "libertarian with a little l," acknowledging the limits of that perspective), and demonstrates a deep interest and knowledge in the arts and culture, in the broad and micro senses. One example I'd point to is his Reason Online article on protectionism and the French film industry, which not only presents a compelling argument against the French film quota system, but also offers a précis of French film history that I imagine many filmgoers may be unaware of. While I disagree a number of his conclusions, I still enjoy exploring his blog, whose most recent post asks people in India the names of random, deserving individuals there to whom he can send money. He also asks his readers to make "merit-based" donations to India as well. He also suggests skimping on tipping waiters in the US and sending the money to Haiti, ending jail terms for people convicted of marijuana possession and some other reasonable things; then again, Milton Friedman is one of his heroes....