Photo courtesy of Winkleman Gallery, New York.

I’ll agree with Ben Street who said in his recent post that there is “no consensus about the difference between ethics and morals, so let’s be broad about it.” This seems to be the most helpful way to have a constructive conversation. It also helps me to excuse why I’ll interchange the two throughout this text in the service of brevity. Also, in order to avoid an annoying series of additional caveats, I’ll note first off that I’m limiting my considerations here to art objects (which include video and film, in my opinion) and not performances or other such live actions.

Oscar Wilde wrote, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.” Replace “artwork” where “book” appears and “made” where “written” appears, and you’ll have a concise summary of my answer to the question, “Must art be moral [or ethical]?” To suggest that “art” can be either ethical or unethical is to personify an object. We don’t talk about the ethics or morality of a hammer or an ocean. We may discuss the ethics of what humans do with a hammer or what they do to an ocean, but ethics are a means of measuring human behaviors. Therefore, it’s actually nonsensical to me to discuss whether an art object must be ethical or unethical. Art cannot be either. Artists can and, to my mind should, be ethical, being fellow human beings within a society, but “art” itself is not human.

Moreover, the subject matter of art cannot be considered “ethical” or “moral” any more than the object itself. All manner of abhorrent human behaviors are represented in artwork. That doesn’t make the work, or even the artist, unethical for tackling such subjects. We wouldn’t suggest that the painter who captures the extreme suffering of a brutal mass murder (clearly an immoral act), such as Picasso’s Guernica, had done anything immoral himself. Nor would we suggest that the act of painting The Rape of the Sabine Women was a good reason to arrest Jacques-Louis David or Nicholas Poussin.  In my opinion, how true the representation seems (part of how high the quality of the work is) remains the only valid issue where subject matter is concerned. Is it well-made or poorly made?

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Jeff Koons, Vacuum cleaner: New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, 1980 Image: Artnet

Back in the fall, a good friend and colleague passed along Denis Dutton’s New York Times Op-Ed piece titled Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank? Deborah knew that the editorial would provide fodder for much needed dialogue about what qualifies as art today, and she suggested I use it for a Socratic Seminar since I would be focusing some of my own professional development this year on running more effective seminars with my students.

Well, today is the day.

I created packets of readings that students would review prior to our seminar, including the Dutton piece, reader comments on the Dutton piece, a Sol Lewitt quote, a review of the recent Tino Sehgal exhibit, and a few other articles. All of the readings address, in one way or another, what qualifies as art. We will open the discussion simply with this: Does an idea qualify as a work of art? Can an artist have an idea, instruct other people to make it, and take the credit?

Experience and history tell us the answer is obviously YES to this second question, but is it fair? When does the idea become art? I remember Deborah facilitating a Socratic Seminar with her classes last year where she explored whether or not those who retouch photos for fashion magazines should be given credit along with the actual photographer. I remember sitting in on the class conversation and thinking, “I want to run more discussions like this. I want more dialogue like this in my own class,” as students defended their positions on whether or not someone who digitally manipulates a photo should be given any credit at all (in a Socratic Seminar, for those who aren’t familiar with them, participants aren’t charged with finding a “right” answer but rather are asked to explore a text, work of art, and/or question in depth and in search of multiple perspectives to inform an opinion. Gee… what a novel idea).

Denis Dutton may have criticized Damien Hirst’s “Medicine Cabinet” and Jeff Koons‘ “Vacuum Cleaners” as “reckless investments”, but the opportunity to use these works as a springboard for defining and redefining art with students is really quite priceless.

That’s right….we’re nearing our 100TH EPISODE of the Exclusive video series and are asking viewers — THAT’S YOU! — to decide which video (and artist) will have the distinction of being the big one zero zero.

The five new videos up for consideration run the gamut (clips after the jump):

• Mary Heilmann throws apples into her swimming pool and teases our camera crew
• Twilight has nothing on William Kentridge’s vampirish drawings of CAT scans
• Beryl Korot shows off a handsome nude centerfold with some very special equipment
• Here’s a riddle: how many guys can you fit behind a Julie Mehretu painting?
• Mike Kelley pens a catchy rap song with the immortal lyrics “I ride that hog, don’t need a bike…a big fat chick is what I like”

Which, oh which, video will it be? Only you can decide…

VOTING ENDS: THURSDAY, APRIL 1ST
OUR 100TH EPISODE PREMIERES: FRIDAY, APRIL 2ND

[polldaddy poll=2938836]

See VIDEO CLIPS of the five contenders below…

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Doris Salcedo. Left: "Untitled," 1998. Wood, concrete and metal, 74 x 44 x 21 1/2 inches. Collection of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Photo: David Heald. Right: "Shibboleth," detail, 2007. Installation at Turbine Hall; Tate Modern, London Concrete and metal, 548 feet long. Photo: Tate Photography, London. Courtesy of the Artist and Alexander & Bonin, New York.

Melancholy photographs, bronze truisms, museum interventions, a giant battleship, and more in today’s roundup:

• Tonight at 6pm, Season 5 artist Doris Salcedo will speak at the Americas Society in New York City. The event is part of Vis-à-vis, a series of conversation between artists, curators, and critics from the Western Hemisphere. Salcedo (who created a colossal crack in the floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2007) is among the nearly 200 artists, architects, and designers invited to imagine interventions in the Guggenheim’s famed rotunda for the exhibition Contemplating the Void. According to Artistbloc.com, Salcedo’s “mash-up art piece [at the Guggenheim] combines a downward view of the rotunda with a photograph of a New York tenement by the German-born artist Hans Haacke. The tenement photograph, part of his series documenting the holdings of a local real-estate baron, was scheduled to be featured in the 1971 Haacke show at the Guggenheim that was canceled for what were widely believed at the time to be political concerns by the museum’s director.” At the Americas Society Salcedo, and artist Javier Téllez, will discuss their work, artistic visions, and related issues in contemporary art. Click here to register for the event.

• On March 26, Guggenheim New York will open Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, a two-part exhibition that surveys photographic imagery since the 1960s that “seems to view history with melancholy or mourning.” Drawn primarily from the Guggenheim Museum collection, Haunted will feature recent acquisitions, many of which will be exhibited by the museum for the first time. Included in the show are works by Art21 artists Sally Mann (Season 1), Roni Horn, Hiroshi Sugimoto (both Season 3), An-My Lê (Season 4), and Cindy Sherman (Season 5). Haunted, part one, runs through September 6. Part two opens June 4.

• On March 24 at 4pm, Season 4 artist Alfredo Jaar will lecture at the University of Connecticut about his work around the Rwandan genocide. His six-year investigative piece, The Rwanda Project, 1994-2000, was created in response to “the criminal indifference of the world community in the face of a genocide that claimed one million lives.” Eight years after Jaar completed The Rwanda Project, he was invited to create a monument to victims of the genocide. As part of his design process, he visited existing memorials and accumulated new visual materials that are at the center of his new work, We wish to inform you that we didn’t know, a three-channel video, on view at the University of Connecticut’s Contemporary Arts Gallery through April 22.

• Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare MBE is making history with a new commission for the Fourth Plinth of London’s Trafalgar Square. According to Sun News, his installation will be the first commission to reflect specifically on the historical symbolism of the Square, which commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar. It is also the first of such commissions by a black artist. Scheduled to be unveiled on May 24, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle is a 16 x 8 foot replica of the battleship HMS Victory set in a giant bottle. Listen to the artist discuss the project here.

• Season 4 artist Jenny Holzer is recipient of the 6th Award to Distinguished Women in the Arts, presented by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Established in 1994 to recognize “the many gifted women providing leadership and innovation in the visual arts, dance, music, and literature,” the bronze plaque given to each recipient was designed by Holzer and features one of her truisms: “It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender.” An award luncheon will be held in Holzer’s honor on April 28.

• About Jenny Holzer (2009), a documentary film about the artist, will screen at Montreal’s Festival International of Films on Art (FIFA). Directed by Claudia Müller, who followed Holzer over a ten-year period, the film traces the artist’s career from the late 1970s to her LED installations of today. FIFA continues through March 28. (Also screening at FIFA is “Transformations,” the Season 5 episode of Art:21 – Art in the Twenty-First Century featuring Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy and Yinka Shonibare MBE.)

• How to Appear Invisible (2009), a film by Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) that documents the demolition of a prominent landmark of the former German Democratic Republic, is showing at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver through April 25. The piece is part of the group exhibition After the Gold Rush, which explores post-event “afterness.” The show is meant to call attention to Vancouver’s own experience post-Olympic Games.

After a well-attended pilot event in January—with over 80 participants spread across 18 teams and music provided by Mary Heilmann—Art21 is returning to host a second installment of Culture Wars: A Night of Trivia with Art21 in collaboration with the 92YTribeca this Wednesday, March 24, 2010, at the 92YTribeca in New York City.

The bar opens at 6:00 p.m. and the event begins at 6:30 p.m.

This trivia event is inspired by contemporary art and the culture of our time. In the spirit of Art21′s mission to increase knowledge of contemporary art and in combination with the social traditions of game night and happy hour, this multimedia event invites you to test your knowledge of current art, film, music and online cultural phenomena. All are invited to form a team of colleagues, friends, and frienemies—or come solo and join a team on the spot to meet other art appreciators/lovers/aficionados—and compete for cultural greatness…or maybe just a prize.

Prizes are generously provided by 20×200 and the Phaidon Store in SoHo.

Follow the action on Twitter (#culturewars) leading into the Wednesday-night event.

Already have a team assembled? Share your clever team names in the comments below, on Twitter (use hashtag #culturewars), or on the Facebook event Wall.

Teams may consist of 2 to 5 people. This is not a ticketed event; however, there will be a cost of $5 per team, payable at the bar, to participate. For more information, please visit the 92YTribeca event page.

"Their relationship was based on preparing absurdly complicated recipes using overpriced ingredients." From unhappyhipsters.com

There’s a lot of discussion and almost no consensus about the difference between ethics and morals, so let’s be broad about it: both are proposals about how to live. Those proposals fluctuate according to infinitely various brackets: socio-historical, religious, economic, and on and on. But what we’re talking about, really, is codes of behavior, a framework by which to live. This question – how to live – informs almost all philosophical inquiry, from Socrates through Montaigne and LeeAnn Rimes. The question of this topic – “must art be ethical?” – rests on wobbly semantic ground, though. The question is: must art itself be ethical (or can it, maybe) or must the art world be ethical?

The contemporary art object is so tightly bound into the context of the art world (by which I mean: it depends not only for its funding and exhibition space on exterior fiscal powers, but on its very justification as art, from Duchamp onwards; read Brian O’Doherty for a far more intelligent analysis of this) that the conflation of object and its receptive context make ethical discussions about art really ethical discussions about how the art world behaves. This is like blaming money itself for the financial crisis. In other words, I want to address the question in the way I first interpreted it: can there be anything ethical about art itself, or is it perpetually at one remove from the conversation? Can art itself be, now, a proposal about how to live?

Piet Mondrian, "Composition in Yellow, Blue, and White I" (detail), 1937. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art.

Take modernism. Contemporary artists spend a lot of time knocking it. We look at the whorls of cracked paint on a Mondrian and patch together a snide metaphor about the ultimate futility of the idyllic utopianism of our Neanderthal forefathers, reminding anyone listening that utopia literally means “no place.” Le Corbusier gets turned into a Fraggle Rock puppet. Tatlin’s Tower (massive symbol of socialist modernity + never actually built = contemporary art goldmine) gets rehashed over and over again, sometimes literally (the proposed reconstruction of the Tower by collective Henry VIII’s Wives) and implicitly (in comically finicky, quixotic projects by Simon Starling and almost everyone else). And yet modernism looks like the last attempt by visual art to make direct parallels between ethics and aesthetics, before the institution of galleries swamped any ethical autonomy art might have had in the early twentieth century. (It’s not absolutely as straightforward as this, I realize; a bit of selective analysis is required.) A really good Mondrian is complex thought made visual. That thought is bound up in how we ought to live, the principal ethical problem in philosophy. So what happened to that interweaving of ethics and aesthetics?

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John Gerrard, "Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas)," 2007

This weekend I travelled to Washington D.C. (Arlington VA to be exact) to participate in a panel called WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE for the Arlington Arts Center‘s amazing TRANSHUMAN CONDITIONS show, curated by Jeffry Cudlin.

While preparing for this panel discussion (and because I tend to over-prepare), I re-read an essay by my current academic crush, Ollivier Dyens, currently a Vice-Provost at Concordia University. In his essay from 1994, The Emotion of Cyberspace: Art and Cyber-ecology he writes:

“The role of the artist, moreover, is destined to change. New emotions structured by the symbiosis of human and computer memes are about to appear: emotions flooded by the cheerfulness of technology, drunk with the recognition of cyber-ecology, but also imprinted with the profound sorrow of the human artist’s expression.”

As someone who is concerned with making things, I find Dyens’s writing inspiring, or maybe I mean poetic. In any case, with these ideas in my head, I came across John Gerrard’s work while touring the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Gerrard describes the process of creating his “Realtime 3D projection” entitled Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas) of 2007:

Production of the work involved the virtual reconstruction — based on hundreds of the artist’s own photographs and video — of a ten mile square section of Texan landscape close to the town of Dalhart, an area scattered with windmills, farms and fences. This documentation was subsequently enhanced by publicly accessible satellite and topographical data.

Once activated, a virtual storm unfolds in a sculptural and constantly random manner within the reconstructed landscape.

Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas) is a visual, spatial and temporal representation of a place, as the animation is programmed to work on a “realtime” cycle. When it is night in Dalhart, TX, it is night in Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas). The stars in Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas) coincide with the stars in Dalhart, TX.

Like Dyens predicts, Gerrard’s work is “flooded by the cheerfulness of technology, drunk with the recognition of cyber-ecology, but also imprinted with the profound sorrow of the human artist’s expression.” It is neither here nor there, existing either as light coming out of a projector, or as an integrated circuit processing a giant batch of code. What we experience as the work is something completely immaterial, ephemeral. It’s thrilling to see this barren environment, the giant dust cloud appearing to approach but never reaching us, the wild traveling shots of “the camera,” pointing to some sort of nonhuman consciousness, moving us in circles through this landscape. The phantasmagoric realness of the scene being created in front of us is completely mesmerizing and haunting.

While on a purely aesthetic level it has a relationship the work of James Benning and J.M.W. Turner to mention but two, Gerrard’s work feels like it is approaching a “nodal point” (to use William Gibson’s terminology) in artmaking, in the way that (and I REALLY hate to make this comparison) James Cameron’s Avatar approaches this same point in narrative filmmaking.

"Deer Eating." Source: http://annej6.files.wordpress.com

Spring is just around the corner!!! Whew, finally. Meanwhile, here’s What’s Cookin:

• VIDEO EXCLUSIVE | Jeff Koons: Money & Value: Artist Jeff Koons discusses themes of money, desire, perfection, and moral responsibility. Filmed in his busy New York studio and surrounded by numerous assistants at work on paintings and sculptures, Koons describes how the practicalities of running a business are often in service to creative ends.
• Matthew Savitsky, Philadelphia-based artist talks with blogger Kevin McGarry about his new project Healing With Purple (Here Lies Helvetica), inspired by a visit to a faerie cemetery in Short Mountain, Tennessee; his thoughts about Robert Gober’s piece currently on view at the New Museum, his frustration with writing and triumphs related to art as poetry; and his urge to communicate gay colloquialisms and sensibilities.
• Continued from Part 1, Kevin McGarry shares his first impressions about the controversial exhibition Skin Fruit. If you are not in New York and don’t plan to be anytime soon, never fear; McGarry describes what he has saw there in detail. If you are still not satisfied, go to YouTube and check out this video produced by NOWNESS. The question remains: how much here is transparent and how much just can’t be seen? How fun to guess?
• Sparkling Nepalese paper, race and civil rights, a northern island, circular botanics, fluorescent lights, a ton of vinyl records, and a few reviews in the Weekly Roundup.
• Welcome new guest blogger Ivan Lozano, a (mostly) video artist currently working on an MFA in Film/Video/New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In another life, while living in Austin TX, Ivan was the programming director for the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, an arts writer for various publications, and a co-founder of the artist collective the Austin Video Bee.
• CONVERSATIONS about CONSERVATION: How can cultural value on a place be defined? Is this an image that is always beautiful? Blogger Richard McCoy has been preparing a presentation for the colloquium at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, “Collaborations in Conserving Time-Based Art.” He now speaks with Mitchell Harnes Bishop, the curator of historic collections at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden responsible for its historic buildings, collections, and the cultural landscape.
• TEACHING WITH CONTEMPORARY ART: We have A LOT to learn from our colleagues! Joe Fusaro lets us in on a well-known secret, but kindly reminds us that, “sharing best practices is something that takes organization, time, and effort. Over the past nine years I have learned repeatedly that this is time well spent and absolutely worth the extra effort…Let’s face it, reading about good teaching, or just daydreaming about it, is one thing. Seeing good teaching in action is quite another…” Let’s feed the fire!
• What if an artist wants to re-create a performance? Does he or she have to credit the original artist? Some don’t. “I realized this is happening because performance is nobody’s territory. It’s never been mainstream art and there’s no rules,” says Marina Abramovic. Abramovic’s current exhibition at MoMA has received a lot of press, perhaps some in part for her continued efforts towards the conservation of time-based performance art. Um, how do you do that? Hey, check out this twist: doing the Marina Abromavic in drag? Blogger Ivan Lozano tinkers with the thought. READ THIS!
• LOOKING AT LOS ANGELES: L.A. galleries are brimming with minimal, kind-of-conceptual abstraction at the moment. According to Catherine Wagley, Mel Bochner makes a keen impression with his palette of words. “He works in the realm of one-horsed wagons and burnt tongues…”
• FLASHPOINTS: Must art be ethical? Advocating ethical practices and tolerance are two different positions. Tyler Green is an advocate for stronger ethics in the art world, while Jerry Saltz seems intent on defending the relative tolerance and heterogeneity of the commercial side no matter how dysfunctional it may appear, even lovingly referring to the art world as “Babylon.” Jerry Saltz and Tyler Green, according to William Powhida, are not talking about the same thing in their public non-debate… Worried about being late to class? Don’t worry, according to Ben Davis 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, you won’t ever be because “the art world is not separate from society or its class structure.” Please note Powhida’s point that the art world is not representative of any society in its entirety…“As an artist I am to both invent and preserve, challenge and perpetuate, be new and responsible,  for the past and the future”… There’s still so much more. READ THIS!
• GASTRO-VISION: Food in Contemporary Art and Culture: Remember Mr. Creosote, the morbidly obese character of the 1983 comedy Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life? Somebody grab a bucket! Are we a culture of gluttonous over-indulgent consumers that want MORE of it ALL? Gluttony in art consumption and our craving for new things was at the center of a provocative panel discussion held earlier this month at The Independent art fair. Nicole Caruth questions and reflects.
• CALL FOR ENTRIES: WRITERS WANTED FOR THE ART21 BLOG!

John Baldessari, "Raised Eyebrows/ Furrowed Foreheads: (Black and Blue Eyebrows)," 2008. Three dimensional archival print, laminated with lexan and mounted on shaped form with acrylic paint, 57 3/4 x 102 x 6 3/4 inches. © John Baldessari, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

Art21 currently seeks several freelance art bloggers to contribute to this site on a regular basis. Application processes for each opportunity are different, so please follow instructions or links below.

1) Berlin- and New York City-based writers to craft exhibition reviews and related contemporary art news, as well as to chronicle local art events, programs, and phenomena. Explore this site’s existing columns on Los Angeles and London as models.

Knowledge of contemporary art and art writing experience are essential. Experience with WordPress, the ability to break news and share contacts are all preferred. Submit letter of interest, your resume, 2 writing samples, and a draft blog post to blog [at] art21 [dot] org.

2) Writers for Art21’s Flash Points topic on the ethics of art. All are welcome to apply. Submission instructions here.

Rolling deadline. Questions? Email blog [at] art21 [dot] org.

Mr. Creosote in "Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life" (film still), 1983.

Mr. Creosote, the morbidly obese character of the 1983 comedy Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, is a picture of gluttony never to be forgotten. Upon taking his seat in a fancy French restaurant, he begins to vomit, showing no concern for the people around him and the dreadfulness of his action. Throughout the skit he continues to project ridiculously large streams of matter onto the floor, into buckets, on the maître d’, cleaning woman, and himself. Between upchucks, he heedlessly orders and consumes copious amounts of food. In a darkly humorous ending, the character explodes, showering the restaurant and its patrons with human viscera. The camera pans back to Mr. Creosote, who is now a hollow carcass with a still-beating heart. The maître d’ presents him with the check.

The same year that audiences were introduced to Mr. Creosote, the art world was entering a period of phenomenal excess. The wealth enjoyed by upper and middle class Americans in the early 1980s brought about rapid growth in the art market. The resulting bubble would, like Mr. Creosote, eventually burst. At the present moment, we are acutely aware of this bulimic pattern: after the buying binge of recent years, the market (along with the larger economy) again purged, and given the latest art fair reports, is back on the rise. Might Mr. Creosote be the perfect metaphor for the contemporary art world that is always hungry for more?

Gluttony in art consumption and our craving for new things was at the center of a provocative panel discussion held earlier this month at The Independent art fair. As one of the seven deadly sins of Christianity, gluttony is of course loaded with notions of repulsive and immoral behavior. It suggests hedonism in food and drink while denying it to those less fortunate and in need. Of course, this idea is not universal. Gluttony can also be a sign of status, wealth, or desire unburdened by beliefs and moral principles. Panelists of “On Gluttony” expressed the full gamut of interpretations. Organized by Kreemart Salon (the group responsible for Haunch of Venison’s New York Cake Party), the program featured painter Will Cotton, food artist Jennifer Rubell, Rachel Lehmann of Lehmann Maupin Gallery, art advisor Raphael Castoriano, and art journalists Anthony Haden-Guest and Linda Yablonsky.

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