Objects of Virtu or Virtue

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Republication of the 2005 observations of David Arthur Walters, Artékritika Extraordinairefor Artéwôrldé, on postmodern artistry at Miami Beach's famed Art Center/South Florida.

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MIAMI MIRROR – TRUE REFLECTIONS

Objects by Steven Gagnon

Objects of Virtu at Art/Center South Florida
David Arthur Walters Artékritika Extraordinaire Artéwôrldé January 2005 A Vindictive Prelude Artécity’s publicist extraordinaire Dindy Yokel inspired me to visit artécitycard’s participating cultural center, ArtCenter/South Florida Gallery on South Beach Florida's famed Lincoln Road. Ms. Yokel, responding to my article flattering Alessandro Ferretti's $100 million Artécity real estate development, recommended that I find some other topic than real estate and art to write about, since those subjects are already covered by qualified writers at the Miami Herald. Ms. Yokel publicizes her reputation for integrity and loyalty to clients, and I understand that her advice carries considerable weight in the community. Ironically, she had previously recommended that I submit my work to a free sidewalk newspaper, the Miami SunPost, a paper of considerable quality, that is, if the orthodox standards of the established press are the criterion for judgment. I took her advice, but my articles and opinions about the possibility of living an ideal Artécity Life were rejected, perhaps because the SunPost happens to be running full page advertisements of the project. SunPost editors and publisher are well aware of my opinions about the gauche quality of some of the artépublicity, opinions which I had only expressed privately

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MIAMI MIRROR – TRUE REFLECTIONS
and directly to Mr. Ferretti until Ms. Yokel made patently false written remarks about my character to the Herald. As for submitting my work to the Herald, it had already been generally rejected without reading by Executive Editor, Tom Fiedler, who kindly advised me that the primary criterion for acceptance at the Herald is not the quality of writing, but "market needs" based on "ethnic and racial" factors, and, to some extent, the “luck of the draw.” Wherefore my inspirational dissatisfaction moved me to get a better education about Miami's artéscene, particularly in respect to the hypéreality of artéstate. I would become better acquainted with the market needs of the community that they be better decorated and a higher profit turned by all persons concerned; in which case I might obtain the wherewithal to finance the purchase of a multi-million-dollar condominium on South Pointe as set forth in my mission statement, 'South Pointe or Bust!' Artécolony I approached artécitycard-participant ArtCenter with some trepidation given Ms. Yokel's advice that the artécity scene is already fully covered. I am starting with nothing, hence am in desperate circumstances. I certainly do not want to waste my time creating works that will be discarded as trash. But I might as well proceed anyway, since I do not seem to fit in anywhere in Miami, not even into selling newspapers for the Herald on a part-time, minimum-wage basis - I don't speak Spanish. Wherefore I approached ArtCenter with judgment suspended, despite good and sufficient reason to be biased if not prejudiced. ArtCenter is located in Lincoln Mall at 800 Lincoln Road on South Miami Beach. It was established as a non-profit artist colony, in 1984, for the express purpose of contributing aesthetic quality to the community. The ArtCenter publicity credits the institution with upscaling the once-blighted and bohemian Lincoln Road Mall, into a shopping and recreation destination for the leisure class, now attracting an estimated 2.5 million visitors annually. A local resident said he liked the bohemian mall better than the hedonist mall it has become, but the bohemian mall was also a bankruptcy mall and had to go. Everyone including members of the underclass is still welcome to walk into ArtCenter, observe the artists in action, chat with them, and buy something. I toured the place and pressed my face up against the glass windows of the workshops. If you like to make faces at big faces, visit the studios of Karim Ghidinelli and Damian Sarno. Making faces is not all they do, but they do that a lot at ArtCenter, apparently because of some silly rule called "being consistent," a counter-revolutionary movement leading to the rejection of innovative artists of the permanent revolution. Luciana Abait's many underwater swimming-pool views are so consistently realistic that one can almost taste the chlorine, lending credence to Plato's view that art is deception.

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Bruce Tolman's uncluttered abstract paintings are colorful to say the least. I might put the golden-toned one in my South Pointe condo. On second thought, if he would not mind toning down the colors, I might commission him to fresco all the walls of my master bedroom. Shirley Henderson is an excellent courtroom illustrator, but I did not care for the modern digressions now displayed. I don't know if she would bend her artistic conscience for $50,000, but I would really like to have some absurd paintings of the legal scene. Tony Chimento is consistently real, but the smoke rising in the distance on one painting reminds me of myself watching a Kansas tornado when I was a kid, and not the consequence, perchance, of an Indian raid on my home. Anthony Silva's signage is consistently spell-binding. I would certainly commission him to do all the signage for Artéwôrldé. Those artists whom I have ignored should not feel slighted but should feel complimented by my ignorance. My dysfunction is not to make a career of ejaculating or barfing on art. Every ArtCenter artist already knows whose work is artéworthy. I'm sure that most of them would admit to a hierarchy in all matters real and artificial, from mates to masterworks. I do have my perverse preferences and counter-cultural prejudices. I don't care much for the consumer society of mass-produced disposables. Idealists used to complain that people had become too obsessed with the possession of material objects. I do not worship fetishes, yet I would love to have just a few beautiful, useful and durable objects. As for art, give me one work of fine art, give me a single Van Gogh, and I will invite my friends over to marvel at it. The rest is all clutter to me. Most exhibits I have seen constitute a few good things framed by clutter. There is too much garbage, junk and trash in the world. And that's not because people crave the things in themselves. Consumers crave more life for themselves in the mindless consumption of things. When artists reflect and elaborate that culture, I have no right to say, "Well, this is not fine art, this is just an artistic junk collection." As a matter of fact, it might be a fine re-creation of junk or innovative embodiment of demented, trashy thinking. However, when I do see an iconoclastic bull in that brittle china shop, preferably a fire-breathing bull-dragon blackened by anarchy, I am wont to celebrate. Alas, given the "market needs" of the political hierarchy, including the need to be consistently vulgar in order to turn a predictable profit, such a bull is highly unlikely to appear, except on those bohemian fringes disdained by the received civic leaders and their publicists, until their craving moves them to gentrify, revitalize, or upgrade yet another "blighted" bohemia. After touring the ArtCenter workshops, I visited a small collection of objects, articles created by the art colony's members, exhibited in the Art/Center's gallery. The collection represented the philosophy of the curators; to wit: ArtCenter Alumni, Edouard Duval-Carrié, and Isabel Block, ArtCenter's Director of Exhibitions and former curator of the Centas Fellows Collection at Florida International University's Frost Museum of Art. On the whole, the exhibit was not a very persuasive sample of the virtues of the artists or the colony, although there was some good, truth and beauty evident.
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Steven Gagnon's Mind if I smoke? a human skull sculpted with cigarettes, virtuously alluded to the link between smoking and death, but the presentation was not powerful enough, in my opinion, to cause nicotine addicts to swear off smoking. If I were a constructive criticism critic, I would keep the skull and set my criticism beside it in the form of a realistic sculpture of an ashtray fashioned from a blackened piece of diseased lung, with two or three cigarette butts snubbed out therein. Vickie Pierre sculptures, for instance, Ugly Little Dreams for Little Girls to Buy, are quite charming. I would not buy them for myself, but I would certainly purchase a few as gifts for friends, who would appreciate them very much. The exhibit, running from November 27, 2004 - January 2, 2006, was entitled Objects of Virtue. I must say the collection was mistitled. Furthermore, the textual description publicizing the exhibit was clumsy, as if the persons who wrote it were not the sort of people who have time to sit around thinking and polishing words all day long, hence they are in want of a good publicist and copywriter if not a fine author. Let the reader consider the curators' description of Objects of Virtue: "Historically, objects of virtue have been defined as finely crafted items for which utility and artistry are equally important. In this exhibition featuring works by artcenter's artists-inresidence, the objects reveal a virtue of vision, as individual as the artists' themselves." (sic) An Excursus in American English Facility in American English is not a cardinal virtue in Miami, where superior English is resented if not despised. That is, unless the speaker is fluent in Spanish as well; otherwise, he has less than half a chance of gainful employment, something many applicants have painfully noted before fleeing north. Bilingual excellence may help many bilingualists into good positions as interpreters and translators, and, in rare cases, if they cooperate to the fullest extent, into the highest offices in the land regardless of their ethical virtues. Yet, generally speaking, the demotion of the nation's first language to the status of its second contributes to negligence in the first, hence to even worse postmodern English babbling in the incorporated towers of Babel. I mean not to derogate the Spanish language. The most intelligent conversations in Miami are reputedly conducted in Spanish, some say by Cubans, whose love for higher education and pride in their own is in part due to the virtues of Fidel Castro's indoctrination program. By the way, Fidel Castro's old Columbian friend, Gabriel Marcia Marquez, is one of the greatest novelists in the world; the virtue of his work, when rightly translated into English, is unmatched by writers for whom English is the mother tongue. Naturally the truthful expression of honest opinions on certain subjects is politically incorrect and is considered to be downright insulting, especially to reputable publicists such as my favorite model, Miami's Dindy Yokel, and their esteemed clients in the money, real estate, art, and political business; for instance, the City of Miami Beach. Even constructive suggestions about living an ideal Artécity Life, made with virtuous intentions, are not welcome in their city: Yokel implied in writing that my very existence as an honest outsider is insulting.

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Today the emphasis is not on right but on might, not on ethical virtue but on force-feeding the gross market need for tokenry, trinketry, gadgetry, and hypetry; by virtue of which the masses are pacified, that the power elite may obtain the highest and most immediate compound growth in profits for conspicuous consumption of luxurious living in their compounds and resorts. To that extent the latinoamericanization of the United States serves to expand the underclass that it might better serve the interests of their betters. Thus does the disparity between rich and poor grow. The yawning gap shall, in due time, match the worst case of material injustice in the Western hemisphere, Latin America, whose poor and rich are fleeing north - the former for jobs, the latter to launder southern surpluses. Miami, the most impoverished rich city in the United States, presently stands as an ambiguous model therefor, foretelling the miamizacion of the United States. Publicists proclaim Miami to be a "world-class" city now, finally in full accord with the neoliberal scheme of imperial globalism. And it is right on track. But its streets are not paved with gold; money does not grow from its palms; the desperately poor and insane can be seen sleeping at night in the doorways of its artécity cultural centers. Pernickety pedants will undoubtedly take exception to my grammar here, and superpatriots will naturally declare my thinking perverse; yet they might find enough truth in their madness to provide me with a loving editor and the benefit of a comfortable couch. In the interim, I reiterate Art/Center South Beach’s publicity for Objects of Virtue. "Historically, objects of virtue have been defined as finely crafted items for which utility and artistry are equally important. In this exhibition featuring works by artcenter's artists-inresidence, the objects reveal a virtue of vision, as individual as the artists' themselves." (sic) Virtue is not Virtu or Vertu (also Virtú or Vertú) The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, with the prodigious assistance of an American madman (he believed he was being pursued by vulgar Irishmen and therefore killed an innocent workman) among other voluntary readers among the public, drew a historical difference between virtue and virtu. Of course vir, 'man, manliness', is at the root of both terms, yet 'virtue' is generally used to signify power as a quality of persons or things, while virtu refers to a love for objects of fine art and not so fine curious, or to the objects themselves. The Art/Center curators, in the first place, chose the wrong English word to name the collection exhibited. The articles I saw with my own eyes were Objects of Virtu. Art is usually intended to arouse a response, and its utility may be said to be to do just that, However, the "objects of virtue" displayed were not utilitarian objects in the usual sense. They impressed me as curious little articles of art, curious, if you will, something one might put on a stand, a table, the shelf, and the like. Still, it may behoove us to address the philosophical statement of the curators regardless of its applicability to the subject at hand. For example, if we take the statement literally, that the objects in question were crafted with an equality of artistry and utility in mind, we would usually assume, without viewing the objects, that none of the works exhibited are fine art.

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Art extends beyond the merely technical aspects of production and the use to which an object might be put, hence "innovation" is a prerequisite of creative art. Generally speaking, the virtue of fine art is not the practical utility of a crafted instrument but rather its aesthetic value; for instance, the motive for the production of fine art is not to fashion an instrument, for instance, to make money, but to produce a beautiful article - not necessarily the pleasurable sort of beauty, but perchance the sublime beauty that might be found even in the portrayal of awful or horrible subjects that do not present any clear and present danger to the viewer. As for money as an instrument, John Ruskin once said, the best work is not done for money. Further, "Believe me, no good work in this world was ever done for money. A real painter will work for bread and water; and a bad painter will work badly, though you give him a palace to live in." That is not to say that a finely crafted instrument like King Arthur's sword, best known for its magical power or virtue, cannot be a work of fine art. Metaphorically speaking (we attribute 'manly' power to an object) the magic sword might be called a virtuous article of virtu. Likewise, we might declare an ancient Chinese sword to be obsolete as such, or not longer of great virtue as a finely crafted article of combat - it had a virtuous balance and was capable of cutting a man in half, yet is now an object of virtu to be hung on the wall. Ancient Chinese swords were, incidentally, also used as a medium for writing, which gives us cause to consider once again the relative virtues of pen and sword. When the Art/City curators said the articles exhibited "reveal a virtue of vision", those among them who are not idolaters and who do not think of things as fetishes did not mean to say that the articles have vision or can see; they might have better said that the collected articles of virtue present or realize or embody the unique visions of the individual artists. To better illustrate the difference of meaning between virtue and virtu, let us refer to a few quotes from the Oxford English Dictionary: 1749 Fielding: "They... may be called men of wisdom and vertú (take heed you do not read virtue)." 1871 Smiles: "The virtues or valour of the ancient Romans has characteristically degenerated into virtu, or a taste for knickknacks." 1830 Cunningham: "This country at that period... exported swarms of men with the malady of virtu upon them." We recall that virtue, as a term analogous to the mysterious life force or virtue posited by physiologists. was the name of a popular notion among romantically inclined liberal thinkers whose art of living answered to natural inclinations un-tempered by the moral conventions of their time. The spelling, virtu, was also used, yet the substitution of virtu for virtue is rarely to be used lest it confuse: 1934 Pound: "Or say where it had its birth, What its vertu and power." 1973 Times Literature Supplement: "The Pagan Vertú, the 'civic humanism' of Machiavelli, had become the proud Christian freedom of the Hugeunots."
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We find this more customary historical usage, the first example being made in a Christian mood: 1825 T. Hook: "Soon they were doomed to withdraw their eyes from the innumerable bits of virtú which surrounded them." 1815 Scott: "The manufacture of some decoration, some piece of virtú, some elegant trifle." 1858 D. Costello: "Pictures, crockery, gimcracks of all kinds - what is generally known as virtú. The Virtue of Criticism The aesthetic value of an object of art is a personal judgment. That does not mean that the value is entirely arbitrary or subjective, for the person is, after all, a social being whose predispositions are tempered by social conventions. That is, the formal aesthetic value of art is largely determined by public criticism, by praise and blame. The artist conforms to some extent to recognized principles, of beauty and the like, or in rebellion would found her own school. In other words, art is determined by culture yet it in turn determines culture by expressing ideas which might otherwise remain unrealized. Art criticism is itself an art. I am an Artékritika Extraordinaire. I am not an art critic, nor do I have to be one to say that I have found "professional" art criticism in Miami as lacking as Miami's professional journalism. Since art criticism advertises critical opinions, one might expect positive criticism at least to be artfully rendered. Criticism of any sort seems to be construed as an insult in Miami no matter how constructive it might be rendered, even with all good intentions toward the cultural institutions involved, including the community itself. Indeed, suggestions from outsiders in any field seem to be unwelcome in Miami, no matter how competent those outsiders might be, hence they they get a nice tan and depart, and are bid good riddance. In the long run, the result will be "pictures, crockery, gimcracks of all kinds - what is generally known as virtú." Those objects of virtu do not constitute the best publicity available to Miami. Conclusion to a Screed In fine, the objects of virtu exhibited at Art/Center South Florida displayed the virtues and vices of the community. The publicity for the exhibit was atrocious. ##

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