ART BRUTE. Kia has pointed me to the Roger Kimball stemwinder "Why the art world is a disaster," which uses an expired art show at Bard College as a launchpad for rage against -- well, plenty, including yuppie naming conventions and high tuitions (no arguments there) but mainly contemporary art. Kimball is an amusing writer, and I would rather have this sort of thing done amusingly than tediously, as is the custom with rightwing cranks, so credit where credit is due.

The thinking is less interesting than the writing -- moneyed philistines corrupt art, it's all politically correct, lobby signage and catalogue copy is shit, etc. I share Kimball's distaste for many of the current big names he cites (Cindy Sherman is fine by me) and for much of what gets shown nowadays.

But I stopped nodding at this:

...it has been a long time since shock value had the capacity to be aesthetically interesting—or even, truth be told, to shock. Decades ago, writing about Salvador Dalí, George Orwell called attention to, and criticized, the growing habit of granting a blanket moral indemnity to anything that called itself art. “The artist,” Orwell wrote,

is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.

Kimball does not pause here, but I had to. Bunuel's L'Age d'Or? L'Age d'Or is lovely. I still view it with pleasure, as do many others, and it's 77 years old -- certainly old enough for its modishness to have subsided. If it still shocks, and I think shock is the least of it, it is for its genuine, audacious inventiveness, not for what once may have been seen as cheap thrills. (BTW, I don't recall the crapping scene -- does memory fail, or did Orwell have the Director's Cut DVD?)

Orwell may be forgiven his disgust, bless his proletarian soul, but it's a little weird that Kimball lets it pass. Maybe he's never seen the movie. Or maybe he has passed a point of no return, after which anything lively and irreverent, notwithstanding its merits or vintage, is to be condemned as part of some era-spanning conspiracy against good taste. And past that point is pure crankishness. No wonder he's so angry. He's no longer responsive to the artworks, but only to the Dylans and Heathers and Marieluise Hessels and Leon Botsteins and all the others who have made the world, in the immortal words of Doc from West Side Story, a garbage can.

This modern world is full of shit masquerading as art, so you, too, might think that criticism is a waste of time. But as Ted Sturgeon said, ninety percent of everything is shit. And I think Sturgeon was understating the case. Still, if you cease to look, you won't see, and there's none so blind as that.

A few weeks ago, while biking in Brooklyn, I happened upon a show of photographs by John Barnard. This show, too, is closed now. The subject was local nannies, mostly black, caring for their little white charges. Thematically this would seem to be agenda-driven, too, but if you can't get past that, you'll never know whether the artist did. Most of the photographs weren't so hot, alas, but a few were really fine. My favorite, as I recall it, showed a muscular woman in jeans and a shirt who had slung a toddler over her shoulder to carry him into a fenced playground filled with ugly plastic slides and tubes. All was dark but the child's face, blankly regarding the camera. It wasn't Atget or Weston, but it was worth contemplating and remembering. And all I had to do was look.