the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

more like being a good person is a necessary but not suffiient condition for [something considerably weaker than 'making good art', more like 'whether they should be given space or put in power']

Well that's just lazy arguing tbh

I'd make the argument rather that art made by bad people that is truly an expression of their badness is pretty much always trivial and disposable, and the exceptions are usually expressions of the good parts of themselves warning us what pieces of shit the rest of them are. Does Tao Lin's work have the requisite amount of edifying self-loathing to get to that level?

I disagree, even accepting the premise that Tao Lin is a "bad person" writing true "expressions of his badness," we can gleam insight from it, in the same way that Noah Baumbach's Greenberg is an accidental masterpiece excoriating a very specific type of Gen X hipster contrarian misogynist that is all too often exalted and excused for in popular culture. the same could be said of the amoral, affectless, drug-addicted narrator of Taipei.

*glean

If that excoriation isn't embedded in the work itself, then really it's the critic who does the excoriating that is making the art, no?

most art isn't made in a vacuum; even celebrated novelists are part of a literary community and exert power and influence in significant ways. i don't think the argument is so much about 'are tao lin novels still good' (even less about whether they ever were--i'll cop to enjoying richard yates when i read it at 22) but 'should this person continue to be validated by this community'. the community is diffuse and includes semi-public figures with platforms from which to denounce them, but also the private decisions of readers to continue to buy their work or how to talk about them among friends. i think 'amplifying the personal to prove taste' is too smug a way of putting it. the idea that everyone just closes ranks and takes a hardline stance for fear of being shunned isn't borne out in reality; most ppl openly admit to having mixed feelings, still love the work, etc

xp No, I think people can learn and get things in works of art that the creator never considered, especially if it endures long after the creator is dead. "Separate the art from the artist" is an imprecise term, I believe that art does not belong to the artist, in a spiritual sense. it's an offering to the world and completely open to interpretation and can mean a million different things to a million different people. Even if you don't believe that, and you think a creator's behavior or beliefs are inextricable from their work, you can use the work to more precisely understand why you think they are wrong or bad.

well said

exile all morally suspect artists to siberia and make them suffer so we can enjoy their art knowing that they are not benefiting

When the art no longer belongs to the originator, then you are the artist. If you can mine valuable things from shit, that was you doing the work, and the value of it should be ascribed to you, not the originator.
I don't think a creator's behavior or beliefs are inextricable from their work, but the more that is the case, the more that work is craft rather than art, and so then a different set of value judgments come in.

wait wait wait how is Greenberg accidental? I feel like Baumbach is pretty obviously making him intolerable

exile all morally suspect artists to siberia and make them suffer so we can enjoy their art knowing that they are not benefiting

― Mordy, Tuesday, November 28, 2017 3:59 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I actually like this solution

There's at least a 75% chance someone in this thread is actually Tao Lin I figure

Good posts

I don't think a creator's behavior or beliefs are inextricable from their work

But does it matter if they are or aren't the answer fyi is no

An object is an object once complete it is not the history of its creation save for that remnant of the history that shows in the object NB this remnant is a lot less than you think ps scrub author names and by christ flamethrower off author biographies from novels and continue in this vein through all artefacts that you would have known as creative endeavour else admit ur fandom and just buy a tshirt

yes that's a threat

of course extricability of intent matters: we've all enjoyed food well-prepared by racists precisely because try as they might, they're unable to imbue BBQ chicken with hatred.

I don't think you've argued a clear point there.

Extrudability of intent is starting outside-in. You're the experiencer. It's you put the creator's intent in there if you find it there.

Autocorrect otoh lends a very sinister aspect to the whole thing

ie the racism you taste in that chicken didn't come from anything in the sauce

If I can taste racism in a chicken, then I would agree it's my taste buds that are the problem.

Or, rather, it's true that art isn't made in a vacuum but it sure as fuck has to travel through one to reach anyone else

XP twas yr analogy bucko

the more that work is craft rather than art,

I don't understand the distinction. art is in the eye of the beholder. darragh otm, once a work is complete it belongs to the world, i think you're giving the artist more power than they deserve or have. the world misinterprets artists' intentions all the time, it doesn't make their view any less valid, if anything it diminishes the singular artist's intent

why use an abstract example when chik fil a is standing right there

Does it stand without a social construct tho

Does it

with craft you can judge on more technical aspects -- is this chicken juicy, is it properly salted, etc...
with art, the chicken doesn't even have to be edible.

If it isn't then it's bad chicken.

I think perhaps the chicken concept has outlived its usefulness here

“Craft” is what people call art made by women or people of color

are you saying... this goose is cooked?

XP that's kinda just a bit nonsensical there silby tbh

Art being in the eye of the beholder is all very well and true but part and parcel of the art is its context. Watching Woody Allen's Manhattan in 1979 is not the same experience as watching it now, because of what we now know about Allen. I suspect when it comes to artists who are bad people we can ignore it a lot more easily when the person is long dead and not impinging on our cultural space in such a direct way. I can enjoy Knut Hamsun's Hunger without worrying unduly about the fact that he was a Nazi in a way that I simply couldn't with a book written by a contemporary Nazi sympathiser.

I liked Taipei, if Lin's a sexual abuser then that makes me feel a lot more dubious about him, but maybe not to the extent of never reading him again.

well, cooking has long been the province of women and people of color, and it's true that pretensions of art in cooking have been given more credence when executed by white men.

Xp Not to reduce your post to two letters but 'we'

When people start writing down what 'we' are getting from a creative enterprise then the stall is already set out

'we' is the worst word in writing today tbh

Well I could easily rephrase the same thought without 'we', so I think my point stands. When we/you/a person beholds art, s/he includes everything s/he knows about it including the stuff about the person who made it and the circumstances of it being made

better great art by a terrible person than terrible art by a wonderful person

I've always been on the lookout for undeniably great art by terrible people, and it's always been totally deniable.

caravaggio was pretty terrible

ZZ I think that when you change from we to I (imo the third person is just 'we' again and ought be jettisoned) it changes the statement completely

The experience you claim for yourself is inarguable and any experience you claim for anyone else is invalid and that's the core of the argument from where im standing, art is experienced in the first person and therefore nothing is true

i think we (non-royal we) allow for a much more personalized experience of art than we do say murder, but maybe art crimes should be prosecuted closer to other kinds of crimes (i.e. by community standards).

What is an art crime

xpost

Yes, art is a subjective experience and there's no right/wrong way to experience it, I agree. I was making an empirical point about the way people seem to experience art. And generally they find it impossible to divorce the object from its surrounds. You can say that once an artist's done with his/her art, it's out there in the world, separate from the artist, but in practice, those beholders of art tend to want to know about the artist etc.

Ah ah ah

People, they, beholders

Am I not allowed to talk about anyone but myself?

if even that tbh

Course you are!

But for the purposes of this discussion it completely begs the question, surely?

i thought the general anxiety around reading tao lin is whether it's communally offensive (an art crime)?
*BANGS GAVEL* Law and Order theme begins.