The All-New STYLUS.

Stylus kapt ermee

I've always wondered this and I might as well ask now: Why does ILX have a Dutch board? What is the logic behind that?

Why not?

~~if u ain't dutch, u ain't much~~

Hm. I thought they had all deserted ILX for greener pastures.

Why not have a tagalog board, then?

Because no one started one?

How ironic it is that on the very day I complete Jeff Nuttall's "Art and the Degradation of Awareness", a furious, inspiring and comprehensive assault upon postmodernism (among other things) that may well influence the way I think about certain art-forms, I also finally acquire the tenth and final album on Nick's "top ten postrock record" Stylus list.

not very ironic.

Just getting the conversation started with some crass sports-commentator fallacy!

http://www.nobodysmiling.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/nas-hip-hop-dead.jpg

not very ironic.

-- max, Friday, December 21, 2007 7:33 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

"He's scored against his former club...on his birthday!"

wtf

No, I think I get it.

Like when they say, "the crowd are literally glued to their seats!"

How ironic it is that on the very day I complete Jeff Nuttall's "Art and the Degradation of Awareness", a furious, inspiring and comprehensive assault upon postmodernism (among other things) that may well influence the way I think about certain art-forms, I also finally acquire the tenth and final album on Nick's "top ten postrock record" Stylus list.

-- Just got offed, Friday, 21 December 2007 19:33

sort of interesting in reading this? what's his beef with postmodernism?
there's good and bad postmodernism, right? i think the whole idea of modernism as some sort of golden age is a bit shaky anyway...

there's good and bad postmodernism, right?

it's all relative lol amirite

nuttall's beef is that there IS good art and bad art, and postmodernism is simply a means of valuing power ahead of actual artistic worth. that's a simplification, of course; he lays into all sorts of cultural failings.

i don't think he minds so much if the postmodernism is at least funny.

lol actual artistic worth

Music with real artistic worth weighs more.

I miss Stylus.

AND BUMP

http://whatwasitanyway.blogspot.com/

postmodernism is simply a means of valuing power ahead of actual artistic worth.

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. I think what you mean has something to do with the idea of being able to designate something as art as opposed to "creating" an original work. It is important first of all to remember that in this respect post-modernism was always playing with the rules devised in Modernist rhetoric whereby Modernism used the power inherent in placing itself in art historical continuity. Post-modernism, far from being a jokey ironic wink as I think it is often interpreted, sought to destabilise these power structures which had canonised Modernism during its own lifetime through critiques of mythologies of creation. Thus feminist art, queer, and many other forms and schools which defetishized certain notions of art/the artist were allowed to emerge.

I know that was gibberish by the way, so you don't need to tell me.

Jus' sayin' is all.

Loveless debunkery shocker.

I wrote that when still in the immediate thrall of Nuttall. I'm now reading David Harvey's "The Condition Of Postmodernity" which will give me a more even-handed, balanced view of postmodernism. The schizophrenia (loose terminology) of art, the variety of worlds and definitions, the ability to ceaselessly reinterpret...none of this relies upon or indeed feeds into a fixed methodology of valuing and appreciating art, and indeed powers subjectivity, at the cost of common language. This is not necessarily a bad thing, although as Nuttall states, this subjectivity and chameleon-esque ability for an image to be reinterpreted as a work of genius became incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands, and led in many cases to a lazy, shallow under-appreciation of genuine artistic talent.

It's all a bit in the past, now we just have really bad graphic design instead of art.

It'd be fine if it was good design, but it's not.

It's just that postmodern is one of those words that is mainly used by people who have no idea whatsoever what it means, so I get a bit defensive sometimes. When it comes to visual art, it helps to think of postmodernism, pretty much as a reaction to Clement Greenberg.

Well, after reading Nuttall, I half-knew what it was. This led to a slightly unfair use of the word, as seen above. Hopefully the more of the Harvey I read, the more secure I'll become in my definition.

Didn't someone describe it as 'an incredulity towards narrative' or something?

Loveless debunkery shocker.

-- James Redd and the Blecchs, Friday, January 4, 2008 4:17 PM

If it's too easy for you, we've got a defense of R.E.M.'s Around the Sun in the works...

an incredulity towards narrative'

not sure i know that quote, but I would say it had an incredulity towards the linear progressions of traditional art history and Greenbergs attempt to flatten them further. Postmodernism takes on a more poststructuralist model of exploding history and seeing it in its atomised form. Its important to see that with every great art movement and great artist book, that there was a whole world, ideas lost, ideas embraced artists who gained success, became obscured, and that it didn't just follow a preordained line of reasoning as traditional criticism would have us believe.

Didn't someone describe it as 'an incredulity towards narrative' or something?

"Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements--narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on [...] Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?"

Lyotard.

Postmodernism takes on a more poststructuralist model of exploding history and seeing it in its atomised form.

ah, so you're doing the "seeing", but the evil narrative guys are doing the "constructing".

the ironing here is that it's an uber-simple flattened narrative that sees greenberg as anything other than a d-bag to be ignored. aren't you ceding a whole lot more than you need to here, letting him get under your skin?

xpost That's a really great quote, i've never read any lyotard and I'm thinking that's a big mistake.

No, because he said a lot of things of worth, and at least he represents a stop sign, a harbinger of where things were possibly going

Also his understanding of what he wrote about were amazing, its just that he turned his taste into value judgements and mixed them up with real theoretical investigation making his oeuvre a pretty tangled mess and marring his genius with his folly essentially

God, I sound really retarded in this thread.

No, because he said a lot of things of worth, and at least he represents a stop sign, a harbinger of where things were possibly going

-- I know, right?, Friday, January 4, 2008 9:35 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

sounds teleological to me amirite.

I'm not sure I know what you mean by that but I would be interested in you clarifying please.

wait i get it

yeah.

Because I think his ideas highlighted the problems people had with modernism, the myth of the artist, the ideal of formal perfection, the grand yawning self important.

Am I just yammering on for the sake of it now? I think everyone else is pretty bored of me.

if everything is "atomized" why read or waste time arguing with ghosts? ghosts who got it wrong. especially if there was "a whole world, ideas lost, ideas embraced, artists [and art critics] who gained success, became obscured"?

i think ya boy clem formalized a ridic version of modernism that sells well to tourists 20-30 years after it was interesting anyway -- modernism wasn't a coherent self-conscious movement like that anyway blah blah. and again if it's all atomized and whatnot why do we even care?

because saying someone got it wrong goes against the grain of postmodernism, and you're right, cg did invent his version of modernism and made it cohere, but he did show up ideas of pure form for what they were. It was because his writing was so realised that it forced a realisation of what those modes of thinking could lead to

And anyway, postmodernism is coughing up its death rattle so its difficult to know what is going to happen next.

love the new look, nick, keep up the good work.

This discussion ought to do wonders for my 1979-present day paper.

History as a series of 'unrelated present moments', discuss. Also, was Andy Warhol as big a charlatan as he seems?