Artspeak on Koons

They probably used the same press release from the artist's studio or press

Since I find Koons's work banal and vacuous (admittedly as advertised) I do find it interesting that two reviewers seem to have paraphrased the same urtext in composing their blurbs. Perhaps the reviewers saved themselves the tedium of actually viewing Koons's work

The funny part is that one of the two photos must be reversed., and at least one critic didn't pay enough attention to the work to notice

'Urtexts?' As in Benjamin's 'Ur Forms' from the 'Arcades Project?'

But you know, Art Criticism has itself become a discourse that feeds on its own tail. But that's why we should look at similar texts describing Breughel's work. I've read plenty, personally, and they exhibit the same 'Ur Form' among themselves that the cited text about Koons do.

ematt...@oco.net:

I was thinking of the Gospels and various other documents of their era, which scholars suppose are based on other documents with mysterious names like 'Q'

Well, that's interesting. I didn't know about the German prefix - that let's me understand Benjamin's use a little better. But I think he got it from Nietzsche, who used 'Ur Form' in a more specific way - something like the visual culture 'spirit of the age'. Benjamin calls the iron/glass work of turn of the century Paris the 'Ur forms', for example.

It's the hashish, I think. I'll bet if Marcel Proust hadn't been so camera-shy he would have looked like that too.

Yeah, I think when you get down to the nuts & bolts art history, theory and criticism, and aesthetics, it can get as boring as philosophy or botanical nomenclature, considering how much is simply recycled generation after generation in the name of academic tradition or a kind of Darwinian accumulation of artspeak. Like the old 'there's a hole on the bottom of the sea' jingle. It is interesting, though, if you're researching a specific topic and you're gleaning information from the general blather. In that venue you can see some important difference in critic's writings that otherwise seem to be the same. Then there are the 'originals' like Irwin Panofsky who see to occupy a different planet, or at least write about things no one else writes about.

I liked that old PBS documentary 'Bill Moyers in Florence' where he interviewed several of the seasonal flocks of art history pidgons that gathered there each year, and everyone of the four of five said something about the genius of the renaissance and the remarkable creative effluvia and so on...but when he got around to Umberto Eco he said 'Nonsense. The only thing invented in the Renaissance was capitalism.'