"That's just stupid-butt, and everybody knows it."

This is the shorter version of what Rachel told me when she read the ideology, pt. 2 post on how to write and place academic articles. She kind of went on a stomp about how Graham’s advice looked pretty good to her and maybe if I followed it rather than picking at it, I’d get more of my smartness out into the world; which she is kind and partisan enough to think of as an unqualified good.

We talked quite a lot about the world of art, which is also full of crap pumped out on the theory that getting stuff out there is the way to get stuff out there. Rachel doesn’t like looking at buckets of landscapes in lurid purple acrylic any more than the next guy. She especially doesn’t like the awkward polite conversations with those artists when they want to go on about how great their stuff is. But she noted that there’s a large market for bad landscapes, and that it’s part of what enables a smaller market for good art. She talked about the status dynamics of connoisseurship, which is always dependent on a contrast space in which what’s good becomes evidently so only in relation to what’s bad. She was partly mollified on these points by my second post in the series.

Gamely trying to wiggle me into shape, Rachel pointed out that good stuff doesn’t get done unless you’re doing stuff in the first place, to which I had no good reply. She agreed with Graham that what he calls ‘alibis’ and we call ‘getting in your own way’ are always available in paralyzingly high quality standards. I agreed from ample personal experience, but objected that there’s no reason to believe in an alchemy where a recipe for crap suddenly produces a gourmet delight, nor that the world is a better place with more crap in it. She talked about painting landscapes as part of a process to master the craft. I pointed out that artists who are going to be good later very quickly stop painting ‘just’ landscapes; their mastery of the form involves questioning and putting twists on it right from the start. She had to agree with this.

Granting finally that Graham was offering a paint-by-numbers for philosophical landscapes, Rachel pondered the propriety and utility of saying so. She’s polite about other artists’ landscapes as a matter of professional and human courtesy. I pointed out that Graham was not just practicing a style, he was offering to teach it to others. If the style is objectionable, all the more so its propagation. Rachel admitted that she knows some very bad artists who are quite successful teachers, to the general detriment. But she doubted that their eager students would have received a better instruction successfully and supposed that talent will eventually find its outlet.

Continuing on the theme of critique, its utility and grounds, Rachel noted that no one is so reviled in the art world as an art critic (warning: incredibly tasteless Kliban cartoon) who can’t actually do art. She wanted to distinguish doers from thinkers about doing. I pointed out that like Graham, what I do is think, so if thinking doesn’t count as doing we’re both hosed. Nevertheless, I’m vulnerable here since one of my objections to Graham’s paper recipe was that it depended on a kind of ultimately arbitrary and self-referential thinking about thinking about thinking, which means all I’m doing is thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking.

Chastened but not defeated, I held out for the utility and propriety of critique even in such rarified atmosphere, on the grounds that if standards are available at all, less bad is good. I suggested that there are four main ways of identifying and publicizing the good, the first two involving critique (understanding a full critique to include both criticism and appreciation, as I learned from Marx and think was the case in my post): critique of others’ methods; critique of others’ content and conclusions; pointing at something better; doing something better. And while I grant that the latter two are by far the best, they’re not always immediately available or well-targeted. Marx never did finish Capital.

Rachel and I didn’t exactly agree in the end; she still thinks I should be writing and publishing more, by any means necessary. Which would be fine with me, I’m just not drawn to pumping out crap and fortunately I don’t have to. But writing these posts did cause a stimulating discussion with a delightful smartie, not to mention the great online commentary; so for me, that purpose at least has been well served.