Sweatshop copies of great art. Weren't many of the originals produced in similar factory-like conditions? Professor? Mr Teachout? Mr Capps? Anyone?
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20 Aug 2007 06:16 pm
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Produce 30 per 16 hour day? That's two per hour. Something is fishy about this story.
Maybe they were small reproductions.
Say, 2x4 inch canvases.
Isn't it telling that the "Comment of the Week," according to the right-hand bar, is:
Comment of the Week
On Coming Soon . . .
Another reason not to read the Atlantic. I won't be back.
Posted by dave™© | August 18, 2007 10:23 PM
Ha, ha. McArdale stinks. Here's my prediction: she'll get drastically fewer hits than Douthat, Ambinder, Sullivan, Yglesias, and Fallows, and will become a sort of "second-class citizen" of the Atlantic blogging masthead.
Not really. The studios of the Renaissance--which are what I suspect you have in mind--consisted of journeymen apprentices, but they weren't "art factories." To be sure, there have been plenty of major artists who worked in poverty (or something close to it) for extended periods of their lives, as well as many lesser artists who made a living through copying and other forms of hackwork. Still, that's not quite the same thing as the sweatshops described in this story.
Hey, Atlantic, here's your neat-o new blogger just a couple of days ago:
...as a class, the old and sick have some culpability in their ill health. They didn't eat right or excercise; they smoked; they didn't go to the doctor as often as they ought; they drank to much, or took drugs, or sped, or engaged in dangerous sports. Again, in individual cases this will not be true; but as a class, the old and sick bear some of the responsibility for their own ill health, while younger, healthier people have almost no causal role in the ill-health of others.
Perhaps they deserve it by virtue of suffering? But again, most of them are suffering because they have gotten old, often in high style.
You must be very, very proud.
2 by 4s will rid us of those meddlesome geezers.
I guess I'm going to Wal-Mart tomorrow.
They were made in poverty, but it wasn't quite mass production. The assistants and journeymen didn't get more than room and board in most cases, though the masters did alright while they were still productive. Old age must've been unpleasant.
Like everyone else in pre-safety society they had lots of unpleasant environmental hazards - just think what paint was made of and remember that they all made their own.
One of the complaints about the show is that it stifles their creativity. Now THAT'S a modern concern. No assistant had much of what we describe as agency. The story of Leonardo da Vinci painting the angel he was assigned as an apprentice in Verrochio's workshop so much better than everyone else that he stood out may be true - but it also shows that the norm was for apprentices to submerge themselves.
The starving artist is, it seems, more than a cliche. The fact that it is a cliche, though, suggests that painting on canvas has rarely been a path to comfort in the material world.
The objections to this are balderdash.
Nobody forces graduate students of art to take these jobs. They do it of their own free will.
Why?
One reason is their salaries, but that is by no means the only or main reason. The other is that it gives them the opportunity to practice painting and learning technique: namely, what mix of colors produces what actual color on canvas. Budding artists since time immemorial have copied works to develop such skill.
To be sure, this practice is quite one sided, but sooner or later, if this business survives, degrees of skill will be recognized and rewarded, and these graduate students will combine their interests and inclinations with the skills and practices they develop to produce works you may admire.
What would you prefer them to do? Work in a shoe factory or an automobile factory for more money?
Their pay is based on supply and demand. If it is low it is because this industry has not yet established itself, and the non-monetary potential rewards make the supply of budding artists more than adequate.
What would you propose to ameliorate their conditions?
Destroy the industry? A great and typical idea!
The best thing you could do for these artists is to buy up their products and destroy them to build up demand for their work. Perhaps their paintings could be used as targets in rifle ranges.
Who loses from their work? Those who have perfected making mechanical copies of these works using photography and computers are the main competition. This is an industry that is clean and almost costless. This is what you really to foster in place of paying young people to copy works?
Ah but the temperature gets hot. Why? The buildings aren't air conditioned! OK, I guess you are right. Close down this nefarious industry!
This is a stupid comment, and you know it Meghan. The people in the factory don't have much of a choice but to do what they're doing. The artists could be a waiter instead. Why don't you just beat 'em with 2 by 4s?
Next blog post.
No. This is nothing like the apprenticeship of the Renaissance. An apprenticeship in a studio during the Renaissance was done with the hope and assurance that the apprentice would progress by learning the craftsmanship of art. This kind of "production" is nothing more than mind numbing, repetitive tasking which has nothing to do with art.
It's my understanding that the artist Watteau worked in similar conditions when he was starting out, doing exactly the same thing -- copying other people's art. So saith the Time-Life volume on him, anyway.
He was not Renaissance, however, but Rococo, or pre-Rococo. He lived 1684 - 1721, in France.
The News here is that now they're copying the Old Masters in style, instead of rapidly creating "new" abstract-ish and semi-representational art for motel chains and people who want some blue art to go with the blue sofa as they did in the 80's. The mass production method of "one-guy, one-color" as used in prior painting is not described, but it's still WalMartArt. China's artistic heritage and history is also vastly different than the West's Rousseauean and semi-Democratic notion of self-expression and individual creativity-based art. Much of what is "High-art" in China is very often an example of a perfect copy of a 17th Century vase, based on a 12th Century Emperor's desired form.
30 pieces in 16 hours? Maybe painting isn't so hard after all.
;->=
I'm a middle-aged, professional painter from New York. To be frank, I received the best training and art education imaginable. Normally I'd be painting full-time these days, as in the past, but I can rarely sell my works nowadays and must secure a living from other manual labors.
Some comments have already mentioned the old, European guild system, but all a bit too glowingly and unrealistically for my taste.
That a Renaissance apprenticeship was pursued "with the hope and assurance that the apprentice would progress by learning the craftsmanship of art" is simply overwrought and Romantic. These were just jobs for most; apprentices were laborers. Leaving the trades aside, the same rule probably will always apply to art making itself, that it is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. Painting was always a manual labor, probably more so back when people had a clue how to do it!
Medieval and Renaissance workshops were often "factories". Subsequently, painting may have lost something since those days of customary training. Willem DeKooning got a last gasp of the old guild training in his childhood Netherlands, the same kind reserved for the anonymous craftsman of old. Then he stowed away on a freighter bound for Hoboken, NJ., where he first pursued sign painting. For his technical knowledge and skill he was untouchable. As a "creative" artist (I despise the subjectivism inherent in that term) he remains one of my masters.
Anyone can see how paint surfaces have suffered since the craze of the Ab-Ex days. Today, with none of the old reasons for existing, non-objective painting has returned to its 19th century roots in interior decorating, The Chinese evidently understand the market better than we do!, i.e., if it's not really good abstraction, which is very difficult to achieve, and - as a mere style - very easy for just about anyone these days to evaluate, then don't trouble yourself trying.
Speaking of projected subjectivisms among other points just as non-Confucian (good argument DirtCrashr) I too found the notion of our cabinet member risible when he said that he can "well imagine how wonderful it would be for the [Chinese] students to be able to express their own creative skills as opposed to being obliged to make copies of works where they have little or no knowledge of the history and condition that inspired those works." Having spent a little time in China myself, I'd say that our painting councilor's "knowledge of the history and condition" of painting suffers from a facile and self-serving equivalence even in regard to our own history. His limited views have more to do with popular notions of art, as commonly derived from newspapermen and others given to self-promotion.
Painters are a strange breed anyway. The cliche of the starving artist barely scratches the surface of stereotypes we hardly comprehend ourselves. A few things to remember about painters and their complaints: a painter's attitude vis-a-vis the public is usually framed as a struggle against an intractable, external world - "the world is out to get me". Also, a painter's self-regard is arrived at differently whether in Europe (where the audience is very impressed by painters' claims that the world is out to get them) or in the more indifferent US, and invariable derives too much on both shores from popular fantasies about painters and about art-making itself.
As to the insertion of journalistic concerns, does anyone doubt that this news-item from the UK, this exhibit, presents a socio-political theme rather than any traditional treatment of painting itself? These are the concerns of journalists and sociologists, even if they are the painting kind. What painters are really experiencing in that Chinese factory, besides the heat, is anyone's guess.
As a rule of thumb Europeans and their journalists tend to stroke the painter's ego by privileging the artist's role in the Great Intellectual Adventure. It always is a bit paradoxical then that painters in Europe seem less burdened by the weight of historical reference than do Americans, despite the impression I always have that they're as unthinking and ill-informed as painters everywhere. Painters in the US tend to paint as though a Matisse were observing from their shoulder, perhaps a psychological holdover from colonial provincialism. Nevertheless, since WWII America's been the center of the painting world, and for good reason.
Sadly, not only the notions of the general public but even those of artists themselves are increasingly shaped by the journalistic mentality. Extra-artistic interests will continue to burden painting until someone - some Watteau perhaps, even issuing from some Chinese factory - will come along and wake everyone out of their tedium. It's not only possible, but probable.
I envy ANY SCENE where painting is happening, where painters themselves are in the process of painting and not (in that moment) in thrall to their own self-importance. That's because painting always come down to the act of applying pigment to a support, period. That's what painting really is, for hours and hours and hours. Discoveries tend to be fleeting and small (and still make it all worthwhile). Only very few in America, Europe, China, or anywhere else will ever discover in any fully-mature way what paint can do beyond "making copies" of other paintings, or aping as mere decoration what others have done before. As far as that goes there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Hopefully for them, they will still eke out a living.
Will someone just get these guys an air conditioner or a window!
But poetaster, that air conditioner will contribute to global warming! Not to mention the more important fact that when I'm out hiking in the desert for a few weeks, the first few days are miserable because I'm out of my comfort zone, but after that I'm used to it. It's still hot and sweaty, but not the end of the world as the air conditioner dwellers make it out to be. That doesn't mean I think they should be made to work in saunas, but I always get a good laugh of the reporter who just stepped off a first class airplane into the third world and complains about the the lack of air conditioners in these factories. My company's warehouse in Chicago and NY don't have AC either and it's damn hot there! I take it they've never visited a screen printer's facility in the summer either...
It must be nice for Councillor Frances Stainton, "cabinet member for Culture and Heritage," to sit and preach from his/her comfortable office in a democratic, developed nation and philosophize on how "acute poverty drives people to things they would not otherwise contemplate." Oh, woe be the poor Chinese graduate student who is but a subject to the impoverished conditions in which he lives, who is so blinded to the injustice he faces that his only option to survive is to eke out a meager living in a 40°C sweatshop.
Whatever. The Chinese graduate students have CHOSEN to attend *graduate* school, an opportunity most certainly resulting from the increased economic activity that China's economic liberalization has afforded. Congratulations to them for working hard to improve their lives, and shame on wealthy western elites like Stainton who look down on such bootstrapism with guilt and disdain.
Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. -Harry Lime, The Third ManThe character of Harry Lime is an amoral peddler of black market drugs. In justifying the suffering that results from his profiteering he relies on the excuse that the chaos and subjugation of post war Austria is justified by the brilliance of its art. Of course the statement is completely false and when Orson Well's character says it, you're not supposed to take it at face value, but to judge the complete lack of soul of the man who would say it.
Say, with the thinness of these one sentence blog posts, you'd expect them to be cranked out at a slightly higher rate.
Even the Factory wasn't a factory. The American Experience two-parter on Warhol gives a sense of how hard he worked, even though he was surrounded by plenty of dilettantes.
Now, late Picasso was just lazy scribbles for cash (or free meals). But that was all his own doing.
Anyway, it was the Germans, not the Swiss, who invented the cuckoo clock...
I wish I had an idea of what the previous poster meant by "The American Experience two-parter". (The genius of the internet is that you can PROVIDE LINKS for your references.)
Either you, "pseudonymous", or The American Experience must be kidding. It was the dilettantes around Warhol that did the work for him. I know this first-hand. Andy was too busy running his empire and collecting antiques to do the actual work.
Warhol afficionadoes parce his history and phases by the hand and style that executed the work.
(You are kidding, of course - my apologies.)
I wonder how their pay scale compares to what Van Gogh got per original painting?
First of all, I didn't "romanticize" in anyway the apprenticeship in Renaissance studios. It was stinking, backbreaking hours of grinding pigments and mixing paints, drafting cartoons over and over again, preparing surfaces for painting and all the other mundane tasks associated with the craft. I assumed that most people would know that. However, it still stands that the apprentice had hope of progressing and learning a craft, which is the difference between those apprentices and these poor saps of the 21st C.
Secondly, if people want to improve the conditions for these labourers, why is that a bad thing? Why shouldn't their working conditions be improved? Why shouldn't the working conditions of all people, everywhere, be improved? Are posters here so innately selfish and amoral, that the thought of others trying to help people is disgusting to them? They don't "deserve" this kind of treatment because they chose art as their life work. Maybe you should be happy they care so you don't have to.
As to Sam's comment about screen printing facilities being miserable in the summer, yes, some of them are - which is why they turn out a crap product and whine to the ink manufacturer about their ink not sticking to or drying on the substrate. It never occurs to the morons that they can't screen print in a sauna.
Why shouldn't the working conditions of all people, everywhere, be improved? Are posters here so innately selfish and amoral, that the thought of others trying to help people is disgusting to them?
It's not that. It's that these people's lives have most likely improved since the opening up of China. Unless you were a member of the Communist Party, life in pre-1980 China was poverty-stricken and without air-conditioning. And anyone who was creative ran a severe risk of being sent off to labour camps for "re-education" when they ran afoul of the political regime (the Chinese regime is still plenty repressive and I am grateful I don't live there, but they are no longer so compulsive about art only displaying the correct Marxist impulses).
Also these articles carry a hint that working in dire poverty making things for Westerners is worse than working in even direr poverty making things for your own fellow citizens is somehow a worse outcome. That the fact that Westerners benefit from the low work means that all the gains to the poor Chinese should be ignored, that jumps in their income only are good things if Westerners do not in any way also gain. Ridiculous.
"... jumps in their income only are good things if Westerners do not in any way also gain."
Yes! and this same subtext somehow conflates with and is supported by our own, precious, confused ideas about art and art-making and artists.
If the curators of the exhibit chose the better quality works for their show (and I'll bet they did) then what specifically would the spectacle have gained by doing so? What is gained by introducing this other layer of "artist" to the socio-political argument that these are merely exploited factory workers? What are our contemporary preconceptions about "art" that this additional manipulation should work almost invisibly on us?
The curators don't even have to belabor the facile assumption of an equivalence between the originals by Western masters and these cheap copies. Audiences nowadays, almost wholly ignorant of our former heights of aesthetic sophistication, come equipped instead with relativistic and other civilization-undermining value-concepts to inform their guilty leisure.
Even in this thread, among my fellow skeptics, there's almost no treatment or analysis of how the curators' subtle polemic uses contemporary confusions about what art is (and what is it?) in order to manipulate the audience in the direction of their socio-economic conclusions.
But do let's make sure that we keep subsidizing our precious and informative arts through taxation, in the hope that artists themselves someday will arrive at the answers to these profound social problems...
Bah!
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Great art? I didn't see a single velvet Elvis in the bunch.
Congrats on the new gig.
Posted by ech | August 20, 2007 6:53 PM