Beautiful Inside My Head Forever

In Ottawa, M and I and her lovely parents visited the Pop Life exhibit at the National Gallery.

Recommendation! If you are near the capital, go. It's a collection curated by the Tate Modern, and all our postmodern friends-- Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Murakami, etc-- are in attendance. Notable absence: Roy Lichtenstein. Not sure why they chose to overlook him...

I am all in amaze. Some crazy, mind-bending works are: Hirst's formaldehyded-unicorn (which is a real pony, sunk forever in this aquarium of chemicals) and his twins (which are a pair of real twins! ...though not sunk forever in chemicals... they were reading Twilight and listening to their ipods). Also Koons's silver balloon animal rabbit, and his provocative/pornographic life-as-art/highly constructed working out of his artisitic/love/sex life in massive, sexually explicit photographs, (don't miss "Glass Dildo," kids) and Murakami's video of Kirstin Dunst singing "I'm Turning Japanese." In fact, there is just so much. You'll just have to go.

As we were leaving, M's mom said something truly fitting; she said, "I appreciate all these works, and I've really enjoyed seeing it all-- a lot of it was shocking and interesting-- but I don't actually like it. I don't find that kind of art beautiful." And I thought, yes.

This kind of art asks us not to appreciate beauty but to think about and connect concepts. In 1979, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was already claiming "A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded" (from Distinction) and in 1996, Marc Redfield, in The Politics of Aesthetics, writes that when there is a "generalization of aesthetic experience [there] is also an evacuation of affect, a waning of aura, an experience of shock" (4).

When I saw Klimt's "The Kiss" in Vienna a few years ago, I cried. That is a painting with a strength of aura and an affective intensity that floored me. None of the art at Pop Life had a similar effect. But I still love postmodern art because (since I have gone to school long enough), I possess Bourdieu's code for (perhaps not totally) understanding the meanings these artists wish to covey. Recognition is sometimes mistaken for attraction. I recognize these works. They are visual representations of and responses to a lot of the theory I've read. However much I love them, though, I agree with M's mom: I don't really like them.