Art Lies, Volume 66, Summer 2010 Page: 11
96 p. : col. ill. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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ARTLE
Executive Director lEditor
Anjali Gupta
Assistant Director
Elizabeth Murray
Marketing Director
Rachel Cook
Associate Editor
Kurt Mueller
Copy Editor
John Ewing
Corresponding Editors
Risa Puleo, Austin
Matthew Bourbon, Dallasl Ft. Worth
Kate Bonansinga, El Paso
Ben Judson, San Antonio
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Editorial Advisory Board
Regine Basha, Annette DiMeo Carlozzi,
Frances Colpitt, Gean Moreno,
Valerie Cassel Oliver, David Pagel,
Noah Simblist, Franklin Sirmans,
Michelle White
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Copyright@ Art Lies 2010Editor's Statement
Magma of Stupidity
It's Not the Bullet that Kills You (It's the Hole)
- Laurie AndersonAs a rule, stupidity is wishfully avoided by this journal. Errors and lapses, as well as
the dull, unintelligible, obtuse and the obvious are precisely what we edit away. In this
quasi-rational, goal-oriented culture of ours, we'd rather draw attention to where things
work rather than fail-to things that make sense, not nonsense. Parrhasius may have
made a fool of Zeuxis, but only because it takes smarts to strike one dumb; we rarely
praise works for their insipidness or ineptitude. Or-pardon the error-we do, if care-
fully quarantined (start the blooper reel). If the Bush era taught us anything, we can at
least agree that real stupidity is dangerous.
In the avant-garde of the visual arts, stupidity, one could surmise, has been a stra-
tegic trend (or countertrend) for at least the last century. From "naive" Rousseau, to the
inanity of Dada, through the long shadow of Duchamp's calculated deskilling, Warhol's
banality, the lowest-common-denominator appeal of Koons, and the empathetically
pathetic (and "beautiful") losers of the early nineties, we've not only sought out idiocy,
we've celebrated it as genius, however begrudgingly.
Stupidity has become diversified to include positions of ignorance, pranksterism,
satire, abjection, anti-intellectualism, intuition, failure and, of course, mass cultural
appeal. Reactions, accordingly, run from disdain to collective destiny. As an artistic tool,
though, stupidity is increasingly self-conscious and aware. Neither noble savage nor
savage noble, playing the fool is an astute aesthetic performance, but to what ends?
Does deliberate stupidity offer critical traction? Is its appreciation sharp relief or the first
slip into undifferentiated mediocrity?
Saluting stupidity, like Susan Sontag's annotated "camp" (also naive, deliberate,
serious and frivolous), means succeeding at being awful. How, exactly, does judgment
function in this inversion? How dumb is it to speak of a connoisseurship of stupidity?
Is it cynical self-hate? Or is it recognition of-and a love for-human nature at its most
basic? However, if we agree with Joshua Decter's assertion that stupidity has become
its own intellectual paradigm, perhaps we are not dealing with an inversion at all but,
rather, an inflection. Considering visual art's causal and reciprocal relationship to cul-
ture, an informed discussion on the subject of stupidity seems the only logical means of
confronting the issue.
- Anjali Gupta, Editor & Kurt Mueller, Associate Editor11 ART LIES NO. 66
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Gupta, Anjali. Art Lies, Volume 66, Summer 2010, periodical, 2010; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228031/m1/13/?q=%22Puleo%2C+Risa%22: accessed June 8, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .