Philistines, my Philistines

So much rubbish about art has been flung around since the announcement of this year’s National Artist awards that we need to mummify ourselves in toilet paper.

A prominent collector made public his definition of “great artists”: painters whose works are in his private collection. That is what art is to him: a commodity to be tucked away under glass.

Meanwhile movie director Carlo J. Caparas, one of the controversial (euphemism for “bizarre”) awardees, has portrayed opposition to his award as an elitist plot. He has managed to goad his critics into ill-considered ripostes which not only derail the discussion by making it about him, but also provide him with ammunition.

Caparas is playing to his core audience, the masses to whom art is an alien concept that has nothing to do with their daily lives. Most of them, being preoccupied with the basic problem of survival, do not know or care about National Artists. However they do know who Caparas is, having read his comic books (which were drawn by other people), or watched his movies in which women are tortured, raped and murdered in slow motion for maximum titillation, or followed the brain-atrophying telenovelas based on his work.

As critics of the National Artist choices have not seriously engaged the masses in this discussion, much less attempted to explain why art matters to Everyone, who do you think they will respond to? Who will tell them why Caparas’s claim of having created many jobs in the komiks industry is not in fact a criterion in the selection process?

The argument that none of his movies have garnered critical acclaim is feeble: many “critically acclaimed” movies are crap.

The crux of the protest against this year’s National Artist awardees is that the proper procedures were not followed. Malacañang simply rammed its choices through.

Ayyy, the arrogance of power. Every year the academe and the art community disagree furiously over the awardees; this year Malacañang has managed to unite them in their outrage. Bravo. Their National Artist awardees will define this administration.

But this furor will amount to nothing unless the academe and the art community take the discussion to the general public. Otherwise the shouting and the angry columns will serve only to proclaim their intellectual superiority over Carlo J. Caparas. This has to be a sign of massive insecurity. If the average Pinoy is not engaged in this issue, then the culturati will be talking amongst themselves again.

Every time I go to an exhibit of contemporary visual art I have a fair inkling of how the masses feel about Art and Culture. Despite my ignorance, or perhaps because of it, I go to quite a few exhibitions: I figure that if I look at enough new art, the right synapses will light up in my brain and voom! I’ll know what the hell I’m looking at.

Last Saturday I went to the opening of “Here Be Dragons: Topology of Allegory,” a group show at Manila Contemporary at Whitespace on Chino Roces Avenue (Pasong Tamo Extension) in Makati. Yeah, I like an exhibition that sounds like the title of a math paper written after a couple of comparative lit electives.

I know crap about contemporary art but I know a little about math, and a topological group is a mathematical group which is also a topological space whose multiplicative operation is continuous such that given any neighborhood of a product there exist neighborhoods of the elements composing the product with the property that any pair of elements representing each of these neighborhoods form a product belonging to the given neighborhood, and whose operation of taking inverses is continuous such that for any neighborhood of the inverse of an element there exists a neighborhood of the element itself in which every element has its inverse in the other neighborhood.

Okay, I copied that from a book, but the experience of reading that definition approximates my experience of viewing recent art. It’s called a headache.

Some of the featured works I did not get, nor did I have any inclination to get them. Some of the other works made me want to seek out the artists and swat them over the head with a rolled-up catalogue. In the words of my friend Noel, “I can do that too, but why would I?”

But some of the works I found quite elegant, like mathematical proofs.

Like this long sheet of paper by Poklong Anading. He crumpled the paper, producing lines and facets on its surface which he then traced with different-colored pens. I cannot explain why it is beautiful to me but it is, and this is a failure on my part because I am in the word business.

Then there’s this painting by Trek Valdizno. From a distance it looks like a cheap woven rug from the Last Supper school of tourist kitsch.

Up close, however, you see that the image is composed of tiny blobs of oil painstakingly stuck together. There is something endearingly obsessive-compulsive about these two works, which may be why I respond to them. But what if the viewer is not as OC as some of us?

Why do some works of art move us, while others leave us cold, bored, and wondering if there was a letter “F” in front of the word that fell off the signage? I have no answers so I turn to books. At a National Book Store I found The Shock Of The New by the influential critic Robert Hughes. Hughes’ books was reissued this year in an edition of 1,500 copies for the 60th anniversary of Thames & Hudson the publishers.

It’s heavy, and I mean that literally — it weighs more than my laptop. However it is worth the back strain, being witty, incisive and accessible.

The Shock Of The New is also very useful. If Carlo J. Caparas starts a debate on art and I am suckered into taking the bait, I could drop it on his foot.

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