One quote from this weeks readings stood out to me as kind of summarizing all my feelings about everything we have encountered in this class, and perhaps just everything ever. It was from Jameson’s Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. It comes during a section where he is urging us not moralize the postmodern condition, which he points out is very difficult, nearly impossible. “We are somehow to lift out minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.” I suppose for me this sentence, and the non-judgmental stance of the section of the essay, was at odds with my conceptions of critical theory of postmodernism. By this I mean that every invocation within art-discourse experience about postmodernism is chalk full of moral judgment, usually someone either for or against likening postmodernism or its destruction to a moral imperative. I found Jameson’s words acutely summed up my own feelings towards capitalism quite powerfully. I reap the benefits and suffer the indignities of late capitalism equally on a personal level and on a global level I can understand its glories and evils in nearly equal measure. That said I will be needing to read his section on mapping again before class, I got bogged down pretty badly there.

On Douglas Crimp’s Appropriating Appropriation I had some sympathy towards his argument but he also did something I find really frustrating among art historians which is making a case that is weak and then cherry picking examples as marshaled evidence for his thesis. For example in his polemic on Ghery and Graves his argument that Ghery’s appropriations were lateral and therefore good and Graves were historical and therefore bad seemed to oversimplify some aspects of creation to. I’m not sure how to articulate this clearly but I’m not sure that historical appropriation is the only thing, or has anything to do with why I don’t Like Graves’ buildings. On the flip side I don’t like any of Ghery’s buildings either and if I did I doubt its because I suddenly saw the intellectual beauty of corrugated steel as loopy siding. This is always where postmodernism arguments lose me (well not only here) that they always seem to hinge on architecture as the best or first or quintessential case study for proving some paramount fact. I suppose I don’t understand architecture very well (my fondness for the Harold Washington Library should be proof enough of that.) When I look at Grave’s Art Center in Minneapolis I am disinterested in what looks to me like too much a tamed Ellsworth Kelly or Joseph Albers painting. I don’t mind the historical appropriation, I just don’t like the way it was done.