Selling Viciousness
Tara Servatius makes her living selling vicious essays about subjects she knows little about, and from time to time, she deposits a nasty piece of work on her blog or in Creative Loafing with the same, prejudicial attitude. Public art is her topic de jour (Citizen Servatius: “Running Circles,” Oct. 3). Anti-government philistines love Ms. Servatius’ malicious little muggings, and slurp up her slanted rhetoric while they page avidly through her yellow journalism.
In her transparent desire to mock and vilify visual artists, Ms. Servatius’ current favorite object of ridicule is the Charlotte Area Transit System’s public art program, in particular a commissioned public art project of large scale earth-cast discs by Thomas Sayre for the South Corridor light rail line.
Her readers call her a good writer. Even though her method of critiquing public art is to lambaste it in the most obvious way possible, some people call her brilliant. Maybe she is. Not a brilliant writer, but a brilliant mime artist, mouthing the feeble ideas and skewed opinions of some of our area’s more ignorant naysayers. Appearing to be clueless about the realities of the public process of granting an artist a public commission, she makes herself seem ignorant in her willful refusal to understand. Failing to express the difference between a proposal and a commission, she masses all of Thomas Sayre’s work in erroneous ways, attacking the artist and sneering at the work.
Rather than grasping that artists develop individual vocabularies of shapes, methods, and materials through personal forms of repetition, Ms. Servatius states that each piece has to look entirely different or it isn’t art; it’s a “rip off.” Even the briefest acquaintance with an art appreciation class would teach her that this is not how artists work. Artists and designers modify forms as they manipulate them, using similar shapes and techniques over and over, until they “own” them. This “ownership” creates a style, and enables people who are visually alert, in the museum or on the street to say: “That must be a Moore. That must be a Rodin, a Picasso, a Gehry.”
I can’t help but wonder if Ms. Servatius is being disingenuous when she claims not to grasp this notion. But she sarcastically describes bodies of work as “… basically the same piece over and over again, with a different intellectual explanation by the artist for what it means.” How many times did Monet paint water lilies or haystacks? Was the great Impressionist a “rip-off artist?” Ms. Servatius, in her mean-spirited blindness would think so.
As if ignorance is not a sufficiently clear element of Ms. Servatius’ writing, there is a clear strain of hypocrisy in her work, also.
She ridicules artists’ use and re-use of similar forms and designs, yet in her attempts at character assassination, Ms. Servatius does exactly what she accuses Thomas Sayre of doing: recycling the same ideas — in print (years apart), on the radio, on the television. Servatius blatantly double-dips her own ideas.
— Linda Luise Brown, former visual arts writer for Creative Loafing, Charlotte
This article appears in Oct 17-23, 2007.
I do so love reading the self-congratulatory ramblings of the intellectually dishonest, self selected elite!
Only an artist or an arts expert is qualified to comment on art. The rest of us just need to shut up an dpay for it.
Take the challenge, Linda: define art with out using the word art or a derivatve thereof, in such a way that anything can be identified as art or not art using your definition. When you fail at that, you’ll (if you’re honest) have taken the first step to recognizing that Ms Servatius or anyone else is fully qualified to judge what is purely a matter of individual subjective perception: art.
Kudo’s though, on having a menopause moment in print. It really was entertaining.
Linda Luise Brown said in her diatribe: “Artists and designers modify forms as they manipulate them…[which] creates a style, and enables people who are visually alert…to say: “That must be a Moore. That must be a Rodin, a Picasso, a Gehry.”
I would have to concur. Being the visually alert Charlottean that I am, I skirted along the South Boulevard rail line the other day, looked at the modified forms and manipulated shapes
and said to myself, “This must be a piece of s**t.”
An odd word for one to use while while writing tripe that can accurate be described with terms such as narrow minded, judgmental, elitist, intolerant, mean spirited, aggressive, condescending, illogical, and ill informed. Your FATHER was a good writer, Brown. You, on the other hand are hardly qualified to critique the editorial writing of someone far more skilled in that arena than you. That piece utterly rings of raw emotion. Unfortunately emotion is no substitute for mature balanced perspective, and the emotion that comes across most clearly is petulent, childish frustration that those with whom you disagree are even allowed express themselves.
Pay careful attention Linda: see if you canm wrap your head aroudn the following slice of reality: your ideological perspective does not imbue you with natural superiority. There are to be found among those whose views you find so valueless both persons far less informed or intelligent than you, and those who are far more intelligent and informed than you. I rather suspect that Servatius is among the latter and that it simply irritates the devil out of you.
Perhaps you should just lock yourself in a room with David and tell each other how visionary you are. It will save you confronting the reality that your opinion is of no more value than anyone else’s.
Thanks for telling it as it is!
Vicious? Yup, that applies to the screed that is that letter. In fact’s what’s astounding is the degree to which Miss Brown’s attack is personal. One is left with the feeling that she has great personal animus toward Servatius and used the commentary on public art as a vehicle to make it public. I don’t know that I’ve seen such a display other than when there are great personal jealousies involved.
to those brave souls who write in their own critiques: if you had balls you’d use your real name.
LLB
Well, I’m one of those who read and responded to your letter. I suppose you would like for me to use my real name, since given the tone of your letter it would seem that you’d like to find a way to get to those with whom you disagree. Mine is not, however, a name that you would recognize.
By the way, that is quite the non-sequitur there: “If you had balls. . .”. I don’t particularly lack courage, but then maintianing one’s privacy is hardly a matter of courage, since it is hardly as though you are to be feared. Instead it is in this case simply a matter of keeping things in their proper perspective: I disagreed with the premise and content of your letter here, and you are free to react to my response here. You hardly need to see my passport to do that, now do you?
(One last thing: it is enough ironic that you refer to Servatius as “viscious” in one of the more viscious bit’s of vitriolic criticism I’ve seen recently. That you react with such thin skin when your letter of criticism is itself criticized takes the concept of irony to new heights! Congratulations!)