The Online Photographer

"...I do not think it means what you think it means."

—Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

I've noticed over the years that human beings are always looking for new and stronger ways to intensify the word "good." (Good is never good enough.) Many of them quickly get bleached by overuse until a new one is needed. Some lead unintentionally to humor, for instance when "unbelievable" is used as a synonym for good with no thought to its actual meaning of "not able to be believed; unlikely to be true" (Trump is an unbelievable President). Best synonym for good ever: bad, popular in the black community 20 or 30 years ago. And of course English-speaking Europeans will testify to how dumb we Americans sound when braying the word "awesome" to excess, a locution now thankfully drifting out of favor. It saps the meaning from awe, which connotes thunderstruck inspiration, a feeling of reverence and respect admixed with fear or wonderment. Sometimes it is correctly deployed almost by accident, however: for instance, monster trucks are indeed awesome.

The latest overused synonym for good is, of course, iconic, which is being firehosed into discourse in English relentlessly and remorselessly. I for one am beyond ready to capitulate. Mercy, please!

Artworld recently asked 14 experts to name the most "iconic" art of the 2000s so far. Among the works named were:

• A 35-foot tall sphinx of a bare-breasted black "mammy" (with visible pudenda at the rear) made of sugar, at the former Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. "Its forceful presence empowers women, subaltern voices, and anyone who stands for social justice and equality," says one of several experts who picked it, "just as it stands as one of the strongest messages ever made against the ongoing legacy of slavery and racism in this nation, and by extension, the world." Ever made?

• A glass cube containing 200 gallons of urine in jugs. "A collection of all the liquid the artist has passed since the Trump administration rescinded an Obama-era executive order allowing transgender students to use the bathroom matching their chosen gender identities." O-kay. Statement, of sorts. But art?

• A video showing a pair of hands counting out a million Japanese yen in 10,000-yen bills. Ah, but, in the words of Kadist, "a closer viewing of the videos reveal that they were created by looping the same scene of moving fingers, giving the illusion that many bills are being counted when, in fact, only a few are in the scene. Beyond commenting on the illusions of transactions and interdependencies in a regional economy, the video calls attention to the way media distort quantity as well as manipulations of values occurring with the transcoding of economic units into visual data." Thanks, but I pretty much got all that already from the $20 bill scene in Paper Moon.

• An oval of loudspeakers recreating, one voice per speaker, a 40-voice choir performing a 16th-century motet. Heard of it?

The problem is not with these works of art, which may have merit and which in any event I have not experienced in person. For instance, I would probably sincerely like James Turrell's Roden Crater, an immersive underground gallery devoted to the experience of light. The "Crater's Eye" is a round hole open to the sky that enables people down in the complex to see a circle of sunlight cast on the walls during the daytime. On the other hand, I feel no need to personally experience that 200 gallons of urine.

[Ed. Note: I wanted to use this JPEG, an artwork from 2000–2017 that might indeed qualify as iconic, as an illustration for this piece, but after several exchanges of emails I could not secure permission in time. Disappointed, but you know what they say: oh well. —Mike]

The problem is that none of these artworks is, by any stretch of the actual definition, iconic—a word which, among other subtleties, means "widely recognized and well-established," "widely known and acknowledged." Not sure about the penetration into the public consciousness of the video of the hands counting the yen. Pretty sure the jugs of pee do not in any sense qualify.

(The Artworld article ends well for grumpy old skeptics, though: George Goldner, art advisor and former chairman of prints and drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, answers the group query by grousing, "The most iconic work from 2001–2017? A misuse of the word icon for a period that is destined to fade into oblivion. There's no Mona Lisa, Raft of the Medusa, or Guernica to be found here." Harrumph! and so there.)

Maybe few of the artworks Artworld's experts trot forward are truly "iconic" in any meaningful sense, but maybe Kara Walker's A Subtlety: or the Marvelous Sugar Baby* should be: watch this video. It's honestly...um, awesome.

Mike

*Full title of the artwork: "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,
 an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant." The sugar refinery has since been demolished, along with Kara's sculpture.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Dennis: "Awesome post."

Mike replies: Thanks, but I'd prefer if you'd said "brilliant."

Tim Bradshaw: "While I agree with you on the 'iconic' thing, of course, I have seen and heard the speakers / motet thing (the motet in question being Tallis's 'Spem in alium'). And, well, it is just completely astonishing. I didn't know about it at all before I went into the room (I'm a Tate member and as such I tend to just go to have a wander around and check out whatever exhibition is on) and I probably spent a couple of hours listening to and exploring it. It's just a brilliant example of art which is only made possible by modern technology and which makes really good use of the space it is in, and also terribly beautiful of course. It's wonderful."

Rich Beaubien: "The comment about the iconic aspects of The Subtlety at the beginning had me squawking to myself. I'm glad I stuck it out to the end. I had the opportunity to photograph this, and just a bit of the event. Two things I most remember other than how awestruck I was when entering the space. The first was the smell of the sugar. It was everywhere. The second was how visitors needed to take selfies or have someone else take a photo of themselves as if to to bear witness—an I-was-there picture. In any case it's the word 'awestruck' that came to mind. Here's just one...."

Bill Poole: "Yes, yes, and yes. As a professional editor for conservation organizations, I am constantly striking 'iconic' when used in reference to one landscape or another. Mountains are especially likely to be 'iconic.' (The one time that I did stet an 'iconic' mountain it had been widely used as branding for a Colorado-based brewery, so I let that one go.) Next up, please consider 'stunning' as applied to views. Thank you."

Mike replies: I might have been guilty of using "stunning" a few times—I have to write fast, and never have an editor—but I usually think of stun as what a poacher does to a baby seal with a club, or one of those horrible videos showing someone sneaking up on someone else from behind and knocking them unconscious with a single blow that the victim never saw coming. That's stunning. The word also brings to mind "stun guns," i.e., electroshock weapons—Tasers without the wires. Thank goodness I've never actually been "stunned" by a view.