Tag Archives: Bart Beaty

I Am Bart Beaty!

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So readers may have noticed that we’ve had quite a number of posts on Bart Beaty’s recent book Comics vs. Art. It’s a good book, but you may well wonder why we’ve (and especially I’ve) decided to spend quite so much time on it.

The answer is simple. Beaty stole all his ideas from me.

Consider.

— In his second chapter, “Defining a Comics Art World,” Beaty argues that comics should be defined in social terms — that is, in terms of a comics world — rather than in formalist terms. I made this argument on HU two years ago.

—Beaty has a lengthy discussion of the way in which art comics has presented Charles Schulz as a depressive genius and avatar of masculine frustration and self-pity in order to establish his high arts bona fides. I made this argument in the Comics Journal more than four years ago.

—Beaty identifies nostalgia as the central endemic feature of comics, and specifically argues that it permeates and defines not just superhero fanzines, but art comics as well. This has been one of the central critical argument of this site. Here’s just one example.

— Beaty spends a whole chapter focusing on Chris Ware’s performance of masculine self-pity, anchored in particular by a look at Chris Ware’s comics about high art. Again, I was making similar arguments, focused on some of the exact same pieces that Beaty discusses, a good while back.

I’m pretty sure I could find other instances too. (This blog has had a lot of discussion of the original art market for comics, for example, which Beaty talks about in some detail.) Reading Comics vs. Art was, therefore, kind of a bizarre experience. On the one hand, I kept turning pages and saying, “ha! I was right all along! See, a real academic says so!” On the other hand, I kept thinking…”Hey! I thought of that first! I even said it in the Comics Journal! Why don’t I get a shout out…or, you know, at least a citation?”

Of course, I’m sure the reason Beaty doesn’t cite me is that he didn’t get the ideas from me. I think most of these ideas (like, the importance of nostalgia in comics) are true — and since they’re true, of course all intelligent independent inquiry will naturally confirm them.

Still, it’s amusing that Beaty can be seen as in some ways enacting the same highbrow/lowbrow performance that is so central to his discussion. Just as Lichtenstein took the work of “lesser” artists and either elevated or stole it, depending on your perspective, so Beaty can be seen (with a little squinting) as taking the work of (ahem) lesser thinkers and elevating them, or swiping them outright. I am Irv Novick!

Again, I’m sure Beaty isn’t actually using my ideas. But it is kind of interesting that in his discussion of comics vs. art, and in his analysis of the critical conversation around these issues, he virtually never discusses the internet at all. The only time he really talks about the web, I think, is when he analyzes the effect ebay has had on the comics back issue market. But other than that, the ballooning online discussion of comics — the discussion that these days shapes the way that most people in the comics world think about comics on a day to day basis — is simply absent. Tom Spurgeon, for example, doesn’t show up in the index — though CR’s appreciation of a broad range of comics is hugely important in shaping the relationship between comics and art, or comics as art. Similarly, Dan Nadel pops up as an anthologist, but his seminal work with Tim Hodler at Comics Comics (leading to their editorship of tcj.com, isn’t mentioned.

Of course, you can’t talk about everything — but, as Beaty would be the first to acknowledge I think, what you choose not to talk about can be as important as what you decide to discuss. Beaty certainly knows about the blogosphere — he wrote regularly for CR for years. So the decision not to talk about the web and its place in comics criticism seems like it has to be a deliberate one. The discussion of comics vs. art is, for Beaty, one that is best approached through established institutions, and writers who have the imprimatur of established institutions, whether those be publishers or the academy — or fanzines, of course, which have longstanding status in comics. The web may shape practices (via ebay), but it doesn’t have anything in particular to say for itself. Or when it does have something to say, the voice Beaty cites is from Salon or the Electronic Book Review or the New York Times, rather than from the comics blogosphere.

The point here isn’t to indict Beaty (whose book I like a lot), but rather to point out the odd disconnect which remains between sholarly discussion of comics and internet discussion of comics. I call this disconnect “bizarre” because it seems to persist despite the fact that scholars (like Beaty) are all over the web. Charles Hatfield and Craig Fischer, for example, are longtime bloggers, and both have written for the Comics Journal (Craig has a column…as does Ken Parille.) There are a couple of specifically academic sites as well, such as the Comics Grid. And for that matter, my own blogging has given me the opportunity to write a book for an academic press. So obviously there is commerce between the two worlds. And yet, at the same time, there remains a cautious distance — such that Bart Beaty can write a whole book essentially about comics criticism without so much as nodding to the place where, at least in terms of sheer bytes, most of that criticism is occurring.

The reason to leave out the internet is fairly obvious; it’s for the most part not especially scholarly. This is a problem if you’re working on a scholarly project, because it’s hard to evaluate importance and worth when there are no credentials, because many people on the web are not speaking in a way that is of help or interest to scholars, and, last but not least, because it brings down the tone.

Tone is particularly interesting, because I think it’s one of the major differences between Beaty’s book and HU, and because that difference turns out to be surprisingly significant. Comics vs. Art is a confrontational book in many ways — but only to a point. Beaty slyly undermines the cult of Chris Ware, or the line between art comics and superhero fandom, or comics’ definitional project. But those jabs are always jabs rather than roundhouses, and they’re always from the scholarly stance of “this is an interesting phenomenon,” rather than from a more polemical vantage. Beaty’s arguments walk up to the line of saying, “people, you are acting like idiots, and you need to cut it out,” — but he never does cross that line. Which is why, when I paraphrase his arguments, adding a really-not-that-much-more-forthright polemical gloss, people tend to engage forcefully in comments — whereas, my sense is, Beaty’s own arguments themselves largely pass unnoticed.

In part this is just an aspect of the internets’ instant response mechanisms, and in part it’s probably because I’m not as credentialed as Beaty so people feel more comfortable (perhaps rightly!) in telling me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. In part, though, I think it’s because Beaty is deliberately working to be low-key. No doubt some will admire him for that, and there’s certainly pleasure to be found in his wicked gift of understatement. At the same time, though, his unwillingness to come out and take stand can make it difficult to figure out exactly why he’s bothering. What does Comics vs. Art hope to accomplish? Why is it worth pushing on the relationship between comics and art? If Beaty had his druthers, how might comics change?

I think Beaty’s answers to those questions would be similar to mine — that is, comics should be less neurotic and status-conscious, less inward-turned, more feminist, more adventurous, and more able to see itself as part of the arts, broadly defined, rather than as a defensive subculture which has to protect its own. Again, I think that’s what Beaty would say, but I don’t really know for sure. Maybe next time out he’ll tell us — whether or not he cites me while doing so.
 

photo
Illustration of Bart Beaty by Martin Tom Dieck from Beaty’s staff page at The University of Calgary.

 
 

Pop Art Vs. Comics: Who’s On Top?

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One of the recurring themes of Bart Beaty’s Comics vs. Art is the way that art is always on top — sexual connotations very much intentional. Art, Beaty argues, is insistently seen or figured as rigorous masculine seriousness; comics is relegated to the weak feminine silliness of mass culture. Thus, Beaty says:

Lichtenstein’s paintings failed to rise to the level of aesthetic seriousness. The core problem was the way pop art foregrounded consumerism — a feminized trait — through its choice of subject matter.

Beaty goes on to argue that Lichtenstein was eventually recuperated for high art by emphasizing his individual avant garde genius — in other words, by claiming that he transformed comics material from feminine to masculine. Either way, Beaty argues, whether pop art wins or loses, comics are the feminine losers. For Beaty, the anger at pop art, therefore, is an anger at being feminized. In this context, the fact that the Masters of American Comics exhibition focused solely on male cartoonists was not an accident; rather, it was comics rather desperate and certainly contemptible effort to establish its high art bona-fides through an acculumulation of phalluses, and a careful exclusion of those other much-denigrated bits.

Beaty’s analysis is convincing — but he does perhaps gloss over an important point. That point being that, while it may often be figured as masculine in relation to comics, high art’s gendered status in the broader culture is, in fact, extremely dicey. For example, in Art and Homosexuality, Christopher Reed notes that Robert Motherwell, a married heterosexual, was rejected for military service on the grounds that being a Greenwich Village painter meant that he must be gay. In other words, at that time art was so thoroughly unmasculine that artists were almost by definition unmanned.

If art could be seen as effeminiate, comics as mass culture could be seen, in contrast, as normal, robust — as manly, in other words. Thus, Beaty relates this anecdote about cartoonist Irv Novick and Roy Lichtenstein.

[Novick] had one curious encounter at camp. He dropped by the chief of staff’s quarters one night and found a young soldier sitting on a bunk, crying like a baby. “He said he was an artist,” Novick remembered, “and he had to do menial work, like clearning up the officers’ quarters.”

Novick was one of the artists whose work Lichtenstein later copied with such success. Beaty correctly reads the anecdote as an effort to feminize Lichtenstein — a kind of revenge for the way in which Lichtenstein feminized Novick. However, Beaty doesn’t really consider the extent to which this feminization of Lichtenstein is successful because high art is already feminized. The anecdote is effective in no small part because artists like Motherwell were always already gay until proven otherwise — and often even if proven otherwise.

The point here is that the gendered relation between art and comics is not necessarily always about masculine art taking advantage of feminine comics and comics responding with resentment at being so feminized. Rather, on the one hand, comics’ antipathy to art is often tinged with contemptuous misogyny — a denigration of high arts femininity. R. Crumb’s loud denunciations of high art, for example (or Peter Bagge’s) are inevitably tinged with the insistence that artist’s are effete fools, distanced from real life in their ivory towers.

On the other hand, high arts’ interest in artists like Crumb or Novick often seems inflected with a kind of envy or desire. Certainly, Lichtenstein’s work, and pop art in general, can be seen as a campy appropriation of mass culture to feminize the often quite homophobic art world, particularly in contrast to the desperate masculinity of Ab-Ex. But Lichtenstein’s appropriations can also, I think, be seen as a performance of desire for masculinity — a bittersweet effort to capture comics’ masculine mojo while acknowledging his distance from it.

I don’t think that these readings are necessarily mutually exclusive. But I do think that recognizing them both as potentials creates possibilities that Beaty doesn’t really wrestle with. If art is not masculine (always) and comics is not feminine (always), then it’s much more difficult to see them as polarized (always.) Rather than art elevating, exploiting, or denigrating the hapless, accessible body of comics, art and comics start to look more alike — both occupying unstable cultural positions in which, at least historically, constant assertions of masculinity have been seen as vital to prevent a collapse into a devalued femininity. From this perspective, Comics fights Art not because the two are so different, but because their cultural positions and anxieties are so much the same.
 

A Russ Heath panel and the Roy Lichtenstein painting based on it.

Comics Scholars are Defined by Definitions. Also Idiocy.

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I’m reading Bart Beaty’s Comics Vs. Art. Kailyn already provided a review, but I thought I’d do a number of short posts on it as I went through.

Beaty’s first discussion (in Chapter 2; Chapter 1 is an introduction) focuses on the efforts to define comics over the years. These efforts are…um. I’m a little speechless, actually.

No doubt I’m overly harsh, but Christ, virtually everybody Beaty quotes in the chapter sounds about as sharp as a decapitated pig carcass. I’d always thought that McCloud’s sequential-art (so no single panel comics) formal effort to define comics was a kind of quintessence of stupidity, but compared to his predecessors, McCloud actually comes off looking pretty good. Colton Waugh, for example, says that comics have to have continuing characters and speech bubbles. M. Thomas Inge and Bill Blackbeard — two of the most respected comics critics — also argued that recurrent characters were essential to the definition of comics, even though, as Beaty dryly remarks, “Definitions of comics that privilege content over form have numerous significant logical problems.”

Beaty suggests that Blackbeard may have been motivated less by incompetence than by chauvinism; his definitions were designed to show that the Yellow Kid was the first comic, carefully excising European precursors so that comics could be seen as a quintessential American art form (like jazz without the African Americans, I guess.) Art Spiegelman, to his shame, has also dabbled in this sort of nativist nonsense.

Other writers, though, have embraced comics’ non-American history — by insisting that the Bayeux Tapestry and even cave paintings constitute comics. Then there’s David Kunzle — again, a much respected scholar — who insists that comics must be sequences (no Dennis the Menace) that there must be a preponderance of image over text (whatever that means) that the original purpose must be reproductive (so your kid drawing a comic isn’t your kid drawing a comic) and that the story must be both moral and topical, which doesn’t even merit parenthetical refutation.

Of course, there are reasons that so many respected scholars in this field have so determinedly spouted nonsensical gibberish. Mostly, as Beaty argues, it has to do with status anxiety; the hope is always that the next definition will make comics worthwhile, either by emphasizing their quintessential American vitality or by showing that they have been art since the first wooly mammoth drew the first hominid on the cave wall. Still, it’s hard to escape the sensation, reading through this chapter, that comics scholars today stand on the shoulders not of giants, but of infants. Beaty doesn’t quite come out and say so, but such ineffectual flailing disguised as scholarship seems like it has to have been deligitimizing rather than ennobling. If comics can’t generate more thoughtful criticism than this, then maybe it really is a debased form best ignored.

At least Les Daniels, whose Wonder Woman scholarship I admire, comes off looking good. Beaty quotes him as acidly commenting, “defenders of the comics medium have a tendency to rummage through recognized remnants of mankind’s vast history to pluck forth sanctioned symbols which might create among the cognoscenti the desired shock of recognition.” Nice prose too, damn it.

It’s Comics Versus Art, (at least according to comics)

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Comics Versus Art

by Bart Beaty

University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2012

Its tempting to split up a review of Beaty’s book, Comics Versus Art, into a series of examinations of its individual chapters. Many of Beaty’s arguments are so relevant to the discussion of comics and wider culture that they deserve their own posts. More devilishly, its equally seductive to make a laundry list of his most controversial claims, just to see if they could nudge the Lichtenstein conversation out of its current emotional stalemate.

Either approach would be easier to write than an evaluation of the whole: Comics Versus Art is an ambitious but uneven chronicling of the diverse historical frictions between the two fields, including but not limited to pop-art appropriation, comic’s belittlement as nostalgic/primitive ephemera, and cartoonists’ ready cooperation with ‘art world’ prejudices.  Beaty is a firebrand and much-needed documentarian, and his book is an invaluable contribution to this discussion. Through an interweaving of many rewarding tangents, he often succeeds at elucidating, even correcting, accounts of art-comics friction through a fair examination of each case’s larger context, even if some of his dramatic conclusions are shakily reached or unearned. Comics Versus Art is far from a manifesto of why comics should or should not be art. Without being vehement or trite, the book is quite damning in its examination of the petty status games that occur at the border between these worlds.

Comics Versus Art is comprised of nine different “case-studies.” The first chapter is especially worth summarizing, as it examines several different definitions of comics, and how these definitions, particularly Scott McCloud’s, have exempted comics from art history. While most definitions of comics have been essentialist, (focusing on recurring characters, thought balloons, or moral narrativising as central components, depending on the theory,) McCloud’s formalist definition is open enough to abduct and rename other phenomenon as “comics,” while it rejects several examples widely accepted as comics, (Dennis the Menace, for example.) While McCloud’s proponents are happy to re-envision Trajan’s Column as a comic, (and couldn’t care less about Dennis the Menace, perhaps,) the rest of the art world remains indifferent; as a freak, isolated case of comics, the column’s new branding doesn’t have nearly the historical interest as it’s status as imperial propaganda. More importantly, ‘comics,’ ‘children’s books,’ and ‘artists’ books’ are only distinguished by their audiences. At this point, Beaty introduces an institutional definition of comics, borrowed from Arthur C. Danto, George Dickie and Howard Becker’s theories of an “artworld.” Loosely, comics are whatever the human members of the comics world (including but not limited to producers, critics and consumers,) deem to be called comics. This theory fails even more spectacularly in establishing borders with children’s and artist’s books, but that’s somewhat the point, and at least it’s honest about it: Becker writes that “‘art worlds typically have intimate and extensive relations with the worlds from which they try to distinguish themselves.’” Problematically, this theory has no way of pinpointing why or what about comics makes them a social nexus, (perhaps, by the centrality of recurring characters in comics, people really do gather around commercial franchises rather than their formal attributes.) Beaty does good work here in positing a parallel comicsworld, but the definition is tautological and directionless, and doesn’t quite address where this would overlap with an artworld anyhow. Moreover, Beaty doesn’t develop the comicsworld theory beyond this point, and only occasionally reintroduces it in further chapters. He also doesn’t cover any of the historical evolutions in the definition of ‘art,’ contextualize how Danto and co.’s definition interact with these, or how it can be expanded past a truism. This unbalance plagues most of the book, where Beaty uses a limited range of analytical approaches to draw his conclusions, and doesn’t apply these tools strictly enough to spawn ideas past his original biases.

Beaty misses the opportunity to develop the institutional theory with the next chapter, which details the gendered power dynamic underlying the Lichtenstein appropriation debate. This study could have benefited from a closer look at the sub-worlds at play: much of the art-world initially rejected pop-art for its association with low-brow cultural forms, and only gradually began to recognize Lichtenstein’s work as worthwhile. This in turn would have clarified Chapter 6, where Beaty erroneously concludes that Gary Panter’s featuring in Blab! and Juxtapoz magazines, and creation of a vinyl art toy, signals his acceptance by the art world at large. Panter’s luke-warm reviews by Artforum, one of which is included in the book, are slightly better than the New York Time’s treatment of another comics luminary decades earlier, Bernard Krigstein, who is instead framed by the book as an artworld failure.

Despite this, Beaty’s arguments have an commonsensical ring of truth, which he occasionally goes out of his way to justify. On Lichtenstein, Beaty frames the case study with discussion of Nietzschean ressentiment, defined as “a tendency to attribute one’s personal failures to external forces.” This is a little overkill, where simply using the word ‘resentment’ could have done the trick, as Nietzche’s philosophies are not mentioned elsewhere in the book. However, Beaty is on the right track:

When, for example, Clive Phillpot offhandedly dismisses the possibility that works of comics might be classified as artist’s books, the division between forms is presented as a self-evident commonplace barely requiring elaboration or argumentation. By contrast, the pent-up aggressive feelings towards the world of fine arts that characterizes many cartoonist’s ressentiment can become an all-consuming passion that threatens to poison their work with an easily diagnosed bitterness.

It is a breath of fresh air to have the emotional dynamic of the Lichtenstein debate not only included in its context, but considered the heart of the conflict itself.  In this case, he also studies how, evidenced by critics of the time, comics and kitsch were increasingly cast as feminine, while pop-art’s appropriations ‘masculinized’ camp that had been enjoyed in earnest. “Pop art, therefore, was a threat because it absconded with the one element that comic book fans assumed would never be in question: the red-blooded American masculinity that informed war and romance comics alike with their rigid adherence to patriarchal gender norms.” It is gender critique, not institutional theory, that becomes the lifeblood of Comics Versus Art, and provides a continuing thread through the other case studies, something that will fly in the face of readers not prepared to understand how certain behaviors and attitudes are routinely cast as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ throughout history. Beaty writes,

The validation of the comics form, which is an essential aspect of fannish epistemology, can take many paths. One of these paths would be the outright rejection of the conservative basis of much of modernist art history, with its conflation of masculinity, artistry, and genius, and the adoption and promotion of new aesthetic standards that would recognize the importance and vitality of feminized mass cultural forms. Another, far less revolutionary, route would be a capitulation to the dictates of modernist art history and the nomination of a select few cultural workers to the position of Artist or Author. In the wake of pop art, it was this latter approach that was most commonly, and effectively, utilized by comics fandom, as they worked to export the idea of the comics artist beyond the limitations of the comics world.

Beaty extends this to comics content, where the industry tends to reward subject matter that reinforces gender tropes, either those of hyper-masculine heroism, or the imagination of the isolated, tragic genius, what critic Nina Baym calls “a romanticization of the straight, white male subject as the object of societal scorn.”  The most successful cartoonists play into the art-world’s existing stereotyping of cartoonists, and behaving like primitive, ( R. Crumb,) or pathetic, (Chris Ware,) versions of the Romanticized genius. Ware is treated as a synecdoche for the current status of contemporary comics, where his savvy use of draftsmanship, nostalgia, self deprecation, and an attitude that is “willfully ironic about the relationship between comics and art in a way that serves to mockingly reinforce, rather than challenge, existing power inequities,” make him the kind of artist that “if Chris Ware did not exist, the art world would have had to invent him.”

Comics emerges less as a victim of art than of its own, unintentional self-sabotaging, and its refusal to grow and celebrate itself on its own terms. Mainstream and alternative comics’ insecurities over their belittlement (better, feminization,) by both Romantic/conservative and contemporary art frameworks cause them to miserably ape ‘high art’ conventions, establishing canons and idolizing masculinized genius-creators.  Even when the artist doesn’t paint himself according to the genius archetype, (Charles Schultz’s optimism and transparent mercantilism, for instance,)  he can usually be reconstructed to fit it– while those outside the comics world tend to recognize Peanuts as a sweet, nostalgic, family franchise, fan-critics instead emphasize a tragic and masculinized reading. One great example lies in comparing Fantagraphic’s conneuseurist The Complete Peanuts, with their unsettling, somber jackets,  to the fabulously popular Peanuts paperbacks from decades before, such as Happiness is a Warm Puppy.

While not revolutionary, Comics Versus Art’s greatest service is to document these dynamics, attitudes and interactions between comics and art, so that they can be read against each other, and found in one place. It’s greatest crimes are its most obvious omissions–like the development and role of comics museums, conventions and festivals, and the erasure of the Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, (now included in the Criterion Collection,) in the biography of the artist. Most unforgivably, Beaty omits the history of ‘deskilling’ in the art world, how deskilling inspired the institutional theory Beaty employs, and how it is an unmissable component of the artworld and the comicsworlds’ mutual dismissals of each other. Compared to that, his zany, unsupported claim that McCloud has distanced the comics and art worlds, rather than bring them closer together, is amusing, and his haphazard braiding of information, where certain lines are suddenly dropped, only to be weaved back in, only mildly frustrating. Comics Versus Art was a gargantuan project for one scholar to undertake, its faults are expected along those lines, and the book is self-consciously a testament to the fact that there are too few critics working on such a crucial, cultural  history.  In any case, Comics Versus Art is a great groundwork for future discussion, and a fiery read.