Why the Art World is a Disaster

It is now that we begin to encounter the fevered quest for novelty at any price, it is now that we see insincere and superficial cynicism and deliberate conscious bluff; we meet, in a word, the calculated exploitation of this art as a means of destroying all order. The mercenary swindle multiplies a hundredfold, as does the deceit of men themselves deceived and the brazen self-portraiture of vileness.
—Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis

Some of what she said was technical, and you would have had to be a welder to appreciate it; the rest was aesthetic or generally philosophical, and to appreciate it you would have had to be an imbecile.
—Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

Why the Art World is a Disaster
Roger Kimball

Last month, a friend telephoned and urged me to travel to Bard College to see “Wrestle,” the inaugural exhibition mounted to celebrate the opening of “CCS Bard Hessel Museum,” a 17,000-square-foot addition to the college art museum. It sounded, my friend said, spectacularly awful. She’d just had a call from her husband, a Bard alum, who had zipped through the exhibition while doing some work at the college. Huge images of body parts—yes, those body parts—floating on the walls of a darkened room, minatory videos of men doing things—yes, those things—to each other, or to themselves, all of it presented in the most pretentious fashion possible. It really was something … special.


Well, these folks are not naïfs. They’ve both been around the avant-garde block and back a few times. If they said an exhibition was ostentatiously horrible, then it was likely to be something worth taking some trouble to avoid—unless, that is, your job description includes regular stints as a cultural pathologist, in which case it is something that duty requires you to inspect, docket, and file away for the instruction and admonition of future generations.


This is my unhappy position. So, one fine May morning I motored up to lovely Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, home of the elite, super-trendy Bard College. Bard is one of those small educational institutions whose ambient wealth has allowed them to substitute avant-garde pretense for scholarly or artistic accomplishment. If your bank account is healthy (tuition and fees for first-year students: $47,730) and young Heather or Dylan is “creative,” i.e., not likely to get into a Harvard or Yale or Williams, then Bard is a place you can send them and still look your neighbor in the eye. The college is probably best known for its baton-wielding president, Leon Botstein, who conducts orchestras in his spare time and whom the music critic Tim Page once described as the sort of chap who gives pseudo-intellectuality a bad name. Bard also has the distinction of being, as far as I know, the only college in the United States to honor the memory of Alger Hiss, the perjurer and Soviet spy, by establishing a chair in his memory.


It had been a long time since I had visited Bard. Back in the early 1990s, I ventured into its sylvan purlieus to write about the opening of the Richard and Marieluise Black Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture. Now here we had, attached to the old edifice, the Marieluise Hessel Museum of Art. Two Marieluises? It turned out to be like the evening star and morning star of philosophical lore, Hesperus and Phosphorus: two names but one and the same orb—in short, as William Demarest put it in The Lady Eve, “It’s the same dame.” The German-born businesswoman shed the unfortunate (or maybe not) Mr. Black somewhere along the line. Although married again, she is taking no chances and now endows her endowments with her maiden name. Marieluise has been busy. In the early 1990s, when the Black Center opened, her collection of contemporary art consisted of some 550 items. It has grown to 1,700, of which approximately 200 items are on view in “Wrestle.”


You will not be able to see “Wrestle.” By the time you read this, the exhibition will have closed. But do not pine. You haven’t missed anything. Have I become jaded? Too many close encounters with Gilbert and George, Matthew Barney, and all the other exotic fauna that populate the galleries and art museums these days? Perhaps. In any event, I thought my friends overstated the awfulness of the exhibition. Don’t get me wrong: it was plenty awful. Body parts, “explicit” images, and naughty language galore. The exhibition certainly merited the warning to parents at the entrance. But it wasn’t worse than dozens of other exhibitions I’ve seen, you’ve seen, we’ve all seen.


I thought about this as I picked my way through the galleries at the Hessel Museum. A “video installation” by Bruce Nauman in which a man and a woman endlessly repeat a litany of nonsense, tinctured here and there with scatological phrases. Been there. Photographs (in four or five different places) by Robert Mapplethorpe of his S&M pals. Very 1980s. Histrionic photographs by Cindy Sherman of herself looking victimized. Been there, too. Nam June Paik and his video installations. Done that. A big pile of red, white, and blue lollipops dumped in the corner by … well, it doesn’t much matter, does it? Any more than it matters who was responsible for the room featuring images of floating genitalia or the room with the video of ritualistic homosexual bondage. Ditto the catalogue: its assault on the English language is something you can find in scores, no, hundreds of art publications today: “For Valie Export, the female Body is covered with the stigmata of codes that shape and hamper it.” Well, bully for her. “As usual with Gober, the installation is a broken allegory that both elicits and resists our interpretation; that materially nothing is quite as it seems adds to our anxious curiosity.” As usual, indeed, though whether such pathetic verbiage adds to or smothers our curiosity is another matter altogether.


No, the thing to appreciate about “Wrestle,” about the Hessel Museum and the collection of Marieluise Hessel, and about the visual arts at Bard generally is not how innovative, challenging, or unusual they are, but how pedestrian and, sad to say, conventional they are. True, there is a lot of ickiness on view at the Hessel Museum. But it is entirely predictable ickiness. It’s outrage by-the-yard, avant-garde in bulk, smugness for the masses. And this brings me to what I believe is the real significance of institutions like the art museum at Bard, the Hessel collection that fills it, and the surrounding atmosphere of pseudo-avant-garde self-satisfaction. The “arts” at Bard are notable not because they are unusual but because they are so grindingly ordinary. Leon Botstein described Marieluise Hessel as a “risk giver.” An essay in the Bardian, the college magazine, elaborates on this theme:

She was drawn to work that challenged and subverted the status quo, work that flaunted [the author means “flouted,” but, hey, this is Bard] and struggled with urgent, utopian notions of gender and identity, feminism, and the politics of AIDS, among other issues.
Mr. Botstein and the Bardian have it exactly wrong. When it comes to art, Ms. Hessel is neither a risk taker nor a risk giver. Like Bard itself, she simply mirrors the established taste of the moment. Far from “challenging” or “subverting” the status quo, the 1,700 objects she has accumulated are the status quo. And far from “struggling” with questions about gender or feminism or anything else, she has simply issued a rubber stamp endorsing the dominant clichés of today’s academic art world. “Academic,” in fact, is the mot juste: not in the sense of “scholarly,” but rather in the sense that we speak of “academic art,” stale, conventional, aesthetically nugatory. A wall full of photographs of two girls does nothing to “interrogate” (a favorite term of art- and lit-crit-speak) identity any more than a mutilated doll forces us to reconsider our usual notions of whatever-it-is those odious objects are supposed to make us reconsider. Really, the only thing exhibitions like “Wrestle,” or institutions like the Hessel Museum, challenge is the viewer’s patience.


Ms. Hessel once enthusiastically recalled her introduction to contemporary art as a young woman in Munich: “It was like entering a cult group.” That cult has long since become the new Salon where the canons of accepted taste are enforced with a rigidity that would have made Bouguereau jealous. The only difference is that instead of a pedantic mastery of perspective and modeling we have a pedantic mastery of all the accepted attitudes about race, class, sex, and politics. Since skill is no longer necessary to practice art successfully, the only things left are 1) appropriate subject matter (paradoxically, the more inappropriate the better) and 2) the right politics.


Again, my point is not to deny the repellent nature of much that was on view in “Wrestle.” It deserves its “X” rating, all right. But it has been a long time since shock value had the capacity to be aesthetically interesting—or even, truth be told, to shock. Decades ago, writing about Salvador Dalí, George Orwell called attention to, and criticized, the growing habit of granting a blanket moral indemnity to anything that called itself art. “The artist,” Orwell wrote,

is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.

Orwell was writing in the 1940s. Already that attitude was old hat: it had definitively entered the cultural bloodstream with the Dadaists shortly after the turn of the last century. What those folks didn’t know about “challenging” and “subverting” conventional taste and attitudes wasn’t worth knowing. In essentials, they pioneered all the tricks on view in “Wrestle”—the sex, the violence, the tedium, the presentation of everyday objects as works of art. The difference is that Duchamp was in earnest: “I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into to their faces as a challenge,” Duchamp noted contemptuously, “and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.” No wonder he gave up on art for chess. Duchamp mounted a campaign against art and aesthetic delectation. In one sense, he succeeded brilliantly. Only the campaign backfired. Once the aloof and brittle irony of Duchamp institutionalized itself and became the coin of the realm, it descended from irony to a new form of sentimentality. I do not have much time for Marcel Duchamp; in my view his influence on art and culture has been almost entirely baneful; but it is amusing to ponder how much he would have loathed the contemporary art world where all his ideas had been ground-down into inescapable clichés, trite formulas served up by society grandees at their expensive art fêtes in the mistaken belief that they are embarked on some existentially or aesthetically daring enterprise. Perhaps Duchamp, aesthete that he was, would have savored the comedy. I suspect his amour-propre would have caused him to feel nausea, not amusement.


Why is the art world a disaster? The prevalence of exhibitions like “Wrestle,” of collectors like Marieluise Hessel, of institutions like the Hessel Museum and Bard College help us begin to answer that question. Their very ordinariness enhances their value as symptoms. In part, the art world is a disaster because of that ordinariness: because of the popularization and institutionalization of the antics and attitudes of Dada. As W. S. Gilbert knew, when everybody’s somebody, nobody’s anybody. When the outré attitudes of a tiny elite go mainstream, only the rhetoric, not the substance, of the drama survives.


That’s part of the answer: the domestication of deviance, and its subsequent elevation as an object of aesthetic—well, not delectation, exactly: perhaps veneration would be closer to the truth. But that is only part of the puzzle. There are at least three other elements at work. One is the unholy alliance between the more rebarbative and hermetic precincts of academic activity and the practice of art. As even a glance at the preposterous catalogue accompanying “Wrestle”—accompanying almost any trendy exhibition these days—demonstrates, art is increasingly the creature of its explication. It’s not quite what Tom Wolfe predicted in The Painted Word, where in the gallery-of-the-future a postcard-sized photograph of a painting would be used to illustrate a passage of criticism blown up to the size of its inflated sense of self-worth. The difference is that the new verbiage doesn’t even pretend to be art criticism. It occupies a curious no man’s land between criticism, political activism, and pseudo-philosophical speculation: less an intellectual than a linguistic phenomenon, speaking more to the failure or decay of ideas than to their elaboration. Increasingly, the “art” is indistinguishable from the verbal noise that accompanies it, as witness the little red band that surrounded the catalogue for “Wrestle.” This “work” was by Lawrence Weiner and read: “An Amount of Currency Exchanged from One Country to Another.” The point to notice is the usurpation of art by these free-floating verbal clots, full of emotion but utterly lacking in what David Hume called “the calm sunshine of the mind.”


A second element that helps to explain why the art world is a disaster is money—not just the staggering prices routinely fetched by celebrity artists today, but the bucket-loads of cash that seem to surround almost any enterprise that can manage to get itself recognized as having to do with “the arts.” The presence of money means the presence of “society,” which goes a long way toward explaining why yesterday’s philistine is today’s champion of anything and everything that presents itself as art, no matter how repulsive it may be. If tout le monde is going to an opening for Matthew Barney at the Guggenheim, you can bet your bottom black tie that the nice lady next door who gave MOMA $10 million will be there, too. The vast infusion of money into the art world in recent decades has done an immense amount to facilitate what my colleague Hilton Kramer aptly called “the revenge of the philistines.”


A third additional element in this sorry story has to do with the decoupling of art-world practice from the practice of art. Look at the objects on view in “Wrestle”: almost none has anything to do with art as traditionally understood: mastery of a craft in order to make objects that gratify and ennoble those who see them. On the contrary, the art world has wholeheartedly embraced art as an exercise in political sermonizing and anti-humanistic persiflage, which has assured the increasing trivialization of the practice of art. For those who cherish art as an ally to civilization, the disaster that is today’s art world is nothing less than a tragedy. But this, too, will pass. Sooner or later, even the Leon Botsteins and Marieluise Hessels of the world will realize that the character in Bruce Nauman’s “Good Boy, Bad Boy” was right: “this is boring.”

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.
Frank Lloyd Wright

"You only have control over three things in your life--the thoughts you think, the images you visualize, and the actions you take (your behavior).

How you use these three things determines everything you experience. If you don't like what you are producing and experiencing, you have to change your responses. Change your negative thoughts to positive ones. Change what you daydream about. Change your habits. Change what you read. Change your friends. Change how you talk."

Jack Canfield – The Success Principles

Cas Haley

!!!

Go Paul!

A Fresh Crop for the Market

Review by Jen Graves

A little-known fact of Seattle art is that contemporary dealer Scott Lawrimore first became involved in art as a grade-schooler singled out for his drawing of Scrooge. Presumably the Lawrimore Scrooge had a sufficiently miserly presence to inspire his teachers to spirit him away to special advanced art classes, and this is how many art students are first identified—by their ability to reproduce something already known. This, however, is the last thing we actually want from artists (or just about any graduate of anything).

Every spring in Seattle, the two most prominent art schools, University of Washington and Cornish College of the Arts, hold exhibitions that display the proposed answers to the never-ending riddle of innovation, like the queen coming to Rumpelstiltskin one more time. The whole setup is dramatic. And in the meantime, as the artists are trying to find themselves, you're trying to find them. Most people with art degrees don't become career artists. Student shows are a way to make early bets on who's going to make it. It sounds harsh, but it's true.

The students at Cornish are supposed to be less polished; they're receiving bachelor's degrees, while the UWers are being declared masters in their field. In general, the art by the UW students, on display at the Henry Art Gallery, is competent. It's also sedate. With a few exceptions, it feels small in scope, and in some cases, shriekingly derivative. Has news of the hot art market reached all the way into UW classes and sent students scrambling to offer their most obeisant selves to dealers rather than to push the limits of what they can do? Or does graduate school itself feed complacency?

It's no coincidence that the two artists who stand out are the ones whose works seem the least fixed, the least contained in the gallery, the ones still squirming with play: Fred Muram and Matthew VanHorn.

Muram made three modest videos: one of him being fed a hamburger by three hands (two of a pair and one misfit, as if in reference to the clunky collage effect of early digital manipulation); one of him struggling comically inside a plaid blanket; and one with writing on his palms and the backs of his hands indicating his left and right and your left and right, with his voiceover reiterating the written phrases. Each video has its charms, but each is easily criticized, too, as if it were built with intentional chinks in its armor. They are actually part of a larger performance series (not included in this show) in which Muram narrates and critiques his own work.

VanHorn's piece, titled "Yes," she said... yes, is a giant crouching monkey made of scrap wood (and with a beard that looks like a frayed used carpet fragment), a big bright yellow tub, and a bunny costume. VanHorn says he intends to wear the costume to interact with the objects. As the story builds, other objects might be substituted, or added. The objects already bear the marks of contingency: the sculptures stand on wheels, the costume is apprehensive on its coat rack. Even the artist doesn't know where this piece will go, but given the uncanny attraction of the objects, I'm inclined to give it a chance.

Other artists worth watching are Michael Simi (is his Beef Stew Monster stalking visitors or imploring them?), Benjamin Eckman (do not miss his folk-artist statement), Nola Avienne (one hopes she is not quickly running out of things to do with metal filings), and Aitana de la Jara (whose large paintings are conventional, but feel devotional, and true). Already humming along nicely in his practice is Ross Sawyers, who has shown his photographs of false interiors at SOIL and CoCA, and who'll solo at Platform Gallery in July.

The art at UW has a lot of robotic moving parts. Cornish, meanwhile, is all body, in states ranging from muscular spasm (Robert Randall) to pleasant sedation (Jessamyn Johns, Justin L'Amie). (The show has already closed.) The women are in the lead. I'm taking down the names of Nicole Laverty (for her video of herself as a dirty old man and a pigtailed girl), Rachel Setzer (for her White House made of birth-control-pill packages), Ashley Bubacz (her sugar-decorated eggs with tiny disaster scenes inside), Madison Stratford (her acerbic celebrity collages fashioned using gauche lights and a handheld label-maker include the line "Everything I need to know I learned from [dealer] Greg Kucera"), Laura Kinney (dirt and delicacy), and Redd Walitzki (her Victorian digital animation).

Almost every one of these women is also showing weak work, which is fine for now. It's the sparks you look for

The Fine Art of Pushing Yourself

Wisdom from Robert Genn

While it's generally a good idea to move in the direction of
successes and proficiencies, from time to time it's also
valuable to take a look at weaknesses. Pros try to understand
and disarm them. Amateurs either deny them or don't know they
exist. Here are a few thoughts on the fine art of pushing
yourself:

It's painful, but you need to make a "baddy inventory." You
need to identify no more than three at a time. If you pick too
many, the task overwhelms and discouragement can set in. Homing
in on specific areas of difficulty is easier if you see them as
"zones of temporary avoidance."

Get specific. Be honest. Give instructions. Make notes to
yourself: "Due to the persistent and chronic failure of looking
and seeing, my trees have become overly simplified, clichéd,
and limited in species identification. I must now resurface
with baby eyes and look again at trees. I must step outside in
all lights, open my eyes to variety, and rethink arboreal
anatomy by notation and sketch."

There's no better cure for mediocrity than a dose of truth. And
there's no better reason for taking the cure than the
challenge. Fall in love with potential accomplishment. Central
to this process is the realization that it's a personal quest.
It's not a mentor or instructor but the trees themselves that
give the demos and crits. Taking this course and building
accomplishments one by one is like putting shiny new coins into
your pocket. Accumulated pushes lead to creative wealth.

To push yourself to higher ground you need an attitude. The
attitude is both achievable and hard won. It's possible to be
deceived that this attitude is the result of natural causes.
Further, it's easy to give credit to what seems to be inborn
talent or irregular creative genius. Digging deeper, the better
artists often have many "eureka" moments when the way forward
is seen to be clearer. Eureka can happen by simply looking at
your hands and realizing that you have everything you need to
overcome. "Genius," said Thomas Edison, "is one percent
inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." Perspiring
is part of the attitude. Evolved creators are just as curious
about their failures as they are of their successes.


PS: "If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly
because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can
accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for."
(Vaclav Havel, playwright)

Esoterica: We artists are fortunate in that most of our tasks,
while often daunting, are also relatively pleasant. The
art-push needs to be noble and yet modest--one step at a time.
Helen Keller noted, "I long to accomplish a great and noble
task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as
though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not
only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the
aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker." This is
the nature of our theatre. "Work," when it involves "play," may
just be the key to "push." In the words of Arnold Toynbee, "The
supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and
play." To perspire in play is to know progress.