Saturday, September 08, 2007
Monday, August 27, 2007
DIARY OF HEROIC PROMISCUITY - Nate Lippens
I just adore nate Lippens ;)
New York is all legend all the time and it can't get enough of its heroic promiscuity. I love it, of course. And resent it too. The old money, boys' club, Ivy League bar-setting mentality makes me sleepy and heavy with disgust. It's a mindset that has shaped all of American life since such a thing came into consciousness.
Hollywood is the acknowledged and flogged exporter of American mythology, but the truth is that New York is the real factory of legends, myths, and heroes. They radiate westward, sometimes gloriously, sometimes with the toxicity of landfill. If Hollywood is the home of illegitimacy, then New York is the home of legitimacy. If you can make it there, you can condescend everywhere else.
In June, I headed there for a hero, to attend the Allen Ginsberg Memorial Reading with Eileen Myles. We met on that rainy Sunday afternoon to catch Gordon Matta-Clark's show at the Whitney. It was the final day of the show and everything seemed fraught: the throngs of people trying to get through the show, to take it all in before it vanished. The tours moved at a clip past us and we wandered off separately.
The show did little for me. Eileen came over and we both blurted out simultaneously, "Did you see the arrow drawings?" Of all the works in the show — the architectural cut-outs, the elaborate, heroic monster transformations — it was two small works on paper that transfixed us. Eileen took some of the papers that were stacked on the gallery floor as souvenirs. "Wallpaper," she said.
Matta-Clark died young of cancer. So did Eva Hesse, whose work I saw last summer at the Jewish Museum. In both cases the materials that the artists used are thought to have contributed to their deaths. Mythically, they play as artist Madame Curies, poisoned by their own hands. We can wonder at what they would have accomplished had they lived. We can admire their obsessiveness. We can feel the martyrdom of dedication.
We then made our way through the mostly embarrassing, Disney-ified Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. There were a few celebrity pics interspersed with ephemera, rock show posters, and optical illusions. Yes, Robert Indiana, Yayoi Kusama, Richard Lindner, and Lynda Benglis all put in cameos, but they were mostly lost in the scrapbook explosion layout. It was more like Spencer Gifts than an exhibition and it was packed. The hard art of upstairs had given way to populism. Of course, the truth was that we were bowing at the Gods of the '60s and the '70s. And the Gods were men. The video in the Gordon Matta-Clark show was focused on the men and the women were literally in the kitchen and serving. In the psychedelic art show Marianne Faithfull and Grace Slick appear but mostly it's cock of the walk. Second verse same as the first. And there was Allen Ginsberg's face in the mix of celebrities, hippies, yippies, burnout, drop-outs, and headcases. We took that as our cue and left.
The Ginsberg event was a continuation of hero worship, much of it heartfelt and personal. Eileen blew a gust of now into the proceedings with some poems from her book Sorry Tree, published by Wave Books in Seattle. She was attaching herself to a tradition rather than a legacy. She read a few poems that she also delivered at the Henry Art Gallery back in April for her talk Everything Is Not Enough.
Following the reading everyone went their separate ways. Eileen and I got caught in a downpour and sought refuge at an empty-ish restaurant. She mentioned that the difference in the event was that "if Allen was still alive, we would have all gone out for dinner together."
★★★
The idea of the one-city critic is finished. This was what I heard in a discussion with another art critic. He insisted that like artists and curators, who travel, the critic must too. He had just returned from Venice and was regaling a table of us with tales of the Prosecco-drinking exploits of the art world. The more he talked the quieter it got. He was holding court. Afterward, a fiction writer who used to cover the East Village scene during the mid-80s boom and who was vilified for not being more "supportive" of the scene at the time told me, "That felt like déjà vu, all the talk is money and real estate and collectors." It was a pitch for critics to shill art as luxury fetish objects. Who wanted to remind the grandstanding critic of the stock market crash of '87 and the subsequent tumble and bust of the art world? Who wanted to suggest to him flipping through old issues of Artforum and asking where they are now, all of those hot commodities?
I actually like the idea of critical promiscuity. But I'd take it further: travel broadens the mind but multiple fields of investigation are even more important. It may seem inconceivable to artists but writers have practices too and it's important to stay fresh, to be restless, to never get too comfortable.
The next day I headed to the galleries. June in New York City felt like school was out. It was in a way because most of the art world cognoscenti were off to Europe for Basel and the Biennale. The merchants really were in Venice and with them some of the feverish trading floor mentality in Chelsea had lifted and I was free to wander through the summer shows.
Unsurprisingly, over-rehearsed uniformity and art-as-commodity permeated the blue-chip galleries. The smaller galleries weren't much better. Many artists seemed to be repurposing barely digested references. Built spaciness abounded. There were enough vapid art / architecture hybrids to fill every shelter magazine and several art quarterlies for good measure.
There were some surprises at smaller venues: Tom Meacham, at Oliver Kamm held promise if you believe painting is dead but canvas isn't. Liz Markus at ZeiherSmith encapsulated the Whitney, '60s / '70s mash-up well. Her works were Rorschach's of 60s painting references with 70s iconography. It beat the psychedelic show but a little went a long way.
I saved Trisha Donnally at Casey-Kaplan for last. I've loved her work especially the Canadian Rain piece, which is owned by Bill and Ruth True and has shown at Western Bridge and HAG. Somewhere on the Rhine the owners of Casey-Kaplan were partying on a pontoon, but in the gallery I didn't smell money or an idea. It was devastatingly bad. Pine branches on the floor, blown up photos, and a sound piece. Her elusiveness didn't even graze cleverness. The shaman vibe of her previous work had shrunken down to a few talismans.
I wandered through a dozen more galleries where plenty of knock-off Banks Violette gothica and junior varsity Matthew Barney pretenders were in evidence. Too much of it was Vice squad Brooklynese for the terminally cool. There was also much more of conceptual algebra: figure out what x equals, break the code, and feel smug. There has to be something more compelling than the mechanics of a clever parlor game to sustain the work. I couldn't wait to get back outside and take in the real visual pleasure on the streets.
★★★
I love flamboyance. Maybe that was why I was so smitten with Gego and Louise Nevelson's shows. Also after Chelsea and Matta-Clark it was a radically different everything. Of course, flamboyance is in the eye of the beholder or the definer. With her outlandish costumes and showgirl / drag queen false eyelashes most people would admit that Nevelson was flamboyant. Gego would be a harder sell. But I think her withholding, exacting yet organic wire sculptures are very flamboyant. They are so ephemeral that they demand attention.
Gego is undergoing the kind of re-discovery that the art world loves: an underappreciated or marginally known artist (usually dead) is finally given the respect and attention they deserve and everyone agrees they deserve it and so we all get to feel satisfied. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I love narrative; I like a story, especially a backstory. A bad childhood, alcoholism, horrible marriages, exile. In various combinations this one-downsmanship is the arc that draws me in. It is the counter-heroic. Or the heroic masked as loser lovely.
Gego does and doesn't fit the model and actually that's her appeal. Born Gertrud Goldschmidt in Hamburg, Germany, in 1912, the daughter of a Jewish banker, she studied for a career in architecture and engineering. But in 1939, she left for Venezuela where she stayed until her death in 1994. Her work is simple and complicated, seemingly freehand semi-geometric drawings and sculptures which she called "drawing without paper." At the Drawing Center it was these twisted wire pieces that captivated. She wrote in a notebook: "Sculpture: three-dimensional forms of solid material. NEVER what I do!"
Gego ignored labels. She didn't really get going as an artist until she was already in her 40s and had raised a family, divorced, and settled with the émigré painter Gerd Leufert. No one knew how to package her work: Drawing? Sculpture? Abstract? Formal? Romantic? Organic? It was a tough sell and to some it probably still will be. Drifting through the small-scale exhibit I was thrilled at the pleasure of the work and the lack of heroics. The anti-heroic impulse in Chelsea is answered with abjection. But here it was something else, demanding yet quiet work.
The heroics came later in the day at the Jewish Museum where I saw Louise Nevelson's show. Nevelson mixes authority and impressionism. There is grandeur to the work, an outsize feel that is in keeping with the artist's persona. She is seemingly the flipside to Gego. Yet both are delicate in sensibility but roused by stoicism to be tough. And both of them remained elusive in Gego's transient perceptions barely registered outside of Venezuela and Nevelson was more familiar to many as a fashion gargoyle in a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph than as a sculptor to be reckoned with.
Her found object assemblages — abstract expressionist "boxes" grouped together to form new creations — have an almost holistic totemic quality. As she said,"When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you're really bringing them to life — a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created."
Nevelson was 42 before she had her first solo show. In 1959, at the age of 60 she was included in "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art. The show was a launching pad for Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ellsworth Kelly — all younger than her son. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend, a compact survey of 66 works organized by Brooke Kamin Rapaport for the Jewish Museum, is her first New York museum show in 27 years.
Nevelson's installations made of street salvaged wooden remnants have AbEx scale, Cubist geometry, and a strong emotional undercurrent. "Self-Portrait, Silent Music," a grid of 24 black boxes is lined with cast-off fragments and a portrait of the artist and it leads to the stunning wall-scale environments including the haunting 225-foot memorial to the Holocaust, "Homage to 6,000,000 I."
They are mammoth in size and yet there is something small, personal, and mysterious to them, in a way that David Smith and Richard Serra never are. I appreciate and admire their work but I'm not moved. Nevelson's work has influenced many but she will always be the eccentric woman in her costumes and bravado, demanding attention. She has her legend because that's what becomes a legend most. In a photograph Gego stands in profile with her gnarled hands, cigarette dangling from her mouth, bending wire and will. Half of her back cock blocks the camera from the pleasure of her creation. She worked a different legend, one of work for work's sake, art as life.
"The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend" is on view through Sept. 16 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street; (212) 423-3200.
Nate Lippens writes about books and art for various publications. He still lives in Seattle.
New York is all legend all the time and it can't get enough of its heroic promiscuity. I love it, of course. And resent it too. The old money, boys' club, Ivy League bar-setting mentality makes me sleepy and heavy with disgust. It's a mindset that has shaped all of American life since such a thing came into consciousness.
Hollywood is the acknowledged and flogged exporter of American mythology, but the truth is that New York is the real factory of legends, myths, and heroes. They radiate westward, sometimes gloriously, sometimes with the toxicity of landfill. If Hollywood is the home of illegitimacy, then New York is the home of legitimacy. If you can make it there, you can condescend everywhere else.
In June, I headed there for a hero, to attend the Allen Ginsberg Memorial Reading with Eileen Myles. We met on that rainy Sunday afternoon to catch Gordon Matta-Clark's show at the Whitney. It was the final day of the show and everything seemed fraught: the throngs of people trying to get through the show, to take it all in before it vanished. The tours moved at a clip past us and we wandered off separately.
The show did little for me. Eileen came over and we both blurted out simultaneously, "Did you see the arrow drawings?" Of all the works in the show — the architectural cut-outs, the elaborate, heroic monster transformations — it was two small works on paper that transfixed us. Eileen took some of the papers that were stacked on the gallery floor as souvenirs. "Wallpaper," she said.
Matta-Clark died young of cancer. So did Eva Hesse, whose work I saw last summer at the Jewish Museum. In both cases the materials that the artists used are thought to have contributed to their deaths. Mythically, they play as artist Madame Curies, poisoned by their own hands. We can wonder at what they would have accomplished had they lived. We can admire their obsessiveness. We can feel the martyrdom of dedication.
We then made our way through the mostly embarrassing, Disney-ified Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. There were a few celebrity pics interspersed with ephemera, rock show posters, and optical illusions. Yes, Robert Indiana, Yayoi Kusama, Richard Lindner, and Lynda Benglis all put in cameos, but they were mostly lost in the scrapbook explosion layout. It was more like Spencer Gifts than an exhibition and it was packed. The hard art of upstairs had given way to populism. Of course, the truth was that we were bowing at the Gods of the '60s and the '70s. And the Gods were men. The video in the Gordon Matta-Clark show was focused on the men and the women were literally in the kitchen and serving. In the psychedelic art show Marianne Faithfull and Grace Slick appear but mostly it's cock of the walk. Second verse same as the first. And there was Allen Ginsberg's face in the mix of celebrities, hippies, yippies, burnout, drop-outs, and headcases. We took that as our cue and left.
The Ginsberg event was a continuation of hero worship, much of it heartfelt and personal. Eileen blew a gust of now into the proceedings with some poems from her book Sorry Tree, published by Wave Books in Seattle. She was attaching herself to a tradition rather than a legacy. She read a few poems that she also delivered at the Henry Art Gallery back in April for her talk Everything Is Not Enough.
Following the reading everyone went their separate ways. Eileen and I got caught in a downpour and sought refuge at an empty-ish restaurant. She mentioned that the difference in the event was that "if Allen was still alive, we would have all gone out for dinner together."
★★★
The idea of the one-city critic is finished. This was what I heard in a discussion with another art critic. He insisted that like artists and curators, who travel, the critic must too. He had just returned from Venice and was regaling a table of us with tales of the Prosecco-drinking exploits of the art world. The more he talked the quieter it got. He was holding court. Afterward, a fiction writer who used to cover the East Village scene during the mid-80s boom and who was vilified for not being more "supportive" of the scene at the time told me, "That felt like déjà vu, all the talk is money and real estate and collectors." It was a pitch for critics to shill art as luxury fetish objects. Who wanted to remind the grandstanding critic of the stock market crash of '87 and the subsequent tumble and bust of the art world? Who wanted to suggest to him flipping through old issues of Artforum and asking where they are now, all of those hot commodities?
I actually like the idea of critical promiscuity. But I'd take it further: travel broadens the mind but multiple fields of investigation are even more important. It may seem inconceivable to artists but writers have practices too and it's important to stay fresh, to be restless, to never get too comfortable.
The next day I headed to the galleries. June in New York City felt like school was out. It was in a way because most of the art world cognoscenti were off to Europe for Basel and the Biennale. The merchants really were in Venice and with them some of the feverish trading floor mentality in Chelsea had lifted and I was free to wander through the summer shows.
Unsurprisingly, over-rehearsed uniformity and art-as-commodity permeated the blue-chip galleries. The smaller galleries weren't much better. Many artists seemed to be repurposing barely digested references. Built spaciness abounded. There were enough vapid art / architecture hybrids to fill every shelter magazine and several art quarterlies for good measure.
There were some surprises at smaller venues: Tom Meacham, at Oliver Kamm held promise if you believe painting is dead but canvas isn't. Liz Markus at ZeiherSmith encapsulated the Whitney, '60s / '70s mash-up well. Her works were Rorschach's of 60s painting references with 70s iconography. It beat the psychedelic show but a little went a long way.
I saved Trisha Donnally at Casey-Kaplan for last. I've loved her work especially the Canadian Rain piece, which is owned by Bill and Ruth True and has shown at Western Bridge and HAG. Somewhere on the Rhine the owners of Casey-Kaplan were partying on a pontoon, but in the gallery I didn't smell money or an idea. It was devastatingly bad. Pine branches on the floor, blown up photos, and a sound piece. Her elusiveness didn't even graze cleverness. The shaman vibe of her previous work had shrunken down to a few talismans.
I wandered through a dozen more galleries where plenty of knock-off Banks Violette gothica and junior varsity Matthew Barney pretenders were in evidence. Too much of it was Vice squad Brooklynese for the terminally cool. There was also much more of conceptual algebra: figure out what x equals, break the code, and feel smug. There has to be something more compelling than the mechanics of a clever parlor game to sustain the work. I couldn't wait to get back outside and take in the real visual pleasure on the streets.
★★★
I love flamboyance. Maybe that was why I was so smitten with Gego and Louise Nevelson's shows. Also after Chelsea and Matta-Clark it was a radically different everything. Of course, flamboyance is in the eye of the beholder or the definer. With her outlandish costumes and showgirl / drag queen false eyelashes most people would admit that Nevelson was flamboyant. Gego would be a harder sell. But I think her withholding, exacting yet organic wire sculptures are very flamboyant. They are so ephemeral that they demand attention.
Gego is undergoing the kind of re-discovery that the art world loves: an underappreciated or marginally known artist (usually dead) is finally given the respect and attention they deserve and everyone agrees they deserve it and so we all get to feel satisfied. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I love narrative; I like a story, especially a backstory. A bad childhood, alcoholism, horrible marriages, exile. In various combinations this one-downsmanship is the arc that draws me in. It is the counter-heroic. Or the heroic masked as loser lovely.
Gego does and doesn't fit the model and actually that's her appeal. Born Gertrud Goldschmidt in Hamburg, Germany, in 1912, the daughter of a Jewish banker, she studied for a career in architecture and engineering. But in 1939, she left for Venezuela where she stayed until her death in 1994. Her work is simple and complicated, seemingly freehand semi-geometric drawings and sculptures which she called "drawing without paper." At the Drawing Center it was these twisted wire pieces that captivated. She wrote in a notebook: "Sculpture: three-dimensional forms of solid material. NEVER what I do!"
Gego ignored labels. She didn't really get going as an artist until she was already in her 40s and had raised a family, divorced, and settled with the émigré painter Gerd Leufert. No one knew how to package her work: Drawing? Sculpture? Abstract? Formal? Romantic? Organic? It was a tough sell and to some it probably still will be. Drifting through the small-scale exhibit I was thrilled at the pleasure of the work and the lack of heroics. The anti-heroic impulse in Chelsea is answered with abjection. But here it was something else, demanding yet quiet work.
The heroics came later in the day at the Jewish Museum where I saw Louise Nevelson's show. Nevelson mixes authority and impressionism. There is grandeur to the work, an outsize feel that is in keeping with the artist's persona. She is seemingly the flipside to Gego. Yet both are delicate in sensibility but roused by stoicism to be tough. And both of them remained elusive in Gego's transient perceptions barely registered outside of Venezuela and Nevelson was more familiar to many as a fashion gargoyle in a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph than as a sculptor to be reckoned with.
Her found object assemblages — abstract expressionist "boxes" grouped together to form new creations — have an almost holistic totemic quality. As she said,"When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you're really bringing them to life — a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created."
Nevelson was 42 before she had her first solo show. In 1959, at the age of 60 she was included in "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art. The show was a launching pad for Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ellsworth Kelly — all younger than her son. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend, a compact survey of 66 works organized by Brooke Kamin Rapaport for the Jewish Museum, is her first New York museum show in 27 years.
Nevelson's installations made of street salvaged wooden remnants have AbEx scale, Cubist geometry, and a strong emotional undercurrent. "Self-Portrait, Silent Music," a grid of 24 black boxes is lined with cast-off fragments and a portrait of the artist and it leads to the stunning wall-scale environments including the haunting 225-foot memorial to the Holocaust, "Homage to 6,000,000 I."
They are mammoth in size and yet there is something small, personal, and mysterious to them, in a way that David Smith and Richard Serra never are. I appreciate and admire their work but I'm not moved. Nevelson's work has influenced many but she will always be the eccentric woman in her costumes and bravado, demanding attention. She has her legend because that's what becomes a legend most. In a photograph Gego stands in profile with her gnarled hands, cigarette dangling from her mouth, bending wire and will. Half of her back cock blocks the camera from the pleasure of her creation. She worked a different legend, one of work for work's sake, art as life.
"The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend" is on view through Sept. 16 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street; (212) 423-3200.
Nate Lippens writes about books and art for various publications. He still lives in Seattle.
Elizabeth Murray - Death to Cancer at 66
Elizabeth Murray
(NY Times)
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: August 14, 2007
There are so many separations in every artist’s life — the projects that live only in the mind, the ones that go no further than a few sketches and, of course, the divorce that takes place when a work is really and truly finished and begins to live on its own. For those of us who celebrated the life and work of Elizabeth Murray, who died of cancer on Sunday at age 66, we mourn our separation from both.
Her paintings will be with us for years and years to come, teasing us, resisting us, giving life to something in her that could only find expression in an almost erotic sense of color and shape. People will come upon her work and wonder about the woman who made it, and she will take the place that every artist eventually takes — overshadowed by the constructs of her imagination.
But we — many of us New Yorkers — have been lucky to have known the woman herself. I have never met anyone in whom frankness and delicacy combined in the way they did in Elizabeth. Her eyes were very bold, and her face seemed constructed to make sure you couldn’t miss that boldness. There was a wildness blowing through her, and to talk to her was to feel that she was consciously effacing, for your benefit, something that would unhinge you if she let it out, which she did in her work. That was before cancer.
And if you happened to see her in the past year, frail and bald and as direct in the eye as ever, you knew that there was no effacing the knowledge of death, or the fresh understanding of life that that knowledge gives.
Elizabeth Murray’s death is enough to teach you how separate and undisclosing an artist’s work always is. And it reminds you how imperfect the very idea of artistic expression is. We know the work rises from within her, but it doesn’t describe her or capture her. Perhaps it’s best to say simply that it expresses what she thought it was possible to express with the tools she chose. It was central to her idea of herself, and yet the reference it makes to the living woman will now become more and more oblique. The work will live on in the durable world. But the memory of the artist lives on only in us, who are made of the same impermanent stuff that she was. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
(NY Times)
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: August 14, 2007
There are so many separations in every artist’s life — the projects that live only in the mind, the ones that go no further than a few sketches and, of course, the divorce that takes place when a work is really and truly finished and begins to live on its own. For those of us who celebrated the life and work of Elizabeth Murray, who died of cancer on Sunday at age 66, we mourn our separation from both.
Her paintings will be with us for years and years to come, teasing us, resisting us, giving life to something in her that could only find expression in an almost erotic sense of color and shape. People will come upon her work and wonder about the woman who made it, and she will take the place that every artist eventually takes — overshadowed by the constructs of her imagination.
But we — many of us New Yorkers — have been lucky to have known the woman herself. I have never met anyone in whom frankness and delicacy combined in the way they did in Elizabeth. Her eyes were very bold, and her face seemed constructed to make sure you couldn’t miss that boldness. There was a wildness blowing through her, and to talk to her was to feel that she was consciously effacing, for your benefit, something that would unhinge you if she let it out, which she did in her work. That was before cancer.
And if you happened to see her in the past year, frail and bald and as direct in the eye as ever, you knew that there was no effacing the knowledge of death, or the fresh understanding of life that that knowledge gives.
Elizabeth Murray’s death is enough to teach you how separate and undisclosing an artist’s work always is. And it reminds you how imperfect the very idea of artistic expression is. We know the work rises from within her, but it doesn’t describe her or capture her. Perhaps it’s best to say simply that it expresses what she thought it was possible to express with the tools she chose. It was central to her idea of herself, and yet the reference it makes to the living woman will now become more and more oblique. The work will live on in the durable world. But the memory of the artist lives on only in us, who are made of the same impermanent stuff that she was. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Mencius
The chinese philospher Mencius once said: "Why I dislike holding to one point is that it injures the tao. It takes up one point and disregards a hundred others."
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Context
From Robert Genn~
Did you ever wonder about the difference between a piece of art
in someone's basement and a piece of art in the National
Gallery? Did you ever wonder just exactly what constitutes
"good" art?
Readers may be familiar with the recent experiment done by the
Washington Post. The brilliant violinist Joshua Bell, fresh
from a performance at the Library of Congress with the Boston
Symphony, busked for free during the morning rush at a
Washington Metro station. Of the thousand-odd passersby, only a
few stopped, or even paused, to listen. Small change fell
infrequently into his open violin case--the very case that
holds his $3 million 1710 Strad. Most were oblivious to some of
the most beautiful and difficult music ever written for his
instrument. Interviewed after leaving the building, it seems
few commuters even noticed the guy in the baseball cap standing
by the frequently swinging doors. Thinking back, Bell believes
some thought his efforts offensive. The nearby skin mags,
shoeshine lady and lotto ticket machine got more attention. If
you want to see a remarkable video taken of the experimental
performance, we have it for you at the top of the current
clickback. See URL below.
Bell, when playing in more conventional venues, is a guy who
makes about a thousand dollars a minute. Much has been written
of his Metro debut. My take is that the Metro is now and will
forever remain an inappropriate place to hold a concert. Any
concert. Quality art deserves and needs a proper frame to be
fully recognized as quality art. In art, perception and context
are all-important. "Art pity" is not a significant generator of
fans.
Many visual artists who read this will never see their work in
the National Gallery. While there's a complex mix of
machinations that needs to happen in order to be there, we can
often make the choice to be in better venues. Quality mags beat
scandal sheets. Commercial galleries beat barber shops. We can
be selective about our galleries, too. The unfortunate truth is
that it's better to be on Lord Bluffington's walls than on Joe
Blogg's on the other side of the tracks. People who pay big
bucks to put their bottoms in the front row are just a wee bit
more likely to be enthusiastic. It's human nature.
Best regards,
Robert
PS: "I was oddly grateful when somebody threw a dollar instead
of change." (Joshua Bell)
Esoterica: Curiously, children being hustled by with their
parents were the ones who often turned and gawked. It was the
adults who hurried them out of harm's way. Still, Bell picked
up about $34 during his 43 minutes in the Metro. "That's about
forty dollars an hour," he mused. This is probably better than
a more average violinist performing in such a place. A
particular few--mainly ex-violinists--noticed the quality and
hung around to give a listen. No crowds gathered. Only one
passerby recognized Bell. She didn't know what the devil was
going on, but she gave him a whopping $20 anyway. She was
framing him differently.
Did you ever wonder about the difference between a piece of art
in someone's basement and a piece of art in the National
Gallery? Did you ever wonder just exactly what constitutes
"good" art?
Readers may be familiar with the recent experiment done by the
Washington Post. The brilliant violinist Joshua Bell, fresh
from a performance at the Library of Congress with the Boston
Symphony, busked for free during the morning rush at a
Washington Metro station. Of the thousand-odd passersby, only a
few stopped, or even paused, to listen. Small change fell
infrequently into his open violin case--the very case that
holds his $3 million 1710 Strad. Most were oblivious to some of
the most beautiful and difficult music ever written for his
instrument. Interviewed after leaving the building, it seems
few commuters even noticed the guy in the baseball cap standing
by the frequently swinging doors. Thinking back, Bell believes
some thought his efforts offensive. The nearby skin mags,
shoeshine lady and lotto ticket machine got more attention. If
you want to see a remarkable video taken of the experimental
performance, we have it for you at the top of the current
clickback. See URL below.
Bell, when playing in more conventional venues, is a guy who
makes about a thousand dollars a minute. Much has been written
of his Metro debut. My take is that the Metro is now and will
forever remain an inappropriate place to hold a concert. Any
concert. Quality art deserves and needs a proper frame to be
fully recognized as quality art. In art, perception and context
are all-important. "Art pity" is not a significant generator of
fans.
Many visual artists who read this will never see their work in
the National Gallery. While there's a complex mix of
machinations that needs to happen in order to be there, we can
often make the choice to be in better venues. Quality mags beat
scandal sheets. Commercial galleries beat barber shops. We can
be selective about our galleries, too. The unfortunate truth is
that it's better to be on Lord Bluffington's walls than on Joe
Blogg's on the other side of the tracks. People who pay big
bucks to put their bottoms in the front row are just a wee bit
more likely to be enthusiastic. It's human nature.
Best regards,
Robert
PS: "I was oddly grateful when somebody threw a dollar instead
of change." (Joshua Bell)
Esoterica: Curiously, children being hustled by with their
parents were the ones who often turned and gawked. It was the
adults who hurried them out of harm's way. Still, Bell picked
up about $34 during his 43 minutes in the Metro. "That's about
forty dollars an hour," he mused. This is probably better than
a more average violinist performing in such a place. A
particular few--mainly ex-violinists--noticed the quality and
hung around to give a listen. No crowds gathered. Only one
passerby recognized Bell. She didn't know what the devil was
going on, but she gave him a whopping $20 anyway. She was
framing him differently.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
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.”
—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.”
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