It may have been the greatest piece of arts criticism ever written – on the topic of “Gates”, by Christo, one of history’s great works of art, which draped Central Park in orange banners.
The critique cuts relentlessly and yet obliquely to the core, and yet hovers uncertainly yet fiercely (or perhaps neo-fiercely) at the most trivial yet profound surface:
The dialectic of Christo’s “Gates” is a reflection of the post-9/11 zeitgeist, absent the schadenfreude qua nervousness that has gripped the American populace in this world of “now-more-than-ever.” The semiotics of the saffron (en)robes serves an ontological function in re-animating and re-introducing the humanity of New New York to their perceptions of the orange joy of being – the being you felt as a child, vis a vis a pinata. The Gestalt bespeaks a Foucauldian Weltschmerz, a sumptuous feast of post-Derridian brio-cum-angst. It’s in this context that “The Gates” covers, even metastasizes, over Central Park like a vast dollop of neo-maternalistic, neo-Marxian mayonnaise.
The panels, a touchstone of familiarity to the bourgeoisie (nursing at the paps of American Idol), emanate as immense labia beckoning, even taunting the onlooker to become, to be the phallus penetrating into Mother Nature – the maternal yin imprisoned in the mechanistic yang of the city and yet floating above the concept of restraint – the “Gates” welcome yet repel; they silently ululate like a shtetl of schmatte-clad yentas and yet remain silent with the deafening-yet-voiceless torment of the ur-mensch; metaphysical yet material (or rather neo-material), smug in its tangibility yet internally, silently, futilely screaming in horror at its immateriality. The “Gates” are, in short, of a piece with and yet utterly discontiguous from the fundamental leitmotifs of our age.
Oh, I’m lying – it was Sheila and a group of her friends, spoofing modern art criticism so well it reads like a catalogue at the Walker.
What brings it to mind is, of course, that it’s dead-on – as related by Roger Kimball in a spectacular piece in New Criterion, “Why the Art World is a Disaster”.
He excerpts a catalogue piece that reads, on its surface, more like parody than Sheila’s piece:
…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.
But that’s a tangent from Kimball’s larger point – why Art (visual art in this case) sucks so badly these days:
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.
Put another way, when everything is designed to shock middle-class bourgeouis sensibilities, nothing does.
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.
Which is, to step out of the world of visual art for a moment, what makes so much post-Ellington jazz music so utterly unbearable, and what made most serious “classical” music of the 20th century positively unlistenable.
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 [which is fun for satirists! – Ed]. 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,
How true is this?
What is the easiest way to satirize art these days – to actually attempt satiric art, or to caricature the manner of an “artist” or “critic” describing things?
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…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.”
Take a meander around Loring Park or Lowertown or Uni-Raymond sometime; start talking with “artists” about how much of their time they spend chasing grants to pursue their “art”.
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.
It was always an abstraction to me, of course – I have little background in visual art; I inherited the family’s music and writing genes. But it smacked me in the head one day in 1987, when my sister and I were at the Walker Gallery, at a “minimalism” exhibit. I was looking at some “minimal” piece of work, and stepped over what looked like some construction material – a diagonal swatch of tartan sponge (think wrestling mat material) lying against the wall on the floor.
A guard hurried over. “Sir, don’t step on the art!”
I looked around, confused.
“Sir, you’re standing on the art”.
No. I was standing on a piece of tartan foam that had earned somebody with an MFA a whole bunch of money – but it was “art” in the sense that Alban Berg was “music”.
But there is, one wants to believe, hope:
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.”
And it really, really is.
(Via Jeff Kouba at TvM)
