Art Is Dead, They Say
By Mitch Berg
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)
June 8th, 2007 at 6:37 am
the “shtetl of schmatte-clad yentas” makes me laugh out loud to this day.
June 8th, 2007 at 7:01 am
Back in college I got branded as a philistine when I happened to be at a dedication for some “art” that College of Arts and Sciences was putting in front of their headquarters. I was waiting for the other prof in my car pool when I noticed the dedication of a piece called “Waves,” which as best I could tell was an amalgam of randomly shaped pieces of steel welded together and painted white. My engineering side got the best of me and I asked the Dean at the dedication, “Why did you pay $100K for something that you would have called vandalism if some frat boys had dumped it on the lawn? Especially since I think the frat boys would have done better at the welding, just look how sloppy it is!”
Let’s just say I rather enjoyed the cold looks I got after that remark. Not that they ever answered the question.
June 8th, 2007 at 7:20 am
“Post-Ellington jazz”?????
God help us Mitch!
The academic pomposity of that phrase is stunning. Where did you pick that up?
Please, please tell me that was some kind of irony!
June 8th, 2007 at 8:00 am
Red,
Hah!
Nerd,
I have had similar moments.
JB,
OK, genius, how would YOU refer to “jazz that came after Duke Ellington’s heyday”, the bepop era and beyond?
Something non-pompous, of course.
Sheesh.
June 8th, 2007 at 8:48 am
I went to the art museum in Des Moines, oh, probably around 1990, it had your typical modern art stuff. In the middle of one room there was this block-like thing with a smooth top, looked like some artsy bench where you could sit down and view the art around the walls. There was no sign around this thing, nothing to indicate it was “art”.
(The “artist” had filled the empty space under a table with some kind of plastic material, to “capture” that space.)
Indeed, I was thinking about sitting down for a spell when a sniffy artsy guy who worked there came by and said “Can you believe people sit down on this?”, implying the yokels are too stupid to realize this unmarked bench-like thing right where benches are in other museums was in fact not a bench.
June 8th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Actually the ubiquity of fake-ass art has always given me a sense of hope – if other income sources don’t pan out, a guy could always try his hand at being a fake-ass artist. And many have succeeded at this, while possessing no more real artistic talent than a Labrador Retriever. It’s just one more possible stream of revenue.
Post-Ellington jazz is great – in fact, these two things tend to go together a lot. Most artists’ openings usually have some kind of post-bop jazz-banger there, playing abstractedly. Actually, I’ve done gigs like that, and they’re great – the weirder you play, the more these kinds of people think that you’re trying to play “outside,” or make some kind of quirky musical statement – when in truth you’ve simply had about 3 glasses of (complimentary) wine too many, and while your bass player thinks you’re still playing “So What,” you’ve gone ahead and abruptly moved on to “Giant Steps.” And if anyone asks what the hell is going on, you roll your eyes and say that obviously you were creating a metaphor having to do with the masses’ short attention spans, etc. The art world is awesome.
June 8th, 2007 at 9:29 am
Wingnuts competing to see who’s the most anti-intellectual. Nothing here for normal people.
June 8th, 2007 at 9:35 am
So jazz after, what 1945 is crap?
That is A LOT of music to be dismissing with a phrase you picked up the from some critic in the New York Times.
Alert–you’re not a Manhattan Sophisticate. So drop the pose.
June 8th, 2007 at 9:40 am
So jazz after, what 1945 is crap?
Um, no. I don’t like a whole lot after about 1955, though. Some, sure, but not a whole lot.
That is A LOT of music to be dismissing with a phrase you picked up the from some critic in the New York Times.
I didn’t “pick up” anything from anyone.
Alert–you’re not a Manhattan Sophisticate. So drop the pose.
Gee, d’ya suppose? People in NYC are some of the most provicial I’ve ever met.
No, I’m just a guy who doesn’t feel any need to dumb down for anyone.
And when you, the business guy from the western ‘burbs with a degree from a big private catholic college, stops slathering on the “NASCAR-lovin’ Grain-Belt-drinkin’ country-western-diggin’ Archie-Bunker-wannabee really-I’m-a-redneck” thang, you might then be able to lecture me about “poses”.
’til then, not really. No.
June 8th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Hey, JB,
you’re not a Manhattan Sophisticate. So drop the pose.
I’m dying to figure out – what exactly is it that makes you think “Manhattan sophisticate”, anyway?
Big words? Well, “post-ellington” isn’t really PhD semiotics, so I’m kinda at a loss.
Failure to act like some slobbering yokel, to satisfy some image you have of…something? Sorry, JB.
I grew up in a small town on the Plains, among real rednecks and truck drivers and all the other stereotypes you ape to give yourself some feeling of…whatever. God love ’em, of course, but I’m not going to act like something I’m not.
So the question is, who’s “posing”, here?
Not that it matters, inasmuch as I’m not your psychologist. Just curious.
June 8th, 2007 at 9:53 am
I went to the U, Mitch.
And the reason I brought it up is that dismissing “Post-Ellington jazz” is something you learned, not something you experienced. It’s a phrase intended to make you seem erudite and sophisticated. It’s pedantic bullshit.
You don’t have to keep apologizing for being from North Dakota your entire life.
June 8th, 2007 at 10:19 am
He isn’t apologizing. He’s embracing it. You wingnuts – from the Ivy-educated son of a president, grandson of a senator President of ours on down – need to continually reassert your “jes folks” pose. Angryclown finds it quite humorous.
Hey jb, tell us again about all the music you’re too Regular GuyTM to get!
June 8th, 2007 at 10:27 am
The apology is the continued insistence of sophstication in every conceivable way.
Mitch doesn’t just have a religion. He cautiously sampled every one of them, spent years in internal intellectual debate, then carefully chose _______ (whatever it was, I forgot).
He doesn’t just like old cartoons. He likes Warner Brothers cartoons made before 1963, which is the year they switched from whatever to whatever and some genius guy quit.
And everyone knows the only real punk was made between 1974 and 1976.
It’s this way with everything! I call BS on 90% of it.
June 8th, 2007 at 10:59 am
dismissing “Post-Ellington jazz” is something you learned, not something you experienced.
Bullshit, JB. You are speaking with no knowledge whatsoever. You are full of shit.
Mitch doesn’t just have a religion. He cautiously sampled every one of them, spent years in internal intellectual debate, then carefully chose _______ (whatever it was, I forgot).
We’ll get back to this.
He doesn’t just like old cartoons. He likes Warner Brothers cartoons made before 1963, which is the year they switched from whatever to whatever and some genius guy quit.
I’ve never written about cartoons of any type. You’re mixing me up with Lileks, another blogger that acts on you like a red flag on a bull.
It’s this way with everything! I call BS on 90% of it.
And you’re wrong 100% of the time, as usual.
So what is it that you find so threatening that you need to “call BS” on anything?
I mean, I find your “NASCAR-lovin’ WalMart-shoppin’ fake redneck” act to be a pile of crap, but, like, who cares? You can have your little delusions. It’s no skin off my ass!
You don’t have to keep apologizing for being from North Dakota your entire life.
Yet another of your delusions, JB. There was no apology at all. I’m damn proud of it.
So what is it about “people who are different than JB” that you find so threatening? What is it about “Mitch writing about what interests him” that pisses you off so much that you need to “refute” (or try and fail to, anyway) any of it?
Simple fact, JB – if it’s about me and I bother to put it in this blog, it’s the absolute truth. No exceptions (barring the occasional bit of satire). Never. If you think there are, you are wrong. If you continue to believe it, you are doing so in the complete absence of the truth. I’m not sure what it is about prattling on in a complete absence of the truth that you enjoy so much, but that’s really all there is to it.
June 8th, 2007 at 11:02 am
When jb said:
“It’s this way with everything! I call BS on 90% of it.”
I was half expecting him to break into song:
“He’s a complicated man, but no one understands him but his woman…”
June 8th, 2007 at 11:04 am
Troy,
Hah!
June 8th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Well, Warner Brothers cartoons did go downhill in 60s. It was those damned UPA cartoons that made everyone think they could pass off cheap stuff as “modern.”
Make that “post-UPA Warner Brothers cartoons.”
June 8th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
And everyone knows the only real punk was made between 1974 and 1976.
Actually, “real” punk ended when Henry Rollins became an A-list star.
June 8th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
And “new wave” died with The Kings. They had a fine way of sending it off, though.
June 8th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Oh oh, the two pinkie-lifters are discussing cultural fine points again. Bet that’ll trigger a lost weekend of Slim Jims ‘n’ Miller Lite for jb.
June 8th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Angryclown, not hardly. Because while jb (aka “Boring Frater”) snivels like a bitch every time a Republican blogger admits to caring about art that doesn’t involve steel guitar or velvet elvi, he’s a total snob for whisky. Because to jb, it’s WHAT you are a snob about, apparently.
June 8th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
“And “new wave” died with The Kings.”
Nothing matters but the weekend, from a Tuesday point of view.
June 8th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
“Feminine rhyme? Hell, I thought they was all feminine!”
-JB Doubtless
June 10th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
It’s this way with everything! I call BS on 90% of it.
Yeah, you do that a lot, JB. So I’ll make you a deal:
You prove that anything I write about
anythingmyself is BS, or you shut up and keep it to yourself. You want to attack my integrity? Man up and bring the goods.Hint: You can’t. I would be an idiot to try to put any BS about myself in this blog. There are enough people who know me out there – co-workers, classmates, old friends, parents and relatives, old girlfriends, and for that matter my ex-wife sometimes – who read this blog and who can easily speak up if I try to pass any bullshit, that I really, really do know better than to try.
So if it’s about me and it goes on this blog, it’s the truth. Period. There never have been and never will be exceptions.
OK, it’s not so much a “deal” as it is a statement.