Re: art world in crisis!
On Jan 30, 2007, at 12:44 PM, Charles A. Grimes wrote:
You’re going to explain this crisis more.
Ok, here’s Jed’s article. Yeah, I subscribe to The New Republic
Doug
The New Republic - February 5, 2007
What money is doing to art, or how the art world lost its mind. Laissez-Faire Aesthetics
by Jed Perl
I.
The art world has never been so well-oiled a machine as it is right
now. Auction records are toppled practically every month, the big
international contemporary art fairs have produced a new breed of
high-end shopaholics, and in New York’s West Twenties the crowds
streaming through the galleries are the most elegant on earth. This
art scene, which has been fattened and massaged and emboldened by a
boisterous stock market, is certainly a spectacle. So it’s no wonder
that last fall both Vanity Fair and W got on the bandwagon, devoting
special issues to the visual arts. In a Vanity Fair feature on “the
auction mystique, the new collectors, and the passion driving it
all,” Tobias Meyer, who is with Sotheby’s, argues that the nosebleed
prices being paid for new work in the auction rooms reflect a
“democracy of access.” What Meyer regards as a democratic principle
will strike others as an old-fashioned overheated free-market
economy. Vanity Fair’s editors seem quite taken with this pay-as-you-
go democratic spirit: they find another example in the video
portraits that Robert Wilson, the stage designer, is now offering to
anybody who can cough up $150,000, a sum that the magazine says “is
peanuts in today’s through-the-roof art market.” As a come-on, Wilson
has done something rather undemocratic, turning out videos of movie
stars, among them Brad Pitt, who landed on the cover of Vanity Fair
with Wilson’s ah-sweet-mystery blue light playing over his bare torso
and white boxer shorts.
Of course it didn’t take the fall of 2006 to tell us that big money
likes flash-in-the-pan art, or that we are in a period–and it’s
certainly not the first one–when art and fashion and Hollywood are
often indistinguishable. Amid the gold-rush atmosphere of recent
months, however, something very strange has emerged, something more
pertinent to art than to money–a new attitude, now pervasive in the
upper echelons of the art world, about the meaning and experience and
value of art itself. A great shift has occurred. This has deep and
complex origins; but when you come right down to it, the attitude is
almost astonishingly easy to grasp. We have entered the age of
laissez-faire aesthetics.
The people who are buying and selling the most highly priced
contemporary art right now–think of them as the laissez-faire
aesthetes–believe that any experience that anyone can have with a
work of art is equal to any other. They imagine that the most
desirable work of art is the one that inspires a range of absolutely
divergent meanings and impressions almost simultaneously. I used to
be bemused when Lisa Yuskavage, whose lesbo-bimbo figure paintings
were featured at the David Zwirner Gallery in October, was praised
for channeling, all at once, Disney cartoons and Giovanni Bellini’s
altarpieces. And I did not comprehend how admirers of John Currin,
who defies accusations of misogyny by making the men in his paintings
every bit as repulsive as the women, could believe that he is both
the direct descendant of Cranach the Elder and a raunchy comic in the
Mad magazine tradition. My problem, I now realize, is not only that I
am looking for consistency, it is that I persist in imagining that
there is such a thing as inconsistency. The paintings by Currin and
Yuskavage that are now going for hundreds of thousands of dollars are
engineered for an audience that believes that a work of art can
satisfy radically disparate and even contradictory attitudes and
appetites, and satisfy them consecutively or concurrently– it hardly
matters. A painting is simply what everybody or anybody says it is,
what everybody or anybody wishes it to be.
The collectors who made sure that John Currin’s show in November at
the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue was sold out even before it
opened believe that it is their privilege to respond to anything at
any time in any way they choose. When they hang a Currin on the wall,
they are given permission–more than that, they are given the right–
to appreciate this oilcloth horror as a painterly painting as
exquisite as a Velázquez, or to enjoy it as an incompetent high-
kitsch send-up of classical painting, or to assess its value as
social commentary, or to laugh at it as a piece of Dadaist stupidity-
for-stupidity’s-sake. Or they may enjoy their Currin as a financial
trophy pure and simple, proof of their buying power. Or they may
regard it as an object of delectation, in much the way that they have
been instructed by some art-historian-turned-art-consultant to enjoy
a Bonnard. They can have it every way. They experience no conflict.
And Currin gives them enough cunningly mixed signals that the
possibilities seem endless. It hardly matters that what Currin
doesn’t know about figure painting would fill volumes, since his
collectors know even less, if that is possible. (What precisely is it
that Currin doesn’t know? For starters, he does not understand that
volume in representational painting can be–and to some degree, must
be–generated through the power of contour as a two-dimensional
expression of three-dimensional experience.)
I recognize that the taste for Currin and Yuskavage is in part a
continuation of developments that are now a generation old. The what-
the-hell attitude with which the new high-end consumers of art
confront the whole question of meaning will strike some as
reminiscent of the mentality of a number of collectors in the early
1960s. Back then, there was a whole group of big spenders who were
turning their attention from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art and
boasting about how much fun they were having now that they had
sloughed off the serious themes of the mid-century abstractionists.
And it is hard not to see the in-your-face kitsch of Currin and
Yuskavage as an extension of the ironic fascination with incompetence
that gave birth to the movement known as “Bad” Painting, which was
kicked off in 1978 by a show of that name at the New Museum,
organized by Marcia Tucker.
Yet there are differences between garbage then and garbage now. Pop
Art and “Bad” Painting were self-consciously ironic; they depended on
the existence of a standard that was being mocked or from which one
was registering a dissent. Irony, even in the whatever-the-market-
will-bear forms that it often assumed in the 1980s and 1990s, was
generally accompanied by at least the afterglow of a moral viewpoint.
The artists were mocking something. They had a target. This is what
has now changed. Laissez-faire aesthetics makes a mockery of nothing.
Even irony is too much of an idea. It treats everything equally.
David Zwirner, the dealer who in recent months has sent Yuskavage’s
reputation into the stratosphere, has observed in an open letter to
the artist that “frankly, I am not sure what your work is about.” He
makes this declaration without any embarrassment. And while Zwirner
does hasten to add that the paintings are “utterly sincere,” I am
left with the gathering suspicion that the meaning of the work is
designed to be unresolved, that the work is meant to register as
noncommittal, at least from the audience’s point of view. This
promiscuity can be regarded, I suppose, as a sort of “democracy of
access.” Transcendence and stupidity, formal perfection and kitsch:
it’s all just part of the same big expensive banquet.
II.
The art world is in many respects an insular place. The
preoccupations of the most gifted painters and sculptors, when they
are alone in their studios, are with tradition and innovation, and
can by their very nature never be fully appreciated by a broad swath
of the public. Even the most highly touted goings-on in the art
world, such as the emergence of an art star like Yuskavage, are the
product of forces that the public can scarcely understand. When
contemporary art does electrify the public, which is surely the case
right now, the art itself is often part of an urban spectacle, a
trophy floating atop the cultural maelstrom, and there can be no
question that the blissed-out atmosphere in the Chelsea galleries
this season has everything to do with New York’s emergence as the
ultimate amusement park for sophisticated tourists around the globe.
On West 19th Street, even as Yuskavage’s show opened in the greatly
expanded David Zwirner Gallery, you could see, right across the
street, the finishing touches being put on Frank Gehry’s first
freestanding building in New York, Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp. It
did not take much of an imagination to make a connection between
Yuskavage’s ballooning babes and the billowing translucent skin of
Gehry’s office building. This is the shape of the art-and-design
carnival in 2007.
One of the strange facts of our time is that although Picasso and
Mondrian and Pollock are household names, the middle-class public has
never entirely accepted modern art, never fully embraced its mystery
and its magic. Even in the face of this deep distrust, however, the
public has assimilated the old bohemian belief in a community of
artists as a sort of freely established aristocracy, perhaps seeing
here another version of the “democracy of access.” This past fall, as
exhibitions by big-name artists opened in the galleries and museums
in rapid-fire succession, the reporting in the newspapers and
magazines was all gossipy enthusiasm, as if the journalists were
courtiers at some newfangled Versailles. At the Museum of Modern Art,
there was a Brice Marden retrospective, and the artist himself was
catnip for the paparazzi, aging but still handsome in the role of
everybody’s favorite lonesome cowboy, a minimalist now turned
maximalist whose strongest paintings remain a few two-color canvases,
in milky greens and blues and grays, that he did in the first flush
of his fame, in the early 1970s.
The art world, which in the old days of Warhol and Studio 54 was the
place you went to get away from your family, has become a family
affair. Among the offerings during the whirlwind of Art Basel Miami
Beach were visits to the Wynwood neighborhood, where the Rubell
Family Collection was open to the public. In a New York Times
Magazine profile, Mera Rubell commented of the way that she and her
husband Don and her daughter Jennifer and her son Jason and his wife
Michelle collect art together that “the fighting, the agreeing, the
resolution, it’s all relevant.” Perhaps the collectors are taking a
lesson or two from the new family-friendly artists. One of Marden’s
daughters, Mirabelle, codirects a much-discussed New York art
gallery, Rivington Arms. Kiki Smith, whose dumb-beyond-belief Whitney
show was full of the sort of neo-hippie baubles I wouldn’t buy at
Target for $14.95, has built a career out of the fact that her father
was the sculptor Tony Smith, a friend of Pollock’s whose hard-edged
vision is now seen as critical in the move from the “hot” 1950s to
the “cool” 1960s. And speaking of ’60s cool, in a show at the Jewish
Museum this season Alex Katz brought together five decades of his
portraits of his wife Ada, the queen of downtown high-bohemian chic.
As for the older artists, they are presented as nutty great-aunts and
-uncles: Robert Rauschenberg exhibited a series of utterly
perfunctory photo-transfer paintings at PaceWildenstein in November,
which were perhaps being passed off as the work of an ultra-cool King
Lear.
The big galleries don’t do shows anymore, they do coronations and
requiems. Larry Gagosian has perfected this style. His exhibition
spaces are so extraordinarily scaled that on the rare occasions when
the art is really good, as was the case with the David Smith show
“Personnage” last spring, the grandiosity can feel genuine. But when
the coronation is for John Currin, the corruption is almost
unbearable. I have not found the art world this depressing since I
attended the press preview for “The Art of the Motorcycle,” at the
Guggenheim back in 1998. And when the requiem is for Andy Warhol,
whose late work was the subject of “Cast a Cold Eye,” an immense two-
gallery show at Gagosian’s spaces on West 24th and West 21st Streets,
the bombast is simply bewildering. There were Maos and skulls and
hammers-and-sickles and camouflage patterns and sketchy renditions of
Leonardo’s Last Supper, some more than twenty feet wide. When Warhol
died, it was generally agreed that his late work wasn’t much, but the
art world knows exactly what to do when a name-brand artists exits
with excess inventory on hand, and so the critical upgrading has been
inexorable. The huge Warhol retrospective at the Modern in 1989 was a
turning point for late Warhol, and now these hollow monoliths are
cult objects for the baby boomers. They prove, much like the
paintings that de Kooning did after his imagination had been
overtaken by Alzheimer’s, that there is always a future in becoming a
gaga hipster grandpa.
Warhol, of course, is the Moses who first saw the Promised Land of
laissez-faire aesthetics. Back in 1982, when Ingrid Sischy was the
editor of Artforum, she published an issue dedicated to art-and-
fashion synergy that had a dress by Issey Miyake on the cover and a
centerfold of Warhol dollar signs. It has been downhill all the way
since then, and Sischy, who helped out on Vanity Fair’s art issue
this fall, hasn’t missed much. If Warhol had to die before the art
world could go completely to hell, it is surely because his amorality
was too deeply stamped with the old morality. But no such qualms
darken the thoughts of the artists whom New York magazine recently
profiled in a cover story called “Warhol’s Children.” One of these
clowns does collages incorporating his own semen, much as Warhol had
his friends and hangers-on piss on canvases to create his “Oxidation”
series.
Warhol is the evil prophet of the profit motive. His portraits of
Chairman Mao can look positively visionary at a time when container
ships full of neo- Pop Art are emerging from China. Warhol was
everywhere this season, not only in the galleries but also at
Barneys, where there was an Andy-themed holiday catalog, Andy
shopping bags, and limited-edition gift certificates with Andy
images. I don’t especially mind Andy at Barneys. Warhol began his
life doing advertising for high-end fashion retailers, and we could
count ourselves fortunate if the damage that he did was limited to
Barneys.
Among the Chelsea dealers with palatial settings and the instinct for
a coronation, Matthew Marks stands out as the man with some taste.
Although it may be that for the time being we have seen enough of Ken
Price’s sensuously shimmering clay sculptures, the aplomb with which
Marks presented Price’s work in October left a gallerygoer with a
champagne high. And in a season when Chelsea has been overrun with
artists who are under the delusion that you can make an interesting
abstract painting by jumbling together everything and the kitchen
sink, it was a pleasure to re-acquaint oneself with Ellsworth Kelly’s
imperial austerity, new and old, in a Matthew Marks extravaganza that
opened in November in three locations. The accusation can be made
that Kelly remains too much the captive of a relatively small
reservoir of ideas that he developed in the 1950s and 1960s, but I am
certainly always glad to see those early works, including a group of
black and white drawings that comprised one-third, the smallest
third, of what Matthew Marks had to show. The new paintings at Marks
are all made of two panels, with the panels painted a single color
and then superimposed to create a sort of shallow relief. On West
24th Street, the panels were rectangles in brilliant colors, and
piled atop one another they exuded a semaphore-like power. On West
22nd Street, the panels were black and white, and I was especially
taken with two vertical works in which the tension between a single
curved edge and a single angled edge yielded visual music, as if two
strings had been plucked to create two sonorous sounds.
Kelly’s tripleheader was a real event, not a media event. The same
can be said of Lucian Freud’s show at Acquavella in November. I have
never been an ardent admirer of Freud’s figurative style, and I think
such hard-bitten journalistic power as his paintings once had has
been diffused in the work of the past twenty years. Still, in these
dark times you could receive an education if you walked from Freud’s
show of figure paintings over to Currin’s folly a few blocks south.
Freud’s manner of modeling the figure with an encrusted pileup of
paint may finally be judged a misunderstanding of modernism; his
celebration of the painted surface, while probably meant to clarify
representational structures in ways we know from the work of Soutine
and Braque, amounts to little more than a series of angsty decorative
flourishes. But Currin understands so little about pictorial
conventions, whether Old Master or high modern, that you cannot even
begin to speak about his work in terms of a misunderstanding of
modernism.
As always, a gallerygoer who visits only the blue-chip dealers is
going to miss a lot of the best work. This fall, Thornton Willis, a
veteran painter, showed some wonderfully persuasive abstractions at
Elizabeth Harris, comminglings of triangular forms, neither exactly
crystalline nor exactly opaque, that suggest an emotional terrain at
once rambunctious and saturnine. And a very young artist, Bryan
Mesenbourg, presented some cunning constructions, reminiscent of H.C.
Westermann in their pokerfaced love affair with old-fashioned
gadgeteering, in a group show at Feigen Contemporary. In the midst of
this white-hot art scene, however, anything that was capable of
holding my attention, whether by Price or Kelly or Willis or
Mesenbourg, seemed to exist not even at the margins of the art world,
but in something more like solitary confinement, with each artist
utterly alone, a lunatic in the padded cell of his own imagination.
It is hardly surprising that even the people who still have the
capacity to respond to a work of art have been finding it so
difficult to get in the mood. The only common language left any
longer is the language of reputations and trends–which is to say,
the language of money.
In the midst of this supremely sordid season, I visited Art Basel
Miami Beach, the fair that now anchors nearly a week of events in
early December that extend well beyond the Convention Center on Miami
Beach. And what struck me most forcibly as I wandered the aisles was
the noisiness and the vehemence with which prices were announced.
Dealers wanted to tell anybody and everybody, whether they were
potential clients or just art-world rubberneckers, not only what
everything in their booth cost, but how much the discount would be.
It was an orgy of money talk. When you take a look at the art market,
what you’re really seeing is the stock market. The whole art world is
like Nobu during bonus week, a freak show of conspicuous consumption.
The point is not what the booze or the raw fish tastes like; the
point is how fiendishly expensive it is.
III.
To point out that culture is a business, and sometimes even a
moderately big business, is to state the obvious, and I will not
argue with those who would say that so it always was and so it always
will be. This is true, as far as it goes. The trouble is that a
business model has come to drive the entire art world, and like the
corporate executive who regards the launch of each new product as a
challenge to the success of the last one, because you must keep
growing or you will die, the arts community finds itself in a state
of permanent anxiety. There always has to be a new artist whom the
media will embrace as enthusiastically as they embraced Warhol; there
always has to be a show that will top the excitement generated by the
last blockbuster at the Modern or the Met. And a lot of the artists
and curators are really into the game–they are fueling the system.
What you see when you look at a painting by John Currin or Lisa
Yuskavage is a business model. From this point of view, the current
season is a big success. And this brings all the more forcibly to
mind the essential paradox of cultural success, which is that growth
becomes the measure of all things. In a world where everybody wants
to quantify the value of experiences that are inherently ineffable,
who can wonder that the guy who recently paid something like $140
million for a Pollock feels that he has cornered the market on
ineffability?
Many people have observed that collectors now prefer to buy in the
attention-grabbing public arena of the auction or the art fair,
rather than in the relative privacy of an art gallery. One hears
various explanations for this shift. Some say that collectors are
worried about being outsmarted by the secret machinations of dealers.
Others say that it is simply that the collectors want to have as many
people as possible watching them as they spend their money. But there
may be something deeper at work here, some fear of the inwardness or
the particularity of the experiences that art can offer. By buying
art in public, the collector turns a rarefied experience–and what
one would hope is the private avidity for art–into a popular
experience, a spectacle that unfolds as if under klieg lights in a
sold-out stadium.
When the collecting of art takes on that familiar pop-culture buzz,
we are seeing a diminishment of the variety of artistic experience,
and this variety is among the glories of any culture. Baudelaire may
have been the first to point out that one of the great pleasures and
privileges open to an educated audience in a modern society is the
possibility of experiencing both high art and popular culture. And
why on earth shouldn’t it be possible to enjoy The Sopranos and Sex
and the City, which we take in with thousands of other people, and
also the new work of an abstract painter that may be known to no more
than a hundred? The trouble starts when people begin to imagine that
all these experiences are equal. The argument for equalization is
often presented as if it were a plea for populism, for a “democracy
of access.” But in practice this equalization is often profoundly
anti-democratic, because the assumption is that the man on the street
will never be capable of appreciating a Mondrian–or a Poussin–for
what it is, on its own terms.
The biggest danger currently faced by people who love painting and
sculpture is this unitary view of culture, which in practice amounts
to the view that all culture is, or should be, popular culture. I am
somewhat baffled by the appeal of such an idea, although perhaps it
has something to do with the value that is currently placed on
“interconnectivity” and “interface.” Of course the organizers of Art
Basel Miami Beach are anxious to distinguish what they do from what
goes on at the multiplex, but the distinctions that they want to make
are less of kind than of caliber. What they really want to do is
create haute pop experiences.
The mood in the Convention Center where Art Basel Miami Beach was
held was not all that different from the atmosphere at a car show–
or, for that matter, at an upscale mall. Fifty years ago, de
Kooning’s friend Edwin Denby was already arguing that “the miles of
New York galleries [are] as luxurious to wander through as a slave
market.” And some of the critics who went down to report on Art Basel
Miami Beach were perfectly aware that they were in the midst of the
biggest and most luxurious slave market on earth. You could hear it
in their been-there-done-that tone. And you could see critic after
critic attempting, without much success, to rise above the muck by
announcing that he or she had made one or two discoveries, something
of real value hidden away at one of the satellite art shows, at Pulse
or NADA or Scope, which had sprouted in some of the low-income and
industrial areas on the mainland. In Miami, the search for integrity
was desperate, and ultimately doomed.
Monty Python would have had a field day with those art tours in
Wynwood. The invasion of the trendoids was closely watched by the
locals, many of whom were obviously living close to the poverty line.
But even people who have never heard of Marcel Duchamp can see that
when the people with the funny glasses show up to stare at the
cubicles full of funny things, the real estate investors with their
condo conversions can’t be far behind. This is not to say that there
wasn’t some first-rate art to be seen at Art Basel Miami Beach,
including significant works by Picasso, Morandi, and de Kooning. I
did find myself thinking that for somebody, perhaps for some college
kids who found their way here, Art Basel Miami Beach could be an open
sesame. But once those kids fixed their attention on that Morandi,
who was going to show them the way forward?
The trouble is that fewer and fewer people are willing to recognize
the fundamentally different nature of various forms of cultural
experience. And make no mistake, there are essential distinctions
that must be made. It is in the very nature of popular culture that
its pleasures are ones that we share with a wide range of people
simultaneously. And it is in the very nature of high art that its
pleasures are ones that we experience as individuals. To insist upon
this distinction is not to say that one experience is better and one
is worse, it is only to clarify the character of each experience. The
art in popular culture has everything to do with creating a work that
catalyzes a strain of feeling in the mass audience. High art operates
in a completely different way, for each viewer comes to the work with
the fullest, the most intense, the most personal awareness of the
conventions and traditions of an art form. The essential high-art
encounter is a private encounter–but we are living in the YouTube
era, when people are often uncomfortable with privacy, with its
challenges and its revelations. The intensity of the high-art
experience has everything to do with a disengagement from the
pressures of the present. It is the unquantifiable experience par
excellence.
The essential problem in the art world today is that in almost every
area, from the buying and selling of contemporary art to the programs
of our greatest museums, there is an obsession with appealing to the
largest imaginable audience. And in practice this means always
operating as if painting and sculpture were a dimension of popular
culture. To be sure, I am drawing a sharper distinction than is
always the case. Pop culture has sometimes gained in interest when it
has adapted some of the fascination with difficulty and obscurity
that is a powerful element in the high-art traditions. By the same
token, the saltiness of pop can add something to a painting or a
sculpture; and at the Museum of Modern Art in the years when Alfred
H. Barr Jr. ran the show, some of the marketing ideas of Madison
Avenue were used to jump-start people’s engagement with difficult
modern art. The problem, again, is not with popular culture, but with
the wholesale imposition of its methods and values on an alien
terrain. It is this muddling of the realms that fuels the insane art
commerce of our day. When we see artists whose careers are barely a
decade old dominating the auction rooms, with their work selling for
millions of dollars, we are being told that a widespread consensus
can crystallize in a moment–and this is a pop culture idea. So, for
that matter, is the idea that the way for a museum to attract an
audience is by creating a sexy new addition where people can see and
be seen. One of the tragedies of the past few decades has been that
the museums have lost faith in their own permanent collections, where
visitors were once invited to engage, one by one, with works created
by the masters, one by one.
IV.
I am as tired as the next person of the high culture versus popular
culture debates that obsessed intellectuals for much of a century.
There was a deep vein of selfcongratulation that ran through those
discussions, in which the literati showed off their in-depth
knowledge of the other side of the tracks. Yet there was also a
terrific energy about the best of those discussions, a spirit that
was fundamentally dialectical and fluid, an effort not to subjugate
one side of the argument to the other but to strengthen our
understanding of all aspects of the culture through a constant
process of comparative investigation.
Laissez-faire aesthetics is fundamentally anti-dialectical, not only
because there is no acknowledgment of the need to comprehend the
divergent implications of our attraction to high art and popular
culture, but also, strangely enough, because there is a refusal to
accept the very existence of competing forces. There is no struggle
with distinctions because there is no recognition of distinctions.
The result is a flattening of all artistic experience. If the
clearest expression of laissez-faire aesthetics is to be found in the
extent to which fashionable painters are now embraced as
simultaneously offering traditional values and Disneyland-style fun,
the new mood is also having an impact in the art museums, where pop
culture is often sold as the new laissez-faire avant-garde. I still
listen to Bob Dylan. I am still caught up in those prickly yet silky
lyrics that I first heard in the ’60s, when I bought the albums as
soon as they appeared. But I question why the Morgan Library and
Museum felt the need to present a show this season devoted to the
life and times of Dylan, and I was frankly appalled to see “Bob
Dylan’s American Journey: 1956-1966″ competing for attention with a
small gathering of medieval illuminated manuscripts and metalwork, a
group of drawings by Fragonard and other artists of the eighteenth
century, a retrospective of the career of Saul Steinberg, and a show
of Mozart manuscripts.
I realize that even to raise the question–what is Dylan doing at the
Morgan?–is to provoke the wrath of the intellectual hipsters. They
will point out that the Morgan was the invention of a modern
millionaire, and that the pages illuminated by a monk in the
fourteenth century were no more destined to be exhibited or collected
on Madison Avenue than some album covers produced by Columbia Records
in the 1960s. And of course a library that is dedicated to our
cultural heritage can arguably embrace a fluid concept of its own
collections and exhibition programs. The hipsters will want to make
it seem closeminded to question why Dylan memorabilia should be
exhibited steps away from the Stavelot Triptych, a masterpiece of the
medieval goldsmith’s art.
But the question can be put a different way. It seems to me that it
is in fact the Morgan that is being close-minded–insensitive to
distinctions, to particularities, to the possibility that high
culture and popular culture are so wonderfully different that they
cannot in fact be put together. I imagine that Steinberg, an artist
whose understanding of the relationship between art high and low was
as deftly dialectical as that of anybody who has ever lived, could
have woven a funny little allegory around the presence of the
Bleecker Street hipster troubadour amid the incunabula at the Morgan,
but if the people at the museum see any irony in the situation, they
are not letting on.
I worry about the Morgan. Renzo Piano’s ballyhooed addition, which
opened last spring, has transformed what was a series of intimate
spaces dedicated to the glories of connoisseurship and scholarship
into a bunch of art boutiques in a high-modern mini-mall. This is not
to say that the Morgan cannot still offer an unforgettable
museumgoing experience. Yet the signs are not good. American museums
are full of curators who worry about the malling of the museum, and
realize that there are other ways to answer the concerns of trustees
who want to bolster the endowment and combat rising costs. But in a
country as wealthy as ours, what are generally presented as fiscal
decisions can also be a cover for deeper philosophical
predispositions. There may not be a museum director in America who is
any longer willing to look a trustee in the eye and tell him that he
is sitting in a museum and it is no place to talk about pop culture
marketing strategies. There may not be a museum director in America
who is willing to argue that an art museum is a particular kind of
place, and that particular places are friendly to particular
experiences.
We live in a country in which we have lots of opportunities to enjoy
Dylan, and motorcycles, and the sight of Dylan on a motorcycle, and I
don’t see that it is asking too much to insist that there is a place
where the focus is on medieval manuscripts and Old Master drawings
and Mozart and the nineteenth-century novel. Make no mistake, there
is an agenda behind the Dylan show at the Morgan. “Bob Dylan’s
American Journey” is an effort to reassure the public that an
institution that might be perceived as off-putting because it stands
for some particular things is in fact a laissez-faire institution–a
place that will happily embrace whatever the market will bear.
What laissez-faire aesthetics has left us with–all along the line,
in the curatorial meetings at museums, in the conversations in the
aisles at the art fairs, in the MFA seminars in the art schools–is a
weakening of all conviction, an unwillingness to take stands, a
reluctance to champion, or surrender to, any first principle. Perhaps
it was in response to such whatever-ism that many people of taste
found themselves waxing enthusiastic over the intractably maudlin
paintings devoted to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib that Fernando
Botero exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in the fall. The
enthusiasm that sophisticated gallerygoers showed for these works,
which had about as much sense of form and structure as mushy brown
gravy poured over marzipan, had a lot to do with the fact that an
artist had taken a stand. (It happened to be the right stand.) And
the fact that Botero was not selling the paintings one by one, but
wanted to donate them all to a museum, could make him seem heroic in
the current climate. By the time that Arthur Danto proclaimed in The
Nation that Botero’s paintings were in certain respects superior to
Picasso’s Guernica, we might as well have been back in the 1930s, in
the low era of socially relevant art, when images of oppressed
workers and handsome soldiers fighting fascism were embraced by an
audience that already knew enough of modern art to know that it was
not really comfortable with it.
Botero appeals to an old-style philistinism, to the idea that works
of art should have meanings so obvious that they grab you by the
lapels. If people are running to embrace his Abu Ghraib paintings,
perhaps it is because they feel so deeply threatened by the new face
of philistinism, which is laissez-faire aesthetics. Perhaps any stand
in art now seems better than no stand at all, and never mind the art.
For what laissez-faire aesthetics promises is a tolerance of
everything–high, pop, whatever: a tolerance so bland that it really
amounts to indifference. (This is not repressive tolerance so much as
manic-depressive tolerance.) And by now gallerygoers and museumgoers,
even the most astute among them, are quite frankly afraid to insist
that high culture always has some element of the prejudicial about
it–a preference for a particular style or way of doing things or
play of the imagination that is to some degree not supported by mere
fact.
Laissez-faire aesthetics is the aesthetics that violates the very
principle of art, because it insists that anything goes, when in fact
the only thing that is truly unacceptable in the visual arts is the
idea that anything goes. At times, amid the chic hedge-fund maelstrom
of Art Basel Miami Beach, it could seem that what had died was the
modernist century, with its vehement advocacy of certain aesthetic
principles. Perhaps we have to accept that it has gone. But what is
really in danger now is something much bigger than modernity. It is
nothing less than the precious exclusivity of the high-art
experience, which stretches from the Tanagra figurines and the
Romanesque manuscripts to the paintings of Rembrandt and Poussin and
Corot and Mondrian. There is nothing laissez-faire about any of these
masterpieces. When we contemplate them in all their particularity–in
the almost delusional extremism of their varied visions and in the
insistent singularity of their poetry–we are constantly reminded
that high culture is anything but easygoing, that it is always
daringly, rightfully, triumphantly intolerant.
Jed Perl is The New Republic’s art critic.