Month: January 2018

A Toilet Is a Toilet Is a Toilet

January 27, 2018 1 Comment
Maurizio Cattelan - America
Maurizio Cattelan, America (solid-gold working toilet exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last year and used by visitors)

Marcel Duchamp’s signed urinal dubbed Fountain isn’t a work of art, “conceptual” or otherwise.1 Neither is Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet dubbed America (offered on loan by the Guggenheim Museum to the White House last year, in lieu of a painting by Vincent van Gogh that had been requested). They are mere artworld stunts.

Isn’t it sad that Nancy Spector, chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum, can’t tell the difference between a work of art and a toilet? Here’s how she blogged about Cattelan’s America, “the 18-karat gold, fully functioning toilet that was installed at the Guggenheim for nearly a year in a long-term, sculptural performance of interactive art”:

Like all of Cattelan’s most complex works, this sculpture [Spector’s term, not mine] is laden with possible meanings. There is the art-historical trajectory, from Duchamp and Manzoni [of Artist’s Shit fame] to more contemporary artists [whose work] traffics in scatological iconography. The equation between excrement and art has long been mined by neo-Marxist thinkers who question the relationship between labor and value. Expanding upon this economic perspective, there is also the ever-increasing divide in our country between the wealthy and the poor that threatens the very stability of our culture. Cattelan explicitly comments on this fact by creating what he called “one-percent art for the ninety-nine percent.”

Entitled “Maurizio Cattelan’s Golden Toilet in the Time of Trump” (Guggenheim Blogs, August 17, 2017), Spector’s post did not fail to point out how “prescient” Cattelan was:

When the artist [her term, not mine] proposed the sculpture in mid-2015, Donald Trump had just announced his bid for the presidency. It was inconceivable at the time that this business mogul, he of the eponymous gilded tower, could actually win the White House. When the sculpture came off view on September 15, Trump had been in office for 238 days, a term marked by scandal and defined by the deliberate rollback of countless civil liberties, in addition to climate-change denial that puts our planet in peril.

Since then, of course, the Trump presidency has been marked by a few other things that a fair-minded critic might note—such as massive tax cuts, a growing GDP, the lowest Hispanic and black unemployment rates in years, expulsion of the Isis caliphate, the rollback of regulations that were crippling businesses, and so on.

But Spector is among those whose hatred of the president is so ingrained that they are constitutionally unable to see anything about him in a positive light. She is in the news now because an insulting email she sent to the White House in September, offering the toilet’s loan, has come to light. And who would expect The Washington Post to refrain from reporting such a brilliant gesture of political protest, stale though it might be at this late date?

Leaving politics aside, let’s return to Cattelan’s “sculptural performance of interactive art.” While it was on display in one of the Guggenheim’s unisex bathrooms, visitors were invited to use it “to commune with art and with nature,” as Spector so cleverly put it.

If the toilet is indeed of solid 18-karat gold, its monetary worth is anywhere between $1,474,592 and $2,527,872. A civic-minded museumgoer might therefore muse that the sum would have been better put toward reducing “the ever-increasing divide in our country between the wealthy and the poor that threatens the very stability of our culture”—a matter of such keen concern to curator Spector.

Be that as it may, whether of 18-karat gold or mere workaday porcelain, a toilet (to paraphrase Gertrude Stein) is a toilet is a toilet—not a work of art.

Notes

  1. If indeed it was even his. See “Duchamp or the Baroness?—What Difference Does It Make?,” For Piero’s Sake, August 2, 2015. ↩

Award-Winning Critic Maligns Ayn Rand’s Theory of Art

January 16, 2018 4 Comments
Jillian Steinhauer, Critic
Jillian Steinhauer, Senior Editor of Hyperallergic.

Google “Ayn Rand’s theory of art,” and the second item you will find [as of this writing] is an article with that title in the online magazine Hyperallergic. Published in September 2012, the article—which prominently cites the book I co-authored on Rand’s theory—has been known to me for some time. But it is such a scurrilous hatchet job that I didn’t want to dignify it with a response.

What changed my mind? The recent discovery that the article’s author, Jillian Steinhauer (Hyperallergic’s senior editor), was honored by the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) with its Best Art Reporting award in 2014. “Prizing excellence in writing,” AICA-USA also designated Hyperallergic the Best Blog.

So it may be worth dissecting Steinhauer’s piece after all, to see what presumably passes for “excellence in writing” in today’s artworld.

To begin with, after being alerted by an abstract painter named Abigail Markov to “the hefty 539-page treatise” What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand, Steinhauer “couldn’t quite bring” herself to “buy the book”—or even, I would add, to consult a copy in the New York Public Library. Instead, she relies on “excerpted bits” and chapter summaries that were published online.

Starting, reasonably enough, with “the most basic question of all: what is art?” Steinhauer manages to come up with the following “key takeaway” from What Art Is Online. In her words:

Rand sees the primary purpose of art as “nonutilitarian and psychological in nature” and says that its cognitive function is “to bring man’s fundamental concepts and values ‘to the perceptual level of his consciousness’ and allow him ‘to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.’”

To my amazement, Steinhauer actually concurs: “OK, fair enough. I can get with that.” The problem for her “begins when you flip the question and ask what isn’t art.” She simply can’t understand why “Rand is horrified by the art establishment’s assertion that anything can be art if the artist (or a critic) says so.” And she can’t abide Rand’s view that representational painting, drawing, and sculpture are the principal forms of visual art.

Steinhauer then proceeds to list some of the artworld luminaries and genres called into question by Rand’s theory (“things that Rand says are not art, from all artistic fields, not just visual”)—few of them directly excluded by Rand, in fact. Had Steinhauer deigned to read the book, she would have recognized that it was Louis Torres and I—not Rand herself—who had drawn such exclusions, based on Rand’s theory. In any case, like others challenged by our revisionist viewpoint, Steinhauer simply rejects our conclusions—our exclusions from the realm of “art”—without considering (much less rebutting) the evidence and arguments behind them.

Among the excluded genres noted by Steinhauer are “any and all abstract art.” By implication, she finds this absurd. But does she consider what “fundamental concepts and values” (a key part of Rand’s theory that she “can get with”) are communicated by abstract painting or sculpture? Hardly. Nor does she venture to reconcile “American Indian artifacts and other examples of ‘craft’”—another item on the list of exclusions—with Rand’s view of “the primary purpose of art as ‘nonutilitarian and psychological in nature’” (which she also says she agrees with).

Predictably, Steinhauer has nothing good to say about our “critique of spurious postmodernist genres (from ‘pop art,’ ‘conceptual art,’ and ‘performance art’ to ‘installation art’ and ‘video art’) and acclaimed postmodernist ‘artists,’ including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, and Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Chuck Close, and Matthew Barney.” Yet she is again mum on the question of how she thinks these examples would fit Rand’s definition of art—which “she can get with.”

Finally, Steinhauer is dismissive of the book’s Appendixes—in particular, Appendix B: Artworld Buzzwords. As if nailing the ultimate absurdity of Rand’s theory, she cites our listing of “such innocuous verbs and adjectives” as “challenge,” “confront,” “explore,” and “quirky,” as well as “the artist,” “emerging artist,” “contemporary,” “gallerist,” “make,” “new,” “object,” and “visual culture.” But she fails to note our countless excerpts from recent arts coverage showing how those buzzwords are used to legitimize “cutting-edge” work that many reasonable people, including genuine art lovers, find beyond the pale of art.

Contra Rand, Steinhauer stands by the “quirky, abstract political web installations made by emerging artists and shown by a handful of new gallerists that explore our society’s visual culture and challenge our notions of objecthood.”

In her closing paragraph, the award-winning critic—whose specialty is the “intersection of art and politics”—can’t resist the following reference to the 2012 presidential campaign:

At this point it might be relevant to mention [Mitt] Romney’s comments about axing the National Endowment for the Arts if elected (in the book, Rand [no, Torres and Kamhi] calls the NEA “a dubious model” for arts support) or the influence of Rand on vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan . . . but I just can’t do it. I can’t take Ayn Rand’s “esthetic theory” seriously enough for that.

Hmm. . . . Could Steinhauer’s political animus explain why she couldn’t bring herself to read the book about Rand’s theory to begin with and discover what it actually says? If so, she’s surely not alone in today’s artworld—though better minds than hers [more] have found that theory well worth taking seriously.

Chinese Translation in Progress

January 11, 2018 3 Comments

Some time ago, I received a message through my website contact form that was headed “Looking for Possibility to Translate Your Book into Chinese.” Needless to say, I was delighted.

After introducing himself as Chen Guang Wang, a Chinese émigré in his third year as a student of Visual Art at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, the writer explained:

Chen Guang Wang - False Simulacra,
Chen Guang Wang, False Simulacra, winner of best figurative/portrait award at the 7th International Represen-tational Show hosted by the Federation of Canadian Artists.

Art has been my lifelong endeavor, yet I have always wondered why I could not understand most Contemporary Art. About a year ago, I Googled “why I can’t understand conceptual art” and found Aristos, with your article “Understanding Contemporary Art.” I also learned of your book Who Says That’s Art?. I was thrilled to see that someone has been dedicated to this issue for decades, and that your writing is very solid.

Observing that art in China is in the same confused condition as here and that people are “thirsty” for anything new from the West, he added that “after 100 years, we might be . . . at a turning point,” with a return to representational work. In such a climate, he suggested, there should be interest in a Chinese edition of Who Says That’s Art?.

In a subsequent message, Chen Guang wrote that he was eager to translate the book because “most people are perplexed by ‘conceptual art,’ ‘readymades’ and ‘abstract art.'” In his view, my “strong argument” against such work “definitely needs to be spread.”

Given the extensive work required to translate the entire book and publish a Chinese edition, however, we agreed that it would be prudent to explore the potential interest for such an edition. A sample chapter—Chen Guang’s translation of the book’s Introduction into Simplified Chinese—is therefore published here. Chinese readers interested in seeing more should contact the translator.

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