Art Critics or Political Agitators/Activists? (redacted)

June 27, 2020 / Michelle Kamhi / Art and Politics, Art criticism, Contemporary art, social justice / 19 Comments

[July 3 Addendum] As a member of AICA-USA (the U.S. section of the International Association of Art Critics), I recently received an email message from the Board of Directors announcing: “AICA-USA has issued a statement of solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives [M4BL].”¹ That statement—which had not been submitted to members for input or approval beforehand—does not speak for me and I emphatically reject it. While I deplore, as would any decent person, the callously brutal murder of George Floyd (as well as instances in which other blacks have been victims of police abuse at worst or misjudgment at best), I question the narrative of “systemic racism” they have given rise to in the black-lives-matter movement. Even more important, I reject the destructive approaches that are being advocated and pursued in response.

What Does Solidarity with M4BL Mean?

I adamantly reject this goal prominently posted on the M4BL website.

To understand my objections, one needs to examine the Movement for Black Lives website (M4BL.org), since being “in solidarity” with that consortium implies agreement with its platforms. “Defund the Police” is one of their chief goals.² Like so many other purportedly liberating goals, however, it would probably most hurt the people it promises to help. The rich could afford to hire their own protection, while economically disadvantaged blacks would be left vulnerable to the criminal elements in society. How well did getting rid of the police in Seattle’s CHOP district, for example, work for the two black men who were shot there before Seattle’s mayor at last decided to take action? Still worse, her failure to quickly shut down that anarchist project has inspired similarly destructive anti-police efforts across the nation—even in the capital, directly across from the White House.

Meanwhile, criminal violence continues at an appalling rate in Chicago, virtually ignored by the anti-racist protesters. How would defunding the police have saved the three-year-old black boy shot dead in Chicago on Father’s Day, or the 13 others killed there that weekend, or the countless black victims of black violence in other cities? Once again, events have shown that blacks are far more often the victims of other blacks than of white police abuse, and the crime rate among blacks is alarmingly high (more on that below). Those black lives don’t seem to matter to the BLM movement, however; only the deaths that can be blamed on alleged white racism do. Could it be that the ultimate goal for many of the agitators (though not for the well-meaning people who joined them to protest Floyd’s murder) is not to preserve black lives but, rather, to overthrow the entire American system?

“Solidarity” with M4BL also entails being expressly “anti-capitalist.” That goal no doubt resonates with one of the more vocal AICA members, who was the first to propose, on June 5, a statement of alliance with the black community and others “who have been disenfranchised by [the] current social, political and economic circumstances” of our “system of oppression.” As I responded, his statement was just the sort of inflammatory rhetoric that destructive groups like Antifa thrive on. “If you want to see what real ‘oppression’ looks like,” I added, “check out their violent tactics—not to mention the Communist crackdown in Hong Kong.” I then asked: “By the way, exactly what system would you like to replace our system with?”³ I’m still waiting for an answer.

“Solidarity” with M4BL further implies agreement with its constituent groups, including Black Lives Matter. Subscribing to #blacklivesmatter does not just mean valuing black lives. It has come to imply embracing the organized movement under that rubric, and all that it advocates and represents. A primary aim of Black Lives Matter is “disrupt[ing] the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” Undermining the black family has lamentable consequences, however, as shown by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Democratic senator from New York, 1977–2001) more than half a century ago.⁴

I should add that much of the intensity of the current response to #blacklivesmatter is inspired by hatred of the current president, which knows no bounds among AICA members. One of them recently posted a cartoon representing him in the guise of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children—with one knee on the neck of George Floyd, and the Statue of Liberty in place of Saturn’s child. I responded that it was

outrageously inflammatory, falsely implying that the president has condoned Floyd’s murder. The president is by no means beyond criticism, but this cartoon is an example of the Trump Derangement Syndrome totally off the rails.

Only one other member commented critically on the cartoon.

The work by Goya that is most apt here is The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

AICA’s “Progressive” Echo Chamber

On matters of art as well as politics, AICA is overwhelmingly “progressive.” (A lone vocal ally against that political tendency has been Franklin Einspruch.) That it is more concerned about politics than about art, however, is evident from its solidarity statement. It says nothing to condemn the attacks on museums or works of art during the recent protests, although one of the organization’s stated purposes is “to act on behalf of the physical preservation and moral defense of works of art.”⁵ The solidarity statement instead advocates that art institutions should “divest from police organizations,” “remove defense contractors from their boards,” “protect . . . frontline staff during the COVID-19 crisis,” and “diversify other departments.”

Diversifying of course relates only to race, gender, ethnicity, and economic status—not to views about art or politics.⁶ When I expressed some of my contrarian views (in response to members’ Trump-bashing, for example, I dared to say that the president’s policies were better than the Democratic alternatives), several members dubbed me a “racist.” Among them was a New York Times art critic, who asserted that anyone not “working against the current president” was a racist, “complicit in upholding white supremacy.” A former Newsweek art critic charged that if I didn’t see systemic racism and the poverty engendered by it as the main cause of the high crime rate among blacks I must believe that “there’s something inherently wrong with black people.” Never mind that wiser heads than his (such as Moynihan) have identified other likely causes.⁷

AICA Views on Art

The member who first proposed a solidarity statement touted “AICA’s unique position of leadership in the field of visual art.” I questioned that position, arguing that most of the contemporary “art” defended and promoted by him and other AICA members in the name of social justice isn’t even recognized as such by ordinary art lovers. For evidence, I referred to my “Hijacking” article and “What’s Wrong with Today’s Protest Art?.”

A former tenured professor of art history whose specialty is “art and politics” commented: “Michelle has written a book on the Aesthetics of Ayn Rand, that should give all of you some insights into what is going on here.”⁸ After actually reading my “Hijacking” article (few AICA members seem to have bothered to do so), the only point she referred to was my distinction between neo-Marxist critical pedagogy and logical critical thinking, which she dismissed as “non analytical,” offering no argument to justify her objection. She also claimed that I had failed to engage in critical thinking—without ever saying in what respect I had failed to do so. Further, she seemed to imply, mistakenly, that I think art can never deal with political subjects. In that, of course, she entirely missed my point. And neither she nor anyone else in the AICA online discussion dealt with that point’s elaboration in “What’s Wrong with Today’s Protest Art?.”

Most remarkably, the former professor had nothing to say about my noting, in the “Hijacking” article, that Gregory Sholette (an AICA member who is now a professor at Queens College, C.U.N.Y.) had expressly welcomed the widespread “‘de-skilling’ of artistic craft” that has occurred in the artworld since the 1960s—in particular, the fact that, as he observed, “conceptual art” has led, in effect, to “the total disappearance of the art object” (emphasis mine). Then what is left for “art critics” to deal with, I would ask. Attempting to answer that question might have provided the professor with a much-needed exercise in critical thinking.

One of AICA’s stated aims is “to develop professional . . . standards for the field of art criticism.” Early this year, therefore, I posted the following message, with the subject line “Food for thought regarding critical standards”:

I’d like to put some thoughts up for consideration regarding “contemporary art.”
A decade and a half ago, our colleague Peter Schjeldahl observed: “Art used to mean paintings and statues. Now it means practically anything human-made that is unclassifiable otherwise. This loss of a commonsense definition is a big art-critical problem.”

The year before, Ken Johnson had similarly noted in the New York Times: “Contemporary sculpture knows no boundaries. . . . This makes [it] a zone of enormous creative freedom. The down side is, if sculpture can be anything, then maybe it is not anything in particular. . . . And it becomes hard for people to care very passionately about it . . . , much less evaluate it.”
In the years since those astute observations, “creative freedom” has expanded exponentially, leaving the public increasingly baffled by and alienated from what passes for “modern” and “contemporary” art in the artworld at large. . . . Yet the dominant trend in criticism is to write sympathetically about all such work, with no regard to the effect it often has on artworld outsiders.

In that connection, I recently came upon this observation by John Canaday: “When sympathy for avant-garde art per se is the assumption behind a critical attitude, criticism can cease to be judgment and become a form of pedantry in which the goal is to find excitement and meaning in an object where they may not exist.”

I would argue that Canaday’s point remains ever more relevant today, and risks rendering our profession worthless in the culture at large.

The minimal response to my post was telling. Just one member wrote (privately, not to the full list) to say that she agreed with me—that my message was “spot on,” especially with regard to sculpture. The only other member who commented (also privately) was the former Newsweek critic. He snarkily dismissed the idea that contemporary critics are seriously out of touch with the public, by simply noting that it has been “the case with criticism sympathetic to modern art since, well, the beginning of modern art.” As if that resolved the problem! Then he directed a parting swipe at Canaday as “the guy who said that Abstract Expressionism had ‘exceptional tolerance for incompetence and deception.’” Indeed it had.

What sort of contemporary or modern work do AICA members find praiseworthy? The recent demise of Susan Rothenberg prompted hearty kudos for her horse paintings. (The New York Times eulogized her as an “acclaimed figurative painter.”)

Susan Rothenberg, Triphammer Bridge, 1974, 67 1/8″ x 9′ 7 3/8″ (170.5 x 292.1 cm). Museum of Modern Art. New York.

Not wishing to speak ill of the newly dead, I refrained from commenting that Rothenberg’s horses struck me as incredibly inept.

For another example: an AICA member posted an appreciative review of a show she had just curated at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha—Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens’s Look, it’s daybreak, dear, time to sing. I responded:

I’ve read Gregory’s review, but fail to see what it has to do with art. Whatever value the exhibition may have in educating the public about threats to the natural environment, Ibghy & Lemmens bring nothing of artistic value to it.

Dubbing their pieces “minimalist” does not help. Although unthinkingly embraced as art by the contemporary artworld, Minimalism was an especially vacuous form of anti-art. Nor does it matter that the pieces in question (they are not “mini-sculptures”)—which resemble “the wooden blocks children use for building and games”—“are actually based on data, graphs, and charts,” since no one could guess that connection without the labels. And reading the graphs and charts themselves would convey far more than the pieces alluding to them do. Isn’t art supposed to deepen our experience?

Finally, I would argue that the exhibition’s video of Eastern Loggerhead Shrikes being banded belongs in a museum of natural history or on PBS’s Nature series, not in a museum of art. It is essentially a piece of documentary footage, not a work of art.

Only one member wrote to say he was sympathetic to my point of view. “I do not think that a lot of what Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens are doing constitutes art-making activities,” he admitted. Yet he defended their piece Sales Volume of the 10 Top Meat Processing Companies (2014) as art. And he confided that he had long since given up arguing “it’s not art” about “all the poorly crafted, conceptualist dreck that clogs up exhibitions spaces on a global scale.” All the other comments were from members who regarded me as hopelessly out of touch with the “advances” in contemporary art. The curator in question acknowledged our “widely disparate understandings of art,” and suggested an extended conversation about them in an open forum. I replied that I’d “like nothing better than to debate these issues of critical and cultural importance in a public forum.” No one on the list seconded the idea, however.

In view of all the foregoing, how much would you stake on AICA’s aim “to develop professional . . . standards for the field of art criticism”?

July 3 Addendum
The co-presidents of AICA-USA have asked me to remove all quotes from other members in this post that originated on the organization’s online listserv, as they violate the listserv’s guidelines for preserving the privacy of members’ communications. I redacted my original post by removing relevant members’ names, but I have retained the quotes themselves, because they are needed to convey my point. As I explained in my response to AICA:

My use of a few brief anonymized quotes in no way violates anyone’s privacy. . . . What it does, in the public interest, is shine light on a profession that has for too long gone largely unchallenged for its views—views which are overwhelmingly at odds with those of much of the American public.

If AICA is sincere in seeking “to promote the values of art criticism as a discipline and to emphasize its contribution to society,” it should welcome public debate on the issues I’ve raised. And you as co-presidents should be more concerned about dealing with the issues themselves than with any minor infringement on my part of the listserv guidelines.

. . . AICA members are free to post Comments in response to my post, provided they do so in a more civil vein than was the case for all too much of the listserv content.

MMK

Notes

The message was signed by sixteen board members, several of whom are prominent figures in the artworld. ↩
Ironically, the founding of M4BL was itself inspired by, and has perpetuated, a false narrative of police brutality in 2014 against Michael Brown, Jr., in Ferguson, Missouri. ↩
I added that I would resign from AICA if it approved his proposal. Though I equally reject the proposal that was adopted, I will not resign, and remain instead as a contrarian voice. ↩
In The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, his 1965 report to the U.S. Department of Labor, Moynihan forcefully argued that the high rate of black families headed by single mothers (a legacy of slavery) greatly hindered the progress of blacks toward economic and social equality. (Though many single black mothers have heroically prevailed despite that disadvantage, the overall effect on the black community has been devastating and has been exacerbated by misguided welfare programs.) See also Steven Malanga, “The Left Needs a Moynihan Moment,” City Journal, February 14, 2017. ↩
The prominent BLM activist Shaun King recently approved the toppling of historic statues across the nation and tweeted: “All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. They are a gross form white supremacy. Created as tools of oppression.” If AICA has issued any statements rejecting King’s tweets, I haven’t seen them. ↩
This recalls what journalist Nicholas Kristof observed a few years ago about the diversity craze in academia: “Universities are the bedrock of progressive values,” he wrote, “but the one kind of diversity universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.” “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance,” New York Times, May 7, 2016. ↩
See also Barry Latzer, “Race, Crime and Culture,” Academic Questions, Winter 2018; and Edward Guthmann, “Shelby Steele has a lot to say about black society,” SFGate, May 15, 2006. ↩
For a sense of the anti-Randian animus of another AICA member, read “Award-Winning Critic Maligns Ayn Rand’s Theory of Art.” For Piero’s Sake, January 16, 2018. The critic in question is now at the New York Times. ↩

"systemic racism", AICA-USA, art criticism, avant-garde, conceptual art, contemporary art, critical pedagogy, critical standards, critical thinking, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, de-skilling of art, Defund the Police, diversity, George Floyd, Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Children", Gregory Sholette, John Canaday, M4BL, Marilou Lemmens, Peter Schjeldahl, Richard Ibghy, Seattle's CHOP district, Shaun King, Susan Rothenberg, Trump Derangement Syndrome

The Rehumanization of Public Art

January 23, 2020 / Michelle Kamhi / Contemporary art, Public Art / 3 Comments

For anyone who shares my utter dismay regarding the dehumanization of public art in recent decades,¹ I have good news. An extraordinarily ambitious, heartfelt, and skillful work of figurative public art is underway that communicates without the aid of an artist’s statement.

Sabin Howard - A Hero's Journey - detail

Sabin Howard, A Soldier’s Journey, first section, full-size clay model in studio prior to casting in bronze.

It is the slightly larger-than-life sculptural relief for the National World War I Memorial —designed by a very young architect, Joseph Weishaar (b. 1990), and a seasoned classical sculptor, Sabin Howard (b. 1963) [more]. Slated for Pershing Park in the nation’s capital (a stone’s throw from the White House), it is entitled A Soldier’s Journey: The Weight of Sacrifice. And as the title suggests, it offers a dramatic narrative, encapsulating what the war was like for a multitude of ordinary Americans—nearly 5 million of whom served and more than 116,000 of whom died in that conflict (exceeding those lost in the Korean and Vietnamese wars combined), in addition to 204,000 wounded.

Genesis of the Project

Despite its wrenching toll on the nation, World War I is a relatively unfamiliar event to most Americans, compared to other wars in our history. Until now, it has not even had a major memorial in the capital. This project to rectify that omission is the result of a long and intricate planning process undertaken by the WW I Centennial Commission, created by Congress in 2013. A major player in that process has been Edwin Fountain, the commission’s vice chairman. As he explains, the memorial aims to serve a dual function: to educate people about the war and to commemorate those who served in it.²

In contrast with the procedure followed for the highly controversial Eisenhower Memorial—for which designs were directly solicited from pre-selected firms³—the WW I Centennial Commission wisely chose to hold a completely open, international competition. Some 360 submissions were received. From these, five finalists were chosen in August 2015, and were then submitted for review to the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), whose approval would be needed for the final design. The CFA raised strong objections to each of the five designs under consideration—based in large measure on how the memorial would relate to the existing park design. The Centennial Commission then gave the five finalists $25,000 each and approximately four months to submit a revised design responsive to the CFA’s concerns. (Funding for the project has come mainly from private sources.)

The choice of Weishaar as the ultimate finalist was remarkable in several respects, not least his youth and relative inexperience. Only twenty-five at the time, he had not yet received his architectural license and was merely an intern at a Chicago firm, Brininstool + Lynch, Ltd. Moreover, his submission was an entirely independent project, whereas the other four finalists were teams of established professionals. Nor did he hail from a prestigious Eastern school with all the connections that might entail. His alma mater was the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville (which may serve to humble the graduates of highly touted institutions such as the Yale School of Architecture).

Most remarkably, Weishaar’s proposal, entitled The Weight of Sacrifice, stipulated figurative reliefs as a prominent part of the design—to depict what such sacrifice had entailed. This was a marked departure from the abstract modernist approach that has dominated public monuments for decades, epitomized by Maya Lin’s granite wall for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. On meeting Edwin Fountain at a reception in Howard’s studio last month, I congratulated him on that departure and commented that I’ve often wondered whether Lin’s wall would have any emotional impact a hundred years from now, when visitors no longer had a personal connection to the individuals named there. He responded that although he admires Lin’s memorial, the same idea had occurred to him, and agreed that a figurative monument, in contrast, can be timeless.

In his proposal, Weishaar had not yet chosen the sculptor, however, who would be crucial to the monument’s success. On subsequently searching for one through the National Sculpture Society, he found Sabin Howard—whose skill as a sculptor was already known to the Centennial Commission, as work by him was an impressive part of a design proposal that had been rejected because the overall architectural conception was deemed unsatisfactory.

The Weishaar-Howard collaboration has proved highly compatible. To begin with, in preparing for the project, each of them had spent endless hours examining World War I photographs to get a sense of what the experience of the war had been like. Deeply moved by what they saw, they resolved to work toward embodying that experience for others, in a readily accessible and emotionally compelling form.

The Creative Process

No aspect of the creative process has been simple or direct, however, because every step has had to be approved by the CFA. Howard began by arranging groups of models, dressed in WW I attire, into a series of compositions inspired by the wartime pictures he and Weishaar had seen. But on assembling photographs of the groups into a sequence, he realized that the whole lacked cohesion. What was needed was a story, a simple narrative to connect them. It became A Soldier’s Journey, showing a single doughboy take leave of his wife and young daughter at the left, to join the fray, share the tumult of war with comrades, suffer injury and shellshock, and eventually return home at the right. Once a reasonably coherent arrangement had been determined, he created a scaled-down drawing of the composition to present to the CFA.

Sabin Howard, A Soldier's Journey - drawing

Sabin Howard, A Soldier’s Journey: The Weight of Sacrifice, preliminary drawing.

A Soldier’s Journey, detail, test “print” in low relief, Weta Workshop, New Zealand.

On receiving the CFA’s approval, Howard was then faced with the daunting task of creating a sculptural maquette of the entire relief, scaled down to one-sixth. He had just six months to create the 9-foot-long maquette, comprising nearly 40 figures! To do so, he traveled to New Zealand to work with the Weta Workshop, renowned in the film industry for employing the most advanced technology to create alternative realities. At Weta, Howard re-shot all the figures in the round, posed and garbed as before, and then assembled the digital images of single figures into the narrative groupings in his drawing. Test “prints” early in the process clearly suggested to him that much deeper relief would be needed to carry the emotional effect at a distance.

When a final 3-D “print” in higher relief was created, it was digitalized and then cut up into 120 plastic sections, which were shipped to China, to be “printed” in 3-D and shipped back to New Zealand, where they were reassembled into whole figures integrated into the full composition. As Howard emphasizes, the result produced by such digital processes was very “mannequin-like.” He therefore spent the next 71 days sculpting the clay surface of the figures to bring them to life as only “an artist and the human hand” can do.

Sabin Howard - sculpting maquette of A Hero's Journey

Sabin Howard sculpting maquette of A Soldier’s Journey in New Zealand.

That creative product was again cut into sections, cast in resin, and reassembed into a maquette for review by the CFA in the U.S. Based on the CFA’s critique of that maquette, Howard went through another round of revision, reducing the projected dimensions of the relief from 75 to 60 feet in length, which would tighten the composition, making it more dramatic. He had just four months to create a new maquette based on the revised composition—another daunting task. For that step, he traveled to the state-of-the-art Pangolin foundry in the U.K.

Models for A Hero's Journey posing at Pangolin foundry

Models posing for 3-D imaging, Pangolin Editions foundry, U.K.

There, live models once again enacted the composition, and were photographed in three dimensions, utilizing Pangolin’s high-tech battery of 160 cameras. The digital image thus produced was then used to create a scaled-down sculptural relief for yet another review by the CFA.

Happily, that maquette was approved, and work on the full-scale figures could at last begin in Howard’s studio. Pangolin provided full-size 3-D “prints” of the figures to be used as armatures for the finished sculptures. In response to purists who would object that using such mechanical assistance means the “death” of traditional sculpture, Howard argues that it “enables us to make larger projects”—adding “but they have to be driven by traditional values and the ability to use your hand, your heart, and your brain to create art.”⁴ And he has indeed used his hand, heart, and brain at every key step of the process to ensure that the result is a work of art, not mere technology.

The Crucial Final Stage

Sabin Howard sculpting from model in his studio.

In the studio, Howard again works from live models, to transform the mannequin-like armatures into life-like depictions of humanity, through painstaking sculpting of the clay surface. His result is a world apart, in both technique and spirit, from directly cast work by postmodernists such as George Segal and Duane Hanson.

Sabin Howard, A Soldier’s Journey, detail: Wife/Mother figure before (left) and after (right) sculpting on Pangolin’s digitally cast armature.

To ensure that the mammoth project can be completed in a reasonable time frame (he expects to finish sculpting by December 2023⁵), Howard has enlisted the assistance of several classically trained sculptors. But he continually oversees their work, and the finishing touches are his. The first section (approximately one-third) of the full relief is nearly ready to be cast in bronze.

As a sculptor who has spent his life until now working entirely independently, Howard credits the broadly collaborative nature of this commissioned public work with forcing him to grow artistically, which he has indeed done. The complex and emotionally expressive relief that has evolved, in what he regards as the “epic journey” of this creative process, goes far beyond the relatively impassive classical figures he previously produced. But they are imbued with the same spirit, the same “sense of dignity” he seeks to project, “speak[ing] well of humanity . . . of heroism,” showing “that we are able to rise to the occasion when faced with great odds.” As such, all his work is in a different realm from what he laments as the “cinder blocks” of modernism.⁶ Collaboration has not made him fundamentally alter his vision for this piece, Howard says, but it has helped him to realize it more effectively. Finally, he earnestly hopes that this major project will help to raise public appreciation of and support for classically inspired contemporary figurative art. To that hope, I add a hearty Amen!

Notes

For some of my previous thoughts on this subject, see “Today’s ‘Public Art’–Rarely Public, Rarely Art,” Aristos, May 1988; and “‘Public Art’ for Whom?,” For Piero’s Sake, May 5, 2015. ↩
Fountain describes the background and aims of the project in an “Interview on World War I Memorial,” C-SPAN, December 15, 2015. He also outlines the five designs that were finalists in the competition held by the commission. ↩
The Eisenhower project was ultimately awarded to starchitect Frank Gehry—who has produced what I, like many critics, regard as a largely execrable design. To make matters worse, the choice of Gehry was probably biased by a personal connection to Rocco Siciliano, chairman of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission. Regarding Gehry’s overblown pretensions, see Louis Torres, “‘Mere’ Architecture?,” What Art Is Online, November–December 2001; and “At His Father’s Knee” (review of John Silber’s Architecture of the Absurd: How “Genius” Disfigured a Practical Art), Aristos, July 2009—apologies for any broken links in these articles, which are more than a decade old. ↩
Sabin Howard, talk on “The New National World War I Memorial,” Civic Art Society, Washington, D. C., December 9, 2019. ↩
The park portion of the memorial is already under construction and is slated for completion by the end of 2020. ↩
For example, see Alberto Montaño Mason, Cinder Blocks for My Father, 2005. ↩

A Soldier’s Journey: The Weight of Sacrifice, Commission of Fine Arts, dehumanization of public art, Duane Hanson, Edwin Fountain, figurative sculpture, George Segal, Joseph Weishaar, Maya Lin, National World War I Memorial, Pangolin foundry, Pershing Park, Sabin Howard, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Weta Workshop, WW I Centennial Commission

Dismaying Exhibition of De Waal Installations at the Frick

June 23, 2019 / Michelle Kamhi / Contemporary art, Exhibitions / 28 Comments

Edmund de Waal, an annunciation (2019). Porcelain, steel, gold, alabaster, aluminum, and plexiglass. Displayed below Virgin and Child, with Saints and Donor (ca. 1441−43), by Jan van Eyck and Workshop. Elective Affinities exhibition, The Frick Collection.

Edmund de Waal is the justly acclaimed British author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, a superb history/memoir of the Ephrussi banking family, of which he is a scion. He is also the creator of an unprecedented temporary exhibition now at the Frick Collection in New York City. Entitled Elective Affinities, it is the first exhibition of work by a living artist in the museum’s main galleries. Lamentably, it presents a dismaying contrast with the Frick’s permanent collection—as well as with his admirable book. It also exemplifies much of what is wrong with the contemporary artworld.

Elevating “Pots” to “Sculptures”

In his book, De Waal refers to himself quite simply as a “potter” by profession. Publicity materials about him tend to use the fancier term ceramicist. Either way, it means a craftsman who shapes pottery on a potter’s wheel and bakes it a kiln.¹ Unlike traditional pots, which serve a primarily practical function, De Waal’s ceramic creations are made only for display, in minimalist installations made to convey meaning of some kind. Remarkably nondescript and repetitive in themselves, his pots allegedly gain import from their mainly site-specific arrangements (more on that below). Such work has brought him prestigious commissions—ranging most recently from the Frick exhibition to his Psalm in Venice’s Jewish Ghetto in conjunction with this year’s biennale—as well as numerous artworld accolades.

Appropriately enough, the Frick show was organized by Charlotte Vignon, the curator of decorative arts—as befits an exhibition of ceramic pots. Yet its press release and other materials repeatedly refer to De Waal’s work as “sculptures” and to him as a “sculptor.” As it happens, Henry Clay Frick collected sculptures, as well as vases, furniture, and other works of decorative art. I have no doubt that he knew the difference between them. In today’s artworld, such meaningful distinctions have been dispensed with. But it is particularly disturbing to witness a traditionally conservative institution like the Frick succumb to the muddling of concepts and debasement of standards.

Unrealized Intentions

At a press preview for the Frick exhibition, De Waal spoke with the utmost sincerity of his reverence for the permanent collection and the home it is housed in, which he first visited at the impressionable age of seventeen. In a lecture given at the Frick, he recalls the “epiphany” he experienced on seeing Chardin’s Still Life with Plums there.

Jean-Siméon Chardin, Still Life with Plums (ca. 1730), oil on canvas, 17 3/4 × 19 3/4 in. (45.1 × 50.2 cm). The Frick Collection.

Remarkably, De Waal was primarily struck not by the objects themselves but by Chardin’s placement of them— by “the way they were placed in the world, . . . which had presence, which had some kind of meaning in the world.” As he explains, inspired by Chardin’s example, he is still dealing with how objects are placed in the world.

What De Waal missed in that life-changing epiphany seems so obvious as not to need stating. The meaning in Chardin’s painting mainly emerges not from how the objects are placed but from what they are—objects of everyday life that we have some experience of and can therefore relate to—luscious plums, a refreshing glass of water, a glossy carafe, etc. In contrast, what meaning can be gleaned from De Waal’s abstract arrangements of nondescript pots and slabs? He has said that he intends them to create a “dialogue” with the collection. I would argue that they are utterly mute partners in that dialogue. They are, in effect, jarringly anomalous intruders—if one notices them at all (surprisingly, De Waal has stated that he doesn’t mind if one misses them).²

The inability of these works to speak for themselves (as the paintings and sculptures in the permanent collection so effectively do) very likely prompted the curatorial decision to provide viewers with audio files of the “artist” explaining each work, as well as of the music that he says helped to inspire it. Much as I love music, knowing what De Waal chose to listen to while he worked is of minimal interest to me. What matters is what he made of that inspiration—which, I insist, is very little indeed.

Hare with Amber Eyes, ivory netsuke figure from the Ephrussi family collection.

Ironically, the unpretentious miniature sculptures known as netsuke figures—which play such a prominent part in De Waal’s family narrative—are far more eloquent than his ambitious installations of pots aspiring to the condition of sculpture.

What Would Mr. Frick Think?

At a press preview for the De Waal show, the Frick’s director, Ian Wardropper, made much of the fact that Mr. Frick himself had collected “contemporary art”—as if that gave license to the present exhibition. The analogy is preposterous. The contemporary work collected by Frick consisted of relatively traditional works of realist painting and sculpture. Millet [more] was a particular favorite. There were no installations of abstract ceramics in industrial-looking vitrines.³ Installation is a postmodernist genre whose origins lay in the anti-art impulses of the 1950s and ’60s, long after Frick’s death.

Henry Clay Frick died in 1919. His acquisition of contemporary art is amply documented in the insightful biography by his great-granddaughter, Martha Frick Symington Sanger—who discerns a “profound psychological relationship between the man and his paintings.” As she persuasively argues, many of his acquisitions of both old and new art were probably inspired by their visual resemblance to people and places from his past.

Frick’s interest in contemporary art was sufficient for him to attend the 1913 Armory Show. But the only work he bought there was a still life of flowers by Walter Pach—though he is also reported to have expressed strong interest in Paul Cézanne’s Femme au Chapelet (Old Woman with a Rosary), which had already been sold. These were hardly revolutionary works, however. Moreover, I suspect that the appeal of the Cézanne, in particular, was mainly personal, stemming primarily from his deep attachment to his maternal grandmother—a devout woman who was “his spiritual mainstay and most ardent supporter,” according to Sanger, who cites several Frick acquistions that she suggests were similarly inspired.

If Mr. Frick’s museum now wishes to exhibit contemporary work truly consistent with his taste, they would do well to turn to the classical realists (see, for example, “Contemporary Art Worth Knowing”), rather than to the latest artworld stars such as De Waal.

In today’s anti-traditional artworld, such a turn would be revolutionary indeed.

Notes

The process can be viewed in a BBC video entitled What Do Artists Do All Day?. In referring to De Waal as an “artist,” the BBC apes the artworld’s promiscuous terminology—which is not missed by viewers, one of whom aptly comments: “He churns out pots and calls it Art, is that it?.” ↩
The piece titled an alchemy is so inconspicuously placed in the Frick Library that on noticing my searching for it a guard stepped forward to point it out to me, a service I saw him perform for other visitiors as well. ↩
De Waal stresses the importance of the vitrines as an integral part of each work. ↩

ceramist, Chardin, classical realists, Edmund de Waal, Frick Collection, Henry Clay Frick, installation art, netsuke, pottery, sculpture

The Art of Critical Spinning

June 4, 2019 / Michelle Kamhi / Abstract Art, Art criticism, Contemporary art / 3 Comments

The Art of Looking (Basic Books, 2018) by art critic Lance Esplund—a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, among other prestigious publications—is yet another of countless attempts to reconcile the public to the bizarre inventions of the avant-garde.¹ A more fitting title would be “The Art of Critical Spinning.”

Subtitled How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art, the book begins: “The landscape of art has changed dramatically during the past one hundred years.” Indeed it has. As Esplund then recounts, we’ve seen things ranging from Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square and Marcel Duchamp’s urinal dubbed Fountain to Jackson Pollock’s “drip” paintings, Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit, and Chris Burden’s performance piece Shoot. “Is it any wonder,” he asks, “that the art-viewing public is bewildered, even intimidated?” How about “disgusted—even totally alienated,” I would ask.

Yet Esplund sees nothing wrong with such inventions. He treats them all as if they were continuous with traditional painting and sculpture of the past. His aim is to make contemporary art “more approachable, by illuminating the similarities between recent and past art.” Like other defenders of the avant-garde, however, he thereby ignores or discounts the explicitly disjunctive intentions of the most radical of its inventors—from the abstract pioneers to the early postmodernists—who knew very well that they were breaking with the past, not continuing it. More on that below.

Esplund defines contemporary art as “any art being created by living or recently deceased artists— . . . whatever the mode and materials and subjects.” Yet like most other critics he says nothing about traditional contemporary work like that in “Contemporary Art Worth Knowing.” Only two of the sixteen works illustrated in his book—Edouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe and The Cat with a Mirror I by Balthus—are representational paintings. And both are aggressively “modern” in their markedly transgressive content.

Despite the chaotic diversity of works he accepts as art, Esplund nonetheless aims to demonstrate what he sees as the “continuum of art’s language.” It leads him to draw some very dubious connections.

What Is the Language of Art?

For millennia prior to the invention of “abstract (nonobjective) art,” the universal language of art consisted of imagery. Contrary to a widely held view in response to the advent of nonobjective work, the “elements of art” discussed by Esplund—line, color, shape, texture, etc.—do not constitute the equivalent of a “language.” Properly speaking, they are analogous merely to the letters or syllables of a language. It is not through such elements in themselves but through the images they constitute—images representing recognizable objects, albeit often in a highly stylized rather than realistic manner—that art most powerfully conveys its meaning. And it is through our experience of objects in the real world that we understand it. In the absence of imagery, art is merely “decorative.”²

Moreover, unlike spoken or written language, the visual language of art—that is, imagery—is not an arbitrary system of symbols but a natural byproduct of how we grasp reality. The abstract pioneers attempted to invent a new visual language without any reference to objects in the real world. But they failed, as they themselves in effect admitted.³ As they feared, their paintings were unintelligible to the public, who perceived them as merely “decorative,” and could not discern the deep metaphysical meaning they were attempting to convey.⁴

In his effort to accommodate every invention of the avant-garde, Esplund ignores such facts. Instead, he claims that the language of art “continually evolves and reinvents itself” and that this “complex language . . . often has nothing to do with the appearance of the world outside of art.” Moreover, he perversely insists that “the elements and language of art remain basically unchanged” in objects as diametrically different as Piet Mondrian’s abstract painting Composition with Blue and Damien Hirst’s postmodernist piece consisting of a real shark in a tank of formaldehyde.

Astonishingly, Esplund refers to the latter—as well as to the Great Pyramid of Giza—as a work of “sculpture”! Were his editors at Basic Books (a widely respected publisher) asleep at the helm? Was no one troubled by so promiscuous a use of that key term?

Falling into the Duchamp Trap

What, we should ask, requires us to regard a pickled shark and other postmodernist oddities as art, in Esplund’s view? Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, of course. And exactly what is a readymade? Duchamp is often quoted as having defined it as “an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”⁵. The only source for that quote (in French) is the Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme by André Breton and Paul Éluard, however, and the attribution to Duchamp has been questioned.⁶ In other, more reliable sources, Duchamp unequivocally declared that he never intended the readymades as art; they were just a “distraction” for him.⁷

Nonetheless, Esplund offers the standard account of Duchamp’s Fountain as his “most famous and influential” work—although Duchamp’s two chief biographers treat it as little more than a practical joke. To his credit, Esplund correctly notes that the readymades were “not fully embraced until after the mid-twentieth century.” Yet he doesn’t pause to consider why.⁸ He merely asserts that, after Duchamp, “anything—anything whatsoever, as long as it came from an artist—could be designated as art.” As he later reiterates: “art is whatever an artist says it is.”

Never mind that Duchamp didn’t intend the readymades as art. Even if he had, why are we obliged to accede to his or anyone else’s claim that they are art? Isn’t an artist properly defined as someone who creates art? And doesn’t that definition also imply that works of art differ from ordinary objects? Why should we grant purported artists infallibility on this crucial cultural question?

Such questions go unasked by Esplund. And as he observes early in his book, the “anti-aesthetic” assumptions of postmodernism—based on the shaky foundation of Duchamp’s readymades—have become the artworld’s “reigning ideology.”

A Fundamental Disconnect

Esplund often says the right things about art in general, making points that I would tend to agree with. For example, he believes that the best artists “have something to say, and the creative means to say it well.” He also holds that the purpose of art is to “heighten . . . experience,” for viewers as well as for the artist. “The more deeply one engages with art,” he further observes, “the more deeply one engages with life and with what it means to be human.” Moreover, he notes that artists expect each viewer to engage with a work in relation to his own life experience, to personal memories and desires—I would say “values”—that the work awakens. In addition, he emphasizes (much as I have done in Who Says That’s Art?) that the experience of art can be enhanced by viewing and discussing it with other people. His ultimate goal is “to help you learn to have faith in your own eyes and heart and gut, and to feel confident reading [I would say experiencing] works of art on your own.”

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Blue (1926), Philadelphia Museum of Art.

So far so good. The problem arises when one attempts to reconcile such principles with the anti-traditional works Esplund focuses on. For example, he rhapsodizes for nearly four pages on Mondrian’s “extremely spare” Composition with Blue—expatiating on the “pushing and pulling” (ideas he borrows from the abstract painter Hans Hofmann and returns to throughout the book) and “tensions” of its minimalist forms and lines. Such a formalist analysis may interest him as a former painter, but how many viewers would have their engagement with life heightened by Mondrian’s abstract design? More remarkably, Esplund says nothing about what Mondrian was actually trying “to say” in such work—which was inspired by his desire, grounded in dubious tenets of Theosophy, to escape from the material world into a realm of pure spirit. How many viewers would guess that from the work itself?

Furthermore, what does Hirst’s pickled shark (which Esplund has the temerity to compare to “an Assyrian sculpture of a deity-king”) tell us about “what it means to be human”?

When Esplund discusses traditional art, he can offer illuminating insights, as in a passage about metaphor in art, likening the figure of Eve by the sculptor Gislebertus (in the wondrous Romanesque relief below, from the twelfth-century cathedral of Autun) to a serpent.

Gislebertus, The Temptation of Eve, c. 1130 Musée Rolin, Autun. Originally on the door lintel, north transept portal, Cathedral of Saint-Lazare, Autun.

The two identities, he aptly observes, “are bridged, fused, and a new being is born—neither Eve nor serpent, but somehow a joining of the two, as she sinuously undulates, as if swimming horizontally across the rectangle—as if passing before us like a dream.”

But the value of such insights is undercut when Esplund attempts to apply them to modernist and postmodernist work. If, as he claims, Alberto Giacometti’s abstract sculpture Reclining Woman Who Dreams (1929) “explored . . . metaphoric territory” similar to that of Gislebertus’s Eve, for example, it is not at all evident in the finished work, even with the aid of the title.

That is but one example of Esplund’s failure to recognize how a normal person not besotted by artworld sophistry is likely to respond to radically unconventional contemporary work. A more troubling instance is his extended discussion of The Cat with a Mirror I by the Polish-French painter Balthus. Though he devotes nearly ten pages to that work, he fails to adequately deal with the feature that is likely to be most salient to an ordinary viewer: her pose with legs spread far apart placing her naked pubic area nearly at the center of the picture. Apart from his rather tame allusion to the fact that “she appears to be opening herself to us,” Esplund ignores that most viewers trusting their gut (as he urges us to do) would probably—and quite reasonably—be repelled by the image as redolent of child pornography.

The publisher of Basic Books touts this as a “wise and wonderful” book. I beg to differ.

Notes

Another is Seeing Slowly: Looking at Modern Art, by art dealer Michael Findlay (New York: Prestel, 2017). ↩
Some abstract designs, such as the mandala in Indian culture, do carry symbolic meaning. However, I maintain that their psychological impact is far weaker than that of imagery and they therefore belong in another category than “fine art.” ↩
See “Has the Artworld Been Kidding Itself about Abstract Art?,” Aristos, December 2013. ↩
The abstract pioneers’ intent, as well as their recognition of failure, is discussed in “The Myth of ‘Abstract Art,’” chapter 8 of What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand. ↩
See the Museum of Modern Art’s gloss on the readymade In Advance of the Broken Arm, for example ↩
Hector Obalk attributes the definition to Breton, as affirmed by André Gervais, in “The Unfindable Readymade,” Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, May 1, 2000. ↩
Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. by Ron Padgett (New York: Viking Press, 1971). ↩
The reason is that it suited the anti-art aims of the postmodernists reacting against the artworld ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism. ↩

Balthus, contemporary art, Damien Hirst, elements of art, Giacometti, Gislebertus, Jackson Pollock, Lance Esplund, language of art, Malevich, Marcel Duchamp, modern art, Piero Manzoni, Piet Mondrian, readymades

Teaching (New) Media Art

May 12, 2019 / Michelle Kamhi / Art Education, Contemporary art / No Comments

Image for article by Pam Stephens, SchoolArts Magazine, March 2019.

Having just read an article bearing the above title—in the March issue of SchoolArts Magazine—I am reminded of the Seinfeld “show about nothing.” For New Media Art, it turns out, includes just about everything. Which means, in effect, that it is nothing in particular, certainly nothing teachable as a discrete discipline.

That has not deterred the School of Art at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff from introducing a degree program in New Media Art, however. Nor does it deter Pam Stephens—a professor of art education at the university—from urging her students to enroll in its courses in partial fulfillment of their studio requirements. Nor does she hesitate to recommend the field for its “meaningful transdisciplinary connections” to readers of SchoolArts, of which she is a contributing editor.

What Exactly Is “New Media Art”?

Unlike the old, digitized “media art”—Stephens informs us—the new version has the virtue of being far more inclusive. It embraces not only such postmodernist inventions as installation art, performance art, 3D printing, and video art, but also “many more” categories not covered in the space of her one-page article. Reading between the lines, open-endedness (in spades) is the name of the game.

“There is no limit to the materials or processes” that can be used in installation art, for instance, which “often test[s] the limits of what can be classified as art.” Indeed. That has more than a little to do with its origin as one of postmodernism’s anti-art inventions (along with “performance” and “video art”)—a salient fact not noted by Stephens, who simply accepts it uncritically as art. One of the “exemplar artists” she cites in this category is Yayoi Kusama, who has gained fame for creating installations such as rooms filled with her signature polka dots, which I would argue are more akin to an amusement park fun house than to a work of art. ¹ And the most famous work by Ai Weiwei (another “successful installation artist” cited by Stephens) is the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project—which consists of a list of names of the earthquake’s victims, accompanied by heartrending videos of their family members. A powerful form of political protest by a courageous dissident, but as I’ve argued elsewhere, it scarcely qualifies as “art.”² For Stephens, however, artworld fame apparently trumps all other considerations.

Then there is performance art, which likewise “covers a broad spectrum of approaches”—“scripted or impromptu, random or intentional, live or filmed, solo or collaborative”—and can include “elements of poetry, music, theater, or dance.” The key question (unasked by Stephens) is, How can anything that amorphous be taught? The answer is, It can’t. “Success” in the contemporary artworld appears to be sufficient reason for study, however. Performance “artists” worth exploring in Stephens’s view include Marina Abramović and Anthea Hamilton, for example. (Hamilton, by the way, was a finalist for Britain’s Turner Prize in 2016, thanks to a piece featuring a larger-than-life sculpture of a naked butt.) A recent “successful” Hamilton piece that Stephens cites is The Squash at the Tate Britain in London in 2018. I would characterize it as an elaborately designed but utterly meaningless spectacle—yet another fun-house brand of entertainment, not art—which manages to divert spectators without engaging them in a truly meaningful way. Similarly, Abramović drew sizable crowds to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010 with her interactive piece The Artist Is Present, in which she silently confronted an endless succession of museumgoers, staring each down in turn across an empty table.

Marina Abramović (and unknown participant), The Artist Is Present, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010.

As for video art, one of its “first recognized examples”—Stephens notes—was Nam June Paik’s “unplanned footage” of Pope Paul VI’s 1965 processional in New York City. Where, I would ask, is the art in unplanned footage?³

Do the New Media Signify Artistic Progress?

Artist unknown, Seated Scribe, Ancient Egyptian, 4th Dynasty (2613–2498 BCE), limestone, quartz and copper, 21 in. high, Louvre Museum.

The fourth of the new media discussed by Stephens is 3D printing. She characterizes it as an “additive sculptural process” and features a “3D-printed artwork” in the only image accompanying her article. Comparing that vacuous “artwork” with the compelling figure of an ancient Egyptian Seated Scribe pictured here, however [click on image to enlarge], leads me to think that while 3D printing is an instance of technological progress, it has subtracted more than it has added to the sculptural process. To my mind, it suggests regression, not progress, in the four and a half millennia that have intervened since the Scribe’s creation.⁴

Yet Stephens, like all too many of today’s art educators, seems entirely oblivious of such considerations of quality. Instead, she makes exorbitant claims regarding the benefits of studying New Media Art in preparing students for the 21st-century global society. Are we really to believe (as she implies, however unwittingly) that Marina Abramović’s performance stunts can serve as a model for “skillful social engagement,” for example, or that Yayoi Kusama’s obsessive engagement with polka dots can help teach anyone how to “solve real-world problems”? Of course we shouldn’t. But how many art teachers will have the sense to reject Stephens’s absurd claims or will instead clamber aboard the New Media bandwagon?

Notes

Given Kusama’s obsession with polka dots, it is no wonder she has spent the past four decades residing in a psychiatric hospital, albeit voluntarily. But what are we to make of the critics, curators, and others who are presumably sane, yet tout her work as meaningful “art”? ↩
See “What’s Wrong with Today’s Protest Art?,” For Piero’s Sake, February 11, 2018. ↩
For more reflections on what’s wrong with “video art,” see my article on one of the artworld’s leading practitioners of the genre: “Bill Viola’s Passions—No Kinship to Rubens,” Aristos, May 2003. ↩
On the false notion of “progress” in the arts, see Kenyon Cox, “The Illusion of Progress,” December 13, 1912; and the more recent essay by composer John Borstlap, “The Myth of Progress in the Arts,” reprinted from his website by the Future Symphony Institute. ↩

3D printing, Ai Weiwei, Anthea Hamilton, installation art, Marina Abramović, Nam June Paik, New Media, Northern Arizona University School of Art, Pam Stephens, performance art, SchoolArts Magazine, video art, Yayoi Kusama

What Semmelweis Taught Me

April 14, 2019 / Michelle Kamhi / Art Education, General / 4 Comments

Ignaz Phillip Semmelweis, 1860 engraving by Jenő Doby.

What does a book report on the life of a nineteenth-century Hungarian obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) have to do with art and art education, the subjects I’m now immersed in? Quite a lot, as it happens.

Never heard of Semmelweis? Neither had I until I read a historical fiction about him entitled The Cry and the Covenant, by Morton Thompson. It was in my senior year at Hunter College High School in New York City, in fulfillment of a biology assignment to read and report on a book about someone who had made a major contribution to the life sciences. I have no idea how or why I chose that book about Semmelweis. What I do know is that it left an indelible impression on me, with ripples extending far beyond medicine and biology.

Semmelweis’s transformative work should have made his name a household word the world over. As a young doctor serving as the chief resident in the First Obstetrical Clinic of Vienna’s most prestigious hospital, he discovered an astonishingly simple measure for virtually eradicating puerperal (“childbed”) fever, which had been killing new mothers and infants at an appalling rate. Remarkably, prior to his work, women who gave birth in the street were far more likely to survive than those who entered the hospital.

Observing that the mortality rates in the First Clinic were more than double those in the hospital’s Second Clinic, Semmelweis deduced the cause. Whereas the Second Clinic was attended only by midwives, the First Clinic was under the care of doctors in training, who often went directly from studying cadavers in the autopsy room to examining women in labor. Though the germ theory of infection had not yet been established as a fundamental principle of medicine, Semmelweis reasoned that the medical students were unwittingly transmitting some unknown contaminant through cadaverous material left on their hands.

In response, he instituted a policy requiring students to wash their hands in a solution of chlorated lime before examining patients. (Since that solution was most effective in eliminating the putrid smell of infected cadaverous tissue, Semmelweis surmised that it eradicated the infectious material itself.) As of April 1847, the mortality rate in the First Clinic had been 18.3%. After hand washing was begun in May, the rate in successive months dropped to 2.2%, 1.2%, 1.9%, and even zero—rates comparable to those in the Second Clinic.

In the following year, Semmelweis stipulated that all instruments used to examine women in labor should also be cleaned beforehand in the chlorine solution—which resulted in the virtual elimination of childbed fever in the First Clinic. Numerous further confirmations of his policy’s salutary effect were forthcoming and were disseminated to the medical community through published papers, professional presentations, and word of mouth.

A Terrible Truth

The transcendent lesson to be learned from the life of Semmelweis lay not in his remarkable discovery, however. It lay in the medical establishment’s stubborn resistance to adopting his simple preventive measure. Despite the overwhelming evidence of its effectiveness, Semmelweis’s policy was almost universally ridiculed and rejected. Eminent German physicians derided him as der Pesther Narr (the Fool from Pest). The vast majority of doctors clung to their prior notions regarding the cause of childbed fever—ranging from miasmas to imbalance in the mothers’ bodily humors. Long-established physicians and hospital administrators in the more “advanced” European countries were not about to be shown up by a young upstart from Hungary. Still less were they disposed to acknowledge that their practices were responsible for countless deaths.

Semmelweis eventually lost his position at the hospital and was impelled to return to Hungary. From there he tried in further desperation to enlighten fellow physicians regarding his urgent findings. Not until nearly two decades later was he posthumously vindicated in the eyes of the medical establishment, however, when Louis Pasteur demonstrated the underlying microbiology of infection. In the interim, thousands of women and babies needlessly died. So, too, Semmelweis himself tragically and prematurely died, possibly driven to insanity by his inability to save those helpless victims of other doctors’ blind stupidity.

Ironically, the Viennese hospital that had once driven Semmelweis out in ignominy is now named after him. But his story was so notorious a blot on the medical profession that its students are now taught to beware the “Semmelweis effect”—the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or knowledge because it contradicts established beliefs. As I wrote in my book report (thanks to pack-rat tendencies, I still have the original!), his experience “shows the necessity of a completely open, un-prejudiced mind in science.”

Though I did not comment on it at the time, the wider lesson to be learned from Semmelweis’s case lodged itself in the recesses of my memory. The tendency to reject anything that challenges established views is a universal psychological phenomenon. As one of Semmelweis’s friends observes in Thompson’s novel, it is “the oldest disease of humanity.” It applies not just to science but to every sphere of human life. I see it clearly in my encounters with the art establishment. The striking difference is that the present groupthink operates against tradition in favor of anything radically new in the guise of art. Art historians, critics, cultural trustees and administrators alike are now wedded to the “institutional theory,” under which virtually anything can qualify as art—from a urinal purchased in a plumbing-supply store to a piece of purported music consisting of nothing more than the ambient noise of the concert hall. What they are not prepared to accept is a theory that challenges that view.

With the example of Semmelweis to inspire me, however, I persist undaunted in arguing that the “institutional” definition of art—and all the nonsense that flows from it—is absurd. For a telling example of the nonsense, see “Fake Art—the Rauschenberg Phenomenon.”

belief perseverance, Ignaz Semmelweis, institutional theory of art, Semmelweis Reflex, The Cry and the Covenant

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