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 / 3 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

Build Kindness not Walls—More Art Ed Nonsense

January 30, 2019 / Michelle Kamhi / Art Education / 10 Comments

Leafing recently through a back issue of Arts & Activities (which bills itself as “the Nation’s Leading Art Education Magazine”), I was struck by yet another instance of the foolish injection of political issues into art education.¹ An article entitled “Design Thinkers” featured the following photo:

Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman, “Build Kindness not Walls,” New York City, March 15, 2016.

The project shown had been carried out in 2016. But its mention in the March 2018 issue of Arts & Activities was prompted by a glowing account of the 2017 Design Thinkers Conference—at which “perhaps the most entertaining and inspirational talk” was given by Timothy Goodman, one of the project’s two designers.

According to the Arts & Activities contributing editor who penned the account, the project

reflected the design community’s response to the Trump administration’s promise to build a wall on the U.S/Mexican frontier. [This] brilliant creative wall . . . [was] an example of the potential artists have to inform the public and make our leaders at least reconsider their decisions.

What’s wrong with that claim? Never mind that at the time the project was executed there was no “Trump administration”; there was only the Trump presidential campaign. Of more substantive importance for art education, the claim ignores the utterly pedestrian (in more ways than one) quality of the project’s design—which naively promotes a dubious political agenda.

As an example of design, the project’s lineup of volunteers holding nondescript placards spelling out the project’s political message was anything but “brilliant.” Its only claim to distinction lay in the community organization involved in assembling the bearers of the placards. True, it had “earned considerable media attention,” including sympathetic coverage in the New York Times (“A Pitch for Kindness Outside Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan”). Yet that, too, was due not to any brilliance of visual design, but rather to the political message that was conveyed.

Kindness to Whom?

Still worse than the project’s design was the political content of its message—exacerbated by its being alleged to reflect the views of the presumably entire “design community.” To begin with, the implied opposition of “kindness” vs. “walls” is inane. As was the comment of a visual arts student who opined: “History tells us that walls never do any good” (quoted, without comment, by the Times). Tell that to the citizens of Israel, where walls have contributed to a substantial reduction in both terrorist attacks and illegal immigration.

Walls may seem unkind to people trying to cross them illegally, but they can be very kind to the people they protect. As in so much of the immigration debate, however, the “kindness” plea is biased in favor of would-be immigrants. It ignores the needs of legal residents whose lives may be adversely affected by illegal immigrants.Consider the family of Officer Ronil Singh, for example. Would a wall on our southern border not seem an act of kindness to them if it could have kept out the illegal immigrant who so tragically murdered him?

Of even greater concern is a much broader question. Rarely touched on in debates about immigration, it applies to legal as well as illegal immigrants. Are the numbers of new arrivals per year exceeding the rate at which they can be effectively assimilated into American life? I am reminded of this every time I visit a doctor’s office or receive mail from my health insurance indicating assistance available in more than 20 foreign languages.

Moreover, should major businesses and government agencies continue, as a matter of course, to provide Spanish and other language options?² Or does such a practice impede assimilation? Still worse, the very idea of assimilation—the long-vaunted principle that America is a cultural melting pot—has become anathema among the “politically correct.” Can a viable society be long maintained under such conditions? I doubt it. And if it cannot, are the very qualities that draw immigrants here in danger of erosion?

According to the Center for Immigration Studies,

The data collected by the Center during the past quarter-century has led many of our researchers to conclude that current, high levels of immigration are making it harder to achieve such important national objectives as better public schools, a cleaner environment, homeland security, and a living wage for every native-born and immigrant worker.

Such complexities are of course overlooked in feel-good projects like “Build Kindness not Walls.” All the more reason to steer clear of such projects in art education, where they are unlikely to receive the critical scrutiny they merit, yet add fuel to an ill-informed emotional response to the complex political issues involved.

Notes

For others I’ve commented on, see “The Political Assault on Art Education,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2010; and “If you see something, say something,” For Piero’s Sake, December 7, 2015; also the section entitled “‘Social Justice’ Activism and Art Education” in “Art Education or Miseducation? From Koons to Herring,” Aristos, August 2017. ↩
Astonishingly, even an agency such as the New York City Board of Elections posts notices in multiple languages!—which means that fluency in English is not required in order to vote. ↩

2017 Design Thinkers Conference, Arts & Activities magazine, politicization of art education, Timothy Goodman

My Contrarian View of Contemporary Art

December 18, 2018 / Michelle Kamhi / About 'Who Says That's Art?', Contemporary art / 15 Comments

“Conversations in Contemporary Art,” Barnard Magazine, Summer 2018.

Contemporary pseudo art’s stranglehold on the culture is reinforced by countless prestigious institutions—among others, my alma mater Barnard College. Since 2011, Barnard has been offering alumnae and friends a “lifelong learning” course entitled “Conversations in Contemporary Art” [more], aiming to demystify such work through an insider view of the artworld.

Taught by art historian Kathleen Madden ’92, the program was initiated by Diana Vagelos ’55, a generous supporter of the college, and Joan Snitzer, director of the college’s visual arts program. Vagelos (who also collects art with her husband, Roy) says of the course: “It helps people overcome ignorance of what’s happing in modern art, which is so different from what most have been brought up with.” Indeed!

An article praising the program in the Summer 2018 Barnard Magazine prompted me to pen the following letter to the editor:

The view of today’s art espoused by Kathleen Madden ‘92 [in “Conversations in Contemporary Art”] is one that many art lovers question. We do not think that visual art made in our own time, in a familiar cultural context, should require expert intervention to be appreciated. Nor do we consider the primary role of art to be getting us “to talk about the issues of the day.”

As I argue in Who Says That’s Art? A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts, the primary role of art was always to embody important values in a directly graspable and emotionally compelling way. Today’s “conceptual art” requiring expert explanation grew out of the explicitly “anti-art” gestures of the 1960s. It was not art then, and it should not be considered art now. Programs such as Barnard’s “Conversations” sadly perpetuate its false claim.

I’m happy to report that the letter was published in the Fall 2018 issue of the magazine. Judging from a discernible uptick in sales of Who Says That’s Art?, I suspect that at least a few of my fellow alumnae were responsive to my contrarian view—as was a classmate who had posted a class note in the Winter 2018 issue about the book’s “highly critical view of much of contemporary art.”

Any chance that Snitzer, as director of Barnard’s visual arts program, might be curious enough about my Commonsense View of the Visual Arts to search for a copy of the book in the Columbia University Libraries catalog and inform her students about it? My guess is (to borrow the immortal words of Eliza Doolittle) not bloody likely—given the sort of paintings Snitzer herself produces, pictured here.

Barnard College, contemporary art

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