Michelangelo’s Humor

November 11, 2017 / Michelle Kamhi / Art History, General / 6 Comments

Portrait of Michelangelo by Daniele da Volterra.

The opening next week of the major exhibition Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman & Designer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art¹ prompts me to post the following brief item about a little-known side of this master.

The awe-inspiring grandeur of Michelangelo’s work earned him the reverent epithet of “Il Divino” among his contemporaries. It is therefore remarkable to discover that this most profoundly serious of artists also possessed a wicked sense of humor. In 1525, on learning that Pope Clement wished him to stop his work on the Medici library and chapel to build a Florentine colossus some 80 feet high (made of blocks and placed at the corner of the Medici garden loggia)—to honor the Medici family and rival the David—Michelangelo responded in mock seriousness through a letter to an intermediary in Rome, observing:

The colossus does not suit the corner, because it would take up too much of the road.

However, on the other corner, where the barber’s shop is, it would, in my view, turn out much better, because the piazza is in front and so it would not cause so much trouble with the street. And then, perhaps because removing the shop wouldn’t be tolerated, thanks to the income it provides, I’ve come to think that the figure could be sitting down, and that the seat could be made so high that if the work were made hollow inside, which could conveniently be done using blocks, the barber’s shop could go underneath, and so the rent would not be lost. And in order that the shop may, as now, have somewhere for the smoke to escape, I am thinking of giving the statue a horn of plenty in its hand, all hollow, to serve as a chimney.

Then if I have the statue’s head hollowed out, like the other members, I also think I can derive some benefit from that, because there is on the piazza here a huckster, a great friend of mine, who has told me privately he would make a fine dovecote inside it. Another idea has occurred to me that would be even better, but it would be necessary to make the figure very much bigger; yet it could be done, seeing that the towers are made up of blocks. This is that the head should serve as the bell-tower for San Lorenzo, which badly needs one. And then, with the bells flying round inside and the sound coming out through the mouth, the colossus would appear to be howling for mercy, and especially on feast days, when the bells ring out more often and the peals are louder.

Needless to say, the pope was not amused. But when renewed efforts failed to engage the sculptor in the proposed project Clement eventually dropped his request for a colossus.

For more on this hilarious epistle and its many irreverent references, see page 182 of George Bull’s Michelangelo: A Biography (from which it is quoted), as well as the account in The Last Judgment: Michelangelo and the Death of the Renaissance, by James O’Connor.

Notes

This truly “once-in-a-lifetime” exhibition illuminates the central role played by drawing in this incomparable genius’s work as sculptor, painter, and architect alike. See the press release for Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman & Designer. ↩

National Arts in Education Week—Should We Celebrate?

September 10, 2017 / Michelle Kamhi / Art Education, Arts Advocacy, Arts Education, Contemporary art, Music Education, social justice / 34 Comments

Oliver Herring session at 2017 NAEA conference

Areas for Action, led by “experimental artist” Oliver Herring, National Art Education Association conference, New York City, March 4, 2017.

This week, September 10–16, is National Arts in Education Week—an annual event established by Congress in 2010 to celebrate the value of the arts in education and gain broad support for it. On what grounds could any civilized member of society object?

The answer is that the value of arts education largely depends on the quality of the works that are presented for study. And the sad truth is that far too many arts advocates and educators have uncritically embraced the “avant-garde” and virtually any work that has made a mark in the contemporary art world, regardless of its intrinsic merit or its reception by ordinary people, including many serious art lovers.

Most pronounced in the field of visual art education, this lamentable tendency was all too evident at the annual conference of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) earlier this year, attended by more than 7,000 art teachers from around the world.

Jeff Koons - Balloon Dog (Yellow) on Met roof

Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Yellow), 1994–2000, on Metropolitan Museum roof. High chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating; 121 x 143 x 45 in. The Steven and Alexandra Cohen Collection © Jeff Koons.

The NAEA’s official statement of purpose refers to the “power of the visual arts to enrich human experience and society.” But the contemporary examples featured at this year’s convention provided little enrichment. They ranged from inanities such as the “Balloon Dogs” of artworld superstar Jeff Koons to a chaotic “open-ended participatory performance, improvisatory sculpture, and real-time collaborative artwork” overseen by “experimental artist” Oliver Herring (above), in the free-for-all spirit of a 1960s Happening.

Scarcely any sessions dealt with exemplary art of the past. Nor were contemporary artists included who have chosen to perpetuate the venerable tradition of Western painting and sculpture. Yet their art is far more likely to appeal to a broad public than the “cutting-edge” anti-traditional work touted by today’s cultural establishment and accepted by far too many who are involved in art education.

The problem is not limited to the visual arts. A prominent example is Richard Kessler, a longtime arts education advocate who became dean of the world-class Mannes School of Music in 2011. An ardent champion of the avant-garde, he has departed from Mannes’s historically conservative stance by establishing a performance space for “experimental music” at its present parent institution, The New School.

Kessler regards the experimentalist John Cage (1912–1992) as a “great” composer, whose “most important work”—his notorious piece 4’33” (in which a pianist sits motionless at a piano for that amount of time)—can teach us something. According to Kessler, it can teach us to “critically engage with silence as a renewable pedagogical act.”

Such woolly thinking should give pause to advocates aiming to incorporate the arts into the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) educational movement. Might the non-arts counterpart of John Cage in STEAM be a scientist sitting before a blank page or an empty test tube, critically engaging with emptiness as a renewable pedagogical act?

The avant-garde mentality of many arts education advocates is further muddled by political aims and assumptions. Kessler—who formerly headed the Center for Arts Education (a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting arts education in New York City’s public schools)—once dubbed me “the Joe McCarthy of Art Education.” Why? Because I had dared to suggest, in the Wall Street Journal, that the primary aim of art education is not to achieve the elusive goal of “social justice” but to teach about art.

Moreover, as I had clearly implied, a “performance piece” praised by a leading art educator in which the purported artist distributed specially equipped sneakers to assist illegal immigrants waiting to cross our Mexican border was an instance of political activism, pure and simple—not a work of art.

Kessler argued that I was exaggerating the politicization of art education. As he saw it, only a “handful of art professors” were teaching about social justice—not enough to merit concern. The latest NAEA conference has proved him wrong.

A plethora of sessions were devoted to achieving “social justice” through art education, with little thought given to the caliber of the purported art involved. One session actually advocated shifting the focus of art criticism to “analyzing social justice issues” outright. Future art teachers, it recommended, should use art criticism “to foster critical thinking . . . about pedagogy and social justice issues.”

As I’ve argued in Who Says That’s Art?: A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts, the proper and urgent subject for critical thinking in art education in today’s culture is the question of what qualifies as art and why—not the complex socio-political questions involved in issues of “social justice.” Such issues enter into the thorny realm of politics and are entirely beyond art teachers’ professional purview. But the question of what art is and why we value it transcends politics.

Nearly fifteen years ago, I published an article asking “Where’s the Art in Today’s Art Education?” [full text]. The question remains. It merits particular consideration during National Arts in Education Week.

How Not to Teach Art History

August 7, 2017 / Michelle Kamhi / Art Education, Art History / 16 Comments

Just in time for a new school year, the September 2017 issue of Scholastic Art magazine features ten paintings that students should know, because they form part of “our collective cultural history.”

Surely a worthwhile undertaking for a publication aimed at middle school and high school visual art education programs—until one examines the works selected and what is written about them.

Legitimizing the Avant-Garde

Most troubling is that four of the magazine’s “10 Paintings to Know” are twentieth-century works that depart so radically from all prior standards that their art historical status is highly questionable. They are Pablo Picasso’s Dora Maar in an Armchair, Vasily Kandinsky’s Composition 8, Alma Thomas’s Splash Down Apollo 13, and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (Skull). Two of the remaining ten (Georgia O’Keeffe’s Two Calla Lilies on Pink and Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas), though somewhat less radical, also date from the twentieth century. When one considers that art history encompasses millennia of picture-making, this is a staggering disproportion. Not one work from the Italian Renaissance or the Golden Age of Dutch painting or the rich tradition of landscape painting in China—much less work by our own Hudson River School or more recent examples by important American artists such as Thomas Eakins or Andrew Wyeth.

Still worse is the choice of Picasso’s savagely cubist portrait of Dora Maar for the issue’s cover—a choice that implies this painting is especially worth knowing. Why is such a visually repellent work considered worth knowing? Because—Scholastic Art tells its young readers—Picasso is among “the most influential 20th-century artists,” and cubism is “one of his most important contributions to modern art.”

What did that contribution consist of?—“divid[ing] subject matter into small, simplified forms” and “reject[ing] traditional perspective.” In the Dora Maar portrait, Picasso “reduces the subject’s face, hair, and body to a collection of geometric shapes” and “places her features in an asymmetrical arrangement, creating an off-balance version of a face” (an understatement if ever there were one!). Picasso also “embraced bright, arbitrary colors” such as “yellow for the face, red for the nose, and blue for the mouth.” On the larger questions of this bizarre painting’s impact on viewers and the dubious value of reducing the face of a beautiful woman (see photos of Dora Maar) to an arbitrary pattern of geometric shapes eerily akin to the wallpaper behind it, not a word is said. Nor does the article ask whether it is wise to regard such extreme stylistic distortions as a “contribution.”

Students are further misled by the poster enclosed with the issue. On one side is a large-scale reproduction of Picasso’s Woman with Yellow Hair, accompanied by this quote attributed to him below it: “Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist” (as if art were mainly a matter of breaking rules). The reverse of the poster displays Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Horn Players (1983). If Basquiat ever learned the rules, I’ve seen no evidence of it. In any case, are these the two most significant works from the whole of art history that students should have posted before them in the classroom?

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Scull), 1981, acrylic and oilstick on canvas, 81 x 69 1/4 in. The Broad, Los Angeles, California.

What prompted the inclusion of Basquiat’s Untitled (Skull—which he appears to have misspelled as Scull) in “10 Paintings to Know”? Since the work dates from less than four decades ago, it cannot quite be said to have stood “the test of time” (one of Scholastic Art’s criteria for a work’s worth knowing about). Instead, his involvement with the New York City street art movement is cited, and the fact that his work was shown “in the city’s top art galleries.” Also noted is that, despite his death at the age of 27, “he is among the most commercially successful artists in history”—one of his paintings having been bought by a collector in May 2017 “for a record $110.5 million.” Nonetheless—the reader is informed—“many questions about his work [remain] unanswered.”

Not mentioned by Scholastic Art is the fact that Basquiat was a drug addict, whose premature death was due to a heroin overdose. Relevant questions about his work that remain are what on earth it means and how much of its chaotic aspect might be due to the drug’s psychedelic effects, rather than to any great creativity on his part. A further urgent question not raised by the magazine for students to consider is whether today’s art market is in fact a reliable indicator of artistic value. Finally, does the crude and confusing nature of Basquiat’s work really merit his presentation to students as a model for appreciation and emulation?¹

Misconstruing Art of the Past

The one incontestable European masterpiece among the ten paintings singled out for study is Jan van Eyck’s justly renowned Arnolfini [Wedding] Portrait. But what students are told about it leaves much to be desired. This is what Scholastic Art deems important:

[The artist] includes details that provide information about the subjects. The figures wear clothing with thick fur trim, which would have been expensive to own. Many people think the woman looks pregnant. But in reality, she holds the fabric of her dress to show off the costly garment’s length. The way scholars interpret these details has changed over time. For years, people thought the dog was a symbol of loyalty. Today experts believe it is simply the family pet.

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini [Wedding] Portrait, National Gallery, London.

Not a word to indicate that this is a work commemorating the sacrament of marriage–signified by the couple’s joining of hands and the husband’s raising of his other hand. Not a word about the painting’s aura of solemnity, befitting such a sacrament. No mention of the fact that the mirror behind the couple is framed by miniature scenes of Christ’s Passion, further alluding to the painting’s sacred purpose. Nor any suggestion that the little dog so prominently placed below the couple’s joined hands could be both an image of the household pet and a token of their fidelity. Most important, there is no indication of why this work still moves viewers nearly 600 years after its creation. As I argue in Who Says That’s Art?, it is features such as “the sober facial expressions of the young couple, their gesture of joining hands, and the aura of solemn calm in the elegant bedchamber” (all conveyed through van Eyck’s consummate mastery of the art of painting) that “ultimately make it a great work of art, a compelling image that transcends the particular historic moment being represented and conveys something about the gravity of marriage in general.”²

One Bright Spot

Grace Lin (middle-school student), Girl with the Bird.

Dismayed though I was by Scholastic Art’s September 2017 cover article, I applaud the issue’s “Student of the Month” feature. Honoring Grace Lin—an eighth-grade student at the Jay M. Robinson Middle School in Charlotte, North Carolina—it pictures her oil painting Girl with the Bird, which won a gold award in the 2017 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. A remarkably sensitive and accomplished self-portrait for a girl of only 12 or 13, it is an admirable foil to the avant-garde thrust of “10 Paintings to Know.”³ What inspired it? Not the likes of Picasso, Kandinsky, or Basquiat, but the landscape and art of Italy—in particular, she noted, the “sense of dignity and peace” in Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

Brava, Grace Lin! Your work would far better serve as a model for your fellow students than that of Scholastic’s poster artists Picasso and Basquiat.

Notes

The lesson plan provided by Scholastic implicitly lauds Basquiat as a street artist who “gained recognition in the art world through collaborations with established artists such as Andy Warhol. His solo work, which explores ideas of inequality, race, and politics, brought him success and wealth.” As noted above, Basquiat’s exploration of ideas is not at all clear, as even his defenders have admitted. On Warhol’s inflated reputation as an established artist, see “The Apotheosis of Andy Warhol” (Aristos, December 2012). ↩
Readers who would like to know more about the meaning of this great work should consult Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 201–203. The National Gallery asserts that the painting is not intended as a “record” of the couple’s wedding, but Panofsky (a highly esteemed art historian) cites compelling iconographic evidence that the work aimed to memorialize the couple’s marriage vows. See also H.W. Janson, History of Art, 3d edition, revised and expanded by Anthony F. Janson (New York: Abrams, 1986), 377–378. ↩
Unfortunately, it is not clear from the magazine’s account if the painting was done in connection with an art class at the student’s school or as an independent, extracurricular project. ↩

10 Paintings to Know, Arnolfini Portrait, art education, avant-garde, Basquiat, cubism, Dora Maar in an Armchair, Grace Lin, Picasso, Scholastic Art

Contemporary Art Worth Knowing

June 9, 2017 / Michelle Kamhi / Art Education, Contemporary art, Exhibitions / 4 Comments

Shana Levenson, Sibling Bond (2016)

Two exhibitions this spring have powerfully belied the artworld pretense that all contemporary art is in an anti-traditional “cutting-edge” vein. And unlike the contemporary work that fills today’s leading museums and galleries, they offer art lovers something to rejoice in.

The smaller of the two shows is Self-Portrait (April 20 – June 20)—at the Eleventh Street Arts gallery, affiliated with the Grand Central Atelier in Long Island City. The other is the Art Renewal Center’s 12th International Salon Exhibition (at the Salmagundi Club in New York, May 12 – June 1)—culled from entries submitted from more than sixty countries. Both exhibitions include work by some of the very best Classical Realist painters from around the world, a movement lamentably ignored by both art teachers and the art establishment.

The works most prominently featured on the two exhibition websites are not the ones I would have chosen. But I found other works in both shows to be truly memorable.

Self-Portraits

To begin with the self-portraits, the sheer diversity of images on display at Eleventh Street Arts is impressive—lest any reader assume that work in the academic tradition is likely to be stale and repetitive. From the keenly penetrating gaze of Louise Fenne’s Working on a Self-Portrait (see below) and Colleen Barry’s pensive Self-Portrait with St. Jerome to Jacob Collins’s rugged Winter Self-Portrait and Gregory Mortenson’s anxious Self-Portrait with Scarf, these works testify to the infinite variety of human individuality. They remind us how crucially we depend on reading the face to discern character, mood, and emotion. And in a culture seduced by the vulgar triviality of Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, it is restorative to see images conveying a sense of dignity and gravity.

Louise Fenne, Working on a Self-Portrait (2017)

Other works I was drawn to were Will St. John’s large-scale Self-Portrait with White Scarf (27 x 35 in.) and Charles Weed’s much smaller Plain Old Self-Portrait (7.8 x 9.8 in). They struck me as 21st-century counterparts of early and late Rembrandt portraits, respectively. Gazing out at the viewer with sober confidence, St. John cuts an imposing figure, poised with the instruments of his art (the white scarf wound around his neck recalls, perhaps intentionally, the white ruffs prominent in so many 17th-century Dutch portraits). In contrast, Weed’s intimate, slouch-hatted image, like Rembrandt’s late work, suggests self-knowledge deepened by experience. If I read it correctly, the sadness or weariness reflected in the eyes is offset by the faint play of a smile about the mouth—consistent with the self-deprecating humor of his title.

Of Joshua LaRock’s two entries, I found his 2016 Self-Portrait especially appealing. Seated before his easel (with a self-portrait in progress), he turns, palette in hand, as if to greet an unexpected visitor to the studio. His mouth slightly open in surprise, and his right arm jauntily braced against his thigh, he does not seem to welcome the intrusion!

Kudos to artist Colleen Barry for curating this excellent little show, and to Milène Fernandez of Epoch Times for writing about it (“Self-Portraits: Meeting the Artist Eye-to-Eye,” April 23, 2017). Will the benighted New York Times critics ever discover the value of such work?

ARC Salon

Unlike the Eleventh Street show focusing on one genre, the ARC exhibition comprised work in multiple categories. Of the landscapes, the two that made the greatest impression on me were not the award winners but Joseph Mcgurl’s luminous Transfiguration and Katsu Nakajima’s luxuriant Stream of the Shadow.

Joseph Mcgurl, Transfiguration (2016)

Photographic though they may seem online, they are in fact selective re-creations of reality (to borrow Ayn Rand’s apt phrase), shaped in loving detail over time, as if honoring every blade of grass. They bear witness to a reverence for the beauty of the natural world. That reverence is made explicit in the artists’ statements, but the viewer scarcely needs those verbal confessions.¹

Grace Kim, Indian Peahen
[enlargement], (2015)

Nor does one need Grace Kim’s feminist-inspired artist’s statement to be transfixed by the penetrating eye of her Indian Peahen. Vividly alive, it seems to say “don’t mess with me!”

Two captivating paintings in the still life genre were Ascolta, ti Ricorderà, by Miki K. T. Chart, and Carmen Ruiz Segura’s Don Quijote. Both are boldly imaginative and effectively realized. To anyone familiar with Cervantes’s classic send-up of chivalric literature, Segura’s paper specter rising from the pages of a book, ready to tilt with a paint-brush lance against an oil lamp, is the perfect embodiment of the novel’s protagonist. No title or artist’s statement needed. So, too, Chart’s image speaks for itself, as art should do. Her tiny canary perched atop an old-fashioned mandolin, singing its heart out, is clearly a nostalgic evocation of the musical traditions of Italy—as further alluded to by an antique map depicted in the background.

In the final chapter of Who Says That’s Art? I suggest that what is needed to counter the artworld’s “cutting-edge” mentality is a 1913 Armory Show in reverse, on a grand scale. The ARC salons are the closest thing to that idea that have yet occurred. But they require better publicity. And the cause may not be well served by some of the top awards bestowed.²

This year’s Best in Show, for example, was Semillas, by Tenaya Sims. It struck me as an ambitious but puzzling and oddly repellent image, too dependent on the artist’s long-winded verbal explanation for understanding his intention. And last year’s Absolute Trust – Sleeping Beauty, by Arantzazu Martinez, left me equally unmoved. What should be the most telling part of the picture—the face of the sleeping princess—was far less interesting than her sumptuous garb and the plethora of props and birds surrounding her, which seemed a mere pretext for displaying technical virtuosity. Then, too, there is the matter of her hair, inexplicably windblown when the drapery around her shows no sign of movement.

In contrast, let me cite the work from this year’s show that has made the most lasting impression upon me. It is Shana Levenson’s Sibling Bond. Pictured above, it is an unpretentious yet moving embodiment of the love between a small, sad-eyed boy and his not-much-older sister, who enfolds him in her protective embrace and seems to set her mouth firmly against adversity. It called to mind for me tender moments I’ve witnessed between my own grandchildren, as well as fictional accounts of such a bond—most recently, the characters of Florence and Paul Dombey in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son. Here is surely an enduring human theme, deeply felt and touchingly rendered.

For today’s art teachers exclusively focused on politically and socially “relevant” contemporary work of dubious artistic quality, this painting should serve as a counterexample worth knowing and teaching about. As it indicates, there is much more to our lives than the social and political dimension. The personal dimension is of profound importance as well, and should not be neglected in the art education of our children.

Notes

Nakajima’s statement. As McGurl reports, his image is indeed a “synthesis of several landscapes . . . seen and painted over the years.” ↩
For more about this year’s ARC salon, both pro and con, see “A One of a Kind Art Salon Champions Realism,” by Milène Fernandez (Epoch Times, May 18, 2017). ↩

art education, Art Renewal Center, Classical Realism, contemporary art, self-portraits

Fake Art—the Rauschenberg Phenomenon

May 24, 2017 / Michelle Kamhi / Contemporary art, Exhibitions / 1 Comment

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram (1955-59). Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Image from Rauschenberg Foundation, Creative Commons.

The phenomenon of fake news is on everyone’s lips in the realm of politics these days, but the equivalent of fake art in the contemporary artworld has yet to be adequately reckoned with. Google the term and you’ll find ample news of forgeries—work imitating that by famous artists and passed off as actually by them. What I’m referring to is far more insidious. It is the creation and promotion of original work that passes for art in the eyes of the cultural establishment but is not art by any meaningful standard, much less by the purported artists’ own statements about it.¹

To witness this phenomenon in full swing, you could find no more telling instances than the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends (which opened this week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) or the exhibition catalogue by co-curators Leah Dickerman of MoMA and Achim Borchardt-Hume of Tate Modern (where the exhibition originated). They demonstrate—in spades—both the creation and the promotion of fake art.

Collaboration to Produce Anti-Art

The theme of the show—the first major retrospective since Rauschenberg’s death in 2008—is his lifelong penchant for collaboration, not only with others in the avant-garde artworld but also with scientists, engineers, and technicians. That aspect of his work appealed to Dickerman because—as she stated at a press preview on May 17—it dispels the “myth of a genius working in solitude” and substitutes the “creative power” of collaboration.

Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

So let’s take a look at some of the products of such “creative” collaboration by this alleged “genius.” A notorious early example is Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing. His “collaborators” were Willem de Kooning, who gave him the original drawing, and Jasper Johns—who persuaded him to exhibit the erased result in a gilt frame, labeled with the foregoing title. The piece was inspired, the MoMA wall text informs us, by Rauschenberg’s just “wanting to know whether a drawing could be made out of erasing.” He might have saved himself the month’s effort and forty erasers he later said he had devoted to it had he simply consulted dictionary definitions of drawing and erasure. In a sophistic gloss on this absurdity, however, Dickerman observes: “Rauschenberg set out to liberate the negative term, the unmaking from the making.”²

Like other work by Rauschenberg (with or without collaborators), Erased de Kooning Drawing is, in fact, a piece of anti-art. In the spirit of the Dadaists who inspired him, his primary aim was to challenge prior art, not to create something new in its place. Tellingly, the section of Dickerman’s essay in which that piece is discussed is entitled “The Destruction of Painting.” At later stages of his career, Rauschenberg was similarly involved in the destruction of sculpture, dance, and drama as coherent forms of expression. In Dickerman’s view, such activities were “creative.”

Can destruction be creative? True, many economists recognize the phenomenon of “creative destruction” in the economic sphere. In it, the new economic order displacing the old is itself seen to be of value. Thus it is truly “creative,” having produced a new economic value. But can any sane person not besotted by artworld sophistry honestly say that Rauschenberg’s erased drawing—or his Tire Print (a collaboration with John Cage)—has artistic value in itself? Only by ignoring or denying that art has a definable identity. Which is of course what Rauschenberg and his defenders have done.

Ignoring Essential Distinctions

Like many observers, Dickerman rightly stresses that what Rauschenberg was engaged in was an “assault on Abstract Expressionism.” What she misses, however, is that the utterly daffy forms his assault took negated not just the overrated and misguided work of the acclaimed abstract painters he hung out with at the Cedar Tavern but also the genuine art that had been produced since time immemorial and that was still being created by painters such as Andrew Wyeth. While Abstract Expressionism’s “claims of . . . psychic and existential significance” were indeed insupportable, those of traditional art were not.

Much is made in the MoMA exhibition materials of Rauschenberg’s famous claim that he aimed to work in the “gap” between art and life. Has anyone located that “gap” apart from Rauschenberg’s reference to it? I think not. Because there is no such gap. There is, however, a distinction. It consists in this: art is about life—a fact that implies it is different from (though profoundly related to) life itself. Failing to grasp that principle, Rauschenberg consistently flouted it. As Dickerman uncritically observes, he not only “admitt[ed] ordinary things into the domain of art,” he also “imagin[ed] . . . an art that did not separate itself from lived experience.” She regards that as “welcom[ing] the quotidian.” I see it as obliterating art.

Rauschenberg once explained: “I was working either with devices that would let the work compose itself, or stepping back enough to let the accidents take over.” On another occasion, he declared: “I don’t want to be in full control.” Like numerous other statements made by him, those declarations are tacit admissions that what he was doing was something other than art, since the concept of art, at root, implies control by the maker. Nor did Rauschenberg intend to convey meaning or “express a message,” though works of art had always done so.

At the press preview, I asked Dickerman whether, in view of such statements, one might be making a big mistake in treating Rauschenberg’s work as if it were art. A long, awkward pause followed. She then responded: “For me, that doesn’t resonate.” Rauschenberg’s approach to art was “very egalitarian,” she explained (echoing a notion prominent in her catalogue essay). He thought that “all things should be admitted [in art],” she added.

Rauschenberg’s “Combines”

The works that most fully exhibit Rauschenberg’s “egalitarian” approach are his so-called Combines—a term he coined to characterize the bizarre pieces for which he is probably best known. Neither paintings nor sculptures (nor art), they incorporate a motley assortment of two- and three-dimensional objects. Combines displayed at MoMA include Monogram (featuring a stuffed goat girded with a tire³), Black Market (comprising, among other things, a street sign, four clipboards, and an old suitcase), Pantomime (containing two electric fans), and Gold Standard (a gilt folding screen cluttered with diverse objects and tethered to a ceramic dog on a bicycle seat). To my mind, they suggested what might be produced in the occupational-therapy ward of a mental asylum that could only afford to supply its inmates with materials collected from the town dump.

Many MoMA visitors I observed smiled at the sight of the Combines—as one might smile at the antics of a dotty uncle. But shouldn’t we expect more from the work of a “defining figure of contemporary art” (to quote the MoMA press release)? Such idiotic fake art, like other examples by Rauschenberg, is far more insidious than forgeries, because it undermines the very idea of art.

One should not blame the dotty uncle, however. He could not help it if he was slightly daft.⁴ The principal blame for such a travesty of art belongs to the curators, institutions, and sponsors (from the Terra Foundation for American Art to Bank of America and Bloomberg Philanthropies) who elevate the dotty uncle’s antics to the status of art—not to mention the critics who help legitimize it, such as Holland Cotter of the New York Times.⁵

Notes

The philosopher and cultural critic Roger Scruton has aptly excoriated such “fake art” in several articles, but this sense of the term has, regrettably, not yet gained wide currency. ↩
For insights like this, Dickerman has won numerous awards—most notably for her Inventing Abstraction catalogue. For my own views on that exhibition and her catalogue essay, see “Has the Artworld Been Kidding Itself about Abstract Art?” (Aristos, December 2013). ↩
On critics’ attempts to read meaning into this work (despite Rauschenberg’s repeated denials of coherent intention), see Who Says That’s Art?, pp. 131-133. ↩
Though Rauschenberg is only mentioned in passing in clinical psychologist Louis Sass’s illuminating study Madness and Modernism, his Combines and other work surely exhibit many of the characteristics Sass associates with schizoid personality disorders, as do his often kooky statements about his work. ↩
See Cotter’s “Robert Rauschenberg: It Takes a Village to Raise a Genius,” May 18, 2017. ↩

anti-art, Combines, Erased de Kooning Drawing, fake art, fake news, Leah Dickerman, MoMA, Monogram, Rauschenberg

Lively NAEA Debate on ‘Who Says That’s Art?’

March 12, 2017 / Michelle Kamhi / About 'Who Says That's Art?', Art Education / 5 Comments

“Resolved that there is much useful to be learned from Kamhi’s 2014 book, and that this book can be profitably read and studied by art educators at any level of their professional development.”

That resolution—proposed by Distinguished NAEA Fellow David Pariser—prompted lively debate at the 2017 conference of the National Art Education Association in New York earlier this month. The clear consensus that emerged affirmed Pariser’s resolution.

The three debate panelists were Lorrie Blair, Amy Brook Snider, and Anna Kindler, all with decades of experience in the field. Though by no means agreeing with every point in the book, two of the three panelists enthusiastically endorsed Pariser’s resolution—a sentiment reinforced by all but one of the audience members who participated in discussion following the panelists’ comments.

Kicking off the debate, Blair argued that the book “gets us out of the echo chamber” of like-minded ideas that tend to dominate peer-reviewed publications in the field. As an example, she cited the comment posted by Paul Duncum (a prominent art educator) on the book’s Amazon.com page. Her own first impulse on reading Who Says That’s Art?, Blair frankly confessed with some humor, had been to wish she could simply “unfriend the author” and thereby erase me and my ideas from memory. But on reflection she acknowledged that the book would have the salutary effect of piercing the art-education “filter bubble.” She therefore wholeheartedly endorsed its use, and thereby joined the ranks of courageous academics meriting praise for fostering healthy debate in academia.

In sharp contrast, Snider voiced vigorous opposition to using the book in either graduate or undergraduate art education. Among her main objections was my criticism of Elizabeth Murray (who happens to have been a close personal friend of hers), and of Art21’s coverage of contemporary art on PBS. Criticizing my “picking and choosing only those examples that further my ideas,” Snider argued that the approach to critical thinking pursued in the Critical and Visual Studies program at the Pratt Institute, where she taught prior to her retirement, is far superior to my book’s argument—see correction.¹ Hers was the lone dissenting voice on the panel.²

Finally, Anna Kindler was not present, but her written statement (read by Pariser) made perhaps the strongest case to her colleagues for the book’s use in art education. While expressing some personal “open[ness] to a certain amount of ‘art-relativism’,” she argued that Who Says That’s Art? “is a powerful reminder of the relationship between art and society,” one that points to “the tension between the expert and commonsense notions of art.” She therefore insisted that art educators would disregard it “at [their] peril.” Referring (like Blair) to the “bubble” surrounding the field, she admonished fellow teachers that

the case for art that we within the bubble . . . have repeated for years is not one that actually resonates with folks outside the bubble. Art education . . . will simply not win the battle for the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens unless and until we can provide clear and credible answers to those whom we ask to support our practice. . . . [I]f the world of art education were to adopt Kamhi’s definition, a persuasive case for art education would be much easier to make.

During the Q&A that followed the panelists’ presentations and discussion, two high-school teachers in the audience expressed strong agreement with the resolution. Moreover, it’s worth noting that the only dissenting voice from the audience was that of Kevin Tavin—a radical in the field with whom I’ve long disagreed.

Notes

Correction – March 26, 2017: I inadvertently misconstrued Snider’s comment about the Pratt program. After reading this post, she wrote to say that the following was her view: “My opposition to the use of Kamhi’s book as a tool for critical thinking also relates to the relatively new Critical and Visual Studies undergraduate program in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Pratt Institute. The focus on critical theorizing in much of the required coursework in that program does not allow for the extensive and time-consuming examination of content nor knowledge of particular subject matter necessary for thoughtful reflection.” ↩
I will refrain from responding to Snider’s particular objections here, except to say that an argument logically selects examples that support it. Even Snider’s own argument against my book has done that. Moreover, in arguing for the artists it covers, does Art21, for example, feature negative responses to their work? I don’t think so, though if it cared to do so critical voices could be readily found, beginning with my own—which its producers should be aware of, as I happened to meet and make my views known to Joe Fusaro, the show’s Senior Education Advisor, at the 2011 conference of the New York State Art Teachers Association. ↩

academic debate, Amy Brook Snider, Anna Kindler, Art21, David A. Pariser, Elizabeth Murray, filter bubble, Joe Fusaro, Kevin Tavin, Lorrie Blair, NAEA

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FURTHER READING

Legitimizing the Avant-Garde

Misconstruing Art of the Past

One Bright Spot

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Self-Portraits

ARC Salon

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Collaboration to Produce Anti-Art

Ignoring Essential Distinctions

Rauschenberg’s “Combines”

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