Every year around this time, the Metropolitan Museum of Art trots out its conception of “contemporary art,” in a specially commissioned work for its rooftop terrace.
Cornelia Parker, PsychoBarn (2016), Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This year’s example is an architectural installation entitled PsychoBarn, by the British artworld star Cornelia Parker—“whose work is in museums around the world,” notes the New York Times.
In remarks to the press ahead of the piece’s opening to the public, Parker lauded the commission as “such a gift to an artist!” Quite so. Why was she chosen? According to the Met’s director, Thomas P. Campbell, her work “is remarkable for the ways in which she looks at things we think of as familiar, and up-ends our perception of them in the process.” As for why we should welcome having our perception of familiar things up-ended, he didn’t venture to explain.
Is Parker a “Sculptor”?
One of the things Parker up-ends is familiar notions of the art of sculpture. Referred to by herself and others as a “sculptor and installation artist,” she first gained artworld notice with a 1991 piece entitled Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. She created it by having the contents of a garden shed exploded by the British Army and then suspending the resulting fragments from a gallery ceiling in an installation lit from within by a bare light bulb. According to Britain’s Tate museum, which now owns the piece: “The way the sculpture was made is a significant part of its meaning as an artwork.” Perhaps. But it is not the way a work of sculpture, properly speaking, is made. Nor can one guess the piece’s intended meaning without an accompanying curatorial gloss or artist’s statement. Without such verbal texts, what one perceives is simply a rather attractive pattern of mostly abstract forms and cast shadows.
By familiar standards, Parker’s PsychoBarn is a derivative bit of quasi architecture, not sculpture. In a fast-talking account of the piece’s genesis and intent, she explains that it was modeled on the notorious Bates house in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho—which had been inspired in turn by Edward Hopper’s painting House by the Railroad. The “barn” in Parker’s title refers to the other element involved in its creation—the homely red barns dotting America’s rural landscape, one of which (slated for demolition in upstate New York) had supplied the materials used by skilled workmen to construct PsychoBarn according to Parker’s directions.
In her account, Parker comments glibly on multiple layers of meaning in the piece. For visitors who don’t bother to read its wall text, however, I doubt that such meanings would occur to them. More likely, they will view the piece as I did—as an amusing folly, sitting atop the Met like a stage set without a play.
A Striking Contrast or Two
As I was leaving the Met, I happened to pass through its Medieval Sculpture Hall, where my eye was caught by a work I had never noticed before—a barely yard-high early-15th-century Burgundian Virgin and Child set against one of the hall’s lateral pillars.
What struck me was the Child’s playfully animated engagement with his wide-eyed mother, whose sweetness of face was evident in spite of unfortunate damage to her nose. This captivating work (the gift of a discerning collector, J. P. Morgan) was a vivid reminder of what sculpture really is. Another was the medieval hall’s centerpiece, Claus de Werve’s superb Virgin and Child, a work I’ve written (and spoken) about before. As I passed it, I noticed a woman pausing to admire it and take a photo. On inquiring, I learned that she was a visitor from Australia who had happened upon that work quite by chance, drawn to it by its gentle power and beauty, not because she had known anything about it beforehand or knew anything about the artist.
Unlike Parker’s PsychoBarn, these two splendid works of genuine sculpture contain their own drama and speak for themselves.
This time students at Columbia University have gotten it right. More than 1,200 of them have signed a petition protesting the proposed installation of Henry Moore’s modernist sculpture Reclining Figure (1969-70) in front of the university’s elegantly neo-classical Butler Library.
Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, 1969-70.
According to Roberto Ferrari—the curator at Columbia’s art and architecture library, who announced the forthcoming installation—the piece was “meant to suggest the form of a woman with her legs outstretched before her, propping herself up with her forearm.” But who would guess that without (or even with) the work’s title? A more apt reading is the one offered in a Columbia Spectator op-ed by three undergraduates and a recent Columbia College alumnus. They likened the work to “a dying mantis or a poorly formed pterodactyl,” further noting that it is “so repulsive that when thieves stole Moore’s original cast, valued at £3 million, they literally chopped it up and sold it for scrap” (as reported in The Guardian).
None of the op-ed writers, I might add, are art students—which may help to explain their frankly irreverent response to a work by “one of the most influential and celebrated British artists of the 20th century,” to quote the New York Times. Art students, no doubt, would have been cowed by Moore’s exalted reputation.
As further noted by the Times, Moore’s sculptures are “on public display in parks and plazas around the world” and “reside in major museums.” Indeed. As I note in Who Says That’s Art?, however, I have never once observed a passerby actually looking at the Reclining Figure by Moore that is prominently installed in Lincoln Center Plaza, for example.
So perhaps it’s high time to reassess Moore’s exalted reputation.
You’ve probably heard of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Match Girl” [full text]. But don’t confuse that touching fictional character with my “Little Mattress Girl,” a live person of quite a different order.
She is Emma Sulkowicz, the former Columbia University student of visual arts who gained national notoriety in 2014–15 for an “endurance performance” piece in which she lugged a 50-lb. dormitory mattress around campus as her senior thesis project, announcing that she would end it only when the fellow student she charged had raped her in her dorm room left Columbia or was expelled. Since he remained on campus (having been cleared of all charges by the university), Sulkowicz ultimately carried the mattress to her graduation in cap and gown last May, assisted by smiling classmates.
What has reminded me of the Little Mattress Girl now? An email announcement from Coagula Curatorial—a Los Angeles “art” gallery—announcing Sulkowicz’s first solo show. The exhibit, entitled Self-Portrait, will be “a live investigation of identity as performance” that “pushes the limits and meaning of the self-portrait as a contemporary concept.” As background, the gallery quotes the Wikipedia entry describing Sulkowicz’s claim to fame, her senior thesis project Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight).
Not surprisingly, Coagula fails to mention the overwhelming probability that the “artist’s” allegation of rape was a bald-faced lie, and that the real victim in the case is her alleged rapist, Paul Nungesser. Quite understandably, Nungesser is suing the university for “condoning a hostile educational environment” for him by “knowingly permitting and apparently approving” of Sulkowicz’s performance piece—which continued to sully his name and character after all the charges against him had been dropped. Columbia has entered a motion to dismiss the case; Nungesser’s attorneys will of course object. The outcome has yet to be determined.
In response to the suit, Columbia’s lawyers have argued that allowing Sulkowicz’s piece was dictated by principles of academic freedom. “This is especially true here,” they added, “where Ms. Sulkowicz was a visual arts major and inherently subjective judgments of aesthetic value were at issue.”
“Subjective judgments of aesthetic value”? How about objective judgments of what constitutes a work of “art”? In that connection, I would point out, no less a thinker than Aristotle made clear that all “art” involves human skill informed by knowledge and applied to a given task or object. What skill would the Columbia lawyers say is involved in lugging a mattress? And are they aware that the bogus category of “performance art” practiced by Ms. Sulkowicz was invented as an avowedly “anti-art” genre that deliberately dispenses with “aesthetic” considerations?1
The $64 Dollar Question
The foregoing considerations raise a question the university has yet to answer:
How can a student earn senior thesis credit toward a degree in “visual arts” for a project consisting of toting a mattress around campus?
If any skill is involved, it lies in Sulkowicz’s canny manipulation of the media and the artworld. In that case, her degree should be in marketing, not visual arts.
University officials would no doubt argue that the project was a valid one, since it was approved by Sulkowicz’s advisor, a Professor of Visual Arts. That professor was Jon Kessler, an “artist” known for his “kinetic sculptures.”2
An interesting footnote to this fiasco is the fact that Sulkowicz’s parents are both psychiatrists. Her father, Kerry Sulkowicz, has been characterized by Psychiatric Times as “one of the most sought after psychoanalysts in the world”; the firm he founded advises the corporate world on the psychology of leadership. If Dr. Sulkowicz has any sense, he should sue Columbia for awarding his daughter a fraudulent degree in “visual arts” at a cost of more than $200,000, and for having indoctrinated her into the psychologically destabilizing world of spurious “contemporary art.”3
To do that, however, Dr. Sulkowicz would have to trust his own common sense, in defiance of the entire art establishment—a highly unlikely event for a sophisticated New Yorker traveling in the best circles. The corporate executives he advises on leadership psychology might very well collect such “contemporary art.” (Here we should recall that other Andersen tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” [full text].)
Onward and Upward in Today’s Artworld
In any case, daughter Emma appears to be moving right along in her career as an “artist.” While still an undergraduate, she was lauded by prominent art critics for her mattress piece. And at the tender age of 23, she is about to have her first solo show, in which she will exhibit two new works. In the first piece—a “durational performance” entitled Self-Portrait (Performance with Object)—she will be on a platform in the gallery, and visitors will be invited to interact with her. The gallery instructs:
They can speak with her about anything. However, questions that objectify or fetishize her [should] be addressed to Emmatron. Emmatron is a life-sized ultra-realistic replica of Sulkowicz. On another set of sculptural platforms, viewers can interact with Emmatron through an app, which is programmed to enable the replica to answer a series of pre-set questions that the artist is no longer willing to answer.
Also in the show is In-Action Figure: a 3D-printed replica of Sulkowicz (edition of 20). Inspired by Sulkowicz’s experience with the media, In-Action Figure reflects the widespread commodification and flattening of her image in the news and on the internet.
My guess is that Sulkowicz has a bright career ahead in today’s artworld—thanks to the critics, dealers, curators, and journalists who legitimize such imbecilities by taking them seriously. The most ironically laughable aspect of her upcoming show is that the Coagula Gallery bills itself as a “a premiere exhibition space of contemporary art” founded by “acclaimed editor, art critic and curator” Mat Gleason as an offshoot of his brainchild, the Coagula Art Journal—which purportedly offers “a no-holds [sic] critique of contemporary art and the art world.” Some critique. Perhaps the omission of “barred” unwittingly reveals more than just sloppy writing.4
[POSTSCRIPT:] Kate Taylor, Columbia Settles With Student Cast as a Rapist in Mattress Art Project, New York Times, July 14, 2017. Note especially the remarks by Janet Halley, a professor at Harvard Law School, arguing that Columbia had erred in not having distanced itself from Sulkowicz’s project and in allowing her to carry the mattress at graduation—both of which contributed to Nungesser’s harassment and ostracism.
Notes
On “art” and “performance art,” see Who Says That’s Art?, pp. 14 and 92–93; and Torres & Kamhi, What Art Is, pp. 191 and 275–78. ↩
One recent Kessler piece, The Palace at 4 A.M., is an installation described as an “obsessive, aggressive, and handmade response to the war on terror.” On entering the piece “through the cut-out crotch of a massive-scale porn image, viewers are surrounded by surveillance cameras affixed to mechanisms that reproduce the lock and load click of artillery as they turn.” ↩
Soon after graduation from Columbia, Ms. Sulkowicz posted a video on the internet of a shockingly graphic “performance piece” entitled Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol (translation: this is not a rape)—accompanied by a mind-bending “Trigger Warning.” I will spare the reader the details, but I can’t help wondering more than ever what Dr. Sulkowicz thinks of his daughter’s “artistic” endeavors. ↩
By far the most comprehensive and nuanced review of Who Says That’s Art? to date is that offered late last year by J. W. Bourne and D. F. Bailey on the Stuckismwales website.[*] Nine single-spaced pages long, it testifies to their close reading of the book, and to their fair-minded reflection on the various points of its argument—for both of which I’m very grateful.
Martin Puryear, Vessel, 1997-2002. Pine, mesh and tar, 18 1/2 x 84 x 68 in.
As indicated by the brief excerpt I’ve posted on the reviews page for Who Says That’s Art?, Bourne and Bailey (members of the Stuckist group in Wales) found much to praise in the book—which is truly gratifying. But their agreement was by no means total. And what I especially value (as I wrote to tell them) is that rather than simply reject conclusions they disagree with, they summarized the reasons for my position and then offered their own reasons for disagreement. That is precisely the sort of intelligent debate I had hoped to stimulate.
To continue that debate, therefore, I respond here to some of the main points of contention—in the order in which they appear in the review.
Why Distinguish Between “Fine” and “Decorative” Art?
Like many in today’s artworld, Bourne and Bailey would prefer to merge the categories of “fine” and “decorative” art. In their view, since both categories “have the common ingredient of craft,”
it seems more democratic to say that they are all one. Some of us are uneasy with the Renaissance artists’ insistence that they were superior to the humble craftsman and we are not sure that such ego is appropriate in art. We feel that in Eastern art especially, fine art and decorative/useful art seem to merge into each other so that it is difficult to see where one ends and the other begins.
The issue thus raised is mainly anepistemological (not an aesthetic) one, for it relates to the nature of concept formation. Epistemologically sound categories and concepts are based on the essential characteristics of their most representative examples. As a result, concepts are often more clearly defined than things in reality. But that doesn’t invalidate them. For example, we don’t reject the concepts “blue” and “green” because it is difficult to say whether a particular intermediate shade is “bluish green” or “greenish blue.”
Regardless of what artists at any time have said or thought, the point of distinguishing between “fine” and “decorative” art is not to declare superiority of one over the other but to recognize fundamental differences between the quintessential examples in each category. The problem with defining “art” as anything exhibiting craftsmanship is that it tells us nothing about the significant differences between a Pietà, say, and a well-crafted basket or a beautifully designed candelabrum. (It’s worth noting that the candelabrum design shown here has been attributed to no less a Renaissance master than Michelangelo; see “Even Michelangelo Designed Works of Decorative Art,” What Art Is Online, November 2002.)
As I aimed to show in Who Says That’s Art?, works traditionally referred to as “fine art”—primarily, painting and sculpture (more broadly, all two- and three-dimensional artistic representations)—have played a key role in virtually all known cultures (Eastern as well as Western), serving to embody important values in an emotionally compelling form. That functional distinction is fairly universal, even in cultures that do not express it verbally. And it clearly differs from the primarily practical function of such useful objects as baskets and candelabra.
The growing tendency to ignore that distinction has very real consequences. In my book, I cited the example of a worthless piece of “conceptual art” inspired by such “democratic” thinking. A clumsy installation of chairs by an art history student at my alma mater, it was submitted (and accepted) as her senior-thesis project. As I noted, however, it failed to convey its intended meaning, and it served no practical function. It was totally useless in every respect.
Another Case in Point: The Work of Martin Puryear
A more lamentable example of the unintended consequences of blurring the distinction between “fine” and “decorative” art is the critically acclaimed work of Martin Puryear (b. 1941)—the subject of an exhibition I’ve just seen at the Morgan Library in New York. The centerpiece of the Puryear show was a work entitled Vessel, pictured above.
Considered “one of the most important contemporary American sculptors,” Puryear regards himself as an artist because his work (unlike the traditional “crafts”) has no practical function. But he ignores what the function of “[fine] art” is—namely, the value-charged representation of things of human importance.
Why did Puryear begin to create his meticulously crafted but physically useless and ultimately baffling works of “art”? His biographical trajectory tells the whole story. In his early twenties, he spent two years with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone. Tellingly, his drawings [more] from that period reveal some genuine artistic talent, applied to capturing the distinctive character of the people and places he encountered there. At the same time, he was fascinated by, and proceeded to learn about, the traditional materials and techniques of local craftspeople.
On returning to the states, Puryear obtained an MFA in “sculpture” at the Yale University School of Art. In the course of his studies there, he was exposed to (and unfortunately influenced by) the contemporary American “art” then in vogue—namely, Minimalism [more]. Thereafter, his work combined the abstract—and therefore meaningless—tendencies of Minimalism with traditional “craft.” Only in the conceptually promiscuous contemporary artworld could his work qualify as “[fine] art”—the context in which it is presented and discussed. (For more about this confusion, see “Perversely Purposeless” in Notes & Comments, Aristos, June 2008, about another Puryear exhibition.)
Puryear applies himself with great seriousness and dedication to his work. But he has been led down a lamentable dead-end by the muddled premises prevailing in the contemporary artworld. However “interesting” or “intriguing” his pieces may appear to the viewer, they remain frustratingly enigmatic, and thus flout the point of “fine art.” According to the curators of the Morgan show, Vessel “resembles a drawing in space.” But a drawing of what? In their view, it “evokes at once a beached bottle or ship and a head.” What sense can be made of that?
On “Imagery”
Surprisingly, Bourne and Bailey took issue with my use of the term “imagery” for both two- and three-dimensional work. They argued that sculpture, in particular,
is not essentially imagery; it is form. A blind person can experience sculpture by touch, with no image involved. And for sighted people a single sculptural form is equivalent to an infinite number of images. Even a two-dimensional painting may be thought of as consisting of forms rather than an image and the image thought of as an effect of the painting rather than the painting itself.
Contrary to that argument, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed., 2011) includes the following definitions of image:
a representation of the form of a person or object, such as a painting or photograph
a likeness, or semblance—such as a “sculptured likeness”
a mental picture of something.
Perhaps British usage differs from American on this point.
In any case, I agree that images consist of forms. But what is crucial for art is whether those forms cohere into an intelligible whole—that is, whether they constitute an image, a likeness of something. And that would hold even with respect to a blind person. Unless one could construct a coherent mental image corresponding to the work of sculpture experienced through touch, the experience would be as meaningless as an “abstract” (nonobjective) painting is for a sighted person.
“It’s Good Having [Hirst] Around”
On this point, I cannot agree with Bourne and Bailey. Quite magnanimously they maintain that the “antics of Postmodernist artists” such as Damien Hirst and other Young British Artists “add colour and debate to the art scene” and encourage traditional artists, who paint pictures, “to question what they [themselves] are doing.” In their view, moreover, the only way to discover the proper boundaries of art is for would-be artists “to produce novel creations . . . to see if they work as art.”
As I see it, artists since time immemorial have produced “novel creations,” within tacit boundaries demarcating the essential nature of art. Countless works of value were produced in diverse cultures within those limits. In marked contrast, during the past century a completely open-ended concept of presumably artistic novelty has come to prevail. I would argue that it has led to total chaos in the artworld, with little or nothing of value being created, and a concomitant breakdown in the very concept of art. In the process, the worst pseudo art has gained ascendancy, at the expense of genuine art. It is the artworld equivalent of Gresham’s law in the monetary sphere. Bad art (more precisely, pseudo art) has been driving out good.
Bourne and Bailey note that some Stuckists are enthusiastic about Modernist styles such as Expressionism and Cubism. Expressionism is surely a legitimate style, with pre-Modern precursors. I consider the pursuit of Cubism misguided, however, because it deliberately subverts normal perception and therefore impedes understanding (see “‘Puzzling Out’ Cubism,” in Notes & Comments, Aristos, March 2015).
Is Photography a “Fine Art”?
Here I come to what is probably Bourne and Bailey’s principal reservation about my book—my view that photography is a “craft,” rather than “art.” Against my claim that a photograph (unlike a drawing or painting) is a largely mechanical product, they argue that successful photographs are “the endpoint of some fairly complex creative decisions” regarding such matters as composition, focal point, depth of field, and lighting.
Yet they acknowledge that a photograph, “[e]ven with the most professional of pre shot camera setting decisions,” often fails “to capture the magic of the scene which so enthralled us, the early golden light of morning through a light mist for example.” They further note: “This ‘expectation’ gap then becomes the subject of further extended creative decision making through post processing or ‘Photoshopping.’” Such processing is something other than “pure photography,” however, which was primarily what I was discussing.
In any case, I am prepared to accept Bourne and Bailey’s suggestion that photography “be considered at least a ‘kissing cousin’ of art.” Provided we agree that “kissing cousins” are not identical (or even fraternal) twins.
*Note: For readers unfamiliar with the term, “Stuckism” is an international art movement founded in 1999 to promote figurative painting as opposed to “conceptual art.” Its members aim to produce art with “spiritual value”—regardless of style, subject matter, or medium.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the recent terrorist attack in [San Bernardino] California was the admission by more than one person of having failed to report suspicious activity around the perpetrators’ home because of reluctance to appear biased.
As many in the media have already commented, it was chilling testimony to the destructive influence of “political correctness” gone amuck. At the same time, anti-terrorism experts have been emphasizing the crucial role ordinary citizens can play in preserving our security by exercising commonsense discretion regarding suspicious behavior.
Why am I writing about this on a blog devoted to art?
Because it is directly related to some of the pernicious nonsense that has been circulating in art education in recent years. As I observed in Who Says That’s Art? regarding the peddling of politics in the art classroom, “visual culture” proponents exploit their role as purported art educators to express their own dubious views on complex social and political issues by discussing things other than art.
“An especially dismaying example” I reported had been featured at the 2006 convention of the National Art Education Association [NAEA], the leading professional organization for visual arts educators worldwide. In a session entitled “The Many Faces of Visual Culture,”
in a ballroom filled to capacity, Kevin Tavin (a professor of art education who was one of visual culture studies’ most ardent advocates) disparaged America’s If you see something, say somethingposter campaign aimed at detecting potential terrorist activity. Tavin objected to the campaign because it plays into “fears based on a socially constructed fear of difference” and encourages citizens to single out “people who don’t seem to belong.”
As I further reported, no one at the session challenged Tavin—“not even to question why such a topic was being discussed at an art education conference.” (Most of the posters consist merely of verbiage; they thus lack even the imagery that might tie them, however loosely, to visual art education.) Nor did anyone argue that the poster campaign may in fact contribute to public safety.
In a note, I added:
Fortunately, Tavin’s specious reasoning is not shared by the average citizen. Only four years after his talk, . . . the lives of countless people were saved by a street vendor in Times Square who “saw something” suspicious and “said something” to the police, thereby alerting them to the smoking van left by would-be bomber Faisal Shahzad.
Yet as recent events in San Bernardino have sadly demonstrated, some people have been affected by the sort of specious reasoning Tavin and all too many other academics engage in. And it deterred them from action that might have prevented the tragic death of fourteen innocent individuals and the injury of seventeen others.
Postscript: Neither Tavin’s talk on “If you see something, say something” at the 2006 NAEA convention nor any other nonsense he has promulgated appears to have deterred his career advancement. The content of his talk was published in the peer-reviewed journal Visual Arts Research, published by the University of Illinois Press. Following that, he served for six years as an associate professor of art education at Ohio State University, one of the top-ranked schools of education in the U.S. He is now Professor of International Art Education at Aalto University in Finland. His areas of specialty there include such arcane subjects as Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. A 2014 paper by him in the NAEA’s research journal Studies in Art Education applied that theory to the appreciation of “violent works of contemporary art”—among others, the video Eating People, in which the Chinese “performance artist” Zhu Yu purports to eat the cooked flesh of dead babies.
A welcome dissection of Tavin’s warped version of art education can be found in a Special Issue of Vision magazine entitled Reflexions: Fondements de L’Enseignment des Arts du Quebec [Reflections: Foundations of Art Education in Quebec], published by L’Association Québécoise des Éducatrices et Éducateurs Spécialisés en Arts Plastiques [Quebec Association of Visual Art Educators]. See David Pariser, “Walmart Made Me Do It: Why Art Teachers Have Nothing to Learn from Fashionable Nonsense,” Vision, November 2015, pp. 49-61.
Let me begin by thanking you for reviewing my book in the December issue of Arts & Activities, a magazine widely read by K–12 art teachers.
Since nothing is worse for an author than being ignored, I’m grateful for your calling attention, however critical, to Who Says That’s Art?. All the more grateful in view of the serious health problems you’ve been dealing with—not least, failing eyesight.
My thanks, too, for saying: “This is a book that deserves reading even though we may disagree with some of its conclusions.”
Given the authority and respect you’ve long enjoyed in the field of art education, however, I fear that the objections you raise in the review will disincline many teachers from bothering to read for themselves what I wrote—which is often quite different from what you suggested.
Most notably, you object that I start “with a definition of art that would preclude photography, electronic media, and most conceptual forms” and that I set about “to elevate forms that have moved [me]”—to the total exclusion of “contemporary art.”
That depends on what is meant by “contemporary art”—which is, of course, the crux of my book’s thesis.
What I in fact start with is a definition of traditional forms of “fine art”—primarily, representational painting and sculpture. Hence there is nothing “deceptively commonsensical” (as you claim) about my view that “all works of art are made with special skill and care” or that “the emotionally meaningful forms of visual art consist of two- or three-dimensional representations of actual or imagined persons, places, objects, or events.”
What I then set out to do is to analyze fundamental respects in which the various new media (including photography)—which now eclipse painting and sculpture in the realm of “contemporary art”—differ from, and are in most instances inferior to, those time-honored forms.
Thus I by no means engage merely in “outright rejection of what is ‘new’”—as you imply. To the contrary, I offer extensive evidence and reasoned arguments for my rejection of the new forms purported to be “art,” forms that have been invented over the past hundred years. Included in my evidence are statements by the inventors themselves, expressly declaring that what they were creating differed essentially from traditional fine art, and even that it therefore merited a new name. In view of such origins, it is ironic that those new forms now dominate the realm of contemporary “art.”
One of the most troubling aspects of your review is your claim that I ignore “the art of our own times.” Quite the contrary is true. Throughout the book I cite countless works from the early twentieth century to the present—albeit arguing that many of them do not qualify as art by any objective standard.
Most tellingly, the list of works you cite from among the baker’s dozen I praise in a chapter entitled “The Pleasures and Rewards of Art—Real Art, That Is” (spanning millennia of art history) is misleadingly incomplete. Oddly, you omit the 9/11 Memorial (September 11th) by Meredith Bergmann (b. 1955)—which I characterize as “a work of truly conceptual art.” Unlike postmodernist pieces of bogus “conceptual art,” it does what genuine art has always done. It embodies an idea in directly perceptible and emotionally moving form that does not require an artist’s statement or expert commentary to be understood. Can it be that you omitted it because it is in an essentially traditional, classically inspired style and therefore does not qualify as “contemporary art” in your view? If so, you are merely embracing the current artworld consensus, which my book is devoted to challenging.
In contrast with my traditionalist view, you argue: “New media and technologies have brought about new forms that have enlarged and enriched the nature of art experience.” I’d love to know which works in these “new media” have truly enriched your experience.
Based on numerous conversations and written exchanges we’ve had over the years, we’ve long recognized that we approach the crucial question of what qualifies as “contemporary art” from totally different perspectives. Yours I’d characterize as the view now dominant in the artworld—i.e., that anything created by a purported artist merits consideration as art. Mine is that unless we formulate some objective criteria for what constitutes “art,” we have no sound basis for deciding who qualifies as an “artist.”
In that context, it is worth noting that at least two contemporary artists have found considerable merit in Who Says That’s Art?, judging its conclusions to be supported by “rigorous argument” as well as “passionate conviction,” and urging that “all who are interested to find the truth about art should study it and engage with its arguments.”
Also worth mentioning is the favorable assessment of the book offered by other art educators—see Reviews and What Readers Say.
Let me close by echoing your view that what is needed is indeed “healthy dialogue and debate.” That debate should not preclude considering that the ideas and practices now prevailing in the artworld—and increasingly adopted by professors of art education and K–12 teachers—are hopelessly muddled and due for revision.
There’s so much about today’s artworld that art critic Joan Altabe and I agree on (see her three Aristos Awards—search for “Joan Altabe”) that I’m more than a little astonished by the objections she raises to Who Says That’s Art? in a brief review published online on August 18, which I only recently learned of.
After noting that it’s “gutsy” of me to attempt to “corral art’s baggy borders,” and that the book is both “well-researched” and “well-written,” Altabe proceeds to dispute what she sees as its many “debatable observations and conclusions.” The unfortunate truth is that those “debatable” points stem mainly from her own misreadings and mistaken inferences.
Francisco Goya, Third of May
To begin with, Altabe disputes my purported claim that “If art can be about anything, then it is nothing.” To which she responds:
Art about anything can be nothing, yes. But it can also be about everything. Putting art in a lock box marked “something” hems it in, makes it smaller and keeps it from resonating with the widest range of human experience.
What I actually wrote, however, was not “If art can be about anything, then it is nothing” (emphasis added) but rather “If art can be anything, then it is nothing.” Altabe’s misquoted version pertains to the range of content or meaning in art works (about which I, in fact, take a very broad view). My statement instead has to do with the sort of entities that qualify as works of art. That is a vastly different point, and one with which Altabe ought to be more in sympathy, given her own view that “Conceptual art is a crock” (i.e., not art), for example—a viewpoint I share and offer solid reasons for.
Altabe also finds my “high opinion” of eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy and “low opinion” of modern art “too sweeping for words.” She thereby implies that I neither express any reservations regarding eighteenth-century ideas about art nor say anything good about “modern art.” In fact, I offer a critical reassessment of both.
In a section entitled “Which Eighteenth-Century Ideas about ‘Fine Art’ Are Worth Keeping?,” for example, I indicate flaws as well as insights, and also point out ways in which that influential century’s ideas have been misrepresented by subsequent thinkers.
As for “modern art,” I’m not sure how Altabe defines the term. Mainstreams of Modern Art, by the estimable art historian and critic John Canaday, applies it as far back as Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) and Francisco Goya (1746–1828)—the latter of whom I do cite, favorably. But even if one takes the term in the more limited sense of late-nineteenth-century work that departed from academic strictures, my pantheon includes quite a few “modern artists”—from van Gogh and Gauguin to Seurat and Kamisaka Sekka.
Altabe further complains:
While [Kamhi] acknowledges that the root of fine art began in antiquity, she leaps straight to the 18th century, bounding over the very century that would have clued her into modern art—the Baroque era of the 17th century.
The balance of Altabe’s brief review (nearly half of the total) is devoted to a vigorous defense of Baroque art, as if I had devalued such work—a mistaken inference she apparently drew from my emphasis on eighteenth-century art theory, which she failed to distinguish from my views on actual works of art. She then comes to the crux of her argument:
Baroque painting showed struggling, earthy figures in turbulent settings. It revealed a world in flux and off balance, a world that was searching and questioning.
Sound familiar? It should. Artists in our time are also searching and questioning.
Nothing I wrote suggests that I would reject work by genuine artists in any time who were “searching and questioning,” however. On the contrary, I express intense admiration for the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin’s deeply probing masterpiece Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion, for example—not to mention my respectful reference to such works as Goya’s Third of May (see image above) and Picasso’s Guernica.
Yet Altabe concludes that I “skewer all modernism.” Her claim is not only mistaken. It is baffling.
The best thing about the exhibition Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through September 20) is the light it sheds on the creation of Bingham’s wondrous Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), one of the treasures of the Met’s holdings in American art.
Since that painting happens to be featured in my chapter on “The Pleasures and Rewards of Art—Real Art, That Is” in Who Says That’s Art?, it’s of more than usual interest to me. Revisiting it in this exhibition, highlighting its artistry, heightened my appreciation of Bingham’s achievement.
A mainly self-taught artist, Bingham (1811–1879) was not a brilliant draftsman. But he was an astute observer of life in what was America’s western frontier in the mid-nineteenth century. And as the numerous preparatory drawings in the Met exhibition demonstrate, he succeeded in capturing subtleties of attitude, gesture, and facial expression that vividly evoked the diverse humanity he depicted at work or play along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.
In its dreamy evocation of a by-then-dying enterprise, however, Bingham’s Fur Traders far surpasses his customary genre scenes. It was, by all accounts, his masterpiece. Happily, two elements of the Met’s show help to reveal the artistic choices that contributed to the painting’s poetry. One is Bingham’s extant drawing for the figure of the father (identified as such in the painter’s original title, French Trader and Half-Breed Son). The other is infrared evidence regarding Bingham’s initial conception of the scene, as indicated in a small video display next to the painting.
While essentially similar in costume and broad outline to the preparatory drawing, the father in the painting is older and sterner. In addition to adding a gray mustache and beard, Bingham intensified his expression, and adjusted the slightly jaunty angle of his cap to one more emphatically erect. As revealed by infrared examination, the painter also greatly simplified and subtly modified the composition. He eliminated extraneous details such as a flagpost erected between father and son, and minimized tree stumps in the background. Finally, he reduced the size of the bear cub [see Martin Rieser’s Comment below], thereby making the creature more catlike in appearance. In Who Says That’s Art?, I suggested that it conjures up images of ancient Egyptian sacred cats. Though one cannot know if Bingham had such prototypes in mind, if only subliminally, the impression remains indelible for me, contributing to the scene’s aura of mystery.
Remarkably, six years after creating this consummate work, Bingham reprised the subject in The Trappers’ Return—a painting so clumsy in comparison that one might think he was engaging in self-parody. On loan from the Detroit Institute of Arts for the Met exhibition, this relatively pedestrian treatment of the same theme serves as a telling gauge of its predecessor’s mastery.
Is the infamous urinal signed “R. Mutt” (featured as the centerpiece on the cover of Who Says That’s Art?) really the brainchild of Marcel Duchamp, as the artworld has long claimed?
Or was it instead merely a copy by him of a piece originally created by a relatively obscure figure of the early twentieth-century avant-garde—a minor baroness named Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven?
And if the urinal is really traceable to the baroness, what are the implications for a contemporary art establishment that regards the piece as the “readymade” that instituted “conceptual art”—the innovation said by the Dictionary of Art to have “decisively altered our understanding of what constitutes an object of art”?
Those are the key questions raised by Julian Spalding and Glyn Thompson in a recent series of articles, and soon to be posed more publicly by them in an exhibition entitled A Lady’s Not a Gent’s, mounted as part of the 2015 Edinburgh Festival.
Thompson is an art historian who has been exploring this matter for some time, posting his views on it in several papers on academia.edu. Spalding—formerly director of Art Galleries and Museums in Glasgow, Scotland—writes widely on art, often as an artworld gadfly (see “Artworld Maverick,” by Aristos co-editor Louis Torres). Together they’ve laid out the known facts of the case in exhaustive and frequently convoluted detail, documenting the many points at which the artworld’s generally accepted account of the piece’s origin is belied by the evidence. They summarize their case for the Edinburgh exhibition as follows:
The Urinal is the first great feminist work of art, created by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in 1917 as a protest against America’s declaration of war on Germany. Long after she died, Duchamp appropriated it and robbed it of its meaning. This fact, known since 1982 but ignored by the art world, changes the history of conceptual art.
Chief among the supporting evidence for that position is a letter written by Duchamp to his sister in Paris, just two days after the Society of Independent Artists had rejected the piece’s application for inclusion in their presumably unjuried 1917 exhibition. In his letter, Duchamp stated:
One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture. . . . The committee has decided to refuse to show this thing. I have handed in my resignation and it will be a bit of gossip of some value in New York.
Yet Duchamp’s account of the incident decades later claimed that he had bought the urinal in question at the J. L. Mott Iron Works Company, signed it “R. Mutt,” and submitted it to the exhibition. Further, he expounded on that name as follows:
Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer. But Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily cartoon strip “Mutt and Jeff” which appeared at the time, and with which everyone was familiar. Thus, from the start, there was an interplay of Mutt: a fat little funny man, and Jeff: a tall thin man . . . I wanted any old name. And I added Richard [French slang for money-bags].
Surviving records from the J. L. Mott Company fail to show the model used in the piece, however—another key fact cited to question Duchamp’s authorship.
Based on such information and on linguistic interpretation published by the baroness’s biographer (literary historian Irene Gammel), Spalding and Thompson have concluded that the baroness was the actual creator of the piece. Consequently, in a protracted correspondence published in the July-August issue of the British magazine The Jackdaw, they have insisted that Britain’s Tate Museum (which paid $500,000 for one of the piece’s numerous copies attributing the original to Duchamp) should revise its attribution and thereby acknowledge that the postmodernist artworld’s founding myth is an outright lie, perpetrated by Duchamp at the baroness’s expense.
So far, so good. No one could be happier than I to see Duchamp publicly exposed as the charlatan I always thought he was.
But in the process Spalding and Thompson make several astonishing claims that to my mind profoundly undermine the value of their project. “[S]ince Duchamp was not the author [of the original piece],” they maintain, “any replica of it . . . must seek its aesthetic legitimacy elsewhere.” To which I am moved to respond (inspired by Jerry Seinfeld’s response to his friend George’s claim to “artistic integrity”) that the piece “is not aesthetic,” and “it has no legitimacy”—as art, that is.
Remarkably, however, Spalding and Thompson state that while Duchamp’s readymades “were not art, . . . Elsa’s urinal was”! In that connection, they note without objection that the piece was submitted “as a sculpture,” and they proceed to refer to it as such.
I protest that no matter who submitted the urinal, or why, it did not thereby become either a “sculpture” or a work of “conceptual art.” It remained an ordinary urinal, plain and simple—albeit one employed as a “statement” of some sort (whether political or art-related) or merely as a prank.
Significantly, Duchamp’s biographers Calvin Tomkins and Alice Goldfarb Marquis, both of whom accept Duchamp’s latter-day account, nonetheless regard the incident as a mere prank. As I note in Who Says That’s Art?, the irony is that the artworld elevated what was no more than a practical joke in Duchamp’s account to a momentous event altering the course of art history.
A still more fundamental point is at issue here, however—one evidently ignored by Spalding and Thompson. They argue that the matter of the urinal’s attribution “has immense implications for the whole history of conceptual art.” Yet they never question the very notion of “conceptual art.”
Even if Duchamp had submitted the urinal, in deadly earnest, as a work of art, it remained (as I’ve indicated above) a urinal. The mere fact of submitting it to an art exhibition did not alter the essential nature of art, much less create a new category. Moreover, as I’ve argued in Who Says That’s Art?, “conceptual art” is an absurdity. Variously defined as “Art that is intended to convey an idea or concept to the perceiver and need not involve the creation or appreciation of a traditional art object such as a painting or sculpture” or as “forms of art in which the idea for a work is considered more important than the finished product, if any,” it is, as I point out, the antithesis of art.
Would anyone say of Michelangelo’s Pietà, for example, that the idea is more important than the finished product? Of course not, because what matters in art is the unique way in which an idea is embodied. Even without proof of duplicity on Duchamp’s part, the “whole history of conceptual art” should be questioned. Sadly, that overarching truth is entirely missed by Spalding and Thompson.
In sum, whoever submitted the urinal signed “R. Mutt” to the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, it was not a “work of art” of any kind. It was, at best, a gesture of trivial significance, worth little more than a minor footnote in the history of art.
The recent installation of a newly commissioned work entitled Masks (Pentagon) by Thomas Houseago in New York’s Rockefeller Plaza highlights the latest of a long list of bizarre projects spearheaded by the Public Art Fund.
Thomas Houseago, Masks (Pentagon) – Rockefeller Center
Like numerous other projects organized by the Fund and supported by prominent public officials and business leaders in recent years, it promotes the “anything goes” agenda of the contemporary art world far more than it serves the public.
The Public Art Fund is a 501(c)(3) organization that receives support from individuals, corporations, and foundations for temporary exhibitions of “contemporary art” in New York City. Its stated aim is to “redefine public art in relation to the changing nature of contemporary art” (emphasis mine).
Redefining art is, in fact, what the art establishment has long been bent on doing. The public, however, has not been buying the redefinition.
It is too soon to tell what the response of most ordinary people to the Houseago project will be. However, only yesterday (a beautiful spring day), very few of the many pedestrians I observed around the Plaza seemed even to be looking at the piece.
I asked three of them how they liked it. “Not very much,” answered one, with a decided frown of disapproval. A second woman, who was struggling to get a picture of it with her cell phone, replied in some frustration: “I don’t know what it is.” Just one of the three answered that she found it “very interesting.”[*]
Also indicative is the public response to last year’s Rockefeller Plaza installation of Split-Rocker—a floral construction by art world megastar Jeff Koons. As judged from remarks following articles online [more], it ranged from confusion and boredom to a frank indictment as “crap.”
Nor did the public respond with enthusiasm to an earlier, more expansive and expensive Public Art Fund project—Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls. Costing millions to construct (and resulting in substantial damage owing to the saline spray it produced), that project consisted of artificial waterfalls in four waterfront locations, one of them under the Brooklyn Bridge. The Fund’s “most ambitious project” to date, it was actively promoted by Mayor Bloomberg.
As indicated by countless comments following a post on a New York Times blog, however, the response of ordinary people to the Waterfalls project was overwhelmingly negative, often questioning its status as “art.” A typically irreverent remark was: “Looks like the Brooklyn Bridge taking a leak if you ask me . . . an expensive leak.” One person aptly quipped: “This is not art, it is plumbing!”
Houseago’s project—a quasi sculptural installation of five giant mask-like structures—is at least not plumbing. But it intrudes upon one of New York’s most urbane public spaces. And its status as art is equally questionable.
Flouting the traditional view of art as something made with great skill and care, for example, the piece entailed such creative processes on Houseago’s part as his incorporating the footprints left by his young daughter’s dancing on damp clay and his “hurling lumps of clay down from a ladder.” Not quite the techniques employed by the likes of Michelangelo or Donatello. The work also involves the interactive gimmickry of enabling visitors to view their surroundings through openings in the masks. Such spurious approaches to art-making are standard fare in today’s art world, which embraces virtually anything—except traditional painting and sculpture, that is.
What has been the point of the Rockefeller Plaza exhibitions? According to Jerry Speyer—chairman of Tishman Speyer (the owner of Rockefeller Center), which has co-organized them—”It’s been an interesting way of educating the public.”
Educating the public about what? one might ask. The likely answer would be: about the establishment’s view of what constitutes “contemporary art.” That view was succinctly expressed a couple of years ago by Glenn Lowry—the director of the Museum of Modern Art, of which Speyer also happens to be chairman.
When I asked Lowry whether what some “contemporary artists” are creating might no longer be “art,” he replied that, thanks to Marcel Duchamp (the putative creator of Fountain—a urinal that was purportedly transformed into “art” by his signing it with an assumed name), we can no longer ask that question.
“If an artist does it, it’s art,” Lowry declared with finality. That dictum has long been the mantra of the art establishment—with little thought being given to what qualifies someone as an “artist.”
Such an attitude does not “redefine” art. It undefines it. Ordinary people seem to get that.
Perhaps the time has come for the public to educate the Public Art Fund—as well as its all-too-willing cadre of public officials and business leaders (not to mention art experts such as Lowry)—who have for too long been imposing their distorted view of “contemporary art” on the rest of us.
*In The Use and Abuse of Art, cultural historian Jacques Barzun aptly criticized “the Interesting as an esthetic category,” observing that it is “the first word [used] about the new and usually also the last,” generally referring to “the offbeat, the Absurd, the Minimal or any other form of the unexpected.”
About ‘For Piero’s Sake’
Who was Piero, and why was this title chosen? Read here
