Healthy Debate in Academia

August 3, 2016 / Michelle Kamhi / Art Education / No Comments

When a Pulitzer-winning New York Times journalist noted for his own “progressive” views laments liberal intolerance on college campuses, we can be sure it’s not just a figment of conservatives’ “paranoid” imagination.¹ Nor is it limited to the U.S. All the more reason to laud academics who have had the courage and integrity to defy the prevailing biases.

One of them is David A. Pariser (Professor of Art Education, Concordia University, Montreal), who was bold enough to consider my contrarian viewpoint, in a fair-minded review of Who Says That’s Art? last year. Published in Canadian Art Teacher (vol. 13 no. 2), his review is reproduced here with kind permission. While expressing significant reservations about some of my positions, he nonetheless endorses the book “as a useful addition to any undergraduate or graduate reading list, . . . for it will generate debate and engaged discussion.”

Generating debate and engaged discussion—isn’t that what education is supposed to be promoting? Quite a far cry from the professor of art education who opined in an email message to me that my work wouldn’t survive the vetting process for peer-reviewed publication because my “arguments are inconsistent with current thinking.” (As I suggested to him, such inconsistency may place me in some notable company. My own favorite example is Ignaz Semmelweis, who bucked the entire medical profession of his day in his battle to protect women from childbed fever.)

In addition to Pariser, praise and thanks are due the editor of Canadian Art Teacher—Michael Emme, Associate Professor of Art Education at the University of Victoria. He not only published Pariser’s review but also welcomed my response to it (just published in vol. 14 no. 1 of the journal,² and reproduced here with permission), made editorial suggestions that greatly improved its content, and graciously thanked me for contributing to the “rich mix of themes in this issue.”

Two more scholars merit acknowledgment for courageously fostering open debate in an often-hostile environment. One is the late Richard A. Ciganko, Professor of Art Education at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Reviewing Who Says That’s Art? for Studies in Art Education (the research journal of the National Art Education Association), he argued that it would be “imprudent” for his fellow art educators to ignore the “serious questions” posed by the book. Finally, the journal’s book review editor—Laurel Lampela (Professor of Art Education at the University of New Mexico)—deserves credit for ensuring that the book was reviewed.

Hearty kudos and thanks to these four academics, who should serve as models to their colleagues worldwide.

Notes

Nicholas Kristof, “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance,” New York Times, May 7, 2016. “Universities are the bedrock of progressive values,” writes Kristof, “but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.” ↩
Owing to delayed publication, the date on the journal is 2015—not 2016. ↩

'Who Says That's Art', academic debate, David A. Pariser, intellectual diversity, Laurel Lampela, liberal intolerance, Michael Emme, Richard A. Ciganko

Jousting with Mark Rothko’s Son

June 22, 2016 / Michelle Kamhi / Abstract Art / 6 Comments

Christopher Rothko—the highly affable son of the famed not-so-affable Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970)—has written a volume of essays lovingly re-examining his father’s life and work. Entitled Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out, it was published last November by Yale University Press, and its author has been promoting it with a passion inspired by devotion to the parent whose suicide left him bereft at the tender age of six.

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1968.

As my readers are probably aware, I’m no fan of Rothko’s work (see, most recently, “Barking Up the Wrong Trees in Art Education”). So it’s not surprising that I welcomed the opportunity to go head to head with Christopher earlier this month on the subject of his father’s paintings.

The unlikely venue was the New York City Junto [more]. I say unlikely because that monthly discussion forum—founded three decades ago by investor Victor Niederhoffer (who has generously hosted it ever since)—has focused on matters related to free markets, the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, and investing. Ayn Rand notwithstanding, art has rarely been more than a tangential topic of discussion.

This month’s surprising departure from that pattern was due to Gene Epstein, the Junto’s main moderator in recent years. Epstein’s day job is as the economics and books editor of Barron’s weekly business magazine. But he happens to be married to abstract painter Hisako Kobayashi—who initiated him into the ranks of Rothko admirers, as he explained in his introductory remarks.

There was a particular irony in a Junto session devoted to Mark Rothko’s work, however, for Ayn Rand made a compelling case against the idea that any abstract work could be an objectively meaningful form of art. So I gladly accepted Epstein’s kind invitation to present my contrarian view—as summarized in these brief remarks [click on > to hear audio]

and fleshed out in dialogue with Christopher Rothko.

Rothko’s overriding aim as an artist, his son explained, was to find a “universal language” for his work—in order to move the maximum number of people, in a way comparable to music. As Christopher put it, Rothko was actually a painter who aspired to be a musician. With the proper training that is the vocation he would have chosen. Feeling a particular kinship with the music of Mozart (his favorite composer), he sought to create a visual analogue that would convey an emotional sense of the “human condition”—the “darker side” of life along with its joyful aspect—much as Mozart’s music does.

In that connection, color was for Rothko “almost synonymous with emotion,” Christopher noted. By applying layers of color, the painter hoped to suggest different emotions. Yet he seems to have discovered for himself that the analogy between abstract art and music soon breaks down, as I argued in my remarks. Consequently, he moved away from his early use of bright colors, because—Christopher explained—people read them as more “joyous” than he had intended (in contrast, would one ever hear intentionally sad music as joyous?).

Over time, therefore, Rothko’s palette became darker and darker and his canvases increasingly “minimalist,” Christopher noted, until they reached the nearly black monochrome aspect of his murals for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. That work came up in relation to the claim, quoted by Epstein from Christopher’s book, that Rothko was a great painter in part because “he pushed painting to do things it wasn’t necessarily designed to do.” Asked by Epstein what he thought painting was not necessarily designed to do, Christopher responded that it centers on the way we need to bring ourselves to the paintings—the need to slow down, spend time, and “lose yourself in them.” Of the Rothko Chapel, he observed, it’s a space “you can walk into and say ‘there’s nothing here’ and be absolutely right”—if, he added, you don’t spend the time to complete the “interactive process” the painter aimed for.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Jewish Bride, c. 1667.

Early in the discussion, Christopher had noted that his father believed “the most powerful expression of an idea is abstract.” Yet he loved figurative paintings such as Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride. Moreover, as I later discovered. Rothko much admired the work of another representational painter, Piero della Francesca (to whom, Christopher noted, my blog happens to be dedicated!)—once arguing that he might have been the greatest artist who ever lived.

That is not the only contradiction begging to be reconciled regarding Rothko’s abstract work. In response to my remarks, Christopher surprisingly avowed that he actually agrees with most of what I said. In particular, he urges in his book that his father’s biography be left out of consideration in response to the work. Further, despite his prior emphasis on color, he now acknowledged that it is “secondary” to form, and cited an essay in his book entitled “The Quiet Dominance of Form.” On that point, he reported that his father was almost obsessive in adjusting the dimensions and proportions of the rectangular forms in his paintings. That limited repertoire of minimalist shapes is scarcely what I think of as meaningful “form” in painting, however—a term that instead conjures up for me the wealth of human figures, objects, and settings depicted by representational artists such as Rembrandt or Piero.

Although Christopher, like his father, loves the representational work of those and other masters, he said he struggles to find meaning in such work, insisting that to be art it must be about something more than the mere image. That is another point on which we happen to agree. Though I hadn’t touched on it in my brief remarks, I’ve stressed it throughout my work, including Who Says That’s Art?. Imagery in art is not an end in itself. It serves to embody values and a view of life.

One of the most telling moments of the evening occurred during the Q&A. Recounting a visit to the Rothko Chapel. a young woman seemed to echo what Christopher had said. “At first,” she confided,

I was perplexed by it, . . . and it felt like there was nothing there speaking to me. But I sat for a while, quietly, . . . and then I felt something. And the longer I sat there, the more I felt—the more energy and depth I felt from the paintings, which at first had felt very flat. And suddenly I realized that this whole space was humming, and it was quite powerful.

My question is, how much of that feeling was evoked by sitting in enforced silence in an enclosed, relatively bare space designated as a “chapel” (whose design had been largely overseen by Rothko)—rather than by the alleged power of the paintings themselves? In other words, how much of the “interactive process” Rothko aimed for in truth boils down to a viewer’s projection of self-generated feelings onto the nearly blank slate provided by the paintings?¹

Readers can easily guess what my answer would be.

Notes

In my remarks, I suggested that knowledge of Rothko’s troubled life, ending in suicide, may contribute to the emotional response some viewers have to his work. Contrary to that suggestion, Kobayashi (see above) reported that her first contact with Rothko’s work was at the 1978 Guggenheim Museum retrospective, when she knew very little about his biography. What moved her, she said, was the sense that he could “touch feeling without forms” and that he understood the “condition that we all live” in—the “pain” as well as the “happiness.” Such an account—from a fellow abstract painter who shares the same premises—does not prompt me to alter my general view, however, that emotional responses to Rothko’s work are mainly self-generated, rather than evoked by visual attributes of the paintings themselves. ↩

abstract art, Christopher Rothko, Mark Rothko, modern art, Rothko Chapel

Barking Up the Wrong Trees in Art Education

May 12, 2016 / Michelle Kamhi / Art Education / 4 Comments

What’s being taught in art classrooms these days?

Lacking a comprehensive survey, I can’t offer a definitive answer to that question. But I can point to some prominent examples that should trouble anyone who regards visual art as a potent component of civilization and thus an important part of children’s general education.

Abstract Art 101

Barbara Clover (an art teacher soon to retire after two decades at Holy Savior Menard Central High School in Alexandria, Louisiana) was recently named Art Educator of the Year by the National Art Education Association (NAEA). So it’s worth asking what we might discover if we could eavesdrop on one of her classes to observe a lesson under way.

A recent news account offered the following glimpse:

All is peaceful as [a] class of juniors and seniors concentrate on a projector screen. Students use colored pencils to sketch what they see.

Mark Rothko, Untitled.

So far so good. But what did Clover’s students see? A typical canvas by the Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970). Not much to sketch there, unfortunately—just some blurred rectangles. Nonetheless, as the reporter noted, Clover had urged her students to try to understand what’s being communicated in such work. We aren’t told their answers. But Rothko’s rectangles surely gave them very little to go on.

Rothko once claimed that the goal of his work was “expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions.”

Had any of Clover’s students wept at the sight of his work? I doubt it. My guess is that apart from some sensuous pleasure evoked by his use of color, any emotion aroused in them was probably frustration at being expected to discern meaning in such a painting. The reason why is simple. People normally “express” basic human emotions vocally and bodily. They don’t reach for a paintbrush and create colored rectangles; they do things like jumping up and down and shouting. I saw a striking example on a crowded bus the other day—a little girl who was clearly not happy to be there. How did I know that? Her brow was wrinkled into a tight frown, and she periodically stamped her foot and emitted little shrieks of anger, while tugging impatiently at her baby-sitter’s arm.

The art forms based on such direct expressions of emotion are music, dance, and drama—not painting. Visual artists can represent human emotion, but they do so mainly through depictions of facial expression, bodily posture, and gesture—as in a justly famed fresco representing the Lamentation of Christ, by the great early Renaissance painter Giotto di Bodone (d. 1337).

Like many dedicated art teachers, however, Clover has simply accepted the artworld’s dubious narrative regarding the value of abstract work such as Rothko’s. What she probably didn’t tell her students, therefore, is that Rothko, along with other famous abstract painters, was haunted by the fear that viewers would fail to grasp his deeply serious intentions and would regard his paintings as merely “decorative” rather than meaningful.

Nor would students in today’s art classrooms be likely to learn that such a fear was fully justified—as evidenced by numerous patently decorative uses of purportedly serious art (uses ranging from Mondrian-inspired bathroom designs to a Rothko reproduction marketed by the Crate & Barrel home furnishings store as a “bright yet soothing . . . contemporary color statement”). Instead, students are routinely fed the artworld’s received wisdom regarding abstract art as a major art historical breakthrough worthy of our attention and esteem.

Postmodernist “Contemporary Art”

Revelations of where a younger generation of art teachers are heading can be found in the “Instructional Resources” featured in the NAEA journal Art Education. Let me cite just two. One, from the January 2016 issue, is about the “dizzying work” of Alex Garant—a Canadian painter who uses the “gimmick” (her word) of superimposing several versions of the same face out of sync.¹

Alex Garant, Comet, 2015, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in.

Garant says she aims “to engage the viewer in a sensory journey” and “to create an aesthetically pleasing optical illusion.” But I defy you to gaze at one of her odd images for more than a few seconds. I found it impossible. Feeling as if my eyes were crossed, I had to turn away from what was a distinctly unpleasant experience.

Yet the adjunct professor and middle school teacher who had “explored” Garant’s work as an example of contemporary art for inclusion in her lessons concludes her article by claiming that it “magnetically draws the viewer in (emphasis mine), forcing us to question the essence of the figure before us.” Which left me wondering if she had ever actually looked at those bizarre images for more than an instant, or had questioned why she herself had emphasized their “dizzying effect.” Pity the poor middle schoolers who will receive lessons on such “art”!

Michael Beitz, Body/Brick.

Michael Beitz, Belly/Brick.

A passion for “big ideas” in contemporary art led another professor of art education to interview “sculptor” Michael Beitz for an Instructional Resource in the May 2014 issue of Art Education.² Some of Beitz’s “sculptures” consist of casts of body parts attached to buildings—such as Body/Brick and Belly/Brick. Of these, he confesses: “I often work subconsciously without understanding what I am doing.” His professorial interlocutor makes matters clear for us, however. “By placing his own body parts into the construction,” she explains, Beitz “addresses issues of anonymity, alienation, and the nature of public space.” She further notes that the work reflects such postmodernist practices as “juxtaposition, recontextualization, hybridity, and layering”—terms given currency in the art ed lexicon through the writing of an influential educator named Olivia Gude.

Michael Beitz, Knot.

Other “big ideas” can be found in Beitz’s furniture “sculptures”—in which he twists and distorts familiar items such as sofas and tables out of any functional shape, to explore “relationships.” One of his favorite pieces is Knot.

Michael Beitz, Dining Table.

Another, created while he was an “artist-in-residence,” is Dining Table. Despite his intensely serious intentions about such work, Beitz candidly observes that they “look sort of funny.” Does that spontaneous impression give either him or his art ed interviewer pause to question his approach to “sculpture” and perhaps revert to one that is more traditional? Not in the least. Moreover, Professor Hoefferle assures Art Education readers that such works are “traditional in the sense that they involve a high level of technique/craft, are a translation or symbol of the artist’s experience, and are not the result of a research project.”

I must confess that my own view of “traditional” works of sculpture dealing with human relationships is a bit different. It conjures up works such as this ancient Egyptian couple, Michelangelo’s Bandini Pietà, or this remarkable latter-day Madonna and Child by a little-known Italian sculptor, Alceo Dossena (1878–1937)—not to mention a more recent example such as Three Soldiers, by Frederick Hart (1943–1999), in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A fruitful lesson might be to ask students to compare their spontaneous responses to these and other genuine sculptures with that to Beitz’s concoctions. But no such question was included in Hoefferle’s Instructional Resource.

Nor do teachers have any difficulty reconciling anti-traditional works such as those described above with the National Visual Arts Standards arrived at to great fanfare by the NAEA in 2014. Which suggests that what the standards most needed was a solidly reasoned conception of what qualifies as “visual art” and why. What was adopted instead was the contemporary artworld’s open-ended view of what art is—which boils down in effect to no standards at all.

Notes

Sarah Ackermann, “Spin Me Round and Round: The Dizzying Work of Alex Garant,” Art Education, January 2016. See also “Alex Garant’s ‘Queen of Double Eyes’ Will Break Your Brain,” by Andres Jauregui, which aptly appears in the “Weird News” section of the Huffington Post, August 17, 2015. ↩
Mary Hoefferle, “Michael Beitz: Objects of Communication,” Art Education, May 2014. ↩

Alex Garant, art education, contemporary art, Mark Rothko, Michael Beitz

Met Rooftop Folly: Cornelia Parker’s ‘PsychoBarn’

April 26, 2016 / Michelle Kamhi / Contemporary art / 3 Comments

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.

Virgin and Child, Burgundy, ca. 1400–1425, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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.

Cornelia Parker, Met rooftop, PsychoBarn

Kudos for This Student Protest!

April 5, 2016 / Michelle Kamhi / Public Art / 5 Comments

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.

Little Mattress Girl Moves On and Up in the Artworld

February 19, 2016 / Michelle Kamhi / Contemporary art / 4 Comments

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. ↩
For truly no-holds-barred critiques of the contemporary art world, see some of the previous posts here (e.g., “Public Art” for Whom?, Duchamp or the Baroness?—What Difference Does It Make?, Folded Paper and Other Modern “Drawings”, and Cy Twombly in Mr. Morgan’s House?) and search in Aristos for the names of artworld stars such as Warhol, Koons, Rauschenberg, and Viola and for terms such as “abstract art,” “conceptual art,” “performance art,” and “video art.” ↩

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