Museum World Aside, Elephant Dung's Not Art
Cfortunato
http://www.mostnewyork.com/1999-09-29/News_and_Views/Opinion/a-42088.asp
By ROBERT W. LAIRD
Daily News Columnist
Regular readers of this page know the Daily News likes to run debates on hot
issues of the day, and in the natural order of things this space would be
filled with a bold defense of the Brooklyn Museum's "Sensation" exhibition,
including "The Holy Virgin Mary" that John Leo lambastes next door.
No such luck, but not for lack of trying on our part. Despite repeated
requests, no one in the New York museum world whom we contacted was willing to
spring to Brooklyn's defense — not even someone at the museum itself.
The best we could drum up was a cautious statement from the Association of Art
Museum Directors that conceded "some of the works in this exhibition...may even
be offensive to some people" but hoped Mayor Giuliani wouldn't cut the museum
off at its financial knees.
We're not alone in noticing this cowardice. Norman Siegel, head of the New York
Civil Liberties Union, while offering to help defend the Brooklyn Museum in
court, rapped the artistic community for being "invisible" in this fight.
What's going on? Why has a world that is famous for its ceaseless chattering
suddenly gone stone silent?
FOG is certainly a big part of it — Fear of Giuliani. This is a mayor who
carries out threats. When he says he'll slash the Brooklyn Museum's budget, he
calls the budget director and orders him to do it. The art institutions know
he's wrong on the merits and the law, but they depend on government subsidies,
and they don't want the next call to be about them.
But there is more here, I think. The art world isn't accustomed to explaining
itself to the public at large, something that sometimes becomes necessary when
taxpayer money is involved. Now it's having trouble justifying an
elephant-dunged Virgin Mary at the subsidized Brooklyn Museum. The convoluted
language of the tight, self-approving art world suddenly doesn't work.
It's not just this show — a lot of contemporary art has strayed a long way from
traditional standards and audiences. For an explanation, I turn to the
distinguished British art historian E.H. Gombrich. In his elegantly written
"The Story of Art," Gombrich traces the problem to the advent of the
Impressionists in the last century. The public and critics responded with anger
and scorn — yet within a few years, buyers were snapping up Renoirs, Monets,
etc. The same thing happened when modern artists like Picasso, Kandinsky and
Duchamp came along early in this century.
A red-faced art world decided it would never make the same mistake again, and
from then on it not only welcomed the latest experiments in art, it rushed to
cash in. That was wonderfully liberating for artists and produced some great
things for several decades. But finally, artists ran into a wall. The
never-ending demand for something new exhausted all obvious avenues of
expression, and it became impossible to startle a public that insisted on being
shockproof.
That is when many artists got it into their heads that just being different was
enough and anything could be labeled art — piles of dirt, stacks of paving
stones, even a bucket of human feces.
Still, no one would said stop, so we wind up with elephant dung at the Brooklyn
Museum.
Okay, naysayers like me have been wrong before, and maybe 50 years from now the
"Sensation" show will be considered a great moment in art history.
But I'm sticking with E. H. Gombrich's observation that there has been a "loss
of nerve" by critics who "have lost the courage to criticize." If the
connoisseurs won't play policeman against bad art, they leave the job to people
like Giuliani.
Original Publication Date: 09/29/1999