The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl starts his review of the most recent Whitney Biennial as follows:
The startlingly coherent and bold Whitney Biennial is a material manifesto of late-pandemic institutional culture.
And, really? That's the pitch? Who out there has a yen to put on their shoes and go out to see a good material manifesto?
If you read on you see it's not entirely all bad. No show with newish work from Charles Ray can be all bad. And some of the work I've looked up for Rebecca Belmore looks interesting.
But we're at a certain point in history, and you have to look back and see how we got here. One of the premises of twentieth century modern art was "It might look ugly at first, but its beauty will reveal itself in time." This could describe Picasso, Pollock, and many others. Very often it bore fruit. But often now the underlying message seems to have changed to, "Ugliness and beauty don't matter. It has a message we agree with." It's hard to see how this can lead to art of lasting value.
Another recent article, by Michael Lind, says that:
The centralized and authoritarian control of American progressivism by major foundations and the nonprofits that they fund, and the large media institutions, universities, corporations, and banks that disseminate the progressive party line, has made it impossible for there to be public intellectuals on the American center left. This is not to say that progressives are not intelligent and/or well-educated. It is merely to say that being a progressive public intellectual is no longer an option, in an era in which progressivism is anti-intellectual.
Well, arts institutions tend to be funded by the same people waving the same money on very similar terms. That doesn't mean that good or even great art isn't being created. But there has hardly ever been less reason to trust the major institutions to find it.
2 comments:
Rebecca Belmore is new to me but I've been an admirer of the pictures I've seen of Charles Ray's sculptures for a while, especially his images of people. It was his 'Family Romance' that first caught my attention.
Jer asked me to send you this NY Times article about Elden Ring, a game he played for a while last month. It was made as the most recent episode in a franchise that's been around for about 15 years. The author of the piece just had to compare his experience of playing the game with how tough it's been to go though two years worth of restrictions because of Covid. He appears to be one of those people who hasn't bothered to look for his shoes, never mind put them on.
Truth to tell though, it's been a long time since I've had an opportunity to visit a museum featuring contemporary art. Toronto and Vancouver both have extensive art galleries but there's no such thing around here that I know of anyway. We do have lots of totem poles and recently the Royal BC Museum replaced most of their 19th century art with more native work, definitely a resonance with Lind's obervations about groupthink.
I see how you came to note the relationship between the two articles you linked to this time. It appears modern taste and discernment in general have been coralled by those few who, as you say, wave the most money around.The Michael Lind article is excellent - I smiled when I read, "You cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star." True, but very sad all the same.
In this current cultural atmosphere the best artists might be found building sand castles on a Florida beach. Hmm.. One thing I know is true and that's the fact real change never comes from the top but from unexpected events that affect everyone. Just have to wait around to see what happens next.
I do remember seeing "Family Romance" before. It's a very vivid piece. As with everyone being said to have one good book in them, a lot of artists start off with one good piece but don't build on it. Ray did.
Oddly enough that New York Times article seems to have disappeared. Or at least been moved. A video game reviewer or tech journalist writing about being a shut-in doesn't sound particularly controversial, so I doubt it was taken down for content reasons.
It's definitely a good thing to have access to a variety of works of art, from different time periods, say. It's better when you as a viewer are given time and space to make your own interpretations instead of having to swallow the curator's biases whole. I do like native art--a lot of it at least--but the whole idea of beauty, of it being an actual work of art, seems to get left by the wayside a lot. In essence white liberals at the museums have concluded that the public won't look at work by nonwhite people except out of white liberal guilt. Which is actually not a very good motivator.
The very rich today are very, very rich indeed. Which even in a middle class milieu gives them a disproportionate influence. And the cycle just goes on. That line about "a cavalry officer or a silent movie star" is one of my favorites as well.
If the person making the sandcastles on the beach is also making his or her own decisions we'll all be better off. You're very right that real change comes from places far from the top. Most worthwhile things do, actually.
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