art criticism
and the
vanishing public:
in search of
some interesting
reading
by Peter Plagens
A long time ago my wife and another couple
were driving back to L.A. from San
Francisco. Now my wife, Laurie Fendrich,
who is a painter, was once a serious
student of political philosophy. Diane, the
woman of the other couple, was a Classics
scholar who'd once been married to a fairly
famous political philosopher of the
Straussian persuasion. With her in the back
seat was her latest boyfriend, a guy named
Al, who had just gotten out of the Navy,
after a couple of hitches on a nuclear sub.
Well, Laurie and Diane got to gabbing about
Hegel and Kant and Rousseau and Nietzsche
and the meaning of life. I chimed in
occasionally because I, like Plato, have
read about six books in my life. Never mind
that five of them were Raymond Chandlers.
Less occasionally, Al put in his two cents'
worth. When we got back to our loft in
downtown L.A., we poured some drinks and
kept talking. Al was drop-jawed fascinated
by the conversation. At about 3 a.m., I
said I was going to have to crash. Laurie
and Diane said they, too, were turning in.
At that point, Al looked at all three of us
pleadingly. "Look," he said. "That
nature/nurture thing--can't we just clear
that up first?"
Now I've got six minutes to clear up this
criticism thing. O.K., first a few highly
partial remarks on the state of things.
I take it as axiomatic that there is
something we might call art to which some
kind of common terminology and standards
can, however loosely, be applied. If there
weren't, you wouldn't be able to put all
that stuff, from Ancient Egypt to
postmodern America, under one roof at the
Metropolitan Museum and entice as many
people as the Met does to come through the
doors to see it. If you had in the Met, to
the contrary, say a chamber music recital
hall, a John Deere tractor salesroom, a
sauna, a Communist Party cell meeting in
progress and a manicure parlor, that would
amount to the range of diversity you'd have
to have to say there's no such thing as
"art."
I say this, because a lot of critics try to
tell you, in effect, that art has gotten so
varied, and its audience so varied, that
there is hardly any such thing as "art"
anymore. Be warned: That's what academics
and critics do for a living. (I know; I've
been both.) They tell you: a) things are a
whole lot more complicated than you ever
thought, b) the boundaries between the
entities you've always taken for granted--
between art and theater, or sculpture and
painting, or poetry and architecture, for
instance--are fuzzier, to the point of
nonexistence, than you ever imagined, and
c) that most everything you know is the
product of biased, even arbitrary, social
and political construction. That last one
is the whole art world's version of the
basic paradox of relativism, to wit: All
truths are relative, except, of course, the
truth that all truths are relative.
First, "audience." Audience is a trickier
thing with contemporary art than it is
with, say, theater or dance. Practically
all dance and theater companies can measure
their audience by the box office, i.e., how
many people buy tickets to plays and dance
programs. In contemporary art, only museums
and kunsthallen survive, more or less, by
the box office. Aside from big chunks of
money from wealthy donors, their income
comes from people who pay to get in and buy a
few items at the souvenir stand.
Art galleries are different. They're stores
that sell stuff from inventory to pay the
rent, the light bill and the receptionist's
salary. Ninety-nine percent of the people
who just wander into galleries from off the
street--those crowds in SoHo on Saturdays--
are what in the real estate business they
call "looky-loo's." They don't buy
anything. The vast, vast majority of people
who come to look and never to buy but who
nevertheless consider themselves serious
gallery-goers and who wonder, at times, why
critics don't make it more interesting for
them, are actually getting a free show on
the backs of those status-conscious rich
people who buy the art. If the galleries
couldn't sell art and had to survive on the
thousands of looky-loo's who come through
the doors for free, they'd go out of
business. And there would be no feeder
system for contemporary museums, and the
whole contemporary world would collapse.
So, perhaps a little sentiment about art
dealers is in order.
I don't, however, have much sentiment about
the general public. I have come to the
conclusion that the average middle-class
American is a real boob, and probably worse
than he was when Mencken first said it. I
mean, have you ever seen what they're
watching on the Jerry Springer Show? Do you
know what kind of jogging suits they buy at
the mall? Have you checked the gas mileage
on the four-wheel drive vehicles they want
to buy, and do you know what they dream
about doing to the natural environment with
them? Have you tuned into C-SPAN and
listened to the freshman congressmen that
average Americans, with open eyes, and by
large margins, elected? As far as I'm
concerned, the movie Fargo is a
documentary. All those oversized meals, the
godawful lounge in the Raddisson hotel,
that ugly new Buick and the hideous little
bell it had when you left your keys in it.
Jerry Lundeberg is America as far as I'm
concerned.
The reason that I'm so hard on the average
American is that he or she has--downsizing
notwithstanding--a comparative lot of spare
time and money. He can buy a Walkman, go to
$8.50 movies, pay for cable TV, replace his
$100 sneakers every time Nike changes its
TV commercials, gobble up $7.00 Dean Koontz
paperbacks, own stacks of Mariah Carey CD's
at $15 a pop, spend $500 for his daughter's
prom dress and share one of those 25-foot
white limousines and put a boat in his
driveway. This same guy could go to night
school, learn to appreciate opera, and read
Walden. But he doesn't. He just wants more
crap. I've come to the point where I don't
have much hope for wooing average Americans
into the contemporary art audience any
more. It's time, as W.C. Fields said, to
take the bull by the tail and face the
situation.
But there's also a problem with much
contemporary art in that, to a middle-class
sensibility, it's simply unappetizing. For
some reason, the middle class can endure--
it even craves--a lot of unpleasantness in
its movies but still wants some kind of
comprehensible beauty in its art. Now, a
lot of us here will scoff and cite Clement
Greenberg to the effect that truly great
art looks ugly first. Fine, but that
doesn't mean that all ugly art is destined
to be truly great. You know, all horses are
quadrupeds, but not all quadrupeds are
horses. Me, I'm used to looking at Cindy
Sherman photographs. Not only do I know
that the grotesque, garishly lighted
genitalia is fake, but I've seen enough of
it so that when I see more, my heart goes
right to the problem of her stagecraft and
whether or not this autobiographical gran
guingol manages, as promised, to make some
sort of biting social comment.
And I see related stuff all the time:
installation art with fake body parts,
sculptures replicating vomit on the floor,
videos with people doing painful things to
themselves, paintings depicting horrible
sex crimes, and performance art that leaves
a big mess on the floor. Any sense of shock
generally eludes me, and I merely start
thinking--as Dave Hickey said recently--
about what part of Walter Benjamin is this
supposed to allude to? But to the suburban
couple with two kids who come into the city
on a Sunday to go to the museum of
contemporary art, the Cindy Sherman
photographs can virtually hurl them back
out the front door.
I may not have the same feeling about Cindy
Sherman, but I know what it feels like with
movies, because I don't go to a lot of
movies. When I do, I'm shocked at the
amount of gratuitous violence and gore
people take for granted. And I don't feel
obligated anymore--thank you very much--to
retrain myself to get over it so I can
appreciate the movie's subtler points or
its advanced cinematic style. Chances are
about one in 50 that the movie has either.
That's why I'm one of the few people in
this audience who hasn't seen Pulp Fiction.
The chances that any given contemporary
show with unappetizing art in it has some
worthwhile subtlety, social comment or
advance in style are also about 1 in 50.
So, the suburban couple thinks (if they've
ever done this before), why put ourselves
through it? Even if I were sensitive to the
pervasive unappetizingness of contemporary
art, I get paid for putting myself through
it. So I do it. Janet Maslin gets paid for
the same thing with movies, and she does
it. Outside of the art business, I bother
only when its something or someone I'm
interested in, like the Coen Brothers's
movies.
Let's go to language for a minute.
Contemporary art, like any specialized
endeavor, is entitled to its professional
theorists writing, in professional
journals, in argot particular to the field.
It's not fair to peek at a Hal Foster essay
in October and immediately complain about
how dense the writing is. That being said,
art, to me, is less entitled to that kind
of privilege, and those journals, than are
the sciences or professions like
engineering or medicine. Why? Because the
nature of art is presentation. It's
outward-facing by definition. The artist's
painting filled with brushstrokes is not
analogous to the physicist's blackboard
filled with equations; the painting is its
own result, while the physicist's
blackboard is a means to an end. So writing
about art assumes a little more
accessibility, even at its most scholarly,
than writing about physics.
Still, contrary to the common perception,
there is a lot of readable art writing out
there. Artforum is actually readable these
days, although it's a Rolling Stone kind of
readable that isn't my cup of tea. There
are lots of readable art writers. Roberta
Smith in the New York Times, Peter
Schjeldahl in the Voice, Deborah Solomon in
the Wall Street Journal, Robert Hughes in
Time are all eminently readable. Dave
Hickey, whose "Simple Hearts" columns in
the L.A. magazine Art Issues are, hands-
down, the best ongoing art criticism in
America, is readable like Cecilia Bartoli
can carry a tune. And whatever else you
think about my art criticism, I am
readable. They don't pay these editors at
Newsweek the big bucks to let me go
unreadable into print.
I used to subscribe to the conventional
wisdom--I even wrote it--that Hilton Kramer
was, whatever else you thought about him,
readable. I've had to amend that. He's
readable only for these curious about
apoplectic politics. I've come to think
that, behind the nice faux-Victorian prose
style and an admirable disregard for what
anybody on the art-world party circuit
thinks about him, he wouldn't know a decent
work of contemporary art if it sat on his
face. He's recently liked the print shows
of William Bailey, Euan Uglow and Dale
Chilhuly, which struck me as practically
definitive of vapidity or tastelessness or
both. Lest you think I'm just kissing up to
those colleagues I named before Kramer, let
me add my caveats: I think Roberta Smith at
times seems to be looking over her shoulder
at the Guerrilla Girls; Peter Schjeldahl is
a little too flattering to artists; Deborah
Solomon is too given to strange, off-the-
cuff theories about what makes the artist
do the work: Robert Hughes actually likes
the painting of R.B. Kitaj, and Dave Hickey
(whom, yes, I've known for 30 years) said
out loud a couple of weeks ago that Jasper
Johns is superior to even the best of
Abstract Expressionism. And me, I tend to
argue with art instead of looking at it
thoughtfully and--unlike any of the
foregoing critics--I like even a
rudimentary field theory about the nature
and judging of art. Caveats aside,
however, all of us are living, breathing
exceptions to the charge of unreadability.
WHAT TO DO:
I don't think it's criticism's job to build
or maintain an audience for contemporary
art, except insofar that the critic needs a
certain number of people to be interested
in reading art criticism for him/her to get
work. When you think of any of a number of
great and/or prominent art critics--Suzi
Gablik, Clement Greenberg, Sadakichi
Hartmann, Hilton Kramer, Barbara Rose,
Harold Rosenberg, John Ruskin--do you think
at all about whether or not more viewers
came through because of them? Absolutely
not.
Audience building is the job, first of all,
of the artists. Think about that. Hasn't
the whole idea of the poor, publicly inept,
reclusive artist been out of date for about
50 years, at least? Hasn't much of the
art since 1960--I'm talking about
Conceptual Art, site-specific sculpture,
installation art, performance art, and
various forms of political advocacy art--
been not about holing yourself up in a
garret to express your inner feelings and
hoping that history eventually cuts you a
break, but about indirectly manipulating
the audience? Yes. Artists have taken on
that job--again--and it's theirs first.
Audience-building is the job, second, of
galleries and museums. That's what they get
paid to do. End of story about audience
building.
What the critic is supposed to do is
satisfy his or her own audience, that is,
write a piece of prose that helps the
audience be a little more discerning. And
maybe it's not even supposed to do that.
Maybe it's supposed to be interesting
reading, and nothing more. Maybe it isn't
the critic's job to make readers interested
in art any more than it's the artist's job
to make viewers interested in criticism.
But since interest in criticism and
interest in art are entwined, I do have one
suggestion for critics: that they quit
being so sentimental about the causes in
which works of art enlist themselves, that
they quit making that sentiment, however
unintentionally, the basis for a favorable
judgment. Now I want to be understood here:
I don't mean that artists shouldn't make
art about AIDS, racism, sexual abuse or
political repression. And I don't mean that
critics should pay favorable attention only
to art that purports to be nonpolitical. I
mean that critics shouldn't judge art by
the causes it supports, but rather by the
artfulness with which it supports those
causes.
The critic's allowing sentiment for the
cause into whose service art puts itself to
influence his or her judgment too heavily
sooner or later causes loss of credibility.
A while back somebody remarked in print
about Frank Rich (when he was still an
excellent theatrical critic instead of a
mediocre political columnist) writing about
"this week's gay genius of the century."
Rich, apparently, had been favorably
reviewing every play about five guys who
rent a summer house and, over the course of
a dramatic summer, come to terms with life,
love and morality. The somebody knew that
all those plays couldn't be that good. He
knew that 90% of those kinds of plays are
bad because 90% of all plays are. Talk
about something immutable in art--it's the
ol' 90% ratio.
What critics should keep in mind is that
artists are artists before anything else;
otherwise they'd be revolutionaries, social
workers or monks. They do what they do
because they like to, and because they're
trying to go one up on their forebears and
peers. The only issue they're really
tackling is the issue of just where are the
interesting edges of the envelope of art.
What comes out of that can be boring and
stupid, or it can be beautiful and
inspirational but, deep down, its motives
are ultimately morally neutral.
I've used more than my six minutes, so I'll
quit here.
A somewhat abbreviated version of
the above text was delivered as an opening
statement at a panel discussion, titled
"Invisible Ink: Art Criticism and a
Vanishing Public,"sponsored by Art Table
and the American chapter of the
International Association of Art Critics at
the American Craft Museum on May 15, 1996. The discussion was moderated by Amei
Wallach; other panelists included Donald
Kuspit, professor of art history and
philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook; Lynne
Cooke, curator of the Dia Art Center; and
Museum of Modern Art curator Robert Storr.Peter Plagens, Newsweek's art
critic, is a painter based in New York.
