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| Storm Warning to the Art World, by Paul Soderberg |
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That was utterly new. It turned all the preceding centuries of Art History on their head. Fast-forward to the end of the same century: that same simple idea, that the proper role of the artist is to express himself or herself, was being taught as gospel in virtually every college and university in America, as well as in the art departments of essentially every high school, middle school and elementary school across the country. All major art publications accepted that idea as an unassailable given, as did virtually all art critics and art writers. And virtually every city council with a public art program anywhere in America supported that same idea, using tax money for the purchase of public artworks that were, almost always, examples of the artist expressing himself. By Y2K, in other words, that new, revolutionary idea had become entrenched and established-something that everyone had repeated for so long that nobody even questioned it anymore. Meanwhile, Modern Art1 set about claiming the Art World for itself. Any artist who refused to believe that idea was simply excluded from galleries and not shown; any art reviewer who refused to voice the new truth was fired; and vast collections of art that predated 1913 were sold off or hidden away in basements and closets, having been rendered quaint and obsolete by the new idea's artworks. And in the spotlights of places like Sotheby's and Christie's, Modern works began to sell for millions of dollars each, thereby establishing the godhood of the best proponents of that simple idea, including Picasso, Rothko, Pollock, Kline and Lichtenstein. Thus nobody thought it particularly unusual, much less bizarre, when a dead (stuffed) horse dangled from the ceiling fetched more than $2 million at a Sotheby's auction in New York in 2004, or when an anonymous buyer paid $5.2 million for a porcelain statue of Michael Jackson cuddling a chimpanzee named Bubbles, or when Steven Cohen, founder of a Connecticut-based hedge fund called SAC Capital Advisors, LLC, spent $8 million for an adult tiger shark pickled in formaldehyde.2 Such mega-sales stand as the ultimate proof that, during the 20th Century, that simple 1913 idea effectively took over the Art World in America (as it concurrently did in the rest of the world). And what's wrong with that idea? There are three things wrong with it. The first is that when you have the mindset that anything an artist does is art, credentials replace talent. Like this: The second thing wrong with the 1913 idea is that when all the focus is on the artist, his or her choice of subjects is finite. If your focus is, instead, the beauty and power of the natural world, then your subjects are infinite; but if your focus is yourself, then there really isn't a whole lot to say. To coin a phrase, the world is much bigger than any one artist. Which is why so much of Modern Art is "derivative," rephrasing, reiterating, appropriating, and outright copying, all to spackle over the big whole where originality should be. For example, Frederic Church (1826-1900) painted landscapes that portrayed the majesty and grandeur of nature in places like Niagara Falls. Frank Moore, a Modern Artist, paints pictures like Niagara (1994), which was a direct copy of a Frederic Church painting that Moore framed with copper tubing and a faucet. This was to convey the fragility of the planet's water supply. "It's terrifying and awful when you realize that billions of tons of pollutants are flowing down the Niagara River every day," Moore said.
But the third and by far worst thing wrong with that idea is that it trivialized the public clear out of the Art World. That idea turned the spotlight squarely on the artists, leaving the public in the dark. As the artist became all-important, the public became unimportant, even irrelevant. In years to come, that single fact - the exclusion of the public - will be shown to have been far more profoundly important than the new role of the artist. It is therefore worth explaining and emphasizing: for all the centuries before 1913, the single idea that governed the Art World was that the proper role of the artist was to express art. Not himself. Something far bigger and much grander: art. And in all those centuries, the role of the public was to view and admire artworks so as to be inspired and uplifted. The 1913 idea totally changed that. Thenceforth, the public was irrelevant except as a source of tax dollars and as a target-the goal was not to uplift and inspire but to offend and incense. The mindset was this: "I am an artist, and therefore if you do not like what I create then you are anti-art and stupid and therefore desperately in need of the art I shall give you which you then obviously must pay for." A classic example of that mindset at work occurred in Australia in 1997, when the National Gallery of Victoria opened an exhibition of works by Andres Serrano. One was Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucified Christ submerged in a jar of the artist's urine. After immediate violent public reaction, the museum director, Timothy Potts, closed the show, for which he was then promptly attacked by the artist: "As far as I'm concerned, Dr. Potts has no future, and anyone who agrees with him is a fool," said Serrano. The ideas at play couldn't be clearer. The public's idea: This art is offensive. The artist's idea: The public needs to be offended so as to be paddle-jolted from their complacency and ignorance into enlightenment. The director's idea: The public's feelings should be considered. The artist's idea: That director needs to be fired, since he clearly doesn't understand that what counts is not what the public feels but what I, the artist, want the public to feel. It is highly instructive to watch what happens when a Modern artist is attacked: he or she smirks and labels his or her attackers as uninformed fools. But then watch what happens when their access to tax dollars is cut off: they go ballistic. Their reaction is shock and outrage, as if someone has stolen their birthright, if the public refuses to support them. In 1998 Karen Finley went ballistic - that is, she sued the National Endowment for the Arts, which had had the audacity to turn down her grant request. Finley's "artworks" consisted of anger, nudity, profanity and chocolate-smearing her nude body with chocolate while screaming obscenities at an audience. Despite the art critics who had praised these "performance works" as "a provocative brand of artistry," the NEA turned down her application for more tax dollars. So, joined by three other "controversial artists,"3 she sued, challenging the NEA's "decency and respect" law as violating her right to Free Speech and accusing the NEA of Communist-style repression: "That's what they do in China," she said.4 Finley and everyone else who unquestioningly accepts the 1913 idea about the proper role of the artist all say this very clearly: artists must have the right to do anything they want, and to deny them that right is censorship. In other words, what the public wants is insignificant and unimportant compared to what the artist wants - and if the public tries to cut off the tax-money supply, then the artist must sue, becoming a valiant freedom-fighter struggling to protect the First Amendment from the American public. And so the last bastion of offensiveness in America today is the Art Establishment, meaning those individuals and institutions who support or have been built upon that 1913 idea. The rest of us hope and strive always to avoid offending people, and displays of extreme offensiveness, like hate crimes and racial discrimination, are vigorously prosecuted. But artists who offend people - by, for example, pasting elephant dung on a painting of the Madonna, or by hanging statutes of lynched children from the branches of real trees in town squares, or by painting pictures of young girls, their dresses raised, being probed by octopus tentacles5 - are praised by the Art Establishment for their originality, their vision, their genius.  | |
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