The Market - Artifice as Art

Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic, and he’s recently written an article that I’ve found to be immensely interesting. He is adamant about pulling his readers on board with him as he wraps the gavel in condemnation of the trends emerging in his world, the world of art.

The world of art is a place where I have little competency, but it’s also a place I love. During my semester abroad, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about art as I found myself ensconced on many a museum bench. I was fortunate enough to spend time with a passionate professor of art, one who could elucidate the philosophies, movements, and overarching history of art with such intellectual prowess and casual familiarity that I was left bedazzled. About midway through the semester I found myself hunched over my computer in a narrow hallway at the university where I studied with the friendly janitor for my only company. It was late, the rooms empty, lights out. But there I was, with the faint crisp smell of cleaning supplies lingering in the air as I pondered the question: What is art? I hadn’t thought much about it before. I knew it was something I enjoyed, but aside from that difficult (and expansive) question that I was supposed to answer in a paper to be turned in the following day in a language in which I was only moderately proficient (if that), I couldn’t even answer why it was that I actually enjoyed art.

But I know my answer now. I enjoy art because it takes me somewhere else, because it allows me to perceive some object (or possibly the absence of an object) and experience that object in it’s own world, even if there be no intentional frame of reference on the part of the artist. As John Dewey explains:

“A crowd of visitors steered through a picture-gallery by a guide, with attention called here and there to some high point, does not perceive; only by accident is there even interest in seeing a picture for the sake of subject matter vividly realized. For to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience. And his creation must include relations comparable to those which the original producer underwent. They are not the same in any literal sense…. Without an act of recreation the object perceived is not perceived as a work of art.”

For me, this offers a clear answer to my once puzzling question: why had I never been interested in art and yet now, I had found myself in love with it? To be sure, I don’t know very much about art other than possessing rough ideas of certain periods and the ability to pick out Cézanne and Monet. But despite my ignorance, I’ve found the world of art to be a welcoming bastion of new, exciting, and unique experiences to be had, each work able to function as an alternative vaulted macrocosm, complete with it’s own cosmos. If I’m lucky, I’ll be ripped from a world of sin and corruption and thrown into one of resplendent beauty. And I see the finger of God there, pushed through the utensil of man.

Jed Perl says this particular world of art is now threatened by a new, market oriented style of art. He references the current fashionable makers of modern art: Murakami, Koons, and Eliason. Perl’s idea of the way art should be: “A painting or a sculpture, whether abstract or representational, must always be a place--a unique locale, a little universe.” The work of these new artists (and the thousands like them): “they replace the there that constitutes a work of art with a nowhere.”

Art is no longer unique, he argues, but the capitalist world and the world of art have merged in order to produce art as a logo, art as a brand. Museums? They’re brands too, “places to dump expensive stuff.” The astute modern artist is really a marketer, well adept at creating things for which people will pay quite a bit of money to possess.

Why no more unique experience?

Perl:

“The people who run many of the contemporary art museums would probably be nervous about an experience that was so utterly unique. They are uncertain about their own taste. They want to give the public a dependable experience, which means an experience that has already been market-tested in other museums and galleries--and in the auction rooms.”

“I could explain why I think one of the two Serras at BCAM is better than the other, but the only thing that really matters is that Eli Broad, being a very important guy, has both of them.”

Art as social platform.

Markets have arguably done many things to force movement towards better living standards for a number of people, i.e. the rise of alternative energy sources as the price of oil increases, firms in Bangalore created to meet the low cost needs of tech companies in the U.S., etc. But when it comes to art, I want the finger of God, not the market savvy faux artist and his trickery. I want the enlightening experience of a new cosmos, not the mundane experience of “nowhere.”

Something valuable is lost when art is no longer enjoyed as it is experienced, but rather bought because it’s an important piece. For me it is frightening that something so petty as a rung along a social latter could be so convincingly disguised as something so important, art.

Artifice disguised as art.

Perl quotes R.B. Kitaj: “Paintings sit there, looking out at the world, which remains separate. I'm for an art into which the painter imports things from the world that he cares about"--imports them into the alternate world that is the work of art. "Painting," Kitaj explains, "is a great idea I carry from place to place. It is an idea full of ideas, like a refugee's suitcase, a portable Ark of the Covenant."

These alternate worlds are important to me. I care about them. I want their creators to care about them. In fact, I need them to. Real beauty is at stake.