SHARKFORUM: OPINION WITH TEETH

Both then and now I very much want people to visit museums, all museums great and small, and I thought a lot about how to encourage people to do this. I thought, “In general, people might not be moved to visit museums because they don’t know enough about them to understand what they will get from visiting a museum. They need to be educated that it is in their own self-interest to visit museums, not that it is some sort of societal duty, like voting or yielding the right of way to pedestrians. Museums aren’t a medicine you take to inoculate yourself against being considered low-brow. They are vitamins you take to make your constitution strong, that it might better withstand the stresses of life.”

The reader will perhaps excuse the clumsy tenor of my thoughts. I had been spending a lot of time at the Field Museum of Natural History in these days, and would watch tense parents with kids in tow worrying about “seeing everything” shooing their kids along and thus away from displays they had gotten engaged in. Surely, I thought, this is no way for people to behave in museums! Museums provide space and require time, yes, that might be very intimidating. But they are not mere tourist attractions that one proudly announces one has seen! Perhaps the key is to educate people to understand that in exchange for their time they have a right to a space in which they can not only physically navigate, but mentally expand…and join the elite who has made the same effort in their own lives.

So in my speech I tried to make the distinction between elitism as a negative force — the force that causes those within the club, so to speak, to restrict access to those outside — and a positive force — the force that inspires individuals to take on the challenge to rise to new levels of endeavor and understanding of what it is to be human.

I tried to explain my theory that the Museum of Contemporary Art might wish to consider positioning itself within the notion of contemporary art as an endeavor to which one must devote a great deal of time and energy, true, but an endeavor that was pretty much guaranteed to offer inestimable rewards. I understood this was not entirely in line with the notions of egalitarianism that were increasingly coloring American cultural life. But, I argued, this was the notion that had been behind the founding of the Art Institute in the 19th century and was part and parcel of the peculiar nature of Chicago as it developed into a major city, this emphasis on social uplift, not merely in the arts, but in all realms of urban life. I mean, the Jane Adams Hull House…I desperately cast about to better express myself. In this state of desperation I cited the Marine Corps slogan of that particular era as an example of “positive elitism” — “We are looking for a few good men!” But in uttering this slogan, my passionate speech sputtered to an inelegant close. It wasn't, I felt, so much that my ideas were disagreed with, but that I had couched them badly. The word elite, well, it just wasn't going to fly.

This was years ago. I have continued to follow the arguments that seem to fuel institutional notions about how the visual arts should be presented within the wider societal reality. I have watched the rise of institutional analysis using various management tools originally developed for for-profit concerns (about which I have very strong views and perhaps shall be the subject of a future posting), and I have watched the rise of marketing as a strategy to interest individuals in the arts given how they seem to be able to be interested in buying, say, clothes at Target as opposed to clothes at Sears. And I have seen the extraordinary expansion of the contemporary art world. Yet I have not been able to put any of this together in a way that makes sense to me. Clearly more and more people are following the arts, and visit contemporary art museums and venues. The message I so desperately wanted to convey about museums being spaces for self-expression and growth seems to be getting out there. Yet within the art world I was hearing more and more embittered complaints about the nature of art. A summation of one sort was the recent article by Barry Gewen in the New York Times (“State of the Art,” December 11, 2005) that poses the question: “Has the art world gone crazy?”

When I was first circling around the one who seems now to be known as The Shark — if the reader will allow me to be anachronistic in my metaphor — I was clever enough to deliver a punch to the nose, the one spot where sharks seem to take notice. “My motto is,” I proclaimed, “do not mistake me for who I am not.” Although I was sure he recognized this as being a motto of Friedrich Nietzsche (see Ecce Homo, or How One Becomes What One Is), I felt impelled to point this fact out as well. After all, I was a curator, and he was an artist. The relationship is never easy.

In private discussion about my last article, my good friend Jeff reminded me that I should be perfectly clear about the difference between artists and curators when it comes to what I term “open-mindedness.” While an artist may be open-minded, it is hardly a necessity and probably a drawback; we want artists who are full, strongly opinionated, passionate, dedicated to their vision. That might be a vision that places Al Franken on the highest hill; it may be a vision that finds Laura Ingraham the font of all truth. It is the viewers of art (which I realize of course includes artists!) and those in the institutional art world that one would hope would arm themselves with a broad range of experience, in order to better receive and judge the output of artists.

Yet, while I agree completely with this idea, it seems the lines between “curator” and “artist” are considerably blurred these days. Young artists freshly minted in absolutely frighteningly large numbers are coming out of art schools with “curatorial practices” courses under their belts inculcated with the idea, seemingly not examined in any way, that there is little difference between being an artist and a curator — these things are merely be two sides of the same creative practice. And then there are concrete examples. What curators do seems to be increasingly considered “artistic” rather than “art historical” and what artists do is considered as making an artwork in a larger or more social realm than the studio. A good example, ‘wrested from the headlines,’ so to speak, is Rirkrit Tiravanija, whom incidentally I knew ‘back in the day’ as a young participant in the Randolph Street Gallery scene (the late, great RSG) that included Jeanne Dunning, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Hirsch Perlman, Dan Peterman, Tony Tasset and many others. Gentle, retiring Rirkrit was the last person I would have tapped as becoming an international art superstar, but in fact he is the first of the group to receive a profile in The New Yorker. Could it be because he has a dual role in the international art world, and thus can cleave to both the artist part of the elite as well as the curator part. Oh, there I uttered that word again.

What I would hope we could all be open-minded about is our own complicity in and responsibility toward the aristocracy, as The Shark puts it. (Well, that word is pretty troublesome too, isn’t it, Shark!?) In short, is it possible to bring the positive aspects of the term “elitism” to the fore? We who love art have a lot of hard work to do, I think: we should make every effort to work against elites, if they exist, that keep “them” outside. That is clearly wrong. We should make every effort to resist the dumbing down of things down to a level where there seems to be no elite, but in fact there is more of an elite than ever — those who can congratulate themselves for “giving access” to those deemed “less fortunate.” Is it possible to develop the idea of “elite” as likeminded people who keep in mind that it is their effort, passion, and dedication that allow them to be so described?

One further anecdote. More than a decade ago, I had a passionate friend (an artist, marrying an artist) for whom I needed to buy a wedding shower gift. I thought a book that catalogued all the “Precious Moments” figurines was the perfect gift, in a cynical, ironical, funny way. Who would collect these things anyway! They are so…well…precious. (See www.preciousmoments.com) Yet when I actually looked at the book, I realized it wasn’t that dissimilar from my own effort of the time to create a catalogue raisonné of the work of H.C. Westermann. Yes, I could yuck it up about ‘those people’ who collect Precious Moment figurines even as I realized they could scratch their heads over my desire to record every Westermann sculpture ever made, or we might look one another in the eye and realize the gulf wasn’t nearly so wide as we thought…well yes, I realized, this purchase of a wedding shower gift was yet another gift from the gods, designed to keep me on my toes…..

More later….

Lynne.