Art: It’s Just Not for Thinking Anymore
Tyler Green’s excellent Modern Art Notes points to an interesting post at daddytypes.com, in which Greg Allen describes a recent visit to the National Gallery of Art with his three-year-old daughter. There, they collide with a docent attempting to explain Clyfford Still’s painting 1951-N to a group of middle-schoolers:
“Who wonders why this is here? Who wonders why it’s even art?” She waits and waits for sheepish hands to keep rising.
“Well, there are curators–do you know what that is? art experts who study and know what art is important enough to be in a museum–curators and art historians and other experts who say this is art, and even if it doesn’t look like it’s about anything and it doesn’t make any sense, you just have to bear with it sometimes.
Allen blows a gasket about all this, finding this attitude destructive to inquisitive minds. But though the docent’s shut-up-and-take-it condescension is clear, this attitude routinely gets dispensed to adults too, even by Smart People. Over the weekend, NPR’s All Things Considered featured a brief story on James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in which poet Paul Muldoon argued, in essence, that you may as well give up trying to understand the damn thing and just try to appreciate it as a sort of music. Why it’s OK to just bear with it with Finnegan’s Wake but not with Still isn’t quite clear to me, but then I haven’t pondered either very closely.
Maybe this is just the tyranny of the middlebrow, but Muldoon and that docent were at least engaging with the art in question. Howard Stern, however, recently reacted to avant-jazz as if he’d just touched a hot stove. And then called in his buddies to make wisecracks about how fuckin’ stupid the fuckin’ stove is.
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12:39 pm
Rite of Spring = Golden Shower (at least in NY).
1:01 pm
i think in an odd way this is the best approach to describing art to children and to potentially inspire future artists. instead of saying “this is art. it is valuable and there can be no debate,” the docent is essentially saying “art is open-ended. some people see beauty and worth in this type of piece, oddly enough.” which is a great lesson to children, because i honestly believe this imparts a lesson in acceptance and open-mindedness. sometimes you have to mock or cast something in a negative light to get people to actually examine it. and i remember when i was a kid going to the freer gallery and seeing blank canvasses and wondering how the hell that constituted modern art, which only caused me to go further into searching for what was actually “good”.
7:12 pm
Um, about your tags: NGA is not part of the Smithsonian.
9:04 am
thanks for the link. I thought that Finnegan’s Wake story was meant to change a Grisham/DaVinci Code reader’s expectations for page-turning narrative and get them to crack open the book, where they may appreciate just letting Joyce’s words and rhythm and sounds go flowing through them.
The equivalent here would enticing someone into the East Wing, where some sensory experience of abstract art replaces the traditional procession of pretty pictures.
And ultimately, that’s why I thought the docent failed so miserably: I can’t see how “I don’t get it, you don’t get it, but some expert somewhere says he gets it, so deal with it.” instills any interest in returning or figuring it out.
Scott’s optimistic interpretation isn’t borne out by the totality of the docent’s uninformed spiel, which went on to talk about what the Still was “about.” Scott’s mention of “searching for what was actually ‘good’” is the docent’s problem, too: an unwillingness or inability to address abstraction as part of the popular, shared culture.
The Still is 70 years old, for pete’s sake; I don’t think it’s too much to expect for the NGA of all places, to be able to talk about abstraction’s relevance in ways that don’t require an art history PhD.