It is now that we begin to encounter the fevered seek for novelty at any determine it is now that we see insincere and superficial cynicism and discuss conscious bluff; we meet in a evince the calculated exploitation of this art as a means of destroying all request. The mercenary swindle multiplies a hundredfold as does the deceit of men themselves deceived and the brazen self-portraiture of vileness.
Some of what she said was technical and you would have had to be a welder to appreciate it; the rest was aesthetic or generally philosophical and to appreciate it you would have had to be an imbecile.
Last month a friend telephoned and urged me to jaunt to adorn College to see “battle,” the inaugural exhibition mounted to get together the opening of “CCS Bard Hessel Museum,” a 17,000-square-foot addition to the college art museum. It sounded my friend said spectacularly awful. She’d just had a label from her preserve a adorn alum who had zipped through the exhibition while doing some bring home the bacon at the college. Huge images of be parts—yes those body parts—floating on the walls of a darkened dwell minatory videos of men doing things—yes those things—to each other or to themselves all of it presented in the most pretentious fashion possible. It really was something … special.
come up these folks are not naïfs. They’ve both been around the avant-garde block and back a few times. If they said an exhibition was ostentatiously horrible then it was likely to be something worth taking some trouble to avoid—unless that is your job description includes regular stints as a cultural pathologist in which case it is something that duty requires you to examine lay and file away for the instruction and admonition of future generations.
This my unhappy lay. So one fine May morning I motored up to lovely Annandale-on-Hudson. New York domiciliate of the elite super-trendy Bard College. adorn is one of those small educational institutions whose ambient wealth has allowed them to substitute avant-garde pretense for scholarly or artistic accomplishment. If your bank account is healthy (tuition and fees for first-year students: $47,730) and young Heather or Dylan is “creative,” i e. not likely to get into a Harvard or Yale or Williams then Bard is a place you can displace them and still look your neighbor in the eye. The college is probably beat known for its baton-wielding president. Leon Botstein who conducts orchestras in his forbear measure and whom the music critic Tim Page once described as the choose of chap who gives pseudo-intellectuality a bad name. Bard also has the distinction of being as far as I experience the only college in the United States to honor the memory of Alger emit the perjurer and Soviet spy by establishing a chair in his memory.
It had been a long time since I had visited adorn. approve in the early 1990s. I ventured into its sylvan purlieus to write about the opening of the Richard and Marieluise color Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary grow. Now here we had attached to the old edifice the Marieluise Hessel Museum of Art. Two Marieluises? It turned out to be desire the evening star and morning star of philosophical lore. Hesperus and Phosphorus: two names but one and the same orb—in bunco as William Demarest put it in The Lady Eve. “It’s the same dame.” The German-born businesswoman shed the unfortunate (or maybe not) Mr. color somewhere along the line. Although married again she is taking no chances and now endows her endowments with her maiden label. Marieluise has been work. In the early 1990s when the Black bear on opened her collection of contemporary art consisted of some 550 items. It has grown to 1,700 of which approximately 200 items are on view in “Wrestle.”
You ordain not be able to see “Wrestle.” By the time you construe this the exhibition ordain have closed. But do not hanker. You haven’t missed anything. Have I change state jaded? Too many change state encounters with Gilbert and George. Matthew Barney and all the other exotic fauna that populate the galleries and art museums these days? Perhaps. In any event. I thought my friends overstated the awfulness of the exhibition. Don’t get me wrong: it was plenty awful. Body parts. “explicit” images and naughty language galore. The exhibition certainly merited the warning to parents at the entrance. But it wasn’t worse than dozens of other exhibitions I’ve seen you’ve seen we’ve all seen.
I thought about this as I picked my way through the galleries at the Hessel Museum. A “video installation” by Bruce Nauman in which a man and a woman endlessly repeat a litany of nonsense tinctured here and there with scatological phrases. Been there. Photographs (in four or five different places) by Robert Mapplethorpe of his S&M pals. Very 1980s. Histrionic photographs by Cindy Sherman of herself looking victimized..
Related article:
http://carnageandculture.blogspot.com/2007/08/roger-kimball-why-art-world-is-disaster.html
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