in which I raise my eyebrow at an essay on art appreciation...

I ran across an article called "How to Behave In An Art Museum" linked to on Andrew Sullivan's blog this week.

Particular quotation:


Your friend comes to visit. You go to whatever exhibit you found on the New York Times website that morning while he was sleeping. At the museum, he talks about the pictures in a voice loud enough to make you uncomfortable. He asks, “What do you think makes this painting so powerful?” Or, “What do you think this artist is trying to say?” The questions are not stupid. It’s just that you can’t think of how to answer them without sounding stupid yourself. Should you say, “I think the vibrant use of orange really enhances the composition”? Or, “She’s critiquing commodity culture, while also reveling in it”? No! Intellectual conversations, as a woman I briefly dated once admonished me, are like public displays of affection—fun to be in, but mortifying to observe, and in a museum you know you’re being observed. But refusing to answer your friend’s questions is no solution either. You’re paralyzed. And you’re not even sure what you’re afraid of. You’re not sure whether your replies will make you look like a philistine or a snob. Which would be worse? Which are you more qualified to be?


Good Lord.

I'm having difficulty articulating the extent to which this person annoys me.

I'm not sure what's worse; the sort of modern artist who feels that something is more profound when it's projected on the ceiling, or all the people who feel like they're being graded if they don't say the right things about it.

Perhaps the author would be more capable of having something profound to say if he wasn't so worried about sounding profound for the other museum-goers who, if they are even remotely aware of his existence, are probably just wondering why this guy looks like a high school student who has forgotten his cheat sheet?

Dear author: just go to the damn museum, look at the pretty pictures, and for the love of God and little Fishes, get the hell over yourself. 

It's funny... the author talks about the decline of High Culture, as if High Culture is anything but a modern phenomenon.  This division of high and low culture seems to have crept in sometime in the 19th century.  Before then, art appreciation was linked inextricably to your social standing or to religion.  People were exposed to great art because 1) they were rich and could afford it, or 1) they were in church, where either the institution itself or its noble (read: rich) patrons had put it there.  People wanted to be conversant with great art because it was such a potent indicator of not just social status, but of financial status.

Now, of course, as the author points out, it still is, but it's an entirely different measure: whether or not the viewer has imbibed enough of the current level of study, enough of the vocabulary, to measure up as one of the Educated Elite.  The actual opinion of the artwork is not nearly as important as the words one uses to talk about it; this sort of Emperor's New Clothes orthodoxy is the death of original thinking when it comes to art.  One almost envies the 17th century patron who could say, "I don't care, I just don't like it.  Do it over or I don't pay."

If all you're doing is coming up with something that's so abstruse that only other properly educated experts can get anything out of it, how is that not simply intellectual masturbation?  How is that so very different than the Klingon Language Institute?  I'll tell you: the Klingon Language Institute doesn't take itself seriously, and the Art World is the Universe's major supplier of Taking Itself Too Seriously.

If art is supposed to hold the mirror up to human existence, what good is it if most of the existing humans can't understand it?

And, for the record, no, I don't think that art should be a race to the bottom.  I do think art should be challenging, but the hallmark of a truly great artist is that his or her work can be appreciated by intellectuals and plebians alike.  Everyone laughs at Shakespeare, everyone admires the Mona Lisa, and Beethoven's 5th is the most overplayed piece of music EVER for a reason.  All these can be, and are, appreciated by complete neophytes and experts at the same time.

As long as, of course, they're not taking themselves too seriously...