현대 서양 미술의 문제점

But is it art? This work, called “School: The Archeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge,” is now on display at the Lever House in New York. The installation, by famed British artist Damien Hirst, includes 29 tanks of sheep carcasses (and one tank with a shark) suspended in formaldehyde. Though highly sensationalist and controversial, the work does explore deep themes of life and death, says Carol Strickland. Carol Stickland

The trouble with Western art today

Contemporary art isn't just shocking. Much of it fails to appeal to both heart and head.

By Carol Strickland

from the December 19, 2007 edition

New York - People don't generally lose sleep over what's wrong with Western art today. But maybe they should.

Western art, after all, is the most tangible representation of Western thought – its dreams, fears, politics, and core values. "The artist," as the American poet Ezra Pound said, "is the antenna of the race," picking up cultural currents via supersensitivity. If that's true, much of what Western artists are picking up is cause for sleepless nights.

Contemporary art isn't just shocking people's taste or leaving them cold. It's also dehumanizing and divisive, because too much of it appeals to only half of our mental faculties.

By targeting either our senses or our mind – but not both simultaneously – much of contemporary art has lost the "whole-man" concept that appeals to us physically, intellectually, morally, and spiritually. To get back on track, artists need to create art that shows and tells. In practice, this means creating art with significant form that communicates ideas and emotions to the heart, mind, and spirit.

Eyebrow-raising pieces

In the past 50 years, all genres, materials, subjects, and methods of production have been up for grabs. To stand out in this explosion of possibility, artists stake out extreme positions, seeking attention through transgressive content that defies conventional taste. Consider:

•In 1961, Piero Manzoni sold cans of his own excrement labeled "Merda d'artista" as art.

•In the 1980s, Jeff Koons, commodity broker-turned-wunderkind artist, displayed "Equilibrium," three basketballs floating in tanks of distilled water. In a controversial "60 Minutes" segment broadcast in 1993 called, "Yes, but is it art?," Mr. Koons told Morley Safer that this work connoted "a definition of life and death." Mr. Safer wryly replied that it also gave new meaning to the term "slam-dunk."

•In 2001, Martin Creed won the prestigious Turner Prize in London. His work, "The Lights Going on and Off," consists of – yes – light bulbs going on and off in an empty gallery every five seconds.

Responding to highly hyped works of this nature, gallery-goers may feel like dim bulbs themselves, unable to decipher the works' meanings. "It's conceptual art that makes the so-called general public nervous about going to contemporary art shows," says David McFadden, senior curator at New York's Museum of Arts and Design. "If I go to exhibitions of highly conceptual pieces, I'm at a loss," he admits, adding, "and I've spent my whole life looking at objects."

Museums are crowded as viewers do their best to take in the cultural superstars. But increasingly, the works are less than nourishing. Instead of a complex stew of hints and tints and imaginative magic, the public is being served a thin gruel.

What's wrong with contemporary art? By staking out the extremes of artistic practice, it excludes much of the core, and thus excludes our ability to react and connect with our eyes, our hearts, our gut, and our minds. Emily Dickinson defined art's visceral effect this way: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."

Contemporary art is increasingly one-note rather than symphonic, emphasizing either cerebral or formal appeal. Instead of taking your head off, it'll have you nodding off or shaking your head in dismay.

A cardinal rule that applies to all art forms seeking to be evocative – not just provocative – is "show, don't tell." Too much contemporary art is a no-show, relying on content to tell the viewer a take-away message. And then there's the other polarity of art loaded toward sensual, formal appeal, which is all show and no tell. What I'd like to see is show and tell.

Two retrospectives currently in New York display the warring tendencies.

At the Museum of Modern Art, Martin Puryear's semiabstract, wooden sculptures appeal to the eye with their tactile, curved surfaces, yet their message is mute. They show the craftsman's ability to create innovative forms, but they tell us nothing explicitly.

At the opposite extreme is conceptual art pioneer Lawrence Weiner's exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, consisting of pithy slogans stenciled on the walls, seemingly more verbal than visual art. Words alone express an image or idea (for example: "BUILT TO SEE OVER THE EDGE"), with no object to seduce the eye or arouse an emotional response.

Donald Kuspit, professor of philosophy and art history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, calls austere conceptual art "a total disaster." Idea-based or one-liner art is "so narcissistically involuted, very much for a small group of cognoscenti, that it's become inaccessible except for the self-styled happy few." Between off-putting conceptual art and the tendency of political art to harangue viewers, it's no wonder the public feels intimidated, alienated, and confused.

How can we reestablish a dialogue so the public can relate to and judge value in today's art? Fortunately, what Mr. McFadden calls a "new materiality" is infusing conceptual art. You see it in another exhibition at the Whitney by the artist Kara Walker, which merges show and tell, form and idea. Ms. Walker pastes cut out black silhouettes on white walls, depicting stereotypical scenes from the antebellum South that excoriate racism with what Safer calls "gallows humor."

Her work, "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," suggests the African-American artist's love/hate relationship with white society. The black voids of the silhouettes surrounded by enveloping white space enlist the format to convey her message. As Susan Davidson, senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum puts it, "The adage 'a picture speaks a thousand words' is embraced in her work." Walker's art appeals to my head and my heart.

A cure for the public's malaise with contemporary art is this combination of resonant form with emotional depth and accessible intellectual content. Not that interpreting art is supposed to be easy. "Back in the late '60s and '70s, the prevailing attitude was sort of 'screw the bourgeoisie,' " admits eminent conceptual art innovator John Baldessari, who adds, "I thought art was supposed to make people uncomfortable."

Art can throw us a lifeline after it pushes us over the edge of our comfort zone. "It's how you get material and form together to have an aesthetic effect and satisfy what Erich Fromm calls 'existential needs' that's desperately needed in our society," says Professor Kuspit. "There's a need for an art that becomes a model for integration and maturity, an art that speaks to adults with subtle reflectiveness."

Much recent art is pervaded by juvenile jokiness, cynicism, and commerce, like Koons's kitsch transformation of an inflated Mylar bunny into a gleaming, stainless-steel object of collectors' desire. Or Takashi Murakami's Pop figures that look like alien Disney 'toons. Mr. Murakami even plasters his infantilized imagery on Louis Vuitton handbags.

"How much more fashionable can you get?" asks cultural commentator Matthew Gurewitsch, a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, "and how much less can there be?" Even knowing the conceptual background about how Murakami (a hot artist in Japan and the US) is responding to Japan's postwar trauma, "it might be more persuasive if the art were less junky," he notes.

Art operates in a pendulum swing, as artists continually look forward and backward. For the moment, a return to metaphorically rich, hand-made objects – a reaction against digital dominance – beckons us to fuse mind and body in responding to art.

Our "us-versus-them" world seems fragmented – politically, socially, and economically. "These objects," says curator McFadden, "made with passion by someone's hands to be enjoyed by someone else, with a subliminal layer of meaning, remind us we all have this essential humanity that's often forgotten when you look at the international political scene."

English novelist E.M. Forster may have been giving advice to artists today when he wrote: only connect."

 

 

La Pietà: Michelangelo's sculpture is an icon of beauty, but today's artists have a very different concept of aesthetics. David Lees/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Does beauty still belong in art?

Beauty is no longer about what's pretty, symmetrical, or harmonious. It's about what stirs viewers to grapple with the world as it really is.

By Carol Strickland

from the December 20, 2007 edition

New York - Is beauty dead? The answer that springs from much of contemporary art is an unapologetic "yes." Grime, grit, death, destruction, flesh, and flaws have replaced pretty models, still lifes, and pastoral scenes.

In the past 500 years, the opalescent beauty of "La Pietà" has become the urine-soaked effrontery of "Piss Christ." It's no wonder crowds prefer the cheer of Van Gogh's sunflowers to such cheekiness. But history is surely laughing at this irony.

Impressionism, now beloved, was considered an assault on beauty when first exhibited in the 1860s. Critics scoffed that the paintings were sloppy, stupid, and meaningless – the same complaints one often hears about art today. As art critic Clement Greenberg famously said, "All profoundly original art looks ugly at first."

So perhaps it is premature to declare beauty obsolete. Instead, what's needed is a more nuanced appreciation of contemporary art's aesthetic. Today, beauty is no longer about what's pretty, symmetrical, or harmonious. It's about what stirs the viewer to grapple with the world as it really is. Art is not a cosmetic to prettify reality or provide escapist pleasure but a hammer to smash our complacency.

The philosopher George Santayana described beauty as "a living presence or an aching absence." In contemporary art, it's quite often an aching presence. As Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa pointed out, "Contemporary aesthetics has established the beauty of ugliness, reclaiming for art everything in human experience that artistic representation had previously rejected."

This challenge to convention reflects artists' "I cannot tell a lie" honesty. After the savagery of World War I, art turned to the dark side with wrenching paintings of brutality by German ｅxpressionists such as George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann. "We had found in the war," the Dada artist Richard Huelsenbeck said in 1917, "that Goethe and Schiller and beauty added up to killing and bloodshed and murder." After World War II, Theodor Adorno said that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

No wonder today's art reflects an unsettling sense of disturbance. Check out Anselm Kiefer's charred landscapes. Or Lucian Freud's clotted canvases grotesquely exaggerating each crease and fleshly flaw in his models. It shouts: What a broken, saggy, ruined piece of work is man! If we don't want to be blind to reality, it behooves us to look at contemporary art, think about it, register its message, and understand its origins.

"If you look at the street art of Jean-Michel Basquiat or younger artists like Dash Snow or Barry McGee, their work is about the grit and grime of reality," says Susan Davidson, senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum. "There is beauty in it but it's harsher, rough, and in your face."

Morley Safer, who covers art for CBS's "Sunday Morning," says, "It's clear beauty has no place in contemporary art." He suggests substituting "emotional and intellectual impact" as the criterion to judge quality.

To assess quality in today's art, don't rely on superficial beauty. Unlike a vapid Breck-girl image, good art has got to have punch to shake us up, wake us up, and – above all – make us sit up and take notice.

Alejandro Cesarco, an up-and-coming artist in New York, sees a work's surface appearance as merely a door-opener. "It's part of a seduction strategy, an initial stage of allowing somebody into the work, although it never ends there." He adds: "There has to be something that makes you continue to think about the work."

Good art grabs our attention, then deepens our engagement with multiple layers that expand our knowledge of the world and ourselves, and make us see and feel and think in different ways. And all this should come in the form of an object made with consummate skill. "Things that quicken the heart" is how John Baldessari, a master of postmodern art, puts it.

Renaissance idealism – a pinnacle of beauty in visual art – embodied the smiling face of life as we might wish it to be. Caravaggio gave art a Baroque twist when he took his models from the gutter and painted the Virgin Mary with dirty feet. Caravaggio's patrons howled, just as today, museum-goers often recoil from art reflecting the sordid side of life.

It's lovely to depict humanity's highest aspirations, but it's necessary to acknowledge our feet of clay, too.

Looking at art today has the morbid fascination of rubbernecking at a wreck on the highway. Yet the artist's intent goes beyond voyeurism to sound an early warning. The canary's song is beautiful and lulling. But when its melody stops in the mine, you'd better cease heaving that pickaxe and run for your life.

 

 

Just tell me what it means: A man listens to an audio guide explanation of Barnett Newman's "Vir Heroicus Sublimis," at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Carol Strickland

We get the art we deserve

Art today is beset by spectacle and speculation, but a cure is possible.

By Carol Strickland

from the December 21, 2007 edition

 

New York - As a mirror for society, art often tells us things we'd rather not know. What big picture are artists painting of Western society? In today's landscape, two features are screamingly evident: spectacle and speculation.

Both rely on flashy style more than substance. But all is not lost. Artists must return to personally making personal objects, rather than turning out "signature" works fabricated by a hundred assistants. Glitz and glamour are as ephemeral as fireflies. Art that endures is serious, hard-hitting, deep, and mature. It requires viewers who are equally committed to decipher it.

Reflecting America's show-biz culture, quiet, contemplative art is overshadowed by art straining to be cinematic or sensationalist. "The requirement that great art be serious and have a message and give aesthetic delight has gone largely by the board because so much art is subsumed as entertainment," says cultural commentator Matthew Gurewitsch.

Art as spectacle was on display in the Brooklyn Museum's aptly named "Sensation" exhibition in 1999. It featured shocking works by the so-called Young British Artists (YBAs). Marc Quinn's self-portrait bust was made from his frozen blood. Damien Hirst's "A Thousand Years" consisted of a box with maggots swarming over a rotting cow's head. Both works score points for originality by updating the traditional "vanitas" genre that reminds us of mortality. Yet the YBAs too often seek to shock more than enlighten.

In a culture obsessed with celebrity and novelty, it's no surprise that artists' works become more strident to win attention. In a society saturated by the entertainment industry – and with digital tools galore – art has developed parallels to panoramic, Technicolor cinema. Photographers such as Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson exhibit wall-sized, staged photographs, digitally manipulated, in dazzling color and detail. Video artists such as Bill Viola turn out Hollywood-style, "wow!" art works.

If every age gets the art it deserves, the other trait – speculation – suggests rampant materialism. Works sell at auction for astronomical sums, as hedge-fund billionaires and oil moguls compete to acquire collections of contemporary art and the sheen of high culture. Many lament this "irrational exuberance" as a pernicious influence. "It's a fallacy to equate a higher price with a better work of art," says the well-respected artist John Baldessari.

Insanely high prices turn art into a commodity with buzz. Fads and hype trump quality and critical judgment. Gallerygoers flock to see name-brand artists whose works garner the highest prices. Often, they leave disappointed and skeptical.

The good news? There is a cure for the epidemic of obesity that inflates art in monetary value and cinematic aspirations. It begins with encouraging art dealers who believe in their artists more than in the power of the purse. "What we need are visionary dealers," says CBS's Morley Safer. He cites the example of Ambroise Vollard, who supported "unknowns" such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh.

It also requires media to make a better commitment to quality arts journalism. That means going beyond coverage of blockbuster exhibitions and eschewing PR hype.

The next generation of artists, meanwhile, shows signs of returning to classic ideals. Lowery Sims, a curator at New York's Museum of Arts and Design who teaches college courses in contemporary art, cites the "total revolt" by her students when she explains post-modern art practices such as appropriating banal, found imagery. Ms. Sims says her students exhibit "an extraordinary kind of old-fashioned idealism."

The final component of the cure lies with the viewers of art themselves. Hordes of museumgoers spend a minute or two in front of each work, as audioguides instruct them how to see and think. But doesn't that preempt direct experience?

"To see" as Henri Matisse said, "is itself a creative operation, requiring an effort." It's OK not to like the art or not like what it suggests. But grant the respect of trying to understand what the work is saying. Art is communication, requiring connection between artist and viewer. It should make us see with someone else's eyes.

Teaching children to appreciate art – not just create their own – is vital to this effort. That means we need to challenge the attitude that arts education is optional.

Interpreting contemporary art is an acquired skill. We can't all be connoisseurs but we can participate in the creative triangle linking object, artist, and viewer. Knowledge of art history – and of how an artist upholds or diverges from it – helps, but you should trust your personal reaction. It's about questions, not answers. To be smart about art means opening your head and heart.

• Carol Strickland is the author of "The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern." This is the third of a three-part series.