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WOID XIX-1. Museumwatch. Last Tango at the Philharmonic

If you need a sense of how the malfunctions of a large cultural institution become a part of its functions, read Johanna Fiedler’s book, Molto Agitato. Fiedler worked at the Metropolitan Opera from 1975 on, and the book is less interesting after that date because it’s one thing to gossip about people you know; it’s too personal to contribute a trenchant analysis. The beginning, though, is full of gossip about trivial events with a long-lasting impact, and here’s my favorite:

Into the early ‘seventies there were few productions at the Met that didn’t include horses and dogs – I still remember the first opera I saw that didn’t, and the whole audience sat in anticipation followed by shock as it became obvious there weren’t going to be any horses and what’s more, the whole point of the production was to not include horses. According to Fiedler, the Met had long wanted to get over the horsie thing, but one of the major patrons happened to love horses, and if you didn’t have the horses you didn’t get the funds. Then again, if you did have the horses the funds all went for the hay and the handlers, not to mention all the tickets left unsold because people who go to the opera to see horses are more likely to go to Barnum & Bailey instead, where there’s elephants and clowns as well.

If you need bigger, better, more up-to-date malfunctions in culture, read Robert S. Flanagan’s report on The Economic Environment of American Symphony Orchestras, commissioned by the Mellon Foundation. Flanagan is a hotshot economist at Stanford – the Mellon doesn’t usually order these things from Ray’s Original Pizza.

Flanagan ends up with the same insight as Fiedler but of course more scientific: it’s not, as some obsessive critics have worried, that he proves American symphony orchestras aren’t doing it right to raise money, it’s that the whole fundraising rationale of large American symphonies is a pile of manure to begin with. For one thing, all the marketing strategies in the world aren’t ever going to make much difference: audiences come if they like the music, and they don’t if they don’t, and – though Flanagan doesn’t discuss this – if you push to bring one type of audience in you’re just as likely to drive another audience away.

This is very bad news, though not necessarily for musicians and artists and art historians. It’s bad news for the whole ponderous back offices of the culture industry, the administrators and fundraisers and those who teach Museum Studies and Management for Non-Profits. But it’s no surprise to those who’ve read Fiedler’s book or thought about the issue: from the very beginning the Metropolitan Opera was run according to the principle that it would not be allowed to survive without its wealthy horseloving trustees. Come to think of it, that’s been true of Opera since Monteverdi, and it was true of symphony orchestras, and it’s true of Lincoln Center as well, as anyone can tell you who’s actually worked there, as Fiedler’s done and as I’ve done, too. The difference is, that over the past ten years large numbers of museums and cultural centers have been set up with the promise that they will pay off, and all they need is a few more competent administrators, a few more MBAs. We are nearing the top of a very steep hill of cultural expansion and some institutions, like the Guggenheim, have figured out what’s on the other side: a very steep drop. Others, like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, haven’t yet, or like a big Bear Stearns of culture, pretend they haven’t. As Flanagan puts it, “The question becomes: When are these expenditures going to pay off?” The answer’s pretty much what it’s been since Monteverdi: Never.

- Frederick Devious

WOID XVIII-48. Museumwatch. Le Salon de 2008

Whitney Biennial
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Through June 1

What we are saying, the newspapers would not dare print, began Baudelaire in the Introduction to his Salon de 1845.

1)
So what do the papers say? Here’s Holland Cotter at the New York Times:

“Advertisements for the 2008 Whitney Biennial promise a show that will tell us ‘where American art stands today,’ although we basically already know."

If we already know why bother unless, like Cotter, we’re not interested in seeing something new, just in proving that we already know what we’re about to see? Cotter explains that “a lot of new art” can already be seen elsewhere, which is the kind of Timespeak that should be banned alongside aerosol cans and plastic bags: did a hundred trees have to die so we could learn that there’s a lot of art in the galleries? And shouldn’t the Whitney aim to show us ‘umble rubes the kind of art we haven’t seen before? Art that can’t be found in the ho-hum galleries? In the ho-hum Times?

Cotter continues: “This year we have a Whitney show that takes lowered expectations...as its theme.” But if the critic has no expectations to begin with, how can those be lowered? By “lowered expectations” Cotter means the “iffy economy” that the Biennial supposedly takes as its theme. Likewise, if this were the biennial Salon of 1851 we'd notice that a lot of realist art was on view that happened to look like the art we saw all over Paris. But then, once we’d approached the artworks on display we'd see that Courbet’s realistic painting of Stonebreakers took despair or disappointment as its theme. Or again, we might be thrilled that the art of Realism, the art we already knew and loved from frequent sightings, was given pride of place at the Salon. And we might in turn, once we examined the works on display, see Courbet’s Stonebreakers as a message of hope. Our prior understanding of the concept of Realism, negative or not, would determine how we approached the Stonebreakers: it would help us determine whether or not Courbet had understood the concept and built upon it.

It seems that Cotter classifies the works at the 2008 Biennial according to two distinct functions: diachronic engagement and synchronic engagement, the relationship of the art-world to its social basis and the relationship of the artwork to is anticipated evolution. On the one hand the art on view is supposedly a faithful reflection of all art going on everywhere – by which Cotter means “in certain galleries and fairs.” On the other, the art on view is a faithful reflection of economic anxieties over the future; but of course if the art on view is only the reflection of the kind of art you see in galleries and fairs and in advertisements in the New York Times then the economic anxieties that are the underlying theme of the Biennial are only the reflection of the economic anxieties of those who buy and sell and write about the kind of art that’s advertised in the New York Times. The Economy plays for Cotter the same role that theories about Realism played for audiences and critics in 1851.

2)
Simone de Beauvoir tells how black became the fashionable color among the in-crowd. It seems a group of bohemians congregated around Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the ‘sixties, whose interest in self-expression was in reverse proportion to their interest in politics: most, in fact, were children of wealthy Vichy supporters eager to distance themselves from the stain of collaboration. One summer a group of them traveled to the Riviera, where they met a group of equally alienated young Italian fascists who still kept to the fascist avant-garde's dress code of black turtlenecks and straight black dresses. This style the French bohemians brought back to Paris, where it was popularized by the existentialist Goth singer Juliette Gréco.

Fashionable despair. It's the new black. Could be the old black as well.

3)
And another thing about the newspapers' art critics: they remind me of a participant in a museum lecture of mine, once, who informed me that the Manet I was discussing was not at all like the Manet he knew, and could we move on?

Not yet, quite. Here’s Newsday’s review of the Whitney Biennial:

"As I slogged through the Whitney's amorphous, random and mostly incomprehensible Biennial, a line from T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" echoed in my brain: 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins.'"

Ironic, considering what’s incomprehensible about Eliot: not the arcane fragments of “real” literature, which are usually explificated in a footnote, but the pieces of pop trivia; not the pieces of pop trivia themselves but the ambivalence of Eliot’s attempt to connect with his fantasy reader: waspish, classicizing, refined, and quite above all of this low-life trivia. There’s an unconscious irony in Eliot’s conscious irony, just as there is in today’s art at the Whitney, but then Eliot and American art criticism both strive, like little Matthew Arnolds, to separate the viewers from the crass, material basis of their own culture: what if the Biennial wasn’t about the art in museums and galleries? What if it wasn’t about either the high art rejected by Newsday or the gallery art supported by the Times as it supports the Times in return?

But then the critic continues:

"The works before us, we are told, "explore fluid communication structures and systems of exchange that index larger social, political, and economic contexts, often aiming to invert the more object-oriented operations of the art market." In other words: 1) much art deals with the world beyond the studio, and 2) artists are purposely making things nobody would want to buy."

Gosh – she says non-commercial as if it were a bad thing.

It sounds as if Cotter of the Times and Buddick of Newsday share the same viewpoint: Cotter thinks the show faithfully reflects the economic side of society, and is therefore a Good Show. Buddick thinks the show does not reflect the economic side of society, and is therefore a Bad Show. This here’s not the Manet that Buddick knows. This here’s the Manet Cotter knows. The critics praise or blame the curators for bringing in the artists who either get it right or not: thus paychecks do make cowards of us all.

I’ll grant them this in common, though, the critics and the organizers of this show, and even the artists as well, perhaps: the two problematics in play at the Biennial are 1) the specular functions of art, and 2) its economic functions. Those are not the themes ‘round which I’d like to create or display art, but apparently that’s what Whitney Biennials are supposed to do, and it seems as if the curators went along, and the artists went along with the curators – and the critics went along, of course. The more important question now, is how the artists dealt with these issues, and with the issues that arise when 1) and 2) collide. Because I’m not convinced that art should or should not reflect the market, or reflect the values of T.S. Eliot, either. And I’m not convinced that art should, or should not be of the type that’s for sale, and if I were convinced I’d go for sure; not in the hopes of being proved right, but in the hopes of being proved wrong.

WOID XVIII-46. Down these Mean LACMAs...

Jason, you can keep the Pulitzer. I want the movie rights. You do the hard investigating, I’ll sell the plot and keep the money. What a team!

Jason Felch – Felch of the LA Times – has been closing in on that monster art scam I mentioned a few WOIDs back: overvaluation. It’s good to read his latest, in the LA Times for March 2.

It’s really good for the following passage, about the recent raids on several California art museums, ostensibly to look for evidence of illegally imported tchotchkes in their collections:

But the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles is investigating whether museum officials furthered the scheme by knowingly accepting donations of overvalued art from suspect dealers and collectors over a decade, according to affidavits filed in January.

That's nice to read, because I recently got slammed for suggesting the same thing: that the raids weren’t just about museums accepting looted art, they were about museums colluding in the evaluation, as well.

So, Jason, you keep investigating, and I’ll keep speculating and – who knows? We might match up again. In that case I want to share your Pulitzer, and I’ll thank you with tears in my eyes when I step up to get my Oscar.

SYNOPSIS:

Movie begins with scenes of the occupation of Baghdad - it’s not a movie without Iraq these days. The camera cuts from scenes of the looting of the Iraqi National Museum to a quiet executive boardroom in which a shadowy group called the American Council for Cultural Properties is meeting.

[Note: legal informs me “shadowy” is inaccurate. The American Council for Cultural Properties was a perfectly above-board organization whose mission was to “liberalize” those pesky laws that impeded the free flow of artworks - including looted artworks, of course. For “shadowy,” substitute “sleazy.” ]

Camera travels down the boardroom table to Huffington Puffington III. Huffy (as his friends from Skull-and-Bones call him), is loosely patterned after any number of members of the ACCP. Actually, we could be talking about any number of high-powered art lawyers who’ve been pushing the concept that international laws on cultural property don’t apply or can’t apply, or if they do apply they can always be made to not apply, given the proper connections and interpretations. Also, we need a stand-in for all those museum directors who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the ACCP. The point is to establish the existence of an ongoing partnership between museum directors and art collectors with law degrees – you know, one of those Ross MacDonald multi-generation plot developments.

Dissolve and fade to today. Police in riot gear are raiding the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Camera pans to CultureGrrl, spunky girl reporter – no, that’s too Hollywood; besides, Jennifer Connelly can't act.

[For spunky girl reporter, substitute dumb reporter who, like dumb reporters everywhere, carries water for the boss. Maybe we could borrow CultureGrrl’s technique of using bits of second-hand legalese to counter (and on occasion, libel) those who raise the concept of a museum accepting looted objects it knows to be overvalued. Maybe we can spring a twist in the plot line where the dumb reporter knows too much, and turns up in a shallow grave. The audience will love it.]

Of course the fact that certain members of ACCP might actually be connected to certain directors of certain museums of art in Los Angeles is unimportant. The issue is if and when those chummy ties between legal eagle art advisers and art museum directors brought the lawyers beyond merely supporting the legalization of illegal looting, to developing legal arguments to favor the acquisition of looted art by museums with which they might have been connected. Did certain such partners move into profiting from illegal looting while arguing (as CultureGrrl has argued, and as real lawyers are actually paid to do), that there was nothing illegal going on? To end, finally, eventually, perhaps, involved in the kind of thing that gets you and your art world buddies busted under the RICO Act?

[Ah, Hollywood. The Dream Factory.]

WOID XVIII-44, 47. Bonjour, Comrade Courbet!

Gustave Courbet
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Through May 18

Courbet was a "Republican?" Golly, geez, it must be true because the New York Times just said so. Courbet, the great French nineteenth-century painter and political activist, the man who sold to the ruling class and yet refused to sell out, the man who was almost shot for his participation in the Paris Commune, would have voted for John McCain according to Roberta Smith, the Times' art critic.

Well, the Times never lies. Well, not exactly; they just kind of don't quite give you the whole truth. Late in 1851 when a Parisian journal denounced Courbet as a "socialist painter," Courbet responded:

I am strong enough to act alone ... Monsieur Garcin calls me the socialist painter; I gladly accept that description; I am not only a socialist, but also a democrat and republican, in short a supporter of all that the revolution stands for, and first and foremost I am a realist.

Back then a "republican" (as opposed to a "Republican" nowadays), meant somebody who supported the Second Republic, the democratic government brought to power by the working class in the Revolution of 1848. Whatever Courbet's words might have meant in 1851, they took on another meaning two weeks later when the Republic was brought down by Napoleon III. After that, anyone who thought of himself as a republican (like Courbet's friend Manet), would be simply placing himself among the enemies of the Regime.

Courbet, unlike Manet, didn't keep his head down. Armed with the prestige he'd earned under the Republic (notably the medal that allowed him to show his paintings in the State-sponsored "Salon" without a jury's approval), Courbet embarked on an eighteen-year career of painterly and political resistance, with considerable help from his friends and fellow-troublemakers: the second lie from the Times (the more egregious one), is the description of Courbet as a "narcissistic loner." Narcissistic, maybe, but Courbet had plenty of friends, just not the Times' kind of people.

Among them was the anarchist legend Pierre-Paul Proudhon - there's a painting of him in the show. Of course, say the art historians, that means Courbet can't have been a "real" activist since Marx himself dismissed Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy. This didn't stop Courbet, or Proudhon's followers, from joining the Paris Commune of 1871: Courbet himself was elected to the governing body of the Commune and served on its committee on public education, as well as working to reorganize the museums, art schools and exhibitions on democratic lines, which kind of conflicts with Wikipedia's assertion that he saved the museums from "looting mobs." Oh, well.

Caricature from the Commune: Courbet, wearing his red deputy's sash, evicts a bourgeois from the public latrine that was the Vendôme Column.

Unless they mean the looting mobs of right-wing troops that stormed Paris, shooting some 30,000 men, women and children and shipping thousands more to the colonies. Courbet was captured, imprisoned, and eventually charged with destroying the hideous Vendôme Column, for which he was fined an enormous sum. Courbet fled to Switzerland where, for once, he might have been described as being a loner, except he seems to have had plenty of friends helping him churn out all those chocolate-box paintings that bear his signature. A troublemaker to the end, he died on December 31, 1877 - or maybe January 1, 1878. Nobody knows. Not even the New York Times. Especially not the New York Times.

II)
It’s not as if there were no mention of Courbet’s politics in the show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - why there’s a whole room at the end, devoted to Courbet’s paintings after his arrest and imprisonment following the fall of the Commune: typical revolutionary paintings of fish, and of fruit. What the signage doesn’t bother telling you, is that a strict censorship was applied to the visual arts after the bloody butchery. Courbet painted a dead trout with the fishing line still caught in its mouth, and at the bottom, in Latin : In vinculis faciebat, meaning: "produced in captivity." Then there’s a pile of battered apples in a pile under a dark hill – “Little red guys with holes in them,” as someone once described them. At the Met, the explanation for these paintings is that of Klaus Herding, one of a number of Courbet scholars implicitly quoted in this unfocused, unthinking show: “It is only rarely possible to discern a directly political iconography in [Courbet's] pictures.” The only politics involved is the hidden kind.

Courbet meets his patron and client Alfred Bruyas as one free man meets another. On the left, a servant shows the humility of the enslaved. Courbet has shown himself as a Compagnon, an independent traveling apprentice.

And that’s a problem but it’s not Courbet’s: if it’s “direct political” symbolism you’re looking for you’re apt to miss the point of what’s political about Courbet. The question whether Courbet painted political themes is a question asked by liberal-lefty art historians whose own politics is always outside themselves: their politics are always in the content of what they themselves stand back and describe, never in their own actions. Linda Nochlin, the feminist, has even argued for a feminist “reading” of Courbet’s art, as if his obnoxiously sexist close-up of a vulva – possibly the first beaver shot in the history of painting – wasn’t really who Courbet was, a revolutionary and a sexist: as if this image was merely about society, and not about Courbet. Nochlin, who herself is haunted by fears of Marxists turning up in her office wearing leather jackets, would rather imagine Courbet as a feminist than a leftist. She might have asked Courbet, not in order to believe him, mind, but out of common courtesy.

But then Courbet wasn’t a Marxist anyhow, he was a follower of Proudhon and his Proudhonian anarchism was consistent from start to end of his career: until the Impressionists came along in 1874 the radical thing to do if you were a radical artist was to push for a free market at a time when Great Art was supposed to be approved and patronized by the State. One Marxist art historian has complained that Courbet was a petit-bourgeois painter painting for the petite bourgeoisie, and that’s quite correct. But then the Commune itself was mostly made up, not of factory workers, but of the small shopkeepers and independent craftspeople who constituted a majority of the French proletariat into the twentieth century. Painting for the petit bourgeois could well, under proper conditions, become a radical endeavor.

Courbet consistently pushed his anarchist-libertarian message in the face of authority. At a time when elderly French gentlemen would turn up at the Salons, the Government-supported art shows, with magnifying glasses to check that every detail in each painting was “correct,” Courbet painted in a rough-hewn way that called forth the viewer’s own subjectivity – a slap in the face of those painters who produced works that only survived through the dictates of the official market. Courbet was a master-extrovert who loved to play the part of the painter-peasant, rough and direct in his painting as in his life. Once, he and his students took on the painter Couture and his students in a Paris café, with each master haranguing the other from a tabletop. Courbet was the model of what one frustrated factory capitalist called Le Sublime: the skilled worker who turns in good work – work good enough that he can tell the boss to take a flyer, and the boss knows it, and gnashes his teeth and puts up with it. Hey, it's a living...

This only places Courbet in the much broader category of non-academic painters, those who “don’t wear clean underwear” as one critic put it: the Barbizon painters of nature and the others. The difference is, that Courbet’s painting manner stood explicitly for the liberation of the worker: by claiming the right to an unalienated way of painting, Courbet claimed the right to unalienated labor for all workers. When the critics complained that Courbet painted no better than a bricklayer with his trowel, Courbet proudly took this up as a badge of pride. If his painting of a trout is “revolutionary” it’s not because the style is innovative or forward-looking, it’s for the massive, rough blocks of color that seem slapped on. Like Jackson Pollock, Courbet says you, too, can do this. All you need is a trowel and a dream.

Which is to say that in Courbet, as in all great painters of the nineteenth century, painting style and content alike were iconographic: how Courbet painted had an implicit political meaning as much, if not more, than what he painted. In front of a Courbet the liberal bourgeoisie and liberal art historians are confronted with the hideous possibility that real meanings are hidden from them, not in the way a secret is hidden from the all-powerful Master, but the way a thing escapes the Master because he/she does not understand the language of reality, which happens to be the language of the worker, the worker-painter who makes the True Sign of the Universe. “Courbet’s blues?” said André Breton. “They’re the blues of the Parisian sky the day the Vendôme Column fell.”

WOID XVIII-42. Museumwatch: Bo-ring.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008 5:50 pm

Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions
Through May 11, 2008
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

There’s something about Poussin that makes me cringe. Not until this show did I realize I was in good company. Not in the company of the art critic for the New York Sun, though, who writes:

There are few, if any, superlatives that would overstate the astounding achievement — the lyric poetry, the rigorous classicism, the emotional richness, the refined magic — of the paintings of Nicolas Poussin. And there are few superlatives that would overstate the impact of "Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions," a profound exhibition of more than 100 landscape paintings and drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For anyone who loves painting, this show, pitch-perfect from beginning to end, is to be savored and adored.

But in the company of everybody else, because the galleries are virtually empty. Vox populi, vox dei.

I mean this: I was standing in front of Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake and thinking of how dreadful a painting it is, the way every single landscape in the show is dreadful with the possible exception of his Landscape with Hagar and the Angel, one of his last works. Every Poussin landscape’s dreadful in the way that all of Poussin’s bad, only more so: Poussin would design his human figures separately, make little theater cutouts of them, and then arrange them in a toy theater against his painted backdrops. The effect is odd enough in Poussin’s History paintings, but his landscapes all end up looking like stage sets with cutouts of human figures spread around. His sense of space was poor and his sense of color was disastrous, and the lack of any kind of overarching atmosphere weighs each painting down like a pair of concrete shoes; it leaves you desperately looking for a unifying principle. The signage for Man Killed by a Snake proudly quotes Diderot’s evaluation of this same painting, in his Salon of 1767: “From the peaceful travelers in the background to the final scene of terror, what an enormous distance there is...” That’s Diderotspeak for: "This painting doesn’t hold together."

But don’t trust Diderot, just look at the central figure of a woman bent over: she’s at the center of the painting and yet she’s painted as if seen from the viewer’s right. She’s also the same size as the man in the foreground. This is what makes the Hagar painting magical: the angel floating in mid-air is as impossible as the Snake lady, but this makes the angel mysterious where it makes the Snake lady look like a result of mere incompetence.

It must have been painful for a French painter of the mid-nineteenth century to look at this stuff and realize Poussin was the great glory of French culture; to wonder if, maybe, all of this dreadfulness could be redeemed. Using the figure of a woman bending over in the background to collapse space was a way of assigning new intent to Poussin’s landscapes and preserving his technique. Then, if you were interested in the symbolic aspects of space and of the human figure you could place a couple of couples in the foreground, with a woman, naked, smiling at the viewer while the others are fully clothed, and the viewer was left, as Poussin must have intended, desperately looking for a unifying principle....

WOID XVIII-37. Museumwatch: Self-hating Critic.

Sooner or later everybody gets bored with the art criticism in the New York Times, including the critics themselves. Many among them wander off after a while, usually to found some right-wing cultural movement: Hilton Kramer left to start the Neo Criterion; Michael Brenson stomped off to various college art departments, muttering dark threats about Postmodern terrorists.

I suspected something similar when Michael Kimmelman started to curtail his contributions to the Old Gray Art Section shortly after publishing The Accidental Masterpiece, a book entirely devoted to the proposition that the real purpose of Art is to make Mr. and Mrs. America feel that their humdrum lives ain’t been in vain for nothing. Now I can understand someone writing that kind of crap for the New York Times – what else is the New York Times Art Section for? But to write that kind of crap because it’s something you believe in? Yecch.

And I suspected something similar when Kimmelman penned a little memoir for the Sunday Magazine about being a red diaper baby; sure, he managed to show a glimmer of respect for his upbringing (his father was a fearless lefty lawyer), but there was little more to Kimmelman’s memories than the usual Katha Pollitics of left-wing repentance.

Kimmelman hasn’t published much over the past few months, but his last two articles were...were...well, gosh-darn, it’s almost as if he had something to say! That’s not to say that Kimmelman has thrown himself down in the marketplace and kissed the soil of Holy Mother Russia Whom He’s Offended Greatly: there’s a strong continuity between The Accidental Masterpiece and those recent articles, except the focus has shifted, and the brain has started to function.

"The idea behind [The Accidental Masterpiece]," according to K., "is that art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully," and by lives he meant the kind of lives that people supposedly live in Peoria – more accurately, the lives that arrogant writers for the New York Times think their middle-brown audience lives. The idea behind the articles is that Kimmelman seems to have come to the dim realization that art might or might not give us clues to live our lives more fully, but when, for instance, the art in question happens to be a series of monstrous monuments set up by Franco to atone for the Spanish Civil War (or rather to have others atone, since the monuments were built by political prisoners), then perhaps the purposes of art might be open to question. In his most recent article Kimmelman takes the same approach to the Roma people of Hungary, traditionally and presently among the most oppressed of Eastern European people. Kimmelmann adds that the Roma are usually known as Gypsies: “The term isn't considered pejorative here.” Hey, I can think of a lot of places in America where terms like Kike and Sheenie and Wop aren’t considered pejorative either, as long as you don’t ask the people you're calling by these names.

But as Kimmelman points out, he has nothing but respect for those wonderful Gyp...I mean Roma: he respects their culture, and their sufferings among Hungarians. The problem is, that he’s reviewing an art show, and the problem with the art show, he says, is, it ain’t art: “The exhibition turned out to be a mess, but an emblematic one... [It] looked more like a flea market.” Translation for American ears: “The exhibition of African American Art looked like a display of watermelon and fried catfish.” That’s a little puzzling considering Kimmelman’s just written a book telling Mom and Pop in Peoria they should send their baby pictures to the museum, because pictures of pudgy white folks could be considered Art. And he’s just written an article telling the Spanish People to respect those hideous monuments to Franco, because those are Art, too.

At last count there are two Jewish museum buildings in Vienna. Like the Roma cultural institutions Kimmelman describes in Hungary, these museums are heavily subsidized in a good faith attempt to right the historic wrongs suffered by the Jewish People. The exit signs and such are in German, and Hebrew, and English. There are no signs in Yiddish, which is interesting since there are surely many more Yiddish speakers in Vienna nowadays than Hebrew speakers. But then the cultural politics of Austria are no different today than the cultural politics of Hungary, or Slovakia, or any number of states that once made up the union of the Austrian Empire and the Hungarian Kingdom - Kaiserliches und Königliches, “Kaka” for short. Kimmelman mentions that discrimination of the Roma in Hungary was practically nonexistent under the Soviet Regime, but he doesn’t understand the obverse: that discrimination has increased considerably since the Fall because the cultural dynamics of Europe as a whole have returned to the same ethnic balancing act that kept Kaka together; that the whole messy system was held together by playing one ethnic group against the other; that Hungary was not, and is not today, made up of Hungarians only, any more than Vienna is made up of German speakers; and that the jostling for cultural legitimacy is as fierce in both places as it was a hundred years ago. Yiddish, a fusion of several languages and grammars, is particularly vulnerable to this because it flies against the very notion of a single national identity. Kimmelman quotes a Roma thinker saying of the recent, post-Communist past, that ''Culture became an artistic tool in a political fight.'' Really, now? ''We thought if we could gain a foothold in culture and the arts, then we could move closer to gaining human rights,'' she adds. It doesn’t work, says Kimmelman, and he should know.

It doesn’t work, he writes, with a certainty I once heard from a Viennese who explained to me there is no Yiddish Literature, because “Yiddish is just the German spoken by dirty people.” For Kimmelman, Spaniards who wish to create their own culture of remembrance are just dirty commies; Roma displays of Roma artwork are just flea market stalls. But when I take a picture of Mom and Dad in front of the carport, that’s Art to Michael, and it's Art because America is crawling with immigrants who think if they just act the way Americans are supposed to act – if they reject their grandparent’s beliefs, or country, or political opinions - maybe they too, can pass for middle class; maybe they can have some Culture, too.

Just ask your bobeh, Michael. She should know.

WOID XVIII-35. Museumwatch: Museums and the preservation of the future

Depending on who you ask, the May movement in France in 1968 started in the universities, or more likely the factories, or perhaps again on February 9, when the Minister of Culture decided to take over Henri Langlois' prestigious collection of movie reels and memorabilia and was met by resistance that turned into police riots. Within a few weeks the occupations had begun - of universities, factories, and cultural institutions.

Well, it's an unconfirmed report. Today, a week short of the forty-year celebration of L'Affaire Langlois, the headquarters of the national network of French museums (Direction des Musées de France) were taken over by a group of museum employees represented by two unions, the CGT and SUD Culture. The strikers demand that the Government reverse its present plans, which they claim would lead to the disruption and privatization of "whole areas that are essential to public service in the realm of culture."

WOID XVIII-34. Museumwatch. Hissyfits.

I once tried to teach my cat to laugh. I figured if I told him the same story every day he'd get it eventually. Every morning I’d stare at the cat. “You may think you’re smart,” I’d say, and the cat would stare back. “But let me tell you something.” The cat’s ears would perk up. “The guy who wrote Snowbound was Whittier.” The cat would get up and wander off. After a few days of this I realized the cat wasn’t ever going to laugh: he’d got it already and it wasn’t funny the first time.

I get it, Culturegrrl: my previous post is ”ignorant” because Museums aren’t supposed to do valuations for tax purposes. In fact, they’re supposed to not even know what the tax valuations of a donation are, because that would be unethical.

Come again, Culturegrrl? Or have you been fixed?

You may call this “ethical,” I’d call it CYA. If I sell you a gun and I tell you I don’t want to know what you plan to do with it that's not because I’m ethical, it’s because I don’t want to be charged with Accessory. If you walk into my gun store and you’ve got a swastika tattooed on your head and you’re raving about the people you’re gonna get and I tell you I don’t want to hear about it I just might get in trouble anyhow, and that’s a lot closer to what was happening at various small and not-so-small museums in California where, clearly, the ethical guidelines were followed even more casually than ever, assuming they were present – quite apart from the question of the efficacy of said guidelines in protecting museum staff, or the legal protections they might or might not have offered if they had been followed to begin with.

And that’s what’s sad about you, Grrl. Like my cat, it’s all a-priori. A priori you’ve never seen anything a museum ever did or showed that wasn’t legal, or ethical, or beeyootiful.

But hey, not getting it’s your job. It’s who you are and it’s no use trying to explain these things to you. Still, you and your artworld-kissing friends might thank me from time to time for cleaning out your litter-box.

WOID XVIII-33. Museumwatch. It’s the overvaluation, stupid.

There’s an old, legendary narrative: a smuggler’s busted at the Mexican border. In the back of his truck US agents find a hoard of magnificent pre-Columbian art ceramics. The hoarder shrugs: You can’t charge me with smuggling antiquities, señores: they’re fakes. The agents bring in their best experts, who all agree these are priceless antiquities. The smuggler shrugs again, picks up a piece of pottery and smashes it against the floor: there’s a brand-new peso baked inside.

Like the customs officials in the story, the media reporting on the recent busts in the Los Angeles museum world seem to have their culprits all right, but for all the wrong reasons. The media critics seem to believe that the January 24th raids on a pack of Los Angeles museums were all about looted antiquities. Lee (“Culturegrrl”) Rosenbaum, who’s never seen a scam she wasn’t blind to, huffily writes, "The dramatic raid was out of proportion to what it was attempting to achieve."

Which might make sense if the Feds were trying to achieve what she’d like to think they were trying to achieve, that is, to secure curatorial records about objects, and perhaps the objects themselves, on the assumption the objects were illegally imported. Unless of course the Feds were looking for records of a less official nature, like a couple of written wink-winks as to the real value of various donated objects.

The scam wasn’t just importing stuff illegally: it was turning over stuff to museums at inflated valuations, and – here’s the point: it’s about the very real possibility the museums knew their own valuations were inflated, and inflated their valuations for gain. The donors, obviously, got huge tax breaks; the question is, what did the museums involved get in return, because a lot of the art involved appears to have been penny-ante stuff, small objects looted here (from Native American sites) and there (Ban Chiang, Thailand, mostly). Some of the museums even took in stuff that wasn’t part of their collecting strategies, on which they had no particular expertise, for which they really had no use, but then museums have been taking in stuff for a long, long time for no other reason than this: that the taking in itself established a value for stuff that had none, or little.

If I were the undercover agent involved in collecting evidence (a highly credentialed and experienced woman according to the warrants), and I had a chance to prove a museum had overvalued donations with malice aforethought I wouldn’t simply turn up with sirens wailing, I’d have a goddam band. I mean, when Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gives, as a full explanation for acquiring a 45 million Madonna, “We just have to have this,” don’t you feel like bringing him down to the precinct house for a friendly chat?

This is your worst nightmare, culturefolks. The small upstart museums are looking more and more like those companies charged with rating bonds called monoline insurers, who never met a bond they didn’t rate triple-A, which the monolines can do because they themselves take on insurance on the bonds performing as the monolines promise to do. It's like museums and critics who think they've got some kind of insurance against whatever they decide is Important. Of course, if it turn out the insurer’s no better than the insured we’re all in trouble.

And of course, there are those who think art is valued according to some kind of objective standard, and who can blame them, because if it turned out all merchandise in the whole wide world was not valued according to a rational standard the system would collapse, but that’s another story – that’s the story museums and art critics are paid to keep hush-hush.

What’s the difference between organic intellectuals and organic vegetables?

Organic vegetables can think for themselves.

WOID XVIII-27, 28. Museumwatch. The MoMA Trap [I&II]

January 16, 2008

Did I drop something? The New York Times has an article about the Erotic Art show at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. Okay, nothing wrong with that, in fact it’s expected, just as it’s expected the Times Travel Section’s going to tell you about this hep place in Paris called “Les Folies Bergère,” or the dim dive in Montmartre where real Parisians in berets and sailor shirts dance with other Parisians in black slit skirts. Oo-la-la’s an important aspect of Franco-American cultural exchange, and why should this show be spared?

Here’s what puzzles me, though, from the New York Times:

“Certainly the exhibition is one of the most popular in years. It takes an hour to get in.”

And here’s what puzzles me some more:

“The newspaper Le Monde has run ads for it on its front page.”

First, and in passing: in a city with thousands of shows at any given time, what is this exhibition the most popular OF? It took me thirty seconds to get in, but that’s because I went to the exit by mistake and I had to walk back to the entrance. Perhaps the writer for the New York Times turned up at the Bibliothèque nationale at 3:00 pm on a Sunday and waited on line herself and timed it – isn’t that what art critics do?

Second, and not at all in passing, not at all: in what way is a massive advertising campaign proof that a show is successful? in France as in America, the media like to talk about a succesful show the way Judith Miller talks about weapons of mass destruction: if you will it they will come. You’d think it would be the reverse, and that a massive advertising campaign was proof that the show’s a failure and there’s no other way to attract visitors. You’d think that if your were one of those zero-sum American-style administrators who have started taking over the French cultural infrastructure.

And guess what? The newly-installed Director of the Bibliothèque nationale, Bruno Racine, is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, which is very much like having a Harvard Business School graduate at the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The success (or “success”) of the Pornography show is meant to show the success of a certain style of administration: Racine brings to culture the great lessons of Free Market Capitalism.

January 18, 2008

Among the many curious features of American culture that Europeans have been spared so far is the ubiquitous ads for pharmaceuticals. I suspect the current show of erotic holdings at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris marks a shift towards a similar practice, and not simply becaus the huge “X” laid out in lights on one of the towers of the Bibliothèque is an awkward come-on: the term Classé X for “X-rated” is a recent American export to France.

Rather, it’s that when you open up your program at Carnegie Hall or see a bus drive down a New York street with a huge ad for a new prescription drug or other you wonder who the ad is for: are you really going to “ask your doctor” about that new treatment for scoliosis? Or isn’t it rather that it prepares you to play the accepting role when your doctor tells you there’s this great new medication everybody’s talking about? Pushing culture’s no different from most other forms of advertising: the trick is to persuade economically or culturally conflicted groups of different things at the same time through the same message.

By this criterion the Erotic show is a signal failure; in fact, the two main groups of visitors hardly seemed to speak the same language. On one side there were young people – especially foreign tourists – disappointed at the staidness of the whole thing; on the other, Parisian couples who were there, presumably, for the show's educational value. A Parisian friend of mine, who announced that she wouldn’t be going after I described the show, nevertheless told me she’d got quite a bit of pleasure from walking around an earlier, similar show in Paris with a prudish cousin of hers.

I would like to believe that Bruno Racine, the newly-installed Director of the Bibliothèque, has returned to the productivist theory of museology: that the purpose of an art museum (this was the grand theory behind many museums in nineteenth-century America), is to raise the skills of the lower classes of artisans and workers, to teach them skills that will allow them to improve themselves at work, and through work, to improve a capitalist society as a whole. The Museum of Modern Art gave an interesting twist to this concept in the late nineteen-twenties: the idea, now, was not to improve the worker’s skill, but the general public’s viewing skills. So here's another shift, yet: the new ruling classes in France have decided that French people need inspiration in their sex life and the National Library's going to help them - it's the kind of institution the French call "reconnue d'utilité pubique," after all. More accurately, they've decided that having fun is a kind of privilege reserved to the elites, and that the French public, like the American working-class, can use some pointers for upward-mobility. The building in which this show takes place is known as the Bibliothèque nationale – site François-Mitterand. Perhaps it should be renamed site Nicolas-Sarkozy for the duration.

WOID XVIII-26. Ooh la-la.

January 13, 2008

Eros au secret : L'Enfer de la Bibliothèque
Bibliothèque nationale de France, site François-Mitterrand (Tolbiac)
Through March 2, 2008.

“Une masturbation agile et fréquente, une irritation de l’épiderme français.” That was Baudelaire in his Salon of 1846, and his target wasn’t masturbation per se but the battle paintings of Horace Vernet.

But that was then, when war was a form of national masturbation. Today it’s masturbation that’s a form of masturbation, in France anyhow. Witness the current exhibitionist’s exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale that brings into the light of day the Library's abundant, venerable and (let’s say it), rather stuffy collection of erotica.

Of course it’s crowded – the show's been played up as typical Parisian naughtiness, and one of the four towers of the Bibliothèque glows at night with a gigantic “X” like a Pigalle of the mind except the sign doesn’t blink on and off. A little bit of tawdry would have been most welcome. Likewise, the audience is pretty serious, with a lot of middle-aged French couples – don’t they get this stuff at home? Outside, the angry teenagers who’ve come to do their homework at the Bibliothèque are happily sneering at the passersby – the main shocker has been that the show's off limits to under-sixteens.

In actuality the only thing oversexed is the presentation, which is totally confusing. I’d been led to believe the show came with its own background music, but instead it’s disorganized around a series of curved display cases in no discernible order. You keep getting that nightmarish feeling shared by bored museum visitors and heroes in The Matrix, Part III, that you’ve seen this subway station before, and you have, because the content is stunningly repetitive: Little or no lesbianism, or gay sex, or anal sex, or fellatio: it’s all vaginas, vaginas and vaginas, with a small area set aside for flagellation, and mind you, I have nothing against vaginas - some of my best friends have one - but I was reminded of a remark the art historian John House made about Courbet’s famous depiction of same: that it’s a view that’s mostly familiar to heterosexual men. The most interesting objects in the show, the Japanese print books, are most appropriate because their intentions are so focused: they’re traditionally given out to newlyweds, cartoonish how-tos for young couples who are assumed to little knowledge or experience. The depictions may be risqué but the act is mostly missionary.

And that’s salutary in a narrow way. The art historical highlight here is the illustrations for the Roman de la Rose painted by a woman illuminator, Jeanne de Montbaston, circa 1325. The tiny scene of a nun picking fresh fruit from the penis-tree is worth the visit for itself, but it’s clear, when you see the original, that Jeanne is very much focused on the meaning of the text she’s illustrating: this is not some kind of liberating feminist upsurge, it’s a practical, functional job that Jeanne accomplishes.

The fact that women’s sexuality (or at least one woman’s sexual outlook), was humdrum, not transgressive as far back as the fourteenth century, tells us a good deal about this would-be transgressive show. Postmodern hotties like Susan Sontag and Roz Krauss keep reminding us of the joys of jouissance, the free-floating pleasure proposed by Roland Barthes; but Barthes at one point explained that the concept of jouissance was patterned after the gay hustling he loved to indulge in. Well, this show is free-floating all right. That doesn’t prevent it from being about power and control, like hustling. There’s an old psychoanalytic insight that a sadist isn’t really interested in sex: the preliminaries aren’t supposed to prepare you for it but to discourage you. Quel dommage.

WOID XVIII-23. Like flies to poop on a hot summer day.

Remember that haunting chorus in Beethoven's Fidelio? The prisoners, allowed a few minutes of sunlight in the courtyard, murmur their sombre praises of the distant sun, that is, of Freedom, that is (this being Beethoven), of Music. It seems a little sentimental, now: Beethoven had taken up wholesale the Romantic idea (fostered earlier by Friedrich Schiller), that “it is through Beauty that we attain to Freedom.”

But then, who am I to argue with Daniel Barenboim when it comes to music? The great Israeli pianist and pretty-darn-good conductor had planned to bring a small group of international musicians to play in a Roman Catholic church in Gaza. The concert, he said, “as we all know, would bring so much joy to people who live there in great difficulty.”

I guess we do all know: the orchestra was stopped at the border with Gaza. The one Palestinian musician was told he needed additional permission to enter. After waiting seven hours, the orchestra as a group decided to cancel the concert in solidarity with their colleague.

As I said, I never quite believed that stuff about Music and the Realm of Beauty. On the other hand (as Voltaire said of God), I’m glad that others do. Schiller, like Beethoven and Goethe, was a great Untouchable among all Germans in the 20th century, including the Nazis. Try as they might (and they tried mighty hard, for instance turning him into the “comrade in arms of the Führer”) there was something in Schiller that the Nazis couldn’t swallow, and couldn’t touch. When all else failed; when every means of protest or rebellion was impossible, the Germans might still go to the theater and applaud those lines of Schiller that spoke of Freedom as the sun’s own rays. Theodor Adorno, who watched all this from a first row seat, thought that this was the triumph of Art: that the very complexity of its expression was a slap in the face to those who would reduce all human beings to: “You’re either for us, or against us.” By being neither for nor against, Art stood for those whose politics stood far above the for-or-against of politicians.

That is Barenboim’s triumph, and Beethoven’s – I told you Barenboim’s a great interpreter. Not that the Palestinians in Gaza would have attained their Freedom through music, but that the Israeli butterfly-stompers were shown up for who they are. Music won’t set you free, but it will drag those who hate all freedom into the terrible glare of the sun.

WOID XVIII 20-21. Book Review: A scram-bag for your brain

Friday, December 7, 2007 9:04 pm

Jean-Michel Palmier
Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America
Verso Books, 2006
Original Title: Weimar en exil (Payot, 1987)
Translated by David Fernbach

Scram-bag: In the old days a circus man, a hoodlum or a traveling salesman kept a scram-bag close by: it was a bag filled with everything you’d need if you needed to skip town in a hurry. Well, it’s time to pack your scram-bag now, my friends, if you’re that American variant of the fairground hustler: the artist, the writer, the lowly professor – all those, in fact, who make a living by their brain.

Face it, Red Fox: the fuzz are on your tail. Writers who wouldn’t think of raising their voices even find themselves on the No-Fly List. Teachers are unre-hired; and your Homeland Security Santa’s making a list and checking it every time you pick up the phone. To be unprepared would be very, very foolish.

Fortunately (I guess), there are precedents. Within days of Hitler’s takeover in January 1933, thousands of intellectuals, artists and performers were rounded up by the SA. Their libraries and files were destroyed, their homes ransacked, their families and friends arrested. Thousands were killed, thousands more managed to flee – maybe 50,000, maybe more. This could never happen today in the old US of A: the Nazis were acting illegally. And besides, it only came out much later, at the Nuremberg Trials, that the Nazis had prepared a list of victims long in advance; Americans already know these lists are in existence.

Jean-Michel Palmier has written a survey of this first wave of exiles, and it’s full of practical tips for America’s own Kulturbolshewiks (a term that in Germany as in America could be applied to just about anybody): What will you do when the Homies come knocking? How will your actions be used against you? How will you survive in exile? For once, comparing Bush to Hitler has a practical point.

Palmier’s book reads at first like that boogie-person of the academic world, a recycled doctoral dissertation. It attempts (and succeeds, mostly) to provide a broad overview of the ideas, activities and survival strategies of German and Austrian intellectuals – a sociology of Weimar in exile. Broad, yet detailed; and close to a thousand pages.

What saves it from nit-picking is the author’s unconcealed outrage. If, as an apologist might put it, there are two sides to every story, Palmier will find five or six: the exiled intellectuals (and those who weren’t so lucky), covered a wide range of political beliefs, from the apolitical Jew to the progressive to the Communist, and even a number of blindsided Nazis. Their reactions ranged from the supine to the foolhardy; their reflections, whether proven right or wrong in the long run, are instructive. Günter Grass, who had spent the last few weeks of World War II as a none-too-competent member of the SS, commented afterwards that when he and his generation of would-be writers went looking for inspiration in Germany proper, “the cupboards were empty.” All of the great writers of the previous generation (Brecht, Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Adorno, Benjamin), had either died in Germany, or gone away in exile, there to die, or to remain, or to return to a country that had forgotten them and didn’t want to be reminded. All of them were skilled writers, and Palmier has a scholar’s genius for unearthing the telling phrase. There’s enough here to make up a fabulous calendar for that special anti-fascist on your list: The Intellectual-in-Exile Calendar, one quote per day, beginning January 20, 2009.

And yes, I know, it can’t happen here; or maybe it might happen here, but after all there’s nothing in our past that would prepare us for it. Palmier points out that the better part of Weimar’s intellectuals were quite aware of the country’s drift towards authoritarianism; many actively opposed it; but they were unprepared to be the first in the line of fire because they ignored or chose to ignore how much hatred was harbored in Weimar Germany against intellectuals and artists of all kinds. Those who compare George Bush to Hitler omit as a rule their greatest similarity: both were vulgar, uneducated men who held an enormous appeal for those who, in America as in Germany, today and then, resent the refined and educated. Berlin in the ‘twenties was in that respect no different than New York or Hollywood nowadays, or than your average academic ghetto: Weimar intellectuals, like American intellectuals and politicians, could hardly fathom the appeal of vulgarity and lower-class attitude; and they had such a high stake in playing by their own rules that they resisted the Nazis according to those rules only: Gottfried Berman Fischer, the liberal publisher, went to a Nazi rally with a plan to raise his hand and ask a question of the Führer. They didn’t have tasers in those days.

Saturday, December 8, 2007 3:25 pm

Unfortunately, the realm of culture also had its Nazis-in-training. From the beginning the Nazis and their many sympathizers had dismissed “today’s snobs and knights of the inkwell” (Hitler’s expression for what we like to call “eggheads”), not for the content of their thought but for the very fact that they thought at all. By the early 'thirties in Germany as in the United States today, a new type of professional had risen, the anti-intellectual intellectual, figures like the architect Schulze-Naumburg or the playwright Hanns Johst who wrote the famous line about reaching for your gun when you hear the word “culture,” and who later became director of the Reich Chamber for Literature. Like David Horowitz or Roger Kimball or Alan Dershowitz or any douchebag shock-jock you could name today they specialized, not in developing ideas of their own, but in assaulting others for having ideas to begin with. Hitler, of course, a failed artist, had shown the way: Through Nazi ideology the right-wing intellectuals could equate the annihilation of anyone who stood in their path with the triumph of Germany over Jews, Bolsheviks, or “politicals.” By 1930 some journalists had begun to wonder if right-wingers would next take on the roses for being red.

“The conservatives believed they had to ‘infiltrate minds’ and seize leadership in this way,” wrote the right-wing intellectual Ernst Jünger – who eventually backed off from collaborating. Just as groups like the Olin foundation heavily fund the anti-intellectual intellectuals in America today, so too in Weimar Germany the anti-intellectual intellectuals formed powerful organizations and networks of individuals willing and able to use every trick in the book to strengthen their own positions. Like David Horowitz and Alan Dershowitz and Rudy Giuliani they had perfected the technique of manufacturing crises in the world of culture and education in order to respond to them with all appropriate vigor: no doubt a touch of dung on a picture would have roused them to action. By the time Hitler came to power and for months after that, cultural life in Germany was a continual round of signed appeals, behind-the-scene positioning, manipulated juries and games of “if you’re not with us then you’re against us.” By 1933 as in America today, right-wing groups circulated lists of “books not recommended” to libraries and bookstores. By year’s end a Nazi periodical announced: “The wheel has turned, and we quickly forget today the time when it seemed a matter of course in Germany that only the Left knew how to write.” Kind of like a time when American conservatives complain that it “seems a matter of course in America” that “only the left knows how to teach....”

Anyone who needs a flavor of that kind of cultural struggle should look at the shenanigans accompanying the selection of the runner-ups for the National Book Critics’ Circle Awards in Criticism last year: the positioning of friendly right-wing critics in the jury through back-scratching and favor-trading; the outrage over leaked information about the jury’s deliberations; the concerted choice of an author whose only distinction’s his rabid islamophobia; and finally, the cries of outrage when the selection is denounced, that anyone should stoop to “politics.” In content and in form these maneuvers are radically divergent from the traditional avant-garde, left-wing argument that X’s poem or Y’s symphony should be honored for breaking new ground. Instead, the Nareps argued (the National-Republicans), the prizewinning author’s islamophobia constituted its very form: Islamophobia itself was artistry.

In America today as in Germany then, the word “political” has become a Rottweiler-word, easily equated with the criticism of Our Nation. And just as today so, too in Weimar Germany, all teaching, all art and all literature that implied a criticism of society was assumed to be left-wing - in fact, anything that smacked of criticism at all. One of the first tasks of Goebbels' Gleichschaltung (the streamlining of German society), was the abolition of the profession of Art Critic. This of course could never happen in America because it wouldn’t have to: there are no art critics in America today, if by “critic” you mean someone who writes anything “critical.” Palmier tells us that after the Nazis came to power, “Schools of journalism were charged with training perfect zealots for the regime deprived of any critical sense” – I am shocked! By 1933 all “Kultur” was equated with Bolshewismus - even avowedly Nazi art students had started to feel the whip.

Conversely, as in America, true creativity was now to lie with politicians and captains of industry. “Politics is also an art, perhaps the most noble and complete one that there is,” Goebbels told the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler – no different in essence from the self-congratulations of “creative” CEOs you read on any other page of the New Yorker nowadays. “The intelligentsia of this nation has been well and truly humiliated,” wrote Heinrich Mann in 1933. In America that's just business as usual.

WOID XVIII-16&18. Review: Smart Art

Sunday, December 2, 2007 12:45 pm

Wilhelm Reich: Sex! Pol! Energy!
Jüdisches Museum, Vienna, Austria
Through March 3, 2008
http://www.jmw.at

I)
In 1933 the French intellectual Julien Benda wrote:

Europe will be scientific rather than literary, intellectual rather than artistic, philosophical rather than picturesque. ... Europe will be serious, or it will not come into being.

Benda, an agnostic Jew, meant to counter the romantic cult of unreason then rising in Germany with the traditional Enlightenment appeal to reason. Too little, too late, but then again such oppositions have a way of returning on the breath of Europe like an ill-concealed swig of brandy, nowhere more so than in Vienna, a city of immense cultural, ethnic and linguistic complexity where even whipped cream carries unfathomable political weight. Especially whipped cream; there’s a Strauss opera on the topic of whipped cream that had to be pulled from the stage for its anti-semitic overtones.

Vienna nowadays, a major metropolis in a tiny country, has started to feel again like the former lynchpin of the Hapsburg Empire: today as in the nineteenth century, a complex set of cultures performs its sullen balancing act against the flashy cardboard sets of Old European politesse: Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croat, German-speaking Austrian, African, Turkish, Eastern European Jewish, Austrian Jewish, African; plenty of Americans, too.

Europe will be serious, or it will not come into being. As a French general might have once responded, “The situation is desperate, but not really serious.” It’s the kind of snark you’d imagine coming from Sigmund Freud or Karl Kraus, back in the days when the days were numbered and you turned up at the coffee-shop each afternoon for a game of cards and the evening paper. It’s the kind of line that seems to apply, not only to Viennese cultural life today, but to the museum and gallery scene in general, and not alone in Vienna, or even Europe.

Today’s Fin-de-Art art is the same fin-de-siècle art of a hundred years ago: exhausted Symbolism. Here in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can go look at a shark in a formaldehyde tank; the shark “references” something or other, the Sublime, I’m told, but then the Sublime itself is a quaint concept that already belongs in a fin-de-siècle museum. I’m told that certain exhibits in Vienna’s Museum of Natural History are now considered Unesco sites, not exhibits in themselves but exhibits of how a museum of natural history looked a hundred years ago, a museum of museums of sorts. And it’s tempting to say the shark in formaldehyde references the sharks in formaldehyde you find in most museums of natural history, but at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the shark is in a room with a couple of old oil paintings of sharks, so it’s more accurate to say the shark in formaldehyde references those old-fashioned museums in which you’re supposed to look at a mangy shark in formaldehyde and get the idea of the Sublime out of it – art museums which, in the nineteenth century, referenced the museum of natural history and the Sublimities of God’s Creation. What swims around comes around.

And here’s another recently-seen artwork at the Met, a hyper-accurate cibachrome image of visitors to the museum, and it “references” the fact that people visit museums, which makes you wonder why the artist even bothered since if people didn’t visit museums there wouldn’t be anyone to notice the reference to begin with. The Master of the Shark in Formaldehyde and the Master of the Museum Visitors are actually out to NOT reference anything if they can help it, because the referenced inevitably gives some ground for a judgment of value. The game instead is to reference referencing, as if the art-function was robotic, repeating the same mechanical process again and over again in any type of situation. As in nineteenth-century Symbolism the process is one of talking about the symbol, not what’s actually being said, just as in Old Europe your choice to speak or write or behave in such-and-such a manner may be more important for what it says about you than what it says about what it says about. Kafka never tells us from what department the monkey got his doctorate.

It would be nice for once to have a show that talks about what it sets out to talk about instead of just a picture that tells you what it’s going to tell you instead of actually telling you – but wait! That’s what a curator's supposed to do: tell you all the stuff the exhibitee is trying to hide. The mise-en-abîme that Derrida writes about – the inevitability of framing - survives the death of the frame because the new frame is the gallery itself or the museum, which explains why the real activity of art today is the act of curating: the signifier of the signified, the referencer of the referenced. The real artist is the one who struggles to decide what the shark’s all about – you thought it was the guy with the harpoon, maybe?

II)
If no one had invented Wilhelm Reich he would have had to invent himself; which is what he did, actually. The son of a wealthy Jewish farmer in the Hapsburg province of Bukovina, Reich in his teens accidentally let out that his mother was boffing his tutor; his mother killed herself. This is the kind of thing that sends you straight to Doctor Freud, which is pretty much what it did for Reich, after he’d survived the First World War and lost the family farm in the bargain. By 1922 Reich was Freud’s point man at the Ambulatorium, the free psychoanalytic clinic in Vienna. He went on to define a number of the fundamental concepts of analysis.

Reich unfortunately lacked that skill that every shrink or Viennese needs in order to survive, a gift for political countertransference. Countertransference is the ability to suck it up: to take in whatever charged insults, rages, or manipulations the other throws your way, whether that other is your patient on the couch or the coachman on the Ringstrasse, and then to process it, and then dismiss your subject and go off and relax with a cigar and the evening paper. In 1927 Reich found out that neither traditional political maneuvers nor Freudian theory could adequately help him to process the rising tide of repression when he witnessed a massacre of working-class demonstrators in Vienna. His response - his defense, as Freud might have said - was to join the Communist Party. By then he’d started taking his message of sexual liberation to working-class districts. Liberation of sexuality shifted towards a liberation by sexuality, which in turn shifted to liberation by sexually liberated proletarians: to free yourself sexually was to free yourself of bourgeois repression. By 1930 Reich had moved to Berlin where he founded the German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics – SEXPOL to you.

With all of the black boots and leather stomping through the streets in Germany you’d think psychoanalysts and communists would both welcome a counter-movement and analysis; in 1933 Reich published Mass Psychology of Fascism, one of the great analyses of totalitarianism. By 1934 he’d been simultaneously booted out of the German Communist Party and the International Psychoanalytic Association.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007 5:35 pm

The second flaw in Reich's own mental makeup was his inability to think in symbolic terms: to see the mental objects manipulated by the psyche as symptomatic of material forces, not as material forces in themselves. Reich was like an artist who's got to stick a real shark in a tank to get across the concept of sharks in tanks in museums, or a gentleman who takes a joke or verbal swipe at face value. Rather than straying from Communist orthodoxy he shared the diamatician's belief that "The dialectic is not only a form of thought; it is also a fact given in matter independently from thought, i.e., the motion of matter is dialectical in an objective way."

In 1934 Reich fled to Scandinavia, and in 1939 to America, where he eventually settled on a mountaintop in Maine. By then he believed he'd isolated the basic particles of life - joining psychic and physical energy. Followed a series of increasingly drastic scientific experiments with increasingly broad claims. The acronyms and the code-names piled up: MODJU designated the "red fascists" who'd persecuted him; DOR stood for Destructive Orgone Rays; Cloudbusters were machines for liberating atmospheric energy; the Orgone Accumulator was a specially lined box that could cure you by keeping out the DOR and letting in the good, a claim that eventually caught the Federal Drug Administration's tight-assed eye.

Reich mishandled this as only he knew how. He refused to appear before a judge, was cited,condemned, and ended up in Lewisburg Penitentiary, where he died. And,finally: his books were burned, which makes of him the only individual to have had his books burned by both the Nazis and the Feds.

III)
To celebrate - if that's the word - the fiftieth anniversary of Reich's death, the Jewish Museum in Vienna has organized a small, intense exhibition, and it's a model for what an art exhibition should be; if you want a model for an art exhibition as it is there's another show in a nearby gallery, curated by a "real" artist, that references Reich by having a picture of Reich on the wall with two white flowers underneath. It must mean something, I'm sure...

The difference is, that the non-artist's show is fun, and it's impossible. It's fun,because Reich left a lifelong trail of weird objects and experiments,of which a few are on display. There is, for instance, a "Mouse Accumulator" - not, as you may think, a storage bin for cat food, but a box in which Reich placed mice before bombarding them with energy. Then there's a model of a Cloudbuster, and a photograph of the Cloudbuster on a pickup truck in Arizona - Reich was apparently looking for UFOs. There's a rare photograph of Reich on the beach, in his bathing togs -for a guy who touted sex he looks suspiciously like someone cruising the Castro - "packing a wallop," as they say. There are tapes of interviews with Reich, or with people who underwent Reichian "Orgone" therapy - his therapeutic techniques are still widely practiced. Then there's an aquarium full of sexy translucent jellyfish doing what comes naturally: Reich thought the pulsating movement of jellyfish was a basis for other kinds of contractions and discharges. Good thing Reich had no particular thoughts about sharks, because this show accomplishes the true function of displays, which is to return us to the museum of wonders, from Shark's come-on to Schatzkammer, from the contemplation of one's own belly-button to an ever-expanding apprehension of the world of things and the world of symbols.

And it's an impossible show, because although like a shark it bites off more than it can chew, unlike a shark-like artwork it excludes nothing, in a kind of monstrous compromise between psychoanalysts, cultural historians,social activists, historians of science, scientists and kooks.

The labels and displays and the facsimiles of letters and papers throw up unanswerable questions. There's a copy of Bertolt Brecht's copy of Reich's article on "The Dialectic of the Psyche," with a cryptic, probing comment by Brecht; there's a report on the discussions in various German Communist cell meetings, prior to expelling Reich: Hitler would take power within weeks, and these righteous proletarians are worried that Reich has an anti-Marxist attitude to the sacredness of the family. Then there are the friendly exchanges between Freud and Reich, and later on a vicious note from New York Psychoanalytic, gloating over Reich's persecution. I could go on and on, or rather the visitor goes on and on because, unlike your usual art show, there's no clear boundary between the referenced and the referencing.

Artists, scientists, shrinks and Euro-thinkers (the boundaries are occasionally blurred among them) know that all thought involves a certain suspension of disbelief: the patient was or was not sexually abused as a child, but we listen as if she was; experiment x appears to cause effect y, at least until we understand it better; we're going to pretend we all share a common culture - or is it Kultur? We disbelieve and yet believe in Reich: interesting, promising, but not really real. As William Butler Yeats said of his fellow poet A. E, the problem arises, not when you believe in the Faerie, but when you start to believe the people you pass on the street are Faerie Folk. The problem arises when you think a mangy shark in formaldehyde really does raise up the Sublime - which you kind of have to believe, because there's really nothing else.

Reich didn't know how to pretend; this show is all pretend. You keep wondering what is commentary and what is raw material, until you realize there is no raw material, and never has been. As Roland Barthes put it, "the very definition of the work changes, it becomes an anthropological fact, since no history can exhaust its content." The curator, Birgit Johler, has an advanced degree in Ethnology; as an ethnologist she has a calling and a duty to stand above the wild rantings of the natives whose skulls she deftly measures. Her next project will involve right-wing, fascist and Nazi curating of Austrian Folk Art between the wars. And you thought sharks were scary...

WOID XVIII-14. M. Nicolini.

Thursday, November 15, 2007 6:42 pm

À vrai dire je n’ai jamais rencontré M. Nicolini. C’est dommage, car M. Nicolini est parcheminier à Duras, en Lot-et-Garonne, et il pratique son métier avec une certaine adresse. En particulier, il poursuit des recherches intéressantes sur l’usage de la craie dans la manufacture du parchemin. C’est un processus qui est décrit en passant dans l’Encyclopédie de Diderot et qui de toute évidence était pratiqué bien avant le dix-huitième siècle, mais dont on ne sait plus grand chose.

Apparemment nous sommes sur le point d’en savoir encore moins, puisque M. Nicolini me demande d’écrire une lettre de soutien auprès du Ministère de la Culture: je ne connais pas les détails, je sais seulement qu’il demande le soutien de l’État pour son entreprise.

Il me semble que depuis plusieurs années en France on s’intéresse de moins en moins à développer les atouts culturels “productivistes.” On préfere aujourd’hui l’exploitation touristique des sites, des tableaux, des trésors culturels, aux dépens des petits métiers (comme celui de M. Nicolini) qui conduisent à l’éducation des jeunes artistes et artisans, à la formation de cette main d’oeuvre spécialisée qui est depuis trois siècles la gloire de la France. On aurait tort de s’imaginer que dans les attractions touristiques traditionnelles on a “trouvé le filon.” On aurait tort, en plus, de s’imaginer que la parcheminerie n’est pas capable d’engendrer des bénéfices économiques. Il n’y a pas beaucoup de parcheminiers dans le monde ; c’est pourquoi le manque d’un seul peut très facilement faire bondir la demande parmi ceux qui restent.

Métier difficile, et métier décourageant. La demande de M. Nicolini nous invite à une sérieuse réflexion. Les parcheminiers, comme les tableaux, ne se remplacent pas facilement....

WOID XVIII-9. Museumwatch: U.A.E.

WOID XVIII-6. Museumwatch: Omega Manet.

Remember the movie? Charlton Heston (who else?) plays the last living gentleman, barricaded among his artworks while ignorant hippies rage against the windowpane - you can tell they’re ignorant because they have blank eyeballs, which suggests they’re unable to appreciate a Rembrandt but actually makes them look like a cross between Li’l Orphan Annie and a Roman Imperial portrait bust.

The sophisticated sheikhs of the United Arab Emirates (who else?), have been playing Charlton Heston of late, building their own little Fortress Culture on an island off the coast of Abu Dhabi, far from the madding crowd. First the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, to bring in some art and culture; next, New York University, bringing a liberal education to the select.

But as with Charlton Heston, the gun is never out of reach. Not just because the United Arab Emirates have an appalling record of human rights abuse, with about 80% of the population consisting of imported labor (maids and construction workers, mostly), with no civil rights and a maximum salary of $272 a month. It’s just that the exploited have begun to act in a crude fashion of late, and the sheikhs have reacted as culturati will with a few strategically placed fig leaves, like a toll-free number you can call to report your employer: “This is a recorded message. If you have been raped, press one; if you have been beaten, press two...”

This weekend the “barbarians” (as the Minister of Labor called them), decided they’d had enough. Some four thousand blocked a main road and started damaging property - cars, not artworks, but hey, what’s the difference? By Sunday thousands more had joined the protests, mostly through work stoppages.

No more Mister Nice Gauguin. The ingrates were driven back with water guns and about three hundred are being thrown out of the country, which does not actually present an issue for many workers who are desperate to get back home by any means necessary, except the Government plans to withhold their salaries - I guess they can always call that toll-free number to complain. But then, as an official spokesman (spokesperson? I don’t think so), explained, the real reason for the riots was that workers weren’t allowed to work even more hours than the law allows.

Lenny Bruce used to say there are few conversations among Americans that can’t be handled with three answers: 1) Yes; 2) No, and 3) Some people, the nicer you are to them the meaner they are to you. Replace 1) with What passionate impastos! What genius! and it’s all the Abu Dhabish you’ll ever need to know.

WOID XVIII-2. Museumwatch: Mercenaries of Culture.

Sunday, October 14, 2007 4:28 pm

Southern California has the Military; Northern California has Culture. San Diego has Blackwater and San Francisco has Don Fisher’s art museum.

There the difference neither ends nor begins: Blackwater plans to build a mercenary training center near San Diego and Don Fisher’s planning a modern art museum in San Francisco’s Presidio Park. Blackwater has Dick Cheney in its pocket and Fisher’s got his old friends in Congress, Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi. Blackwater made millions from the privatization of warfare, thanks to its friends in Washington; Fisher seems to fantasize making millions as well. Dream on, Don.

Under the old Capitalist Rules of Engagement what’s going on in Presidio Park would be called bribery and conflict of interest. Don Fisher, the man who brought you the crap at the Gap, back in 1996 worked with Representative Nancy Pelosi to turn a 1,200-acre National Park into a privately run trust with himself on the board; now he’s planning to build a 100,000-square-foot business on top of the land. The fact that the “business” happens to be a museum to house his own collection of more-or-less behind-the-times contemporary art supposedly makes it all right.

Unfortunately, that which makes museums all right has been rapidly running out of steam and logic over the past decades, pretty much like whatever it is that explains why we’re paying Blackwater to stay in Iraq. You’ll find plenty of art professionals in San Francisco going into orgasms about the need for yet another museum in the neighborhood, but you’ll find if you look closely that the arguments are incoherent. San Francisco’s artcrats haven’t yet figured out what even the Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, City Council has begun to understand: that this country as well as others is saturated with MacMuseums, shallow little piles of architecture with an uncanny resemblance to those Depression-era roadside stands in the shape of ducks or coffee-pots thrown up under the illusion that somehow, by the magic of Art, some second-rate provincial town is going to turn into a hot tourist magnet. “The Presidio Museum [...] will really, finally put the city on the map," according to one Marjorie Schwarzer, professor of museum studies at JFK University in Berkeley. San Francisco on the map? That’ll be the day.

The second delusion is, that having thrown up your museum you can fill it with any kind of art and the tourists will rush in. Fisher’s collection is to real art what the Gap line of clothing is to real clothes: Boredom posing as Taste; and I don’t mind Taste, my dear, but if you’re going to get the masses rushing in you’re best off not collecting Richard Serra sculptures – the self-same Serra who got his butt kicked out of Downtown Manhattan in 1989, so impressed were the masses with his rustydusty sculpture. Serra once stated that "Art is not democratic. It is not for the people;" the least we can do is respect the artist’s intentions. The rest of Fisher’s collection’s tasteful all right, stuff like Anselm Kiefer, the Master of Shoah Chic. It’s okay for everyday viewing, but everybody’s already got a couple in the closet. That’s a lot of vanilla, even for San Francisco.

Third delusion: that an art museum makes money, apart from bringing in the money for whatever cow-town built it. The irony, of course, is that illusions two and three are self-canceling: if a museum brings in cold cash like any other business, what’s the point of asking San Francisco taxpayers to pay for it? Fisher’s treading in the steps of François Pinault, the French gazillionaire who tried to favor France by graciously offering to take over an island on the Seine a couple of years back, until it turned out the Government was going to have to pay for all the infrastructure. Eventually Pinault took over the Dogana, facing San Marco, in Venice – there’s an excellent gondola service in place and you can’t say that of the Presidio. The question then remains, how much of the Presidio museum’s building and operating costs will be paid back through admissions fees?

The difference is, Pinault can afford to operate at a loss because he also owns Christie’s auction house. As a frustrated museum director pointed out when Pinault beat out the Guggenheim Museum for the Dogana project, Pinault had no intention to promote any art but his own. On the other hand he could promote the stuff simultaneously in his auction house and his museum, not to mention that his museum will function as an adjunct to the Venice Biennale. Unfortunately, Fisher’s museum will not feed into an international art show, it will not benefit from a previous infrastructure, and it probably won’t boost sales of khaki.

The Fisher collection’s bound to drain money – the question is, from whom? Already Fisher's offered his collection to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art and the de Young Museum and was turned down, and it might be because he wanted too much control over the collection, and it might be because neither museum felt the collection was worth the kind of special attention Fisher demanded; after all, if somebody offers you a truly worthy collection you find a way to work with them, and museums aren't shy about grabbing extra real estate whenever a good excuse comes along – sometimes I suspect the real estate’s the reason for the collection and not the other way around.

The fourth illusion – I hate to tell you this, but: ART COSTS MONEY! It’s hugely expensive to store, and to maintain, and to curate, and to persuade people to come look at it. This project sounds like an ego thing: Don Fisher, the self-made multimillionaire, apparently thinks he’s going to make a pile of money out of the art he’s picked up, and he’s going to do it by himself. And I wish him luck – just not on my dime.

WOID XVIII-1. Museumwatch. The Aging of Rembrandt

Saturday, October 13, 2007 2:50 pm

The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Through January 6, 2008

Lenin supposedly said somewhere of Trotsky that his vanity was so great it amounted to a kind of objectivity. He might have said the same of Tom Krens, who acted out in public what others only dreamed in secret of their real relation to the artworld.

Walter Liedtke, The Met’s Curator of European Painting, has put on a show that’s all about himself and what his job consists of: it’s a scandal that reaches a form of objectivity.

In this show Holland Cotter of the New York Times was shocked to discover that the Met’s entire collection of Dutch baroque paintings hasn’t been laid out to follow a chronology of artists or styles, but a chronology of patrons. Not even, mind you, a history of the patronage of Dutch Art in the baroque era; this show’s about the Yankee butter-and-egg men who bought Dutch art and gave it to the Met. It’s about the Met’s relationship to its own patrons, beginning with the orientation room preceding the show where Rembrandts and others glow beneath large Roman caps that spell out “Altman” and “Vanderbilt” and “Marquand.”

The descriptive labels are written to match. After you’ve combed away the usual wank-words (“masterpiece” and “vibrant” and “superb,” little balls of Montebello-speak that cling like lint to your brain), you’re left with an ingenuously honest narrative of failures and half-failures. In 1871, we learn, a couple of magnates bought 174 Old Master paintings to form the Museum’s initial collection. Of those 174 a little more than a third turned out to be genuine – or rather, not to be out-and-out forgeries, since a number of the remaining 64 have been reattributed: they’re Dutch Masters all right, just not necessarily by Rembrandt or Hals. A few feet away hangs the once-famed image of a crazed old lady, Malle Babbe, accepted as Hals and then described as a “free repetition” of the “real” Malle Babbe, before ending up “In the Style of" Hals. There are quite a few “Styleofs” in this show. The signage for StyleofRembrandt’s “Man with a Beard” explains that “Remarkably, Rembrandt’s authorship wasn’t...doubted in print until 1966.” Remarkably is right: its unrembrandtidity jumps at you from across the room.

Question, then: how many more Rembrandts remain to be disrembrandted? Will this same show, a hundred years from now, consist of twenty paintings? The past thirty years have seen the rise and collapse of ambitious projects to decide, once and for all, what makes a Rembrandt; but it’s not all obvious that the present curator’s opinions will carry more weight than the opinions of a Vanderbilt or Trump. When it comes to cutting corners in connoisseurship to please a lender, a donor or trustee the Met has a long, long way to go. I’m thinking, for instance, of the four Caravaggios at the Met, of which only two can be seriously argued to be Caravaggios: the others are on loan, meaning the Met has a vested interest, as it always has, to accept a gift first and ask the questions later.

So, yes, it’s a fascinating show. You wander through the galleries and with all the “real” Rembrandts to chose from it’s fun to try to pick out the clunkers and the future fakes. There’s a much larger group of Hals than is usually seen – Hals was always favored by the Robber Barons because his shallow showboating justified their own. You can leave the large new catalogue raisonné to the reference libraries, but the short narrative of the actual acquisition of the collection (authored by Esmée Quodbach) is worth owning. Then as now, what makes a masterpiece is the money behind it. This isn’t an exhibition, it’s a cry for help.

WOID XVII-48. Museumwatch. Museum to New Yorkers: Kiss my Astor!

Frederick Douglass writes in his Narrative of an institution he calls the n*gg*er-breaker, a white farmer who made a specialty of taking in uppity hands and making sure they never uppitied again. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has its own version of the N*w-Y*rk*r-breaker, it’s called the “voluntary” admissions policy by which patrons are “encouraged” to contribute to the Met and given a round metal sticker in exchange, which allows them entrance to the collections.

Like most economic exchanges this one has almost nothing to do with actual needs: the receipts from admissions make up twelve percent of the Museum’s budget – and that’s “Budget,” by the way, not “Operating Budget.” Anyhow, The admissions policy wasn’t primarily meant to raise money, it was the Board of Trustees’ revenge because too many people were coming to the Met to begin with, especially those pesky visitors to the famously disturbing Harlem on My Mind. Henry Ittleson, an investor who sat on the Met’s Board of Trustees, came up with the idea for the voluntary admissions - “the embarrassment factor” he called it. A little bit of Shock makes a lot of Awe, and Awe, we know, is what art museums are all about.

This past weeekend the Met went one step further: visitors who paid their tithe were handed the following admission button:

The price of admission was not simply “doff your hat and wait in line,” it was the glorification of the recently deceased Brooke Astor, society lady and benefactress of some more than others. That’s a violation of the First Amendment rights of every visitor: I may not necessarily wish to publicize the Glory that was Brooke, no more than I may want to Live Free or Die even if I do live in New Hampshire. You can’t force me to drive with a license plate that says Live Free or Die if I’d rather Live Free or Get the Hell Out; and you can’t make me wear a button telling the world what a wonderful person Brooke Astor was if I don’t feel like it. Next I suppose the Met will require me to say nice things about the artworks as the price of admission – and for me that could present a major problem. By the way – I didn't much like Brooke Astor, not that it has any bearing on the case.

Or perhaps it does. About fifteen years ago I was sitting in Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan. That was the time when Bryant Park was being cleared of drug addicts to make it safe for Kate Moss. I was watching a group of black kids – pinafores and jumpers – running along the pathways, when the elderly lady in a large hat next to me made a discreet gesture to a cop nearby. Quick as a bunny the little wretches were whisked away.

Was this Brooke Astor? We weren't introduced. If it was, then her spirit lives on at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If it wasn’t, the Met shames her, and shames itself.

WOID XVII-47.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007 10:35 am

An establishment art critic is like a dog walking on its hind legs; but one shouldn't go by appearances alone. Twice in the past week the New York critics have jumped on Tom Krens, feet first. But as I said, it's not that it's done well but that it's done at all. Jerry Saltz, last seen jumping on Tom Krens in the September 24 issue of New York Magazine, was jumping on Tom Krens long before I was, so let's give the man some credit - here goes:

Okay; but is it done well? By the end of the first paragraph we've learned that Krens was "cold, distracted, and rarely on hand," as well as "reckless, destructive, myopic and misguided." Follows an incoherent rant - and much as I love a rant, I hate incoherence. By the end of the last paragraph we've learned nothing new because Saltz is incapable of thinking of the art world structurally, as he himself is proud to admit. Of course the Gugg-Abu Dhabi is a boondoggle built on slave labor, but that's not a practical problem, just an aesthetic issue as far as Saltz is concerned: he's mostly bothered that the United Arab Emirates doesn't recognize Israeli passports and is therefore antisemitic - an amusing comment considering that the first Director of the Guggenheim, Hilla Rebay, was a rabid racist and Nazi propagandist. This didn't seem to bother the Guggenheims overmuch, so why the sudden squeamishness? To Saltz tthe problems at the Gug are merely problems with Tom Krens: Krens, concludes Saltz, "betrayed art." Replace Krens with one of Jerry's favorite directors, and all is well again.

That's where the second article takes over, and it's just as naive a Saltz's, but far more devastating in its implications. The author, writing in the Sunday Times, goes to Bilbao, pokes around, and notices that the Guggenheim Bilbao might have brought money to the coffers of Bilbao or the Basque Regional Government; maybe it even got Bilbao spruced up a bit; it hasn't done much to improve the cultural climate.

I'm not sure how the cultural climate in Bilbao would be improved by having more of the same of what's shown at the Guggenheim, least of all the half-ass local-global art the Guggenheim-Bilbao sponsors. It's encouraging to know there are people in Bilbao (the majority, it seems), who are happy to take the tourist euros and happier yet to turn their backs on the Global Art World in order to build their own culture.

I wish there were more of that in New York. Perhaps the New York mainstream has finally figured out that plonking down a Guggenheim Something somewhere doesn't automatically conjure forth hordes of art-loving myrmidons from the ground, no more than bombing Iraq into submission brings forth a thriving free-market economy.

WOID XVII-41. Museumwatch: United Arab Workers

Sunday, September 9, 2007 1:36 pm

Not fair. Not fair to John Sexton, President of New York University, the man who performs at NYU the same functions that his colleague up the street, Butcher Bob Kerrey, performs at the New School.

Sexton recently announced the formation of “NYU-Abu-Dhabi,” a branch of the University he’s planning to set up in the United Arab Emirates. The project is in line with Sexton’s long-range focus on speculative real estate and grant hustling.

Not surprisingly, Sexton’s also known for his contempt for Organized Labor – or for labor, period: Teachers who teach he dismisses as “Knowledge Providers.” Sexton’s heroes are the “Knowledge Creators,” those who spend their time getting grants from rich Arabs and research institutes. Sexton lost his adjuncts to the United Auto Workers a few years back, but he stopped the UAW from organizing the graduate assistants – at least until the Bush Administration’s gone.

Now this. It turns out the United Arab Emirates's not the Non-Worker’s Paradise it was supposed to be. A country made up of 20% hideously rich “natives” and 80% hideously poor immigrants, many illegal, most of them hideously exploited, should make a New Yorker feel right at home, except that in a misguided attempt to prove how civilized it is the United Arab Emirates decided to proclaim an amnesty for illegal workers, mostly from India, Bengal and Pakistan, most of them employed in the building trades. What happened next is what happens next in the United States if illegal immigrants are ever amnestied: so many ran for the exits in Abu Dhabi that there’s a serious labor shortage there, now, meaning (gasp!) the wage-slaves of Abu-Dhabi are starting to demand raises, and even to hold public protests – which under normal circumstances would get them forty lashes.

Of course John Sexton’s not the only one with plans to bring the Light of Western Culture to the UAE (not, obviously, to the UAW): Tom Krens of the Guggenheim Museum, New York and Nicolas Sarkozy, the owner of the Louvre in Paris, are also planning large-scale projects in Abu-Dhabi. Unfortunately the gallery guards at the Guggenheim are unionized, and I imagine even the poorest employees at the Louvre have decent salaries. And since your average NYU adjunct still makes slightly more teaching four hours a week than the average skilled electrician makes in a month in Abu Dhabi, bringing in strikebreakers from New York or Paris isn't an option, yet. The best-planned lays of men by rats...

WOID XVII-35. Museumwatch : De la muséocratie en Amérique [I]

Monday, August 27, 2007 4:32 pm

À Indian Creek la route n'est pas pavée, ce qui ne présente aucune difficulté pour les ego-touristes qui atterrissent sur le petit aérodrome annexe à la réserve écologique parallèle à la route, superficie, 76,000 hectares. De la route on peut voir par-delà l'arche qui perce la belle enceinte en pierre de taille derriere laquelle, paraît-il, douze maisonnettes de luxe à air conditionné attendent les touristes. Un garde est planté sous l'arche, face à la Crique de l'Indien, petit village aux toits de chaume sans electricité, sans eau courante, composé surtout d'indigènes mayas du groupe linguistique Kekchi, et où les poules, les cochons, et les petits indiens tout nus se poursuivent nonchalamment. Juste avant le village un tournant mène au site archéologique de Nim Li Punit. Le site est financé par l'Union Européenne.

Bélize vit une passion de l'enclos : dans ce petit pays sous-développé dont la population compte moins de 300.000 habitants et dont la densité est une des plus faibles au monde, on trouve un grand nombre de réserves écologiques, de terrains acquis par des particuliers au milieu de la jungle et sans eau courante, sans électricité, sans accès. Le long de la côte où le tourisme, l'écotourisme et le fricotourisme sont en plein essor, on spécule.

Ce sens de l'espace comme une chose qu'on clôture n'est pas dans les traditions indigènes. Les Mayas vivent encore sous le vieux système de l'ejido, la tradition des terres communes octroyées par les conquérants espagnols. Depuis le génocide au Guatemala des Mayas traversent la frontière pour s'installer dans des terres sans titres. Les bonnes âmes administratives encouragent les Mayas à dépasser leur économie de subsistance, malheureusement les Mayas manquent de capital ; leurs voisins les Mennonites immigrés des USA sont heureux de leur louer des batteuses agricoles à des taux usuriers, pour racheter ensuite leurs terres. Les bonnes âmes culturelles leur vendent des assortiment de verreries chinoises que les Mayas transforment en bracelets en style indigène qu'ils vont vendre dans le parking du site archéologique de Nim Li Punit, parce que les Mayas eux aussi sont requis de payer leur entrée au site archéologique.

C'est que Bélize est l'un des plus grands producteurs mondiaux de bananes, et que l'Union Européenne est impliquée dans une guerre protectionniste en faveur des cultivateurs de bananes dans ses territoires d'outre-mer. Si l'Union Européenne pouvait transformer l'ensemble de Bélize en réserves écologiques, en terres en friche, en condominiums de luxe ou en sites archéologiques cela simplifierait bien les choses pour tout le monde.

Sauf pour les Mayas, qui sont requis de payer l'entrée au site de Nim Li Punit. Mais après tout, pourquoi ce site maya pourrait-il interesser les Mayas? Il y a une dizaine d'année, quelqu'un s'est introduit dans le site archéologique et, par le feu et la machette, a détruit la plus grande partie des stèles anciennes. Cause ou effet? Comme disait cet officier américain au Viêt-Nam, " Nous avons été obligés de détruire le village pour le préserver. »

Ou de le préserver pour le détruire...

WOID XVII-28. Museumwatch: De Docta Ignorantia

Wednesday, August 1, 2007 9:10 am

Le journaliste H. L. Mencken disait qu’on n’a jamais fait faillite pour avoir sous-estimé l’intelligence du public américain. On n’a jamais suggéré la même chose à l’égard du public français – pas tout haut, du moins. Ou du moins pas jusqu’à récemment, quand un ministre français a déclaré que les Français pensent trop.

Vu les sympathies des classes regnantes en France pour les théories économiques américaines on comprend que ce soit le Ministre des Finances qui s’inquiète du retard de la France dans le domaine du retardement : L'intelligence du public français présenterait un risque intolérable pour le bon fonctionnement du commerce à l’américaine.

Mais puisque le Gouvernement français est fervent de Gleichschaltung, on ne s’étonne pas de voir appliquer cette théorie à tous les secteurs de l’économie française, y compris celui de la culture. C’est ainsi qu’on commence à demander que l’Histoire de l’Art soit enseignée au lycée.

C’est qu'on est troublé que les Français n’aillent pas assez au musée. Au Louvre et dans les grands musées commerciaux ça ne se remarque pas trop, pas du moins à proximité de la Joconde : dans les autres galeries, ça se remarque. Quant aux musées de province, oui, au Palais des Papes à Avignon ça ne se remarque pas puisque le public s’y presse : le public étranger. Mais allez au Musée Calvet voir le Bara de David : c’est vide. Dans l'ensemble, tout marche. Dans les détails, il faudra bien un jour ou l'autre, soit fermer tous les petits muséees, soit leur trouver des visiteurs, des sujets pour les objets, comme on dit.

On s’imagine peut-être une contradiction entre les déclarations du ministre des Finances en faveur de la stupidité des Français et les projets officieux pour mieux éduquer les Français ; vraie dialectique et fausse contradiction, puisque l’Histoire de l’Art sert la plupart du temps à abrutir les visiteurs du musée en les rendant moins receptifs à tout ce qu’il y a de difficile et de contradictoire dans les oeuvres d’art, tout ce qui résiste à la consommation béate. Comme écrit le New York Times, "Once people are taught to appreciate beauty, the price of a ticket may no longer stand between them and a visit to a museum."(Alan Riding, July 22). Dans ce domaine les historiens de l’art en France sont en avance des Américains, puisque l’Histoire de l’Art en France consiste surtout en un spécularisme Gombrichien : ce tableau illustre X ; cette statue représente Y. On se demande bien ce qu’un cours d’Histoire de l’Art pourrait y ajouter, puisque ce genre d’histoire illustrée s’enseigne déjà dans les cours d’Histoire, avec de jolies illustrations dans le manuel et une visite au musée une fois l’an. Prétendre que l'Histoire de l'Art enseigne à profiter des musées, c'est comme si on prétendait que l'Histoire enseigne à faire la Révolution. Moi je suis pour, mais je n'y crois pas.

Pour cultiver à fond la bêtise à l’américaine il faudrait introduire au lycée des cours de Béatitude (ce qu’on appelle ici Art Appreciation) où l’on vous apprend à faire des oh! et des ah! devant tout ce que les autorités désignent comme une Oeuvre d’Art. Malheureusement, c’est un système qui déjà est en déclin aux USA, puisqu’on peut tout aussi facilement pousser des petits cris à un match de baseball. La fameuse Culture Industry que dénonçait Adorno a vu de meilleurs jours en ce qui concerne la culture d’élite. En France par contre, où l’on enseigne depuis près de deux cents ans que l’extase est réservée aux nantis, il semble un peu tard pour faire marche arrière : si tout le monde se mettait à faire des oh! et des ah! on ne distinguerait plus les élites et les autres.

Charles Péguy, dans le premier numéro des Cahiers de la Quinzaine, raconte une belle histoire concernant la statue de Dalou, Le Triomphe de la République, place de la Nation. D’après Péguy elle avait fait l’objet d’une espèce d’investiture populaire, une inauguration spontanée qui avait attiré des milliers de prolétaires de tous les coins de Paris. Malheureusement cette attrait spontané de l’Art n’est jamais si spontané que ça, et Péguy le savait bien, pour qui « ap-prendre à lire » aux autres était le seul vrai but de l’éducation : apprendre à lire un tableau, à lire l’histoire, à lire la rue. L’éducation elle-même était politique, dans le sens où l'on se basait sur des dispositions plus ou moins innées parmi les classes sociales et on les faisait fleurir. Pour éduquer les gens à être bête il faut d’abord s’imaginer que les gens sont prédisposés à la connerie. Pour convertir l’amour de voir en une attraction spontanée vers un musée où on vous fait chier dans la queue pour vous faire payer un prix ridicule pour passer quelques minutes serrés comme des sardines pour voir quelque chose dont on ne sait rien et dont on n’a rien à foutre et tout ça pour renflouer le trésor – pour s’imaginer ça il faut être plus bête qu’un ouvrier : plus bête même qu’un historien de l’art, et ça n’est pas peu dire.

- Paul Werner

WOID XVII-27. Museumwatch: In Advance of the Broken Rep

Tuesday, July 31, 2007 9:12 am

Lisa Dennison has quit her job as director of the Guggenheim Museum to join Sotheby’s. Ho-hum: That’s as surprising as hearing some Republican Senator just quit to join the corporation he was supposed to oversee.

Just as depressing, too. Not that I had high hopes for her, but at least she’d risen through the ranks, and I expected she’d hold onto that sliver of dignity that puts some kind of distance between the curator and the pimps who make up the upper reaches of museum ownership. The most memorable fact about Lisa’s tenure is the corporate parties for which staff (I mean people with PhDs and MAs) was required to don silly hats and sing songs to entertain the boobs. Did Lisa cha-cha on a table in her red spiked heels? It’s all a blur.

most memorable fact about these latest news is that Tom Krens might be stepping back into Lisa’s job – you’d think he was too busy with all of those terrifically successful deals in Venice, Guadalajara and – hey! - Abu Dhabi!

At least Tom Krens never asked me to wear a party hat. There was a certain grandeur about him – not as tragic as some might wish, but there’s still time for that.

WOID XVII-21. Strategic Thinking

I)
A friend of mine once overheard two yuppies engaged in yuppie conversation: "After all," said one, "a job is just a cash-flow mechanism for your investment strategies." Agnes Gund, should know, being Director Emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, and therefore the person in charge of the investment strategies of art. A few months ago when asked about the art market: "No Picasso is worth what people are paying today," she answered.

Well, I agree. A market dominated by Russian multimillionaires in dark glasses is a market you want to stay out of for your health - and I don't mean your financial health alone. Plus, you don't want to be around those guys when the market dips. But then Aggie (as she is fondly known to those who are fond of her) added: "Real estate is always the better investment." To which Lisa Dennison, Director of the Guggenheim, happily agreed: "As a museum director, it's hard for me to say you should invest in art."

Well, it can't be that hard since the Guggenheim has a Young Collectors' Circle that encourages yuppies to do just that. And it's pretty tactless of Gund and Dennison to suggest that collecting art in general is a bad investment. Truth is, there are many areas of art doing very poorly, now, while a few big-ticket items are used to bring in the suckers. Both Guggenheim and MoMA grew rich on collecting the neglected stuff - apparently there's no neglected stuff left anymore.

II)
Used to be, museums were mostly run by curators - you know, those people who know to pick up the good, neglected stuff? Curators answered to the president, who answered to the board of trustees, and the president was supposed to act like a curator-in-chief: even Philippe de Montebello has an advanced degree in Art History, though you'd never guess. But what do curators know about investments? Last week, Gund announced the formation of something called the Center for Curatorial Leadership, and the title tells it all: you never hear anyone prattling about Michelangelo's leadership, do you? The idea is to take in hand those incompetent curators and turn them with the proper training, into investment managers - what used to be known as museum directors.

Used to be that MoMA had a director who had the temerity to act as a curator - Alfred Barr. It was Barr, of course, who built the museum, at a time when the prices for Sargent and Berne-Bellecour were going through the roof. This must never, ever happen again. Thanks to Gund, it won't - at least not at MoMA.

- Paul Werner