Leftist Tricks! A Response to John C. Wright's essay

I don't know John C. Wright and I understand that he is a controversial figure in the science fiction world.  I was directed to this essay, "How We've Been Robbed of Beauty by the Left" by a friend who thinks I would be interested in the ideas.  I'm going to try to stick to the ideas in the essay because we clearly see art and art history very differently.  Other writers are also tackling this same subject.


Wright starts his essay:

To be a man means to seek a truth that satisfies the mind, a virtue that sates the conscience, and a beauty that breaks the heart. Deprive a man of any of these things, and he will find neither happiness nor rest.

To a degree, I agree with him here. This is why human beings seem compelled to create.  We use the visual work to express our inner beliefs, to bring them out to where they can be seen by others and shared and discussed (embraced and denied).  But I think that we can't diffuse these three into separate categories.  To a degree--if a work presents a truth that speaks to our understanding of the world, then it is compelling in the same way that beauty is compelling.

Wright seems torn between an idea of "true beauty" and "sublime beauty" and this "Leftist" idea that 

According to the Left, beauty is a matter of taste, and arbitrary taste at that. There is no discussion of taste because to give reasons to prefer tasteful to tasteless things is elitist, nasty, uncouth and inappropriate. To have taste implies that some cultures produce more works of art and better than others, and this raises the uncomfortable possibility that love of beauty is Eurocentric, or even racist. To admire beauty has become a hate crime.

I believe that my idea of beauty is shaped by my own taste.  I like some ways of handling surface better than others--I love the sfumato that draws Correggio's figures from the darkness and gives them such softness.  Cranach's even light and hard edges seem false to me.  I am drawn to some physical types rather than others.  Give me Correggio's Venus over Cranach's any day.  Cranach's elongation of the head and neck, his handling of the transparent drape over the pale skin, his perfect orb breasts were certainly considered beautiful in their day.  But so too were Correggio's handling of skin, shadow and light, and curves and flesh.  In the same period! These two artists were both successful; patrons found their work beautiful at the time.  (History matters to our understanding of beauty)

Lucas Cranach, Venus and Cupid, ca. 1530

Correggio, The Education of Cupid, ca. 1528

 It isn't just a question of "taste" and "tasteless".  It isn't a question of one culture producing "more" works of beauty than others; it is a question of that culture producing more works which appeal to me as a beholder.  I am drawn to European works because I am shaped by that same European culture.  I recognize that there are things to be appreciated in African masks and that they must be considered under the idea of compelling expression.  Do I find them beautiful?  Sometimes.  Do I find them harder to respond to? Often.  Do I find it worthwhile to try to see what the culture felt was beauty in them? Always.

As a relevant aside--Every semester I teach medieval art, some student writes on their evaluation that they wish we had studied more secular art, that all this Christian art is the same.  The fact that the culture prioritized the production of Christian art--putting its economic support behind its values and beliefs--shapes what we have to see now.  Am I drawn to it because I am also a Christian?  Maybe.  But is that iconographic argument going to shut out my appreciation for Muslim geometric ornament?  Probably not.  There we begin to compare apples and oranges.

Wright then gets tries to get us caught in the art versus kitsch controversy.  It's a false controversy.  We all recognize different  venues for decoration.  No one puts the Mona Lisa and wallpaper in the same category of "beauty".  I'm not going to rehearse Clement Greenberg or Walter Benjamin or any of a dozen theorists here.

Wright asserts: "If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then there is no such thing as training the taste."

This is part of what culture does, Mr. Wright.  It trains us to believe certain things are valuable because of an idea of beauty.  This is how we have supermodels--women who embody our cultural ideal of beauty.  (And why none of them look like they were painted by Rubens...)  Our culture trains us in an idea of beauty from the very beginning--colors for genders, Barbies for girls and Batman for boys.  Training the taste is about understanding what a culture values and WHY.

Wright gets at a central tenet of modern artistic theory:

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then anything, anything at all, can be declared to be beautiful merely by the artist. Like God creating light from nothing by the power of His word, the artist creates beauty not by any genius nor craftsmanship, but by his naked fiat. It is beautiful not because he actually created anything, but only because he says so.

But Wright misses the essential dynamic of this equation.  It is only in the viewer's response to the work that the declaration is validated. Willem de Kooning articulates the dynamic really well:

Painting isn’t just the visual thing that reaches your retina, it’s what’s behind it. I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in -- drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or an idea. It doesn’t matter if it’s different from mine as long as it comes from the painting which has its own integrity and intensity.

So far, this is all one problem with Wright's argument: beauty isn't easily articulated and agreed upon.

The second problem is the ahistoricity of Wright's discussion.

All of Wright's examples are extremes of artistic discussion, prompted by issues of modernism NOT of issues of beauty.  He cites Duchamp's urinal (1917) as an example of an artist trying to put over this issue of anything being "beautiful".  Duchamp isn't making something "beautiful".  He's making a readymade, a work chosen by an artist to be considered in a new context. And to see Duchamp outside the context of Post World-War I art and the Dada movement, whose aim was to be shocking and to counter expectations of "good taste", or outside the multiple editions of this work, or outside Duchamp's own personality is to fail to understand that moment in history.  You are subjecting historical values to your present moment.  The objectives were totally different.

Among other examples, Wright mentions Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, 1987.

I teach this photograph in my modern art class.  I begin by teaching it without its title.  We talk about the warm colors, the glow of the crucifix, the soft edges, the surface speckles.  The students find it a positive image--often beautiful, Mr. Wright--until you discuss the circumstances of making the photograph.  But as a Catholic, Serrano is addressing the bodily incarnation of human beings and the beauty of the sacrifice of Christ in that human form; Serrano uses his own body to shape that idea.  Serrano describes himself as a Christian artist of today. 

In addition to choosing the most controversial, deliberately un-beautiful works of modern art (such as Piero Manzoni's Artist's Shit 1961, Damien Hirst's A Thousand Years 1990, and Tracy Emin's My Bed 1998), Wright suggests that "Ours is the first generation in the history of Christendom to have no fine arts at all. The public has turned away from the neurotic wallowing in self-disgust that dominates the fine arts and seeks to slake its craving for beauty in the popular arts..."  Nonsense.  John Singer Sargent, the American Impressionist, was still painting in 1915, making him a contemporary of Duchamp.  In the midst of World War I, plenty of artists were trying to make conventionally beautiful works:

Maynard Dixon, Corral Dust, 1915

Louis Comfort Tiffany, 1915

 

Patrick Henry Bruce, Composition I, 1915

It's a question of what you want to believe is "BEAUTIFUL".  Is modern abstraction not beautiful in its undulating shapes and colors (and its desire to communicate artistic feeling without propaganda)?

Wright states: 

At any point before World War One, if you asked any philosopher or intellectual what was the point of art, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, all of them of each generation all the way back to Socrates would have said the purpose of art is to seek beauty. Socrates himself would have said that by beauty, by the strong love and longing created in the human breast at the sight of something sublime, we are drawn out of ourselves, and are carried step by step away from the mundane to the divine.

Socrates actually said that art is imitative of reality and therefore removed far from the divine.  The ideal of the bed is imitated by the carpenter when he makes a bed and that the painter or poet merely imitates the imitation (Book X of the Republic).  If, as Keats suggests, beauty is truth, then the accurate depiction of the blobfish is beautiful because it is truthful.  You can swing the quotes but "ALL" is simply not true, Mr. Wright, and even our Classical philosophers  had trouble defining beauty.  To bring historicity back into this--World War I changed a lot of things.  And our world is definitively not the world of the Renaissance or the Classical Roman Empire. (Art and politics is tricky--Hitler's support for Aryan inspired figure types? Beautiful from the perspective of line and proportion and color but scary in the ideology it supports.  What about Stalin?)

I find Mr. Wright's degeneration into a class split that reveals the supposed strength of our character reductive and offensive:

Imagine two men: one stands in a bright house, tall with marble columns adorned with lavish art, splendid with shining glass images of saints and heroes, mementos of great sorrow and great victories both past and promised. A polyphonic choir raises their voices in golden song, singing an ode to joy. The other stands in a slum with peeling wallpaper, or a roofless ruin infested with rats, hemmed by feces-splashed gray concrete walls lurid with jagged graffiti, chalked with swearwords and flickering neon signs advertising strip joints. Rap music thuds nearby, ear-splitting, yowling obscenities. A bureaucrat approaches each man and orders him to do some routine and routinely humiliating task, such as pee in a cup to be drug tested, or be fingerprinted, or suffer an anal cavity search, or surrender his weapons, or his money, or his name. Which of the two men is more likely to take a stand on principle not to submit?
Which one will automatically and unconsciously assume that human life is sacred, human rights are sacrosanct, and that Man is made in the image and likeness of God? The man surrounded by godlike images? Or the man surrounded by mocking filth?
Which one, in other words, is more likely to fall prey to the worldview of a dark world cosmos without meaning, without truth, without virtue?

These word portraits are not realities, either one.  The rich are not celebrating their lives in odes to joy; the poor aren't living in the abjection of feces-splashed walls.  These are generic straw men.  What gives Mr. Wright the right to assume that from our slough of despond, despite being surrounded by the filth of our modern lives, we do not aspire to virtue and dignity with a fierceness not experienced by those in the comfort of beauty?

Collecting strategies: Ephemera

Collecting ephemera is always difficult.  How do you live in the historical moment and yet stand outside it enough to be able to know what will have value?

The Victoria and Albert Museum, one of England's premier museums with a long history of collecting contemporary design, has developed a collecting strategy they're calling "Rapid Response Collecting".  In their press release:

The objects [which include the toy below, the first 3d printed gun, a pair of jeans from the factory that collapsed in Dhaka Bangladesh, Katy Perry false eyelashes, a new designed cable for taller and faster elevators] have been recently acquired as part of the Museum's new approach to collecting contemporary design and architecture, known as 'Rapid Response Collecting'. This new strategy will help the V&A engage in a timely way with important events that shape, or are shaped by design, architecture and technology. Regularly updated with new objects, it will be the first gallery in the Museum that can be responsive to global events, technological advances, political changes or pop cultural phenomena that have an impact on art, design and architecture. The long-term result will be a permanent legacy of objects in the collection that will help future visitors and researchers to access material culture in the 21st century.

Ikea soft toy, now in V&A collection

What's behind this strategy?  It seems to me motivated by a couple of things:

1. The very real pace of ephemera in modern cultural life.  Modern packaging and things like lottery tickets, photos, etc.--all the sort of things collected by the Ephemera Society of America, in fact--are transient.  They aren't designed with the idea of lasting forever, the way a painting or sculpture is designed to transcend its own time.

2. The pressure of a consumerist society which manufactures so many material objects.  With so many brands of soap and so many postcards and advertisements, we're simply hard pressed to choose and so there is the desire to collect everything.  In fact, this article brought the new strategy to my attention and it made the point:  
"It’s great that a huge, historical museum like the V&A wants to engage with the present in such a tangible way, but what’s been announced about Rapid Response Collecting so far seems like a random jumble more than an articulated vision. Hopefully the curators will pull everything together in a more meaningful way in the permanent museum gallery dedicated to the program, which opens to the public July 5."

3. The connection between the museum and culture as a driver of culture.  To what extent does the Museum create value by owning and displaying an object?  To what extent do companies like Ikea design and promote to reach BOTH mass and exclusive markets?  I'm clearly NOT a design historian precisely because I look at this Ikea toy and think: why collect this and not Ikea fabrics?To what extent is one MORE culturally representative?  Do I really understand the wider culture from the corner in which I'm standing?

4. Pockets! The fear here is that if you w...a...i...t...to see whether the doll will be the next Cabbage Patch, you might not be able to collect the best example.  Perhaps it will have disappeared completely, despite momentary cultural prominence.  Perhaps--horrors!--children will have played with it and the best examples will still be dirty and torn and broken.  Perhaps you will have to pay more than you wanted to... Maybe someone else will get it before you. 

That seems to me a big issue here.  The V&A seems to be saying--better to spend now, collect everything and sort it out as history determines cultural path.  Then whatever you don't want, you can deaccession on Ebay. This strategy depends on money: having the money to get into the game at a certain level, the money to buy somewhat indiscriminately, the money to house/store these objects, the money to create a curatorial vision from the objects, the money to deaccession works when they don't fit that vision.  And clearly, collecting ephemera depends on having deep pockets.

Does that mean we shouldn't collect ephemera?  obviously, I think there's a value to seeing our culture through the eyes of what we created on a mundane level.  Should we wait, carefully following the trends of history and hoping to catch the right moment?  Is it better to collect widely or focusedly? I think as a historian I advocate focusing, trying to watch what's happening in the media to help understand the culture.  Knowing that we will never catch it all.  Hoping that as social history develops, we can catch ephemera before it disappears, rather than as it appears. 

Will these collections tell us as much in a hundred years as we imagine they will tell the space aliens who dig up our ruined civilization thousands of years from now?  Is this all a strategy of our human desire to stand in the water of culture, gathering up a small handful of what flows rapidly by?  Is it our human nature to want to gather in these objects because by extension, they are proof of our presence, of our importance?

Science Art II: Angela Haseltine Pozzi

So cruising my news feed this morning, I came across the work of Angela Haseltine Pozzi.  She's particularly interesting to me because her materials here are reclaimed trash, as part of the Washed Ashore Project's "Buoy, Beat-n-Bop" exhibit.

View of Pozzi exhibit at SF Zoo, 2014

  The idea of working with trash to draw attention to the beauty of the ocean--especially its textures--is interesting because it simultaneously draws attention to the need to preserve the ocean.  I think she's working in a vein similar to Chris Jordan's Midway project.  (I want to write more about Jordan at some point but here's an intro to one of his projects) The difference of course is that Jordan is drawing attention to the destruction that's being caused through the decay of the birds--it's meant to be graphic and visceral, in part because the birds themselves cannot pull themselves away from the graphic and visceral fascination they have with our trash.

Chris Jordan, Midway Project, 2009-present

Both Jordan and Pozzi are aiming to draw attention to the environmental issues through their work.  

But what drew me to Pozzi's art is that it is constructive--making something new from the trash--and interactive.   

Pozzi, Starfish at SF zoo, 2014

The starfish has bottles into which one can blow and on which one can tap.  You are encouraged to stand inside its arms.  This lets you be part of the piece and experience it more closely.  Pozzi's point is that this makes the work more memorable--because you aren't just looking.  You are learning it as a sensory experience.  Where Jordan's Midway photos are flat depictions of information (tremendously moving, nonetheless), Pozzi is suggesting that you need to be part of this--you need to be part of the idea that reclamation of trash can be fun and beautiful and TRANSFORMATIVE.

Pozzi, Whale Spine, SF zoo, 2014

That's what so many artists are doing, such as Tim Noble and Sue Webster, and local Hartford artist Anne Cubberly are doing.  That's what schools around the country are doing in their art classes--what can you make by seeing your trash in a different way.  And the more we can pare our art with the message, the better...

"High" Art and Science Fiction

I am a fan of science fiction and fantasy as a reader.  I am not knowledgeable about the current issues in the science fiction community; if you’re interested in that, go read John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever or Mary-Anne Mohanraj (who also writes on many other things). The title of this entry is also meant to raise traditional questions about how we classify genres--high vs. low, select vs. popular.  Science fiction as a literary genre struggles with this as much as visual arts have.

In a recent conversation with my husband, we discussed how the biggest award in science fiction, the Hugo, has categories for several visual forms (Best Graphic Story, Best Professional Artist, and Best Fan Artist).  I’ll relinquish the graphic story category here as well since there is an interplay with text that the graphic story relies on that I think moves it into a writer’s purview. I’m omitting the categories for dramatic presentations, which because they include film and television could be considered visual forms.  The nominations for best professional artist tend to cluster: “During the 61 nomination years, 59 artists have been nominated; 20 of these have won, including co-winners and Retro Hugos. Michael Whelan has received the most awards, with 13 wins out of 24 nominations. Frank Kelly Freas has 11 wins and 28 nominations, the most nominations of any artist. Other artists with large numbers of wins or nominations include Bob Eggleton with 8 wins out of 23 nominations, Ed Emshwiller with 4 out of 8, and Don Maitz with 2 out of 17. David A. Cherry and Thomas Canty are tied for the most nominations without an award at 10 each.” (Wikipedia) The works (both professional and fan) tend too to be ones that cluster with written forms—book covers, illustrations in science fiction magazines, comics (printed and web), and text based games (like Dungeons and Dragons).  I (like many of the Hugo concerned community) seem to be a little unclear on the professional/amateur status distinction. 

But for this blog, I’m not going to be able to read enough quickly and thoroughly to bring myself up to date in the history of the Hugos and their disputes beyond the basic outline.  I do want to address science fiction as a matter of subject in the works of many contemporary artists. I tend to think that the Hugo committee could benefit from widening their field of exploration beyond works which are connected to the printed word BUT I also see the benefit to them of defining their categories as specifically connected to writing (I myself am NOT a member of the voting group so I don’t really have a car in this race).

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And this is the interlude, where after a few folks have read it and pointed out in other venues errors with my understanding of the Hugo awarding, I feel a bit of a fool.  Blogosphere prerogative, right? However, I stand by my general feeling that the Hugos are generally still strongly connecting their visual and text forms and that the forum for popular science fiction does not strongly overlap with the venues for visual artists who are not working with text.

For the record, my friend Jed Hartman who is far more involved in this community than I, as a writer and editor, corrected me: "wanted to note in passing that there's no Hugo committee per se defining this stuff. The voters could, if so inclined, nominate and vote for any kind of artist in the fan artist category--and potentially in the pro artist category too, though that might require some flexibility of interpretation about what constitutes a "professional publication" and how seriously to take the word "illustrator." But Hugo administrators tend to be flexible when nominators make their will known.

The categories themselves can be changed by WorldCon attendees who attend meetings, but changing a category is very hard and requires a lot of work over multiple years, including overcoming resistance. But the artist categories don't specify the medium of the art as such.

Your basic point about the Hugos is well taken: it's unfortunate that the categories are described using terms that focus on illustrations of textual material, and it's unfortunate that Hugo nominators aren't generally aware of other kinds of relevant art. I'm just saying that it isn't quite a matter of a committee casting a wider net."
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Science fiction and science fact are part of our contemporary existence.  We live in a world of gene sequencing, global climate change, and paleo-biology.  The advantage of science fiction has always been the ability to use science fact as a jumping off point for imaginative speculation, for exploration beyond our current knowledge.  To suggest the questions of “what if?”.  Science fiction has always allowed us to stretch beyond our physical limitations to consider what we might do if we were not hampered by our material bodies or Newtonian or Einsteinian physics.  Science fiction has allowed us to imagine worlds where microbes exhale methane to evolve a whole new range of creatures, where bilateral symmetry is highly overrated, where our extraordinary human sense of intuition becomes a mundane shared practice of telepathy.  MOST importantly, in my mind, it gives us a forum where we can explore our feelings about our limitations and boundaries, creating stories where we reinforce our social strictures about race, gender or sexuality and stories where we are freed from those social strictures (both for good and ill).

As a starting point here, I thought I’d try to regularly (or at least as regularly as I do any writing) showcase the work of an artist or two really exploring the boundaries of science from a visual point of view. 

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla are two collaborating Puerto-Rican artists whose work intersects science and politics.  I first noticed their work, Growth (2006).  It features a number of grafted cactus plants.  About the work, they have said: “We also like the idea of the monstrous. What’s interesting is that it’s a deviation that’s still part of nature, or part of culture or humanity, but it stands as a kind of distorted mirror against it. It becomes an active point from which to understand what a society or culture views as its norms and boundaries, and to show the limits of one’s own thinking or a set of cultural values.” (Art21; there's lots of great stuff on them here, including interviews and videos)

Allora and Calzadilla, Growth, 2006

Human Legacy (2010), seen at FIAC 2010, also suggests so much to me in the realm of science, fantasy and fiction.  The leg comes forth from the tree—our Western Greek myth heritage of tree nymphs has always bespoke our hope for human communion with nature.  But the grotesque element of the tree birthing a form that is not fully human, that looks human but is wooden, a whole different material.  Could we could be that in our evolutionary future/science fiction parallel?

Allora and Calzadilla, Human Legacy, 2010

In its minimalism, Solar Catastrophe (2011) is a beautiful repetition of color and form; it is only when we know that it is made from fragments of solar panels that we can feel the sinister elements: failure of energy policies, global climate change, and the anxiety over our adaptabilities. 

Allora and Calzadilla, Solar Catastrophe, 2011

Works like Nature of Conflict (2004) also hit at this with the beauty created by spilled oil on water.  Even more pointedly, a work like the sculpture, Petrified Petrol Pump (2010) uses fossil-filled limestone to draw attention to the organic history and the stultifying effects of oil/gas production.

Allora and Calzadilla, Nature of Conflict, 2004

There is always a political point here—these artists are pointing often not just to the science of climate change but the politics that keep it in place.  They are also Puerto-Rican so there is a fraught history coming forward in works like Vieques that addresses US naval use as a bombing range as a colonial connection as well as an environmental issue.  Vieques as a place is the fusion of extraordinary beauty in the water and lush growth, vibrant life in the turtle breeding grounds, and harsh destruction in the bomb craters.  To pull one parallel work, look at a piece from the Fault Lines installation—The bird of Hermes is my name, eating my wings to make me tame (2010) a bird made from technology and weaponry.  For Allora and Calzadilla, our Western heritage is a story we tell ourselves, taming our wildness with technology, even while it consumes our very nature.  It is impossible to turn away—science fiction as our fascination with the fantastic.

Allora and Calzadilla, The Bird of Hermes is my name.., 2010

Reuse! Architectural design in Capetown

You have to see this!

This is a group of grain silos in Capetown South Africa.  Yup, 42 silos, standing 180 feet high, each only about 18 feet across.  Concrete with a steel frame.

Closed in 1995, it's been chosen for redevelopment as the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art and oh, it is so (potentially) beautiful.  Thomas Heatherwick's architectural firm has released these images of the redesigned 6,000m2 gallery space in a 9000 m2 complex:

I'm in love with the atrium which really preserves the silo tubes as architectural space.

There's obviously a lot more underlying these ideas of reusing before removing.  I've been following Detroit's discussion very closely as they track blight,  rehab houses, and give away houses.  I'm always looking at MassMoCA and their use of the Arnold Print mill/Sprague Electric Co. facilities.

Think about your boxes, world.  We can be revolutionary.

Probably get in trouble for saying this...A post on the sale of art

Lately, as brought to my attention by a friend who is an alumna of Randolph College when it was Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, a 1912 painting by American Ashcan School artist George Bellows was sold to the National Gallery in London, bringing in $25.5 million dollars which was applied to the institutional endowment.  There's a good summary of the controversy here in Inside Higher Ed.

The issues here are complex.  When art is left to a college or university, it can be done in a number of ways.  Sometimes the work is actually given in trust, so that there are constraints on the gift.  Often when this happens it is because the donor wants the art to enhance the educational experience of the students, faculty, and community of the college.  It is not about giving money.  (However, even in these situations, because there is always a valuation for taxes, there's never the suggestion that art is without a monetary value...)  Sometimes, the works are given, as is the case with this work, without a trust; the college owned the work outright.  It was part of the collection in the Maier Museum on campus, however.  I suspect, although I do not know for sure, that this was done because at the time of gift it made sense to put such an important piece of art on display as part of the educational experience (which is way better than just sticking it in an administrative office for personal enjoyment) and the museum had the facilities to care and store it (convenience).  This clearly leads to a blurring of the ownership in question as the recommended policy by the College Art Association and the American Association of Museums (among others) is that artworks should be sold only to enhance collection acquisitions and maintenance in other art areas; the money should not leave the art institution but be put back in for new uses.  Sale of artwork is a legitimate way to invigorate a collection or to protect other holdings or to move the mission of the museum forward.

This is NOT a new issue.  This sale joins Brandeis's 2009 announcement that it would sell all 6,000 works art after severe financial hardships rocked their endowment; this proposed plan rocked the news for weeks, prompting lawsuits (under what conditions was the art held and were sales legal?) and indignation and retrenching on the position.  It joins pressure on the University of Iowa to sell their Jackson Pollock, insured at $140 million, to repair the institution after severe flooding.  And of course, we must add the issue of Detroit's Institute of Art collection and the city's bankruptcy.

At the heart of the issue is how we value art.  We value it for itself: for its ability to make us think or dream or cry, for its technical virtuosity or curiosity, for its passing through the life of a talented person, for its connection to our culture at a particular time and place. We value what we can learn from interacting with a work directly, rather than from a reproduction.  And yet! We live in a monetary economy where insurance and security and access all require monetary participation.  We have to also put a price on the art in order to participate in that world.  So while art is worth whatever some schmuck will pay for it, it's worth something in equivalent monetary terms.  There's also a tendency to look to that monetary value when we're desperate.  It's not possible to get the same value from almost anything else in the college's ownership.  No one wants old physics texts and selling land (something my graduate institution did a lot) makes you a real estate speculator (with other ramifications on your educational mission).

Do I wish Randolph College could have kept their Bellows (and the other works that no one talks about that were also slated for sale/have already been sold, including Edward Hicks' "A Peaceable Kingdom," Ernest Hennings' "Through the Arroyo" and Rufino Tamayo's "Troubador.”)?  You betcha.  I don't believe that art's monetary price is actually equivalent to its cultural value.  I cannot personally put a price on its cultural value; how much should inspiration cost? how much for outrage that makes us think?  I also believe that having the Bellows was a part of the experience for students that is irrevocably lost and that is tremendously sad.

Stressing that I have NO personal connection to the college and cannot adequately assess value because I believe there is also a value to college experience that can't be rendered in money, Randolph College may have made the sale more palatable for me in a couple of ways. 1) The sale went to the National Gallery of Art in London, a public institution with an educational mission.  Had the sale removed the work entirely from public access by selling to a private collector, I certainly would have felt differently.  One might even argue that removing it from the College is a boon in terms of sheer numbers of people who could see it now.  I'm not entirely convinced by the breadth-vs-depth argument but it is certainly there.  2) The College did work to establish a connection with the National Gallery that is beneficial on both sides: there will be lectures at the College by members of the museum community and students will have internship opportunities at the museum.  There is an educational value that goes with the Bellows piece.

And 3) which is the hardest for me:  $25.5 million dollars could buy a lot of educational experience that might not otherwise be had.  If I trusted the College, the good that could be done with the money in terms of scholarships/aid/enhanced programs, might be worth it.  I see students every year who leave after 1 year (or even 1 semester) having not gotten enough financial aid to make it.  This is a blow to their life experience that cannot be made up by 1 work of art, or even a whole museum.  If this money enhanced the College's ability to really be a stronger institution, it might be worth it.  (I say "if" and "trust" because there is plenty of suggestion that Randolph is struggling to find its footing, after its feeling that switching to co-education would solve all of its problems)

I can't advocate FOR selling art to solve monetary problems when that art is put into the public trust for public experience (different when it's a private collection).  But I have a hard time always arguing AGAINST.

An update--The AAMD sanctions the Meier Museum for monetizing its collection.

Art imitates Art imitates Art

The Han Dynasty was a very stable dynasty, lasting in two periods for about 400 years.  It was a time of expansion, established Confucianism, poetry, literature and diplomacy.  China also controlled the trade routes through the Taklamakan Desert (the Silk Road), thus bringing in tremendous prosperity.  In part as a result of both Confucianism (and its connection to ancestor worship) and tremendous trade, very hard stoneware ceramics flourished in the Han Dynasty.
 

Artist Ai Weiwei, one of the most important artists of the last few decades (not just because he's coming from the context of China and its repressive regime), has taken Han Dynasty vases and reimagined them.  As brightly colored dipped works.  My favorite, stamped with the Coca-Cola logo, parallels for me the take-over by modern American consumerism of everything. 

As the Hirshhorn puts it: "In this and other works in which the artist destroys the old to create the new, such as “Coca-Cola Vase” (2007) and his ongoing series of “Colored Vases,” Ai raises questions about the definition and endurance of cultural value."

Ai Weiwei then created a photographic triptych of an event in which he drops a Han Dynasty urn.  Ai draws our attention to what makes value--we value these vases precisely because of their age; they are of dubious quality and they are ubiquitous (precisely because of the circumstances of their creation). 

 

On Sunday, February 16, artist Maximo Caminero walked in to the Perez Art Museum in Miami, took one of the vase works from Ai's According to What? installation and smashed it.  He has been charged with criminal mischief for breaking the vase, valued at $1 million.  Caminero told the police/press: "I did it for all the local artists in Miami that have never been shown in museums here," he says. "They have spent so many millions now on international artists. It's the same political situation over and over again. I've been here for 30 years and it's always the same."

Caminero says that it was spontaneous (the museum says premeditated), that he didn't really think about the value of Ai's work.  The value question is again raised--is it $1,000,000 because of the Han vase's value, the value that it has as a work by Ai, the value it has as one part of a multiple work installation, and/or the value the insurance company insists it have when exhibited?  Ai's response was that he should have found another means of protest, because of the trouble it will bring Caminero, but that the vase is gone and he expresses calm with that.  Other artists, many upset with Perez Art Museum's policy of passing over local artists, seem to support Caminero's act, feeling it was in connection with Ai's own work. 

Caminero's own work will receive more attention because of his act of vandalism.  But what he has done is the equivalent of a child kicking someone because he is thwarted--it brings the wrong attention in greater measure than the correct attention.  Will the Perez Art Museum look at its exhibition policies? (They are currently hosting the work of Edouard Duval-Carrie, a Haitian born but Miami based artist; I can't delve their history enough to know whether Caminero's protest is valid.)  Sometimes we feel just like children who can't get parents' attention.  Desecration and destruction are one way to draw that kind of attention.

Monuments Men: The Salvation and Conservation of American Image

This is a response essay to the 2014 film, Monuments Men.  It is NOT a review of the movie.  It does however, broadly discuss ideas related to the film and as such does mention scenes.  I tried hard not to write spoilers but your definition may vary.

Also--I will point out--the ideas and errors are my own.

I recently watched Monuments Men, directed by and starring George Clooney.  Based on a true story (Robert Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, Center Street, 2010) an international team of art historians and architects and “regular” soldiers form the backbone of the search for Nazi looted art at the end of World War II.  The movie has many problems—not just Clooney’s direction that makes a movie that cannot decide if it is a war picture, a heist movie, a buddy flick, and several other genres—but most glaring is the lack of historical accuracy, served with a dazzle of American patriotism.

The premise of the team is a “big idea”—that art is what makes us stand apart as civilizations.  Art is what makes us “truly” human, what allows us to transcend our pedestrian lives and petty quarrels.  The line is repeated over and over: this is an important mission because of the value of Art.  I’m an art historian; on some level, I believe this.  Art is what we make to tell our cultural story, values, concerns, and fears.  (And as such, it includes ephemera and pop culture and music and films. Not just the Michelangelos.)  But it is certainly an arguable position—are paintings more or less valuable than the lives of soldiers and civilians?  Who gets to decide?

Hollywood’s Monuments Men exist in an idealized space.  They exist in a war without individual looting.  Soldiers (of all armies) have always carried off small objects—flags, pins, uniforms, ephemera; they are part of a memorializing process that links the objects to events and places and people and indeed, are part of how we come to terms with the acts and demands of war.  Our magpie eye is also attracted to shiny and beautiful things, as evidenced by stories like Fred Butts who served in 1945 with the battalion which looted Hitler’s chalet, the Eagle’s Nest (Charlotte Sun newspaper, Port Charlotte, Fla. on Monday, September 27, 2010). But Allied soldiers looted works of art as part of this process of repatriation.  The Quedlinburg treasure is one of the most glaring examples; eight works from the lot hidden to protect it were probably stolen by First Lt. Joe T. Meador who was on guard during their rediscovery in 1945.  Meador likely knew well the value of what he had taken; he graduated with a BA in art from North Texas State University.  The case was dropped in 1949 when Quedlinburg became part of East Germany.  Works began to resurface in the 1980s in Texas after Meador’s death and became the focus of legal attention to return the stolen property (William H. Honan, “A Trove of Medieval Art Turns Up in Texas”, NYT 6/14/90).  Hollywood ignored the question of looting on any level.

Hollywood largely ignored the complicated questions of repatriation of stolen art.  At one point, Matt Damon’s character, James Granger, simply picks up a work from a storehouse of Jewish possessions and returns it to the apartment on the label on the back; the apartment is, of course, horrifyingly empty with Juden graffiti on the wall but of course, he can see where the work used to hang and he puts it back on the wall.  This whole scene is supposed to show us how sincere he is when he says he intends the return to rightful owners.  The road to Hell is still paved with good intentions.  The scene indeed implies that it will be an easy job—just look at the back and take the painting there. Cate Blanchett’s character, Jeu de Paume staff member Claire Simone, admonishes him by emphasizing the empty apartment but Clooney’s filmmaking buries this in the characters’ relationship and the over-arching motif of earnest intentions.  600,000 works of art, in a sea of furniture, dishes, clothing, shoes, hair, teeth.  At a hearing in 2006, some 100,000 are still listed as missing (https://plone.unige.ch/art-adr/cases-affaires/liberation-of-saint-peter-from-prison-2013-feldmann-heirs-and-private-person/review-of-the-repatriation-of-holocaust-art-assets-in-the-united-states/view). Almost 70 years later, there are works still in dispute.  How do you return a work when the owner, the owner’s immediate and extended families are wiped out?  How do you prove ownership when all your papers and photographs were destroyed after your family was forced to flee or sent to the camps?

Hollywood isolated the Soviets as the systematic “bad guys” of the world, looking to make a quick profit in their sweep of found Nazi art into their own collections.  Matt Damon’s character, Garner, makes an offhand reference to the Soviets as having lost 20,000,000 people, as an excuse for their behavior, which Clooney’s character dismisses; the film makes the Soviets villains second only to the Nazis who not only stole art but also destroyed it rather than lose it to the Allies.  Systematic military intention to take works of art and move them into the Soviet museums is well documented. However, there is no denying that in the post-war period art entered the international markets when owners could not be easily found, and for those with ready cash, these works entered both private and museum collections.  Various museums have listed works of questionable provenance linked to the Nazi era (Metropolitan Museum: 393 works, Art Institute of Chicago: over 500 works, National Gallery of Art: 400 European paintings). Beginning in 1998 there has been a concerted effort towards acknowledging these works, tracing these works, and returning when possible. The Nazi Era Provenance Project (http://www.nepip.org) is a searchable database of works created before 1946 that changed hands to American museums between 1932 and 1945.  It currently has 28943 objects and 175 museum participants.  It is a step in the right direction but as has been frequently noted, it does not include dealer records or international museum records; other countries keep separate records, keeping searching limited.  Major museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, devote staff and resources to provenance research, an area growing alongside a global art market, global art trafficking, and continued wars.  As late as 2012, with the find in the home of Cornelius Gurlitt, however, new caches of Nazi-looted pieces are still being discovered.  Did dealers, collectors, and curators know that these works were likely looted? The market of the post-war years clearly suggests that they knew but were deterred by the difficulties (and impossibilities) of returning works and dazzled by the allure of acquiring these artistic masterworks.

Why does any of this matter?  Could you just dismiss this whole essay as the ramblings of another cranky historian? Certainly.  But it matters because the Taliban attacked the giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan in 2001, destroying a cultural heritage because they considered the works idols, contrary to their religious teaching.  It matters because during times of civil war, archaeological sites go unprotected and unguarded, and works of precious value slip away from towns like Balkh in Northern Afghanistan (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/whos-stealing-afghanistan-cultural-treasures/).  It matters because at times of political unrest, works are raided, damaged, and stolen as in Mallawi Egypt, perhaps never to be seen again (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/pictures/130823-museum-mallawi-egypt-looting-artifacts-archaeology-science-antiquities/); the Egyptian Antiquities Museum on Tahrir Square struggles in the instability of the climate, with reports varying about looting, thefts, and security.  If art matters, and I hold this as the tenet of the movie with which I do agree, then how we tell the story of the Nazis and their looted art matters.

What Clooney could have done with a few text slides at the end of the film was set the historical record straight from the inspirational story.  He could have acknowledged the magnitude in numbers of works stolen, the difficulties of restoring works to owners, and the efforts underway to do so.  He chose not to.  He chose to let his story stand.  So his story is simple in a world where we actually need the complex.  His story is one of unalloyed heroism and virtue, with America as the driving force of cultural right. If his story is the one we tell ourselves, then we underestimate the rapaciousness of power to sweep through culture as well as people; we miss the desperation that forces people to sell or abandon their cultural heritage; we miss the lessons that we could have learned about guarding and restoring patrimony. We are instead condemned to repeat these lessons. We are strong enough to be told the whole story.