Gotham Diary:
Reception
14 June 2013

Janet Malcolm’s essay about the art world of the early Eighties, focused on Artforum editor Ingrid Sischy and called “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” appeared in 1986 in The New Yorker,  where I must have come across it and decided not to read it. Why? Many partial explanations present themselves, many of which can be grouped under the following statement: it was at about that time that I learned that our original idea, what living in New York would be like for Kathleen and me, had to be replaced. Our original idea had predicated a measure of engagement with the social scene — the old-guard, uptown social scene, I hasten to add, that David Patrick Columbia so lovingly follows at New York Social Diary. Without having undergone any crises of painful disillusionment, I came to see that this world was not for us, if only because inhabiting it is a full-time job (or a paid publicist’s full-time job, and we cold not afford that), and we were interested in other things. For a few years, this re-think of how we might live in Manhattan was masked by a retreat from the city, in which I spent more and more time at our newly-acquired lake house in Connecticut. I also retired, precociously but permanently. In 1986, I might have flipped through Malcolm’s essay, seen how long and formidable it was, and decided that the days of my interest in such things were over — for in those days, without being aware of it, I took “the art world” and “the social scene” as two sides of the same frame.

But who knows. In any case, I did not read “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” until yesterday, and even now I haven’t finished it. Almost everything compelling about it is tinctured by a wincing awareness that the issues and personalities under discussion are of a vintage that’s closer to twenty-five than to thirty years old, but that feels, suddenly, more like thirty. Some of the personalities have disappeared (as the French say; I think of Kirk Varnedoe, cut short by early cancer), and those still with us are now a lot older, and no longer determining the scene. But what about the ideas? I ask about the ideas because the discussions about art that Malcolm captures coincide with the thoughts that I’ve been having —thirty years later.

I wrote yesterday that Andy Warhol put an end to a way of looking at art that made it possible to talk about art seriously. I see now that Barbara Rose, an art historian and critic who had left the board of Artforum before Malcolm began her investigations, said pretty much the same thing to Malcolm way back then.

There’s a generation now that feels you don’t have to make that distinction. Mickey Mouse, Henry James, Marcel Duchamp, Talking Heads, Mozart, Amadeus — it’s all going on at the same time, and it all kind of means the same thing. For that, you have Andy Warhol to thank.

(Rose blames Susan Sontag, too, but I don’t follow her there; Sontag tore down the old temple so that she could be the priestess of a new one.) I myself feel that distinctions are so obvious that they don’t need to be made. Amadeus, for example, is a tone-deaf misrepresentation of everything valuable about Mozart. I don’t mean that it is disrespectful; that would not be the problem. It is simply and altogether misleading. It posits notions of “genius” and “creativity” that, had he subscribed to them, might have disinclined Mozart to bother setting aside his skittles game to write a few bars of music. In his short but magisterial study of late Mozart, Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune, the Bach scholar Christoph Wolff documents the composer’s extraordinarily adult program for the revitalization of a specifically German art music. (And how odd it is to imagine Mozart and Wagner writing the same sort of manifesto.) Mozart was the very opposite of the idiot savant; in his final years, he quite consciously and ambitiously set himself ever more formidable challenges. Peter Schaffer’s play is, from every standpoint — that of listening to music, that of understanding history — nothing but junk (as are its predecessors by Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov). It may be entertaining, but it cannot be entertained in the same hour as a the Dissonant Quartet.

If anyone had developed what is now called “reception theory” when I was a student, I was unaware of it; to the best of my knowledge, a readable history of the reception of art remains to be written. We know a lot about artists, and a fair amount about the patrons who commissioned their works, but shifts in public taste — bearing in mind the shifts in the meaning of “public,” from small courts in the Renaissance to the bourgeois audiences of the Nineteenth Century who in turn were so ill-received by many artists around the turn of the Twentieth Century that rebartative modernism was invented as a rebuff — have not been rigorously traced. Such shifts go against our ideas, such as we retain, of the transcendence of art: transcendence always suggests the eternal. It is still shocking to learn that concerts in Mozart’s day could go on for five hours or that people were allowed to talk through them, and to come and go as they pleased — shocking, that is, to audiences schooled in concert-hall behavior and unfamiliar with stadium rock. To a degree, charges of ignorance and inattentiveness can be lodged against those ancient audiences: they truly did not imagine the power of music, except on ceremonial occasions in which music played a supporting role. Today, we’re in rather the opposite boat, overscrutinizing the flotsam of “mass culture,” pretending to mind meaning in the ephemeral.

Until modernism — or, perhaps, until merely affluent, not particularly well-educated people began showing up at concerts and exhibitions — the arts were vehicles of pleasure. They were appreciated by audiences that studied pleasure, that grasped the complications of its evanescence. A scale was developed, somewhat loosely, between the inborn digestive pleasures and the acquired cerebral ones. The former risked grossness, the latter preciosity. But it was clearly the artist’s job was to provide some degree of pleasure. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain put a stop to that, or, rather, it announced to the public that artists were getting out of the pleasure business. This was so shocking that it attracted a phalanx of critics willing to defend the move. It became the artist’s job to be difficult and obscure. Andy Warhol’s boxes put an stop to that, as Barbara Rose observed, and that’s pretty much where we still are, I think.

The important thing about art, in other words, is no longer what artists are producing. It is how audiences are responding — with an accent on the plurality of audiences. The audience for Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc — the federal workers at the Javits Building in Lower Manhattan — hated what the sculpture did to their plaza, and eventually the piece was removed. I remember working through a strong resistance to the power of “popularity” in determining public art (just as Ingrid Sischy herself did, according to Malcolm’s essay), and arriving at what I would call the Jane Jacobs view, which holds that public art must be appropriate to its setting. There can be little doubt that Serra’s sculpture was designed to be completely inappropriate: that was its primary aesthetic point. It was meant to insult the admittedly ghastly Javits Building. But it was wrong to ask the people who had no choice but to work in that building to live with so severe and incommoding a work of art. When I say that Tilted Arc was a bad idea, the wrong work for the space in which it was installed, I am claiming that the artist’s inspiration and achievement is not the criterion. The work’s reception is.

As is perfectly obvious already in the world of literature, where all texts come in more or less identical packages (books), and the history of the art encompasses vast lumber rooms of forgotten authors. The fact that very few people today are willing or able to read Sir Walter Scott with pleasure consigns him to the attic, and we might very well have lost sight of him altogether had his novels not inspired so many operas. No one gives the neglect of Scott a second thought; we are not in any way obliged to appreciate him. Which is to say that nobody is making a persuasive case on his behalf. Let someone come along and show us things in Scott that we had missed, let someone open him and us up to pleasure once again, and the Penguin Classics will reappear on readers’ bookshelves.

When critics complain today that today’s art market is all about the art market itself, they are not missing the point.