Gotham Diary:
Changing the World
15 May 2014

Running around with Ray Soleil yesterday, I visited this year’s Roof Garden installation at the Museum for the first time. It’s very agreeable. The pavement has been covered with some sort of turf, and the structure, which consists of facing panels of ivy linked by a sinuous “S” of reflective glass, is beguiling — although it might be more so if the two open chambers did not end in culs de sac. The most exciting thing about it — not that this work is meant to be exciting — is the fun-house reflection of the skyscape to the south of the Park.

Yes — but is it art? My ideas about art have undergone an extraordinary consolidation in the past couple of months, inspired somewhat by Hannah Arendt’s essay, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Political Significance” but more, I think, by The Human Condition, a book that presents a view of human affairs that is both simple and comprehensive. In this view, the plurality of human beings — all of us who have ever been or will be, in all our differences — are separated, one from another, by a space that is called “the world.” Human beings can change the world (although few leave any material trace), but they are all born into it and they leave it behind when the die. The only lasting objects in this world are man-made.

Most objects in the world serve a purpose. As tools or buildings, they permit human beings to create human habitations. But some objects are useless — although perhaps it might be better to say that they serve the purpose of “uselessness.” Perhaps it would be better still to say that these apparently useless objects testify to human meaning — hardly a useless existence. I don’t care to quibble. These objects, called “works of art,” represent states of human existence (whether or not a human being is actually represented). As such, they produce in viewers the aesthetic responses that constitute a distinct set of links in our common sense of life.

This understanding of art, like many of the works that it comprises, is fairly recent, no more than a few centuries old. The museums in which we have grown accustomed to encountering art are more recent still. Our Metropolitan Museum of Art will celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2020, but the Museum as it is experienced today did not exist until about 1975. I call attention to these dates as a way of explaining the uncertainty of our ideas about art. An approach to art — I refrain from calling it a philosophy of art — that is grounded in the experience of art has not had a long time in which to develop. I would argue further that the experience of art was, until the Postwar era, limited to a coterie of mandarins. Very few ordinary people were permitted to have much of an experience of art; it would be fair to say that the presence of ordinary visitors was tolerated by museums, but not welcomed. That is what changed when the modern museum came into existence. So our common sense of life as it is embodied in art is not remarkably articulate. The experts are still much better at telling us what to think than at telling us how.

The experience of art, then, is a matter of viewing artworks that other human beings — many other human beings — have also viewed. Museum art is art that has become part of the world, and, in so doing, changed it.

There is, of course, another, much older experience of art: the production and acquisition of new art. “New art” relates to “museum art” much as new wine relates to brandy. Most new art will never grace a museum’s walls. That is my hunch, anyway; as I say, the experience of art is still rather new and, if familiar, inarticulate.

One important difference between new art and museum art is the presence of artists. While it is certainly important to the appreciation of art to know as much about the circumstances of its creation as possible — this kind of knowledge can pile up indefinitely without disturbing the aesthetic response — the artist remains absent from the museum because our responses cannot effect him. The popularity of the Mona Lisa is no longer a source of inspiration (or contempt) to Leonardo da Vinci. Living artists, in contrast, are always aware of fashions among contemporary viewers of art — especially those who purchase it. Over most of modern Western history since the Renaissance, artists have sought to steer their patrons within the aesthetic frame, but that frame has been shared by artists and patrons alike.

In the Nineteenth Century, however, there arose a new class of patron, the bourgeois. What made the bourgeois a new kind of patron was his determination to do the steering. Even though he knew nothing about art (except what pleased him), the bourgeois arrogated to himself an authority for the production of art that few kings or popes had ever dreamed of. And, unlike kings and popes, the bourgeois was not concerned with the public impact of art. He tended to want art that would adorn his residence with impressive grandeur. Unlike the aristocrats who had usually commissioned this sort of art, however, he had not grown up with grandeur. The bourgeois had what artists, and those few men and women who had the opportunity to experience art, called “bad taste.”

The philistinism of the bourgeois patron eventually inspired the artistic rebellion that we call “modernism.” Modernism was characterized by the invention of new and therefore initially incomprehensible aesthetic frames. It is my belief that much of the work created within these new frames is not art — not museum art — but rather a kind of momentary, time-bound criticism of current affairs, current affairs in the art world certainly. From Marcel Duchamps’s ready-mades to Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes to Jeff Koons’s cartoon sculptures, we see an array of statements about art that are deliberately devoid of aesthetic meaning and incapable of inspiring a genuine aesthetic response. The term “conceptual art” has assumed a widespread acceptance, but as I prefer to avoid any confusion about art, I stumble around among alternatives, such as “graphic criticism.” To the extent that any of this work is at all meaningful, it is as a kind of literature — but definitely not the only kind of literature that has much in common with art: poetry.

It is not hard to understand why graphic criticism appeals to the patrons of new art, but it is also clear that the appeal stops pretty much there. Graphic criticism is unlikely, I believe, to take much a place in the world — the world in which we all live our different lives.

To return to the first question, is Don Graham’s pavillion, set in Günther Vogt’s landscape, art? I have no answer, for the simple reason that the structure is going to be dismantled in a few months, and, wherever it might be re-erected, it will not engage in the same relationship with Central Park and the midtown skyline. So it will become something else (if anything at all), and it will therefore mean something else. The aesthetic quality of temporary art is difficult to assess. No one who passed through Christo’s The Gates will forget how those orange banners transformed not only the Park but the act of walking through the Park, and yet a great deal of the power of that transformation owed to our awareness that that those banners would never get old. The Gates did not change the world in the way that works of art change the world. Perhaps it did something else.