The unbearable banality of art journalism
in the New York Times always manages to raise the blood pressure. If the coverage of issues like museum and aesthetics is so atrociously bad - and this is an area in which I can claim some amount of specialization - then one has to wonder about the newspaper's coverage of topics about which I really know very little, like the Israel-Lebanon war, or the Bush White House's legal problems.
Witness this most recent gem by Roberta Smith on museums and the transformative powers of free admissions policies:
"When the art world often wonders out loud if art can change society, it seems fairly obvious that museums can."
Museums as engines of social change? This is either totally dishonest museum adminstrator flattery -- go Roberta, you've got a lot of opening dinners under your belt, or else it is extremely lazy thinking. When was the last time a museum changed a society? I can give you many examples of museums established AFTER revolutions or huge accumulations of capital in order to legitimate the new regime and money launder sugar profits-- Palais de Luxembourg and the Tate both in the 19th century, being the most obvious, but let's leave that for another time.
"They [museums] put us in touch with the world and its history. They reveal to us our own feelings talents and capacities, shaping our idea of what we can become. They give us the visual equivalent of things sorely needed today: an understanding of difference, and therefore of, tolerance. In times as dire as ours, everything matters more than art. Yet in such times, art matters more than ever."
Strangely enough, what museums can teach us has nothing to do with art, and everything to do with everything else, meaning, in Smith's insular universe, the world, history and ourselves (our capacities and talents). The art world may be asking itself if art can change the world, but the art world is not an agency. It is part of the world, and I've said it here before, if it's a bad world, we have bad art, the two are not separable. Of course I'm being telegraphic about these ideas, but the middlebrow truisms that Smith offers should be blown apart, now more than ever -- and this critical gesture has no effects on making the world a better place. But it may make you think twice about what Smith and her readership take for granted - the agency of art and the existence of an art world separate from the other world, as well as the pseudo-populist instrumentalization of art as tool to promote tolerance.
Witness this most recent gem by Roberta Smith on museums and the transformative powers of free admissions policies:
"When the art world often wonders out loud if art can change society, it seems fairly obvious that museums can."
Museums as engines of social change? This is either totally dishonest museum adminstrator flattery -- go Roberta, you've got a lot of opening dinners under your belt, or else it is extremely lazy thinking. When was the last time a museum changed a society? I can give you many examples of museums established AFTER revolutions or huge accumulations of capital in order to legitimate the new regime and money launder sugar profits-- Palais de Luxembourg and the Tate both in the 19th century, being the most obvious, but let's leave that for another time.
"They [museums] put us in touch with the world and its history. They reveal to us our own feelings talents and capacities, shaping our idea of what we can become. They give us the visual equivalent of things sorely needed today: an understanding of difference, and therefore of, tolerance. In times as dire as ours, everything matters more than art. Yet in such times, art matters more than ever."
Strangely enough, what museums can teach us has nothing to do with art, and everything to do with everything else, meaning, in Smith's insular universe, the world, history and ourselves (our capacities and talents). The art world may be asking itself if art can change the world, but the art world is not an agency. It is part of the world, and I've said it here before, if it's a bad world, we have bad art, the two are not separable. Of course I'm being telegraphic about these ideas, but the middlebrow truisms that Smith offers should be blown apart, now more than ever -- and this critical gesture has no effects on making the world a better place. But it may make you think twice about what Smith and her readership take for granted - the agency of art and the existence of an art world separate from the other world, as well as the pseudo-populist instrumentalization of art as tool to promote tolerance.
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