It Never Happened and It Is Still True What Magic Art Is This

Whether artists produce or rich people die, whatsoever happens is good for the museums. Similar casinos, they cannot lose, and that is their expletive. For people become hopelessly lost in the galleries, isolated in the midst of so much fine art. The only other possible reaction to this situation is the one which Valéry sees as the full general, ominous result of whatsoever and all progress in the domination of material—increasing superficiality. Art becomes a matter of didactics and information; Venus becomes a document. Education defeats art.
—Theodor W. Adorno, "Valéry Proust Museum," 1967

When Billy Graham once strolled with him through the Eden of the Magic Kingdom, the evangelist congratulated Walt on having built such a marvelous garden of fantasy. "This is the real world here," Walt sternly replied. "The fantasy world is outside."
—Disney World: xx Years of Magic, 1991

TO SAY THAT AN ARTWORK has been shown or bought by a museum still affords it enormous cachet, despite the fact that the museum has been discredited as a mausoleum.¹ "Museum quality" still seems the correct model of value, for even the most ideologically right art wants to greenbacks in at the casino. The signal of the recent "Dislocations" show, for example, is its location in the prestigious Museum of Modernistic Art in New York, non the ostensibly destructive consequence of the art on display at that place. For art's quasi-revolutionary power to disturb and disrupt consciousness is, in fact, neutralized and reified by existence given the imprimatur of the museum's authorisation. The irony and pathos of art's museum destiny were recognized long ago past Paul Gauguin, who in 1895 wrote that "in art at that place are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And, in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the Land takes information technology over?"² To become official is a kind of living death: "Courier'south words are still true: 'What the State encourages languishes, what it protects dies.'"³ Gauguin was alluding to the state museum, the Louvre. Only every museum, whether conveying the authority of the state or not (and what museum today is non state supported, however indirectly?), seems to function like a little principality—a sort of Monaco.

What Gauguin missed was the fact that even the about would-be-revolutionary art, every bit eager to reeducate us as whatever commissar, longs for a rubber haven in a museum. When it has lost favor in the optics of the world it was made for, it looks for favor in the eyes of posterity, which is represented by the museum. Fine art identifies with the museum as the site of immortality, for it is the institution that is immortal, not the fine art. Art knows that its "afterlife" depends upon its institutionalization, which is why, for all the artist'south protestations to the contrary, he or she is hardly loathe to be institutionalized. Even Gauguin, for all his independence, tried to manipulate his way to official success. Indeed, today's museums are veritable "salons of independents."

Every artwork, and so, is produced with an eye to the imaginary, ideal audience of posterity. This fantasy audience is necessarily the museum audience, for information technology is hither that art will live after the artist's expiry. Hither information technology will be taken at face value, loved for itself and unchallenged, equally if by an eternally good, caring, uncritical parent, shown off to the hereafter, which, in the artist's museum fantasy, is a kindly mirror maxim his or her fine art is the fairest of them all. Thus the museum is not only the madonna of the pietà, the madonna in whose all caring arms fine art dies the way Leonardo da Vinci apocryphally died in the artillery of Francis I (the state), but as well the madonna of the Birth—or, more precisely, the madonna of the second nascence. The museum is a much more than magical, dialectical identify than Adorno thought. Information technology cannot automatically be damned equally a cemetery wherein art is necessarily reified and neutralized. Art may, in fact, exist reprocessed by the institution, be born again as a spiritual phenomenon superior to its mere cloth existence in its premuseum life.

The museum is thus not so much a tomb as a perverse fountain of youth. Accustomed for membership in the exclusive order of the museum, an artwork tin lead a glamorous life that makes the life it had earlier it joined the club pale in comparison. Or else it finds that it doesn't fit in, and dies in mortification at non living up to expectations. Seen in the museum, an artwork seems either more than significant than information technology ever seemed before or completely insignificant. It is either a devotional object of communion—a sacred relic able to perform emotional miracles if prayed to with the proper respect—or a bone in the desert.

The museum audience, nonetheless intellectually sophisticated, unconsciously makes snap emotional judgments almost art, deciding its fate in what might seem like a peculiarly gratuitous, peremptory fashion. For the audience has waited a long time to be, at last, alone with the art in the museum, far from the rough and tumble of the everyday world. Indeed, the goal is to enter into a peculiarly unreflective, yet intense and consummate, relationship with the art object. The theory supporting art demands delayed gratification from it; now, self-conscious in its supposedly rightful place in the museum, that fine art had better put up emotionally or shut upwards.

The expected rewards are great. If the museum audience can internalize art equally an ideal miracle—a perfect thing in an imperfect world—that mirrors its unconscious belief in its ain inner ideality or perfection, information technology will accept all the primitive emotional satisfaction it ever wanted. (Interestingly enough, the artist also uses art as a narcissistic vehicle—as an objectification and symbolization of his or her ain imagined perfection.) It is art's function as narcissistic fuel for the audience, and as egotistic project for the artist, that gives it archaic vitality, making information technology seem a fountain of emotional youth. To utilize Adorno'due south phrase, rejuvenation is the real "promesse du bonheur" of art.⁴ Narcissism expresses itself most profoundly in the unconscious—and not so unconscious—wish for eternal life, and the museum, as the place where the immortality of art is trumpeted, is presumably the place one can await this wish to be satisfied, at least in fantasy.

The museum, then, is the identify socially set autonomously for the profoundly intimate relationship—transaction—between artist and audience. The art is the medium between them, as Marcel Duchamp emphasized. The museum is really as private a place as any bedroom, and the stakes in it are higher: the audience's gamble on the immortality of the artist, which it wants to share—even identify with. The rendezvous between audience and artist may or may not work out, depending on the depth of the narcissistic expectations each has of the other. Does the artist brand universal claims—does he or she need to be mirrored and arcadian by anybody? Or is the artist for the happy few who truly sympathise his or her sense of entitlement and inward perfection—who are every bit narcissistically extravagant and self-privileging as the artist? If the reciprocity between audience and artist is good, they appear to merge seamlessly—appear fabricated for each other. if information technology isn't, they become their separate emotional ways.

But what Duchamp chosen "the pole of the viewer" has the last discussion. Indeed, he thought the audience was ultimately more to the point of art than the so-called art object.^five For him, if the audience thought an object was "art" then its producer was an artist: one is just nominally an artist until the audience thinks 1 is. Extending Duchamp's statement, one can say that unless the object satisfies the audition's unconscious narcissistic needs information technology will not be experienced as immortal. Indeed, information technology will get a kind of grasshopper, mirroring the fate of the unfortunate woman of Greek mythology who, granted her wish for immortality, forgot to ask for the vitality to go with information technology. She dwindled away, never quite dying, and, as such, truly experienced a living expiry. Museums are plagued with many such objects, or "object-locusts," to employ a more than apt term.

Of grade, the audience's fickleness is notorious. People are not lost and isolated in museums, equally Adorno thought, but wander effectually in dissatisfaction, looking for the side by side art fix—a new fine art they can fixate on. They expect lost and isolated because they are between infatuations. Museum priests assume that some art is inherently more than of import—magical—than other fine art, but only in case the audience doesn't appreciate it, they proceed other art effectually. Legions of artists, generation subsequently generation, relentlessly work to satisfy their own and the audience'due south narcissism. They may never quite go it right, even so they are condemned to brand every creative effort, or the museum would have to close its doors and artists would go out of business organization.

While fine art'due south narcissistic importance has been recognized,⁶ the fact that the wish for immortality includes the wish to be vital forever has not. Satisfaction of the wish for everlasting vitality is necessarily hallucinatory—no club or individual lasts forever, and both lose vitality earlier they dice—and the museum is the hallucinatory scene of its satisfaction. Art remains attractive equally long equally the illusion of immortality lasts. Since the unconscious has no thought of death, this may be a long time. Merely sooner or later ane becomes wide awake in conscious recognition of the reality of death. The bubble of the illusion bursts, and the futility of both art and the museum becomes transparent. Of course, some people—esthetes?—never wake up. They dice unconsciously believing that they and the fine art they identify with are immortal, especially considering the art is of museum quality. The pleasance principle has won out over the reality principle in their inner life. Most people, however, cannot afford not to awaken. Their survival in the globe and individuation depend on it.

THE MUSEUM MAY OR MAY NOT work magic in the relationship between the creative person and audience, but it e'er works magic on the art object. Equally Adorno says, the museum turns it into an educational document. The question is whether this trivializes it, every bit he idea, or whether it tin brand information technology more than profound, as I think. The object is never what it seems to be, but is always more than superficial or more profound—under- or overestimated—for it has no necessary, fixed identity in the audience's eyes. It is merely as a public document that the object has a fixed, necessary identity, indeed, becomes "fine art," transcending its seemingly inescapable narcissistic role. (Some snobbish audiences prefer their narcissistic pleasure the hard, masochistic style, so they let themselves be emotionally victimized by profound "avant-garde" objects. Others prefer piece of cake, fast pleasure, enjoying superficial "kitsch" objects. Just, of course, what is profound to 1 person will be superficial to another, and vice versa. It is rare to discover an individual every bit satisfied by profound and superficial objects—the optimal country of emotional grace, that is, narcissistic balance. And it is equally rare to find an object that remains profound or superficial—strictly advanced or strictly kitsch—forever.)

No doubt, in one case in the museum, the art object becomes superior backer material or property—this is what, in ironical parlance, information technology ways to be of "museum quality"—and is thus immune the privilege of dominance (with imagined immortality the ultimate category). Cloth authorisation means to be elevated into an idol for posterity, or to become an object of supposedly everlasting interest. Material dominance ways that the media gatekeepers open up their pearly gates to acknowledge the art into their informational and opinionated heaven—that other magic kingdom. Simply, in both cases, the artwork is turned into an educational document. And it is the immortality of the art document that is at stake in the museum, not the immortality of the art object. In fact, it is only as document that art tin be immortal. Indeed, the "documentation" of the object is an effort to stabilize its identity in time and then that it tin can be self-identical for all fourth dimension. Lifted out of procedure by documentation, information technology seems eternally real, and as such true and immortal—museum-quality art. But the question is: What is the eternal truth of immortal art? And more peculiarly: What is the right manner of documenting the art object? What kind of document is it anyhow? The answers depend on what the art document is supposed to educate us to. The very definition and dominance of the museum depends on its estimation of the educational mission of art.

The museum world is non of 1 heed about this matter. In fact, there are at least two schools of thought about the nature of the educational activity fine art gives us. One is exemplified by Harald Szeemann, free-lance exhibition curator at the Kunsthaus Zurich. Art, he writes, must be assessed "by its mastery and/or freedom of expression. . . . It may exist a constantly renewed run into between inner nature—always active, saturated with images and destinies—and outer surrounding nature which synchronously becomes a sediment."⁷ Thus "art is at its best when information technology is a concentrated essence of life, imagination and dream and of the audacities, weaknesses, the fears and the desires of homo beings and their goals. . . . Art's creations are a synthesis of torso, soul, eye and eros."⁸ The other way of thinking is exemplified by Robert Storr, curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Mod Art in New York. He describes himself as "representing the underdog," because the underdog is "where the action is."^ix There is clearly an enormous distance between Szeemann'southward dense, enigmatic language—as much an "enigmatic display of beingness" equally art¹⁰—and Storr's journalistically thin, sloganeering language. Just more crucial is the unbridgeable difference betwixt Szeemann'due south conception of art as a dialectically rich matrix of internal and external worlds and Storr'south one-dimensional formulation of art as a site of the oppositional—the social space where the difference between the action of the rebellious underdog and the comfy passivity of the establishment superlative dog is disclosed.

Storr's advocacy of the underdog confronting the peak dog shows the prejudicial character of his hierarchical division of the art world, which is intended to be emblematic of the basic class division of Western lodge. Only is it? There is, in fact, a simplistic Solomonic wisdom in Storr's separation of artists into top dogs and underdogs (also insiders/outsiders).^xi Information technology is implicitly modeled on the Cartesian listen/body distinction, or, more pointedly, the distinction betwixt the mind's higher effete intellectual functions and the torso's lower "instinctive" ones. Only is the "activity" really more than in one place than in the other? Is the one really more necessary and authentic than and thus preferable to the other? Who determines which "action" is more legitimate? Both sides endure from Storr's facile, obsolete, nondialectical stardom.

In fact, the locus of Storr's distinction is the museum. Art already institutionalized is summit dog, art uninstitutionalized is underdog. Narcissistically—about solipsistically—Storr thinks the institution he works for is the arbiter of artistic significance. In practice this means that art is de facto significant if information technology is shown in and/or owned by the museum. Just Storr wants it both means: he wants to straddle the institution and not-establishment worlds, playing off each against the other. He is in incomplete revolt against both. In practice, his only sense of an artwork's significance is its standing vis-à-vis the museum, the presumed essence and center of the art world, the very lever that moves it. Storr wants to bring the underdogs into the museum, in rebellion against the summit dogs. But brought into the museum, the underdogs become top dogs, past the museum's cocky-definition equally the meridian of the art world—of more than sublime importance than any art gallery or fine art mag or fine art school. Storr is compelled to scramble for new underdogs to sustain his revolt. But what is it a revolt against? In fact, it is not a true revolt, because it never questions the museum's claim to be the sacred infinite of truthful significance. Storr is trapped in the cruel circle of the museum's conceit. In a sense, all he is doing is feeding the museum panthera leo fresh artistic fodder, then that it will never die of boredom. Since there are ever more than underdogs than top dogs, by reason of the museum's exclusivity, Storr can play turnstile forever. Admission is ever limited, and many artists just never accept the correct change to get in.

It is worth noting that still inadequate, even hollow, the elevation dog/underdog distinction might be, it persists as a benchmark of significance in the American museum, suggesting that the American curator cannot empathize art exterior the museum context. There might seem to be evidence to the opposite: for case, David Ross' advancement of video as quintessentially of the zeitgeist, Kirk Varnedoe's conception of advanced art as a "fine disregard" for the existing rules of the art game, and Storr's own interest in the "run into between the subjectivity of the creator and the objectivity of textile reality."¹² But the fact of the matter is that video becomes allegorical of the "real fourth dimension" of the zeitgeist because it stands in opposition to the unreal time—timeless spirit—of the museum; the existing codes of fine art are maintained and enforced by the museum; and it is the museum that "objectively" and "subjectively" defines what fabric volition be considered art. Ross, Varnedoe, and Storr, every bit museum curators, want no doubt to bespeak that the museum will catch up with actual "art" practice—open its doors to the different new objects proposing themselves equally art—but the closed arrangement of the museum is implicitly their betoken of difference and their touchstone. The museum may not be hermetically sealed, but it is closed in that it thinks that the art in it is objectively significant.

It is precisely when an fine art object does non seem to measure up to the standards of objective significance, and thus seems opposed to the very idea of the museum, that it becomes of interest to it. For the museum, as understood by Storr, this threatening opposition is the existent reason the art is "different." The other likely reason, what Szeemann describes as the artwork'south life-world significance (which is dissimilar in kind from that of the art already preserved in the museum), is understood as less of import. The threat represented by the opposition must be dealt with—and the best style of doing so, later a decorous interval symbolizing the museum'due south back up of the art already in it, is to accept the "revolutionarily" different art into the museum, later rationalizing information technology as far from different, that is, every bit an evolutionary step in the history of art.¹³ The fact that "the art of our contemporaries has no precise history," as Rudi Fuchs says, and that the museum's endeavour to give it one denies the dialectical journey in which it really participates,¹⁴ suggests that the museum offers a fake consciousness of contemporary fine art. It tends to view an alien art defensively through an arcadian vision of art'due south overall history, that is, one that forces information technology into a linear procrustean bed, when it is, in fact, as Robert Smithson said, "a sprawling development," like nature.^xv Forced into historical identify, the new art loses its threatening alienness; it seems, after all, to be playing by the rules, including the avant-garde rule of breaking the rules. That authentically unlike fine art couldn't intendance less about the museum and the rules of by art—that its struggle is to effect the expressive synthesis of inner and outer worlds, as Szeemann remarks, and that it will survive every bit art if it becomes their concentrated essence, independently of the museum and the art in it—never occurs to the museum.

The distinction between Szeemann's sense of art, which carries it beyond the museum, and Storr's sense of art, which trivializes it into a museum phenomenon, is implicitly a distinction between European and American attitudes to art. It is a distinction embedded in Adorno's business relationship of the difference between Valéry's and Proust's attitudes to fine art, and how these reverberate what the experience of art in a museum tin can be. Valéry'due south "own attitude, the elevation of art to idolatry, did in fact contribute to the procedure of reification and dilapidation which, co-ordinate to Valéry's allegation, fine art undergoes in museums. For it is only in the museum, where paintings are offered for contemplation as ends in themselves, that they go as absolute every bit Valéry desired, and he shrinks back in terror from the realization of his dream. Proust knows the cure for this. In a sense works render home when they become elements of the observer's subjective stream of consciousness. Thus they renounce [the] cultic prerogative" they accept in the museum.¹⁶ The American curator—a kind of vulgarized Valéryan—tends to invest art with the objective necessity the museum is supposed to occupy as the place of art's manifest destiny. Through the idolatry of art—presenting works of art every bit cult objects—the museum contemplates its own absolute authority. Testifying to that authority, fine art obtains its own and becomes as tautologically indispensable equally the museum believes itself to be. At the same time, it is flattened into one-dimensionality.

The European curator—a sophisticated Proustian—tends to give art the subjective necessity that the private has. This provides information technology with a kind of "roundedness," to allude to Due east. One thousand. Forster'southward stardom between flat and circular characters. Szeemann's piece of work of art is in fact a microcosm of the tensions—audacity/weakness, desire/fearfulness, body/soul—that found human freedom, cryptically encoded in artifactual form. The curator decodes them through their effect on his or her ain subjectivity. Of course, as Adorno says of Proust, this "overestimates the act of liberty in art, equally would an amateur,"¹⁷ as well every bit the curator's ain subjective freedom in responding to it. The subjective stream of consciousness takes objective historical form, simply as the museum's objective historical form represses subjectivity, diluting and reducing it to a trace mineral in art.¹⁸

Nonetheless, the European curator attempts to prevent the facile reconciliation of objective museum and subjective art, maintaining that impossibility by emphasizing the museum as the viewer's rather than the object's space. Every bit Jean-Christophe Ammann, manager of the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt-am-Main, writes, "A work of art, though traditionally an artifact placed in an environment. . . must seek the contrary of this and accost the spectator's perception."¹⁹ Amman and Szeemann, ii of the organizers of Documenta five, in 1972, conceived of the exhibition as a forum for discourse, as its subtitle, "Questioning Reality—Epitome–worlds today," suggested. Indeed, the critic Jürgen Harten thought that the bear witness would become "some kind of theory-crazed rampage confronting the established artist-collector-public fix-up."²⁰ The bespeak was to bring canonical conceptualizations of fine art into question likewise as to challenge the idea that whatever of the fine art exhibited was itself canonical. This spirit of soapbox, implicating the viewer in a marathon of ideas, is maintained by Jan Hoet, the organizer of Documenta ix, which will open up in June 1992. As Hoet says of the relationship between museum and audience, "We must come into a discussion, into a dialogue. A verbal dialogue regarding the things placed there but to look at." ²¹

There is an attempt past the European curator to utilize the museum space to emphasize the irreconcilability of art with itself—that is, to present contradictory kinds of art. There is no endeavor, every bit in the American museum, to resolve artistic differences in a grand panoramic spectacle. Fuchs, for example, describes his philosophy of presentation equally one of "combination and encounter," in which works are hung in such a way "that they are continually influenced past others nearby." The individual work is no more than than a fragment, "in that in a unlike environment information technology receives new significance."²² For Szeemann, the curatorial "human activity of choice" is, of necessity, self-contradictory.²³ Thus he tends to run concurrent exhibitions, in 1967, for example, simultaneously showing Pierre Bonnard's paintings with imagery related to scientific discipline fiction, and Alfred Jarry's "Pataphysics" with work from the gimmicky Zurich art scene. Hoet has perhaps the virtually radical formulation of the museum, as his 1986 "Chambres d'Amis" prove suggests. The exhibition, in which 58 Ghent families opened their homes to 50 artists, in effect disseminated the museum, and the museum itself became a work of fine art—a genuine installation.

The European curator'southward principle of irreconcilability in exhibition—the creation of a space that becomes a play of alien artistic forces, making both sides seem as dissident, and implying that they are equally valid parallel lines that tin can meet simply in the viewer'south imagination—reaffirms the museum as a identify where aperture and difference rather than continuity and sameness are disclosed. Thus, the European museum denies a common immortality for art, and in so doing frustrates the audience's wish for immortality. Past demonstrating the unresolved tensions within art, it forces the audience back upon the real contradictions in its ain life.

Donald Kuspit is Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Andrew Dixon White Professor at Large at Cornell University. His forthcoming book is entitled The Dialectic of Decadence.

I am grateful to Amy Schichtel and Ballad Schwartz for their enquiry and ideas. They are not responsible for my employ of them.

—————————

NOTES

one. Theodor W. Adorno, in "Valéry Proust Museum." Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. 1983. p. 175, notes that "museum and mausoleum are connected by more phonetic association. Museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art. They bear witness to the neutralization of culture. Art treasures are hoarded in them, and their market value leaves no room for the pleasance of looking at them."
2. Paul Gauguin, The Writings of a Barbarous, ed. Daniel Guérin, New York: Viking Printing, 1977. p. 107.
3. Ibid., p. 32.
4. Adorno, Artful Theory, 1970. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1984. p. 17. writes: "Art's promesse du bonheur, then, has an fifty-fifty more emphatically critical meaning: it not only expresses the idea that current praxis denies happiness, merely as well carries the connotation that happiness is something beyond praxis."
v. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett. New York: Viking Printing. 1971, p. 70.
six. Otto Rank, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development. New York and London: W. Westward. Norton, 1989. pp. 43–47, for example, understands art as "the will-to-self-immortalization. which rises from the fear of life" and serves the wish for "collective immortality."
7. Harald Szeemann, "Cy Twombly: An Appreciation." Cy Twombly: Paintings, Works on Newspaper, Sculpture, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1967. p. 9.
8. Ibid.
9. Quoted in Nicholas Jenkins, "Robert Storr: Switch-Hitter," Artnews 90 no. 2. February 1991, p. 63.
x. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Trunk: Psychoanalysis and Art, New York: Columbia University Press. 1986. pp. 26–27.
11. Robert Storr, Philip Guston. New York: Abbeville Press. 1986, p. 95, argues that the reason artists such every bit Guston go "consummate insiders" is because they were true to themselves, but he does not define what that ways. What it seems to mean is that, like Elizabeth Murray, they refuse "to walk the walk or talk the talk of 'high way' vanguardism," which "cost [Murray] total recognition." Storr, "Shape Shifter," Art in America 77 no. 4, Apr 1989, p. 212. For Storr. "'high style' vanguardism" seems to be identified with esthetic pleasance, which he believes artists as diverse equally Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, R.J. Kitaj, and Pablo Picasso dead-end in. See Storr, "Realm of the Senses." Art in America 75 no. November 1987, pp. 132–44. 194. I suggest that Storr is unable to capeesh esthetic pleasance not just because he sees no "activity" in information technology, but because he cannot comprehend that art, whatever else it may exist, is, as Friedrich Nietzsche writes, "substantially affirmation, approval, deification of existence." felt as esthetic pleasance. Nietzsche, The Will to Ability, New York: Vintage, 1968, p. 434.
12. David Ross, currently the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, was the first curator of video art (at the Everson Museum, in Syracuse, New York). Esthetics are less an issue for him than the presumed "radicality" of the alternative medium. See Rene Becker. "Mr. Lucky." Boston Magazine 80 no. 6. June 1988, p. 209.
Kirk Varnedoe, in A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Fine art Mod. New York: Harry N. Abrams. 1990, p. ix. describes the avant-garde artist in terms of the metaphor of the creator of the spirit of rugby. "who with a fine disregard for the rules of football game as played in his time, commencement took the ball in his arms and ran with it." The key indicate is that the "fine disregard"—a term that suggests disdain—became objectified every bit the rule of a new game. The whole notion of avant-garde innovation every bit a "fine condone" falsifies the anxiety and uncertainty—the drastic search for a new ground of art and cocky—implicit in it.
Storr, quoted in Jenkins, p. 64.
13. Varnedoe'south use, in A Fine Disregard, of Roland Barthes' notion of play—rather poorly developed past Barthes in view of D. Westward. Winnicott's conceptualization of it—supposedly represents a deviation from the traditional formalist evolutionary approach of MoMA's curators. Yet, his approach tends to remain morphological, as in the 1983 "'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art" exhibition. As such, he is subject field to the same criticism Meyer Schapiro made of Alfred Yard. Barr's business relationship of the emergence of abstract fine art: "No connexion is drawn between the art and the weather condition of the moment. He excludes every bit irrelevant to its history the nature of the social club in which information technology arose, except as an incidental obstructing or accelerating atmospheric gene. The history of modern art is presented as an internal, immanent process among the artists; abstract art arises because, as the author says, representational fine art has been exhausted." Or, equally Varnedoe puts it, someone arbitrarily decided to break the rules—in, of grade, a gentlemanly, formal way—of the existing fine art game. Varnedoe'southward mechanistic old dominion/new rule theory tin be criticized the same fashion Schapiro criticizes Barr's "theory of exhaustion and reaction [which] reduces history to the pattern of pop views on changes in manner," the game of new looks. Schapiro. "Nature of Abstract Art." Marxist Quarterly i no. 1. Jan-March 1937. pp. 79–80.
fourteen. The consummate title of Documenta 7, 1982, organized past Fuchs, was "Documenta 7: In which our heroes afterward a long and strenuous voyage through sinister valleys and nighttime forests finally arrive in the English language Garden, and at the gate of a splendid palace." One tin can hardly imagine an American curator conceiving an exhibition in such terms. In full general, Fuchs believes that every exhibition must have "the lively, expressive quality of dialect." Quoted in Paul Groot. "The Spirit of Documenta 7: Rudi Fuchs Talks about the Forthcoming Exhibition," Flash Fine art 108. Summer 1982, p. 22.
xv. Robert Smithson. "Frederick Constabulary Olmstead and the Dialectical Mural," The Writings of Robert Smithson. New York: at the University Press, 1979, p. 124. I believe that for Smithson the dialectical mural was the culling to the museum as, in his words, a "null structure," educating united states of america, every bit Allan Kaprow says, "to a caricatural of fullness," an "aristocratic" sense of fullness that goes hand in paw with its "cosmetic" sense of life. Smithson, "What Is a Museum? A Dialogue betwixt Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson," The Writings, pp. lx, 64.
16. Adorno, "Valéry Proust Museum," p. 184.
17. Ibid.
18. In objectifying art as historically determined esthetic form, the museum ignores the subjective pregnant of the "artful. . . as the last endeavor to find art'due south psychological justification in itself," as Rank, p. 24. says.
nineteen. Jean-Christophe Ammann. "Richard Artschwager." Art of Our Time: The Saatchi Collection, vol. two. London: Lund Humphries, 1984. p. nine.
20. Jürgen Harten. "Documenta 5: At Kassel." Studio International no. 946, July-August 1972. p. 3.
21. Jan Hoet, speaking at "Discussions in Contemporary Culture: Politics of Images" panel, Dia Art Foundation, New York, x–11 November 1990. In Michael Gibson and Jill Lloyd. "Opening Minds Is Everything: An Interview with Jan Hotel." Art International no. x, Bound 1990, p. 45. Hoet states, "A museum isn't an isolated institution merely a means of bringing fine art to the public."
22. Rudi Fuchs, quoted in Groot, pp. 22 and 23.
23. Szeemann, Happenings and Fluxus, Cologne: Kolnischer Kunstverein, 1970, north.p.