Conceptual Art: People-Watching
By Piri Halasz
Herewith I offer a piece of conceptual art: an exhibition of invisible paintings and sculpture, created by myself going to museums solely to look at the other people there. I got this idea from making the rounds last spring, and reporting in my column on the people I’d seen while visiting the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
At the Guggenheim, the Brancusi exhibition was sharing the ramp with an abbreviated version of the "Singular Forms" minimalist show of last winter, and I noticed many younger people, especially boy-and-girl couples, there with me. Strolling through the permanent collection of the Met, I noticed how these galleries were mainly populated by families who looked like tourists, especially from the heartland of America. These good people looked to me more like lower middlebrows as opposed to the upper middlebrows of the
Guggenheim audience, who looked much more like New Yorkers. My definition of upper middlebrows and lower middlebrows comes from the 1949 article on the subject in Harper’s by Russell Lynes, and the chart prompted by that article in Life. Both are still worth reading. As Lynes explained, the highbrows nurtured culture (his model highbrow was Greenberg). The upper middlebrows disseminated culture, and the lower middlebrows consumed it—the upper middlebrows by contributing to upper middlebrow magazines like the New Yorker, and to lower middlebrow ones like the Saturday Evening Post (as well as creating the comic books and pulp fiction that lowbrows read before the advent of TV).
What has more importantly changed since 1949 is the direction to which the upper middlebrow looks for inspiration (upper middlebrows including not only journalists, but also curators and some educators, according to Lynes). In the 40s, this group looked upward to the highbrow, and tried to help the lower middlebrows respond to Picasso and Pollock. Starting in the 60s, the upper middlebrows started looking down to the lower middlebrows and
lowbrows, not only for source material but also for values. Picasso, it is true, had used newspaper clippings and other detritus from mass-produced culture for his collages and constructions, but he never shared the underlying premise upon which mass-produced culture is based, namely that whatever sells the most is the best, and the hell with any other sort of value judgment. Only in the 60s did a majority of contemporary art lovers start to revere mass appeal and resent critical judgment.
Along with such diminished expectations, I speculated, had come a decline of interest in older art. Painting was "old-fashioned" to people taught to think that the Mona Lisa should have a mustache. When I was in college in the 50s, I went to the Met with a Columbia classics major. We looked at Greek vases, and he explained that the inscriptions on many meant "the boy is beautiful," because the vases were designed as gifts by Greek men to their teenaged lovers. Last spring, it seemed as though young couples were more likely to want to look at modrun art, and I said "modrun" because even
conceptualism is no longer considered postmodern, but "modern." Few critics besides me talk about the great wave of reaction that started with Rauschenberg’s white paintings in 1951 as "postmodernism" any more. However ephemeral or soulless new work may be, it nonetheless gets called Modernism, to judge from a review by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times that
defined Duchamp’s "Fountain" as "the great breakthrough of modernism." Evidently there’s still such an aura about modernism that everybody wants to say the recent art they admire is "modern." But I digress.
Revisiting the Met and Guggenheim this fall, I found their audiences more alike than I’d thought in the spring, but then, I visited more of each museum. At the Met, I looked at special exhibitions, besides the permanent collection, and I looked at both the Guggenheim’s special exhibitions and its permanent collection. Many people at the Met were still obviously tourists. I could tell by the maps of the museum they carried and consulted, but a fair share were Europeans, nor did they look square. I saw a substantial number of tourists at the Guggenheim, too, particularly looking at the permanent collection (except for a German tour group being led around a special exhibition of photography). Meanwhile, the Childe Hassam show at the Met had a sizeable share of what looked more like New Yorkers. Quite a few were younger, and, though they weren’t as likely to be in pairs, they were really looking at the paintings on view, the way highbrows do. So I’m not quite ready to say the past is doomed just yet.
(© Copyright Piri Halasz 2004. This article is excerpted and adapted from Ms. Halasz’s online column, From the Mayor’s Doorstep,
http://piri.home.mindspring.com)
