Quantity or Quality?
Piri Halasz
Mali Morris, Blue Spot, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 34 x 36 cm.
Seven days a week, The New York Times covers the art scene. Aside from "art news" (prices, prizes, museum expansions, etc.), the biggest share of that coverage discusses contemporary art as defined by Duchamp, when he suggested that anything can be art if the artist says it is. I agree that anything can be art, but I add that doesn’t necessarily make it good art. I was underwhelmed by The Gates; nor was I thrilled with the Überorgan hung by Tim Hawkinson in the atrium in the IBM building, a concatenation of balloons and tubes vaguely suggestive of intestines, emitting, through anus-like horns, sounds equally suggestive of flatulence. The bathroom humor of Fountain lives on.
Art in the Duchampian tradition was almost all that could be seen in "Contemporary Voices: Works from the UBS Collection" at the Museum of Modern Art this spring. A corporate collection, given or promised to MoMA, it was dominated by artists already overly represented in the museum’s permanent collection, where they can be seen any time. Do we need yet more Rauschenberg, Twombly, Clemente or Nauman, I asked myself, as I strolled through it. Yet more Kiki Smith, Howard Hodgkin, Guston, Close, Warhol or Lichtenstein? Evidently, we do if we want to satisfy the crowds I saw around me, with mommies and daddies teaching their children that such art is to be admired. This audience has developed in the past half-century, entering in the later 50s to witness abstract expressionism, and, since most of them couldn’t warm up to that, welcoming pop art when it began to dominate the scene in the early 60s.
These art lovers, or rather their spiritual descendants, continue to multiply. According to the NEA, the number of Americans who went to museums and galleries (of any sort) has grown 50 percent in twenty years, from 36.2 million people in 1982 to 54.3 million in 2002. Not only the demand for art but also the supply has increased. New York had about 90 galleries in the 40s, about three hundred in the 60s, roughly twice that now. It appears likely that there are about ten times as many artists in the U.S. today as there were in 1950, while the population of the country as a whole has only doubled. Are Americans five times as talented as they were in 1950? Or does this increase in quantity merely reflect demand, and correspond to a dilution in quality?
My regular readers will probably suspect how I stand on these questions, but they may not know all of how I explain my point of view. I’m not an elitist in that I think you have to be rich or socially prominent in order to make or appreciate the best art. I do think education–anyway, the right education–can help, but even the best teachers must have some raw material to start with. I don’t believe that "all men are created equal" means that all people are created alike. I may be able to carry a tune, but that doesn’t mean I could sing at the Met (or even be able to hear when a singer is sharp or flat). I may be able to throw a ball, but that doesn’t mean I could pitch for the Red Sox (or know the difference between a knuckle ball and a slider).
The fact that more people want to make and appreciate art doesn’t mean they are all equally capable of doing so. I feel that people with better aptitudes to make and appreciate art may already have been part of an earlier art world, and that many in those crowds which come surging after have lesser aptitudes–because all of us like best to do something when we do it well. I suspect that persons with lesser sensitivity to color and composition may find it easier to create and respond to art as defined by Duchamp than to more traditional modern art, which may help to explain why we see so much of the former, and so little of the latter. Artists in the Duchampian tradition may use literary or performing aptitudes to supplement their visual ones, but this only makes me wonder why they aren’t trying to become writers or movie producers.
Still, all is not lost in the Big Apple. The large canvases in the Larry Zox show at Stephen Haller showed me the radiance and airy expansiveness of color-field painting from the 60s, while the smaller and more subdued recent acrylics of Mali Morris at Robert Steele demonstrated that even in the 21st century, color-field painting, now more accurately known as modernism, still aspires to and often achieves excellence.
This article is excerpted and adapted from Ms. Halasz’s online column, From the Mayor’s Doorstep, http://piri.home.mindspring.com )
