Sing Along with Michael
Paul Werner
The Athenians had a name for him: theoros, the man whose role among the people was to bear witness. Michael Kimmelman is such a witness, the senior art-critic at the New York Times, a Judith Miller, as it were, to the Grand Jury of the culture-conscious crowd. And the very least one expects from him is a certain professional smarts. One does not find it in this book, and neither, I suspect, will Two, Three and Four. The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa (Penguin Press, 2005) is Kimmelman’s foray into cultural slumming, loaded with guru-trash insights like "Beauty depends on individual expression," or "The world is full of amazing surprises." For this a tree had to die?
"Put differently, this book is, in part, about how creating, collecting and even just appreciating art can make living a daily masterpiece," writes Kimmelman. Yet I can’t imagine anyone who’s seriously thought about art, let alone who has collected or created it, and who’d be taken in by these platitudes. There’s a rambling chapter telling us how Bonnard made great art out of his sufferings at the hands of his wife, because, after all, "art is born of love," followed by another rambling chapter arguing that "amateur snapshots are often appealing" and concluding, like Martha Stewart, that you should ship your own old faded photographs to the museum. This chapter’s followed by a third–it tends to ramble somewhat, by the way, and it ends with the argument that "art becomes our entrée to the sublime." Entrée? Honey, I’m still waiting for the appetizer.
Anyone can be "creative" in Kimmelman’s book. Well, sure, but as they say back in Senegal, "Diop Douf," meaning (if you’ll pardon the sloppy Wolof) that every Joe may be crazy but that doesn’t mean every crazy’s just a guy named Joe. True, if you’re trying to get someone into bed it helps to tell them sex makes a great artist; and perhaps the drug dealers in Washington Square sell cocaine to psychology majors by promising it’ll turn them into little Freuds; the bars in the East Village are crammed every weekend with kids who think they’re artists because they’re getting smashed. If that were the kind of book Kimmelman had written it would have been no worse, as advice, than any number of similar books going back to Baudelaire through Pater and Wilde. The first difference (leaving aside the obvious one, between Hyperion and a satyr) is that Wilde and Pater and Baudelaire never told you it would be easy.
The second difference lies in Kimmelman’s imagined audience and patronizing, talk-down attitude. Kimmelman’s artificial paradise is here already, or rather there, in your boring, petty lives, America. At least most artists have the honesty and strength to leave Mom and Dad back in Ohio. Kimmelman’s subtly sadistic take is that Mom and Dad were artists to begin with, despite (or rather, because of) the boring, petty unimportant details of daily existence that made Mom and Dad the people you decided to leave to begin with. One of Kimmelman’s chapters even contains the kind of excruciating photograph of the author that most of us hope our mothers won’t bring out in front of company. The book’s so middle-brow, so 50s, so Republican, I can’t even imagine Peoria wanting a part of it. Especially not Peoria. I forgot who once pointed out that most working-class stiffs may talk about a hand-holding romance with Little Nelly Kelly next door, but they all dream of screwing Sophia Loren on a trampoline, and Kimmelman’s no Sophia Loren, even as you watch him screw himself for the money.
"The idea behind [this book]," writes Kimmelman, "is that art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully." This is Self-Help for the wannabe art-lover, and like all self-help books it teaches learned, cultural self-helplessness. It’s like those books and courses and reading groups about Proust that are predicated on the assumption that the participants can’t read French and will never finish A la Recherche, anyhow, because if they came close they’d get to the part toward the end where Baron de Charlus pays to be whipped by young soldiers in a brothel. Mothers never see what they don’t want to see, but Kimmelman, like Donald Rumsfeld, gets a subtle, vicious pleasure from all this, asking repeatedly: "Who knows?" and "Who can ever really know?" when, like Rumsfeld, he really means: "You don’t want to know, and I don’t want to tell you."
The French equivalent of the theoros is the huissier, whose job is to walk into the room when a man is in bed with another man’s wife. As Kimmelman put it, "it is always good to keep your eyes open, because you never know what you will discover."
Then again, it’s sometimes smart to keep your eyes closed, especially if you’re paid to do so. Kimmelman is less of a theoros than a reissiuh, a huissier in reverse, endowed like most Times reporters with a talent for not seeing what it pays to not see. In this book he tries to pass on his hard-learned skills, though not so skillfully, alas, as Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who once explained, "Some have suggested that it is public-spirited to advocate that in order to reach the communities we serve, we should seek to demystify the museum-going experience. I must say, I view our role quite differently; in fact as the very opposite." Nor as brazenly as Roger Kimball, the critic from the neo-conservative New Criterion, who lays waste to whole forests in order to denounce to his readers those evil Marxists and fee-minists who say the wrong things about paintings–paintings about which he, Kimball, has nothing to say to begin with. The point, in each case, is not to stand witness to the artwork or the art-life, but to demonstrate that an artwork is not to be witnessed, or understood, but admired–now shut up.
Kimmelman is consistent here with his work for the Times, and consistent with much of the cultural theory floating around the Times these days. I just wish he’d done as well in this book as in his columns. Or at least as smoothly. The great Russian basso Alexander Kipnis used to tell how, at the end of World War I, he had begun a charity concert for war victims with the Four Serious Songs of Johannes Brahms. At the sung passage, "For a man hath no preeminence over a beast," an elderly officer tottered to his feet and shouted: "You, perhaps, Sir, but not I!" That is where criticism should begin, not where it ends.
Paul Werner is the editor of WOID, a journal of visual language. He is the author of Museum Inc.: Inside the Global Art World.
