Exhibiting Contempt
Art museums are under
pressure these days. There's the constant hunger for money, exacerbated by the
decline in government funding. There is brutal competition for donors and works
of art. Since the onset of the culture wars, museums also have faced the hazard
of political controversy and the chilling effect it can have on potential
sponsors. Perhaps most relentless is box office pressure--the demand to boost
attendance.
A recent
New York Times article argued that these burdens have made the job of
museum director less desirable than it might seem. Perhaps so. But that doesn't
excuse the way some directors have responded to these pressures: with a style
of populism that is very different from a genuine democratic sensibility.
Museum populism is not quite the same as the blockbuster
syndrome. Though devised and marketed on a large scale, shows like the upcoming
Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington or the Monet
retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston fall within the traditional
boundaries of what these institutions display. They may not contain much that
is conceptually fresh, but they do provide mass access to artistic
masterpieces. You can't really argue with that. The populist trend, by
contrast, draws museums away from art their curators sincerely believe is
great--or sometimes away from art entirely. The current, defining example is
the "The Art of the Motorcycle," now on view at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum
in New York City. Other examples include the exhibition of landscapes by the
traditionalist painter Andrew Wyeth that just closed at the Whitney Museum of
American Art and the Louis Comfort Tiffany show that just opened at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Museum
populism began with an unlikely figure: a patrician medievalist by the name of
Thomas Hoving, who was the director of the Met from 1967 to 1977. Hoving is the
guy who came up with the idea of flying huge banners over the entrance to the
museum. He also essentially invented the blockbuster show. His tenure began
with a splashy exhibition on royal patronage and built to the crescendo of
"King Tut," which visitors waited in long lines to see in 1977. In an
entertaining book published a few years ago, Making the Mummies Dance:
Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art , Hoving unabashedly recounts his own
Machiavellian management and P.T. Barnum-style hype. But despite his excesses,
Hoving was still in some sense a conventional-minded curator. It never occurred
to him that you could herd even more people into an art museum if you didn't
force them to look at art at all. Thus it was left to the San Diego Museum of
Art to mount, a few years back, a Dr. Seuss retrospective, and to the Whitney
to mount a fashion show titled "The Warhol Look" last year.
Conservative critics such as Jed Perl and
Hilton Kramer, who predictably have decried the motorcycle exhibit, might
reflect upon the fact that the populist approach it represents grew out of the
Mapplethorpe-National Endowment for the Arts controversy of the late
1980s--which they started.
Charged with being out of
touch both with popular morality and with popular taste and punished with a
loss of funds, museum directors have been trying hard to demonstrate that they
are not elitist, difficult, and obscure. The best way to prove you're
not a snob is by not letting your museum seem empty. And the master of
preventing emptiness, while at the same time cultivating it, is Thomas R.
Krens, the director the Guggenheim.
The
hallmarks of Krens' 10 year tenure have been aggressive global expansion--there
are now three Guggenheims in Europe in addition to the two in New York--and the
box office smash. In the last few years, the museum's main branch, the iconic
Frank Lloyd Wright corkscrew, has mounted huge retrospectives of less difficult
contemporary artists, such as Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg. Where
modern art ceases to be popular, Krens ceases to display modern art, at least
in a main-event manner. Last summer, Krens cooperated with the Chinese
government in mounting an exhibition titled "China: 5000 Years" that fell well
outside the museum's charter. But with aggressive promotion, including
advertising in Chinese language newspapers, the museum set new records for
itself, drawing an average of nearly 3,000 visitors a day. The commercial
success of "The Art of the Motorcycle" has dwarfed that. Nearly 4,000 people a
day are paying an obscene $12 per head to see the shimmering machines, making
it by far the best-attended show in the Guggenheim's history.
An exhibition on motorcycle design at the Guggenheim would
be defensible if it made a better argument for either the cultural significance
or the aesthetic importance of the machines. Industrial design is a stepchild
of fine art, and the cross-fertilization of high and pop is an important part
of the story of artistic modernism. But the exhibition doesn't make the case.
The basic message of the show is: Motorcycles are really cool; here are a bunch
of really cool motorcycles. It includes too many machines--114 in all. Some of
these are undeniably eye-catching, but by the end, the nonaficionado is bored
silly. Part of the problem is that, as you might expect from an exhibition
direct-marketed to motorcycle clubs, the approach is design-technical rather
than design-aesthetic or design-cultural. The information plates that accompany
the exhibition and the catalog text both seem pitched at pre-established
fanatics. Here's a snatch from the catalog entry for the 1914 Cyclone, one of a
few truly stunning bikes in the show:
The hallmark feature of
the 61-ci V-twin Cyclone engine is its shaft-and-bevel-gear-driven overhead-cam
and valve arrangement. The motorcycle also contains a number of other important
features that presage modern high-performance engine technology: a
near-hemispherical combustion chamber, the extensive use of cage-roller and
self-aligning ball bearings, and a precise, recessed fit of the crankcase,
cylinders and heads all contribute to the engine's exceptional performance.
Even with its modest compression ration of 5.5 to 1, it is estimated that the
Cyclone produces 45 hp at 5000 rpm.
As curator
of the exhibition, Krens lays on this technical specification as a defense
against the charge of unseriousness. But in doing so, he more or less
eviscerates his own claim that these machines belong in a modern art museum, as
opposed to one focused on design, transportation, or history.
Perhaps ironically, museum populism comes with
a tendency toward corporate exploitation. BMW is the sole sponsor of an
exhibition that includes BMW motorcycles, including a current model. In its
defense, the Guggenheim points out that there are only six BMW bikes, fewer
than the number of Hondas or Harleys. But the point is not that the sponsor
influences the content of the show. It is that the sponsor influences the fact
of the show. That a company like BMW can get brownie points for art patronage
by promoting its own product is part of the reason that this exhibition took
place, instead of the one examining 20 th century art at the end of
the millennium, which it replaced. The current Tiffany show at the Met is
sponsored by Tiffany. Everywhere, the border between the museum and its gift
shop is growing more porous. At the Guggenheim SoHo, you can't enter the
galleries except through the gift shop.
The Guggenheim has been busy
rationalizing its decision to mount the motorcycle exhibition. Krens, a
motorcycle enthusiast and the owner of two BMWs, contributes an utterly
unpersuasive introduction to the catalog, in which he breezily declares that
the distinction between the unique work of art and the mechanically produced
object is now "irrelevant." In other words, it's open season for guys like him.
Others are embracing this philosophy of complete categorical breakdown. The
Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art just hired its new head away from Disney. In
interviews, Robert Fitzpatrick, who styles himself director and CEO, has said
he wants to make the museum friendlier to visitors. According to my sources, he
recently stunned his curators by proposing to fill the galleries with potted
plants (they draw bugs--no good for paintings).
Resisting empty populism
doesn't have to mean a haughty elitism. An aesthetic democrat says that more
people could profit from the experience of art if those who ran museums thought
more creatively about how to converse with their audience. A populist says that
if you drop what is difficult in art, you can get more people to pay attention.
The democrat at the helm of a museum, a symphony orchestra, or a publishing
house tries to expand his audience while challenging it. The populist, by
contrast, panders to his audience, figuring out what it likes and then
delivering it in heaps. Where the democrat exhibits respect for the public, the
populist exhibits contempt.
