Stephen Colbert, Art Historian?
November 12, 2009 on 11:46 am | In Beyond the Walls | 5 Comments | Andrea D.| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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For someone who claims not to like art, Stephen Colbert possesses an uncanny ability to recognize (and exploit for comedic purposes) one of several on-going debates circulating throughout the Art World.
His interview with Thomas Campbell, the new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, started out innocently enough by Colbert-standards: there was candid discussion as to whether tapestries are merely “rugs you nail to the wall,” a passing reference to Night At The Museum, and assertions made about the palatability of Vermeer paintings.
But then Colbert caught me (and, quite possibly, Mr. Campbell) completely by surprise by bringing up a very relevant discussion:
COLBERT: I don’t know [what’s] art. I don’t know if that [coffee mug] is art, or if [Damien Hirst’s] shark is art…Who’s to say what is art? Is art only “good art” if an art critic says, “Yeah, that’s good art”? Or could it just be good art even if nobody knows it’s good art? Can “good art” exist without an audience?
CAMPBELL : We’ve got a lot of experts at the museum whose job it is to really understand the history of the time and to collect, make careful decisions, to bring forward objects that are really meaningful in the context of their periods. When you come through to present day, where the values are still really being kind of determined, it’s kind of a tricky business.
COLBERT: And who determines [their value]? You guys do. You elitists do. You elitists say, “That’s good, that’s bad” don’t you?
CAMPBELL: I’d say it’s our audience.
COLBERT: You put it in a museum. When you put it in a museum, you say “that’s art”.
Mr. Colbert has a valid point. Museum space is transformative: because the public ventures into museums with the intention of “seeing” the art objects inside, everything within a museum becomes subject to formal scrutiny. It is this transformative power that can turn your average discarded urinal into a “fountain,” or a pile of green candy into a work of art. People look at things differently in a museum, and simple details like the shape of a Brillo box or the alignment of a stack of steel rectangles appears much more purposeful and profound than it would, say, in your local supermarket.
It’s not that the objects change. What changes is how the objects are viewed. What changes is us.
Which brings me to the second part of Colbert’s argument: if it is the viewers who attribute artistic value to a work of art, (as Mr. Campbell claims), and that value is based on their own appreciation of its formal characteristics, their own knowledge or biases…if the viewers are responsible for “determining the value” of a work, then who has the right to judge whether an artwork is “good”? Who decides what’s a masterpiece, and what should be displayed in an obscure back hallway in the museum basement?
As Campbell points out, many museums (including the Met and the Modern) base the value of a piece of art on its significance to its historical context, or its importance to a particular artistic movement. A work’s value is less a question of how aesthetically pleasing it is, and more about how it fits into the “big picture” that is The Art History Canon. Obviously, this is not the only way to attribute “value” to works of art, but it’s often the best way to display a piece in order that it might be better understood by viewers as a part of the larger scheme of things. For museums whose primary focus is the experience between the object and the visitor, this is one of the most effective ways of displaying our collections. But the fact remains that somewhere along the line, someone in a museum has to make a decision prioritizing certain works over others. This is not necessarily “elitist,” but it is necessary.
In fact, this decisive act is not so different from Mr. Colbert’s decision to display his painted portrait over his fireplace, as opposed to some other location on his set. The portrait reflects the awards and accolades of the show, and thus its prominent location on the set makes it incredibly relevant to its context.
Does this make Mr. Colbert an elitist…? You can be the judge. But we do offer Mr. Colbert a “tip of our hat” for bringing this artistic debate to the forefront.
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Yes kudos to Colbert and Campbell for being a good sport…pretty funny.
I’m pretty sure he was joking with the elitist statement but I would say that IMO he does bring up a point of view that even some artists exude; which is that museums nowadays OVER focus on showing and procuring pieces from only the latest artistic genres (fads) of the last 50 years.
I am a contemporary artist who paints in older genre (impressionist manner). So where does my (and others who paint in older styles) work fit? Are we not ‘modern?’
By Campbell’s definition above, does that mean that my work is less worthy of consideration by museums than say a living mixed media graffiti artist because there has already been a Monet, Manet, Renoir, Cezanne, etc? I surely hope that’s not the case.
Comment by Ryan Vojir — November 13, 2009 #
Ryan brings up an interesting point. I agree, it would be incredibly difficult to “place” your work in a museum according to its historical context, as Campbell implies, if you’re currently a contemporary artist who is painting in an older style. As Ryan points out, these museums have to be careful not to define their collection by historical context alone…after all, “context” is about providing many examples that are reflexive of a time period, in order to make the scope as broad as possible.
For this reason, I wanted to ask Ryan’s opinion on the following: As an artist that is working now, (i.e. making you a “contemporary” artist) do you consider yourself a “modern” artist because you’re working in a modernist style? Or do you consider yourself “contemporary” despite your style of art being an older genre?
The reason I ask is because that boundary between Modern and Contemporary art is incredibly blurry, and I’d appreciate your take on it, as you appear to be working somewhere between the two labels.
Thanks!
Comment by ADuffie26 — November 15, 2009 #
The line between contemporary and Modern is quite clear, and Modern, except for a few like Anselm Kiefer, no longer exists. It actually does, but as it is not taught in art schools, it is no longer seen in museums or many galleries. Unless you have an MFA in hand no one will look at you, yet few great artists ever graduated from an art school. This includes music as with Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis at Julliard as it does for visual artsits.
Modern art layered meaning and was built of intertwining relationships of line, color, and structure as music does with melody, harmony and rhythm. True creative art is and always has been closer to music and poetry, the prosaic forms more illustrative of current desires of those who run the countries, not the popllace as a whole. It is about maintaining status quo, not exploring humanity, nature and god as all true art does.
Art now is strictly about the individual, contemporary does not use the entire picture plane, has no concern with form, color, flow, all that which is of life. It is about ideas, simplistic ideas, as art is not a theory, it starts from one, but works towards life. Theories are for teachers and reporters, not artists. And so art has suffered. It is more elitist than ever before in history. Few intelligent people have any interest in art as it has no interest in them, their lives, their families, their countries, their species, their world, their universe. It is about commerce, selling and speculating. It is about the glorified individual, and thats what the museums put before us, and why so few care.
Art has been ruined by art academies just as surely was it was in Cezannes time. We are at the end of a gilded age, one of Meism and Excess. Those days are over, and art must begin to reflect humanity, not the few who want to be called the chosen, just as much as other religious fanatics. Everyone wants to be special, with no special effort. And so it is.
art collegia delenda est
Comment by Donald Frazell — November 18, 2009 #
Without getting too far into it, doesn’t Time pick “good” art? Good art endures. Also, if I remember correctly, Robert Pirsig did some interesting thinking along these lines in “The Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” way back when.
Comment by Eric — November 24, 2009 #
Emperors without Clothes
Did it ever happen to you to be in a contemporary art exhibition and think: „I can paint that“, or „this installation looks like my garage“, or just „I don’t get it“.
As I walk through modern art museums and exhibitions where paintings are painted upside down, where I can hardly find any harmony in the composition let alone a message or inspiration in the artwork, I am wondering whether I am the only one to feel this way.
I remember walking through empty museum rooms blocked by a thin metal barrier, or wondering why the cleaning service had forgotten to remove the black spot on the floor just to discover later on that was the work of art.
I am asking myself how decadent we have become, and how influenced we are in our taste and sensibility to make them depending on the comments of few art critics who celebrate such works as highest art form and expression.
The most astonishing phenomenon to me is not that these works are exhibited and have achieved fame and a high commercial value, but that most of my fellow museums’ visitors are in awe in front of these works, and admire how a metal line between two walls in an empty room may mean anything beyond being a metal line. I remember watching with fascination how three elegant ladies obediently took off their Gucci shoes to wear a pair of dubious felt slippers to enter an installation made by a crushed wooden crate where inside a half living room was reproduced. As I was musing that probably a visit to IKEA would be more rewarding than admiring the crushed living room, I heard the “aaahs” and “oooohs” of the ladies inside the wooden crate.
At this point I want to ask: is anyone ever going to say: “These Emperors have no clothes!” is ever an art critic going to state that she sees no clothes on these artists and that such installations, digitally reworked compositions, upside down paintings and sculptures are an imposition on museums, galleries’ visitors.
I have the highest understanding for the cleaning service of a famous museum who disposed of a heap of metal and wood on the floor of the museum, and delivered it to the local discharge.
When have the curators of such exhibitions stopped to consider that it is all about the emotions raised in the visitors, it is not about the “objects”, i.e. paintings or installations, it is about giving the sense of belonging to the visitors in order to create a sustainable fulfilling art experience which touches not only the eyes but also and mainly the hearts of the people.
Dr. M.C. Remund is co-founder and partner of Kunstmuseum Gehrke-Remund in Baden Baden, Germany.
The Kunstmuseum Gehrke-Remund is a privately owned art museum dedicated to Frida Kahlo with 111 oil pantings of the Mexican artist (licensed replicas from: © Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2008. The exhibition has the most complete collection of Frida Kahlo oil paintings worldwide
Comment by Dr. Mariella Remund — November 30, 2009 #