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« Back to Is Contemporary Art, Art? main page   Transcript for: Is Contemporary Art, Art?Think Tank Transcripts: Is Contemporary Art, Art? ANNOUNCER: 'Think Tank' has been made possible by Amgen, arecipient of the Presidential National Medal of Technology. Amgen,bringing better, healthier lives to people worldwide throughbiotechnology. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, theRandolph Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. MR. WATTENBERG: Hello. I'm Ben Wattenberg. Today we take a visitto the world of art. Has art become too abstract? Too political? Tooobscene? Should the federal government pay for it? Joining us to sort through the conflict and the consensus areHilton Kramer, editor of The New Criterion, co-editor of the recentbook 'Against the Grain, an art critic for The New York Observer;Peter Plagens, art critic for Newsweek magazine and author of'Moonlight Blues -- An Artist's Art Criticism' and a painter whosework is in many collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum; MarciaTucker, director of the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New YorkCity; and Neal Benezra, chief curator of the Hirshhorn Museum andSculpture Garden in Washington, DC. The question before this house: Is Contemporary Art Art? This weekon Think Tank. When I was growing up less than 100 years ago, we learned aboutthe glories of Michelangelo, Rembrandt and the French impressionists.In much of today's art, however, traditional subjects likelandscapes, still-lifes, religious scenes, battlefield scenes,portraits are out; abstract expressionism, neo-expressionism,conceptualism, post-modernism and a lot of other 'isms' are in. After World War II, painters like Mark Rothko explored the uses ofgeometry and color in his canvases. Ad Reinhardt painted simple blacksquares and titled them with names such as Black Series Number 59.And Andy Warhol endlessly reproduced pop images of Marilyn Monroe. Today artists are pushing to new limits. Some critics claim thattoo much of the new art is obscene or even blasphemous, such as thecontroversial 'Piss Christ' by Andres Serrano. Others point to the1993 Whitney Museum display of the Rodney King video as toopolitical. And whether you like it or not, the government sometimespay for it. But art marches on. A recent widely heralded exhibition by BruceNauman at the Museum of Modern Art includes two wolves, two deer, ahanging collection of simulated dead animal parts, and clown torture. Critics and collectors have hailed much of this art, while many inthe public are shaking their heads, including sometimes me. Mr. Benezra, let me ask you first, and let's go around the hornonce quickly, what is it about contemporary art that makes itimportant and/or different? MR. BENEZRA: To my mind, contemporary art-- the making of art today in the late 20th century is not markedlydifferent from the making art by artists in the late -- in the early20th century. I don't think that people working today are so muchdifferent than Picasso and Matisse and Duchamps. They want us to seethings, think about things, feel things that don't normally enterinto daily life and to challenge us with those thoughts. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Marcia Tucker? MS. TUCKER: Well, I think that what contemporary art does is toencourage and stimulate people to think for themselves, to thinkindependently, and also to think critically. But it raises a lot ofquestions and opens out on to debate. And -- well, to dialogue anddebate. And always dialogue and debate about the ideas and issuesthat are most important to our own time. MR. WATTENBERG: Great. Peter Plagens? MR. PLAGENS: It has a kind of healthy unruliness about it, Ithink, although probably any observer at any time during the last 100years might have told you that his or her particular scene seemed tobe unruly. But it is no longer the state, as an artist oncecomplained to me about 20 years ago, 'Why is it that 98 percent ofthe artworks are made out of 2 percent of the available materials?'You have a nice sort of Pickwickian club in which anybody can makeany work of art out of anything. You get a kind of a mess at thebottom, but you get some nice surprises at the top. MR. WATTENBERG: I think, Hilton Kramer, you would stand inopposition to some of these remarks. MR. KRAMER: Well, I think probably from my perspective the mostdistinguishing mark of contemporary art isn't its controversialnature or the disagreeableness of the imagery, because that's been --those have been attributes about for a long time. What reallydistinguishes contemporary art is the almost instant respectabilitythat is conferred upon even the most outrageous and far-out andrepulsive ideas. That is, the contemporary art scene is an open doorin which is not only encouraged but embraced. MR. WATTENBERG: Why don't you give us some examples of what isrepulsive? MR. KRAMER: Well, the Nauman -- the Bruce Nauman show at theMuseum of Modern Art is certainly an example where a good deal of itis an absolutely unremitting assault on the senses. Ugly air-crackingnoises, electronic noises, repulsive images, sexual violence, people,you know, doing unspeakable things to other people, and so on. MR. BENEZRA: It's important to say that Nauman's not a youngartist any longer. Nauman's a veteran, a senior artist, very wellrespected, and first appeared in New York in the late 1960s, asHilton knows. And at that time his work was heavily criticized,thoroughly criticized, by all manner of critics and professionals of,you know, one stripe or another. And he has worked very, very hardand very, very long to earn the stature that he's received. It hasn'tbeen an overnight, immediate embrace that he's received from the artworld. MS. TUCKER: You know, I did the first retrospective. I was aco-curator for it, and none of the work included the images that you,I think, took objection to. And, in fact, a lot of the work -- theideas in that work really became -- they're very, very much in themainstream now, but even then it was quite controversial simplybecause people weren't used to it. And when there is a new form, itappears to be an absence of form. MR. PLAGENS: I'd like to say something about the nature of aconversation about art, and this is by way of ground rules -- for theground rules, which is it has been my experience that anyconversation about contemporary art, particularly where there areimages involved, anybody who is a proponent automatically looks likea fool because the categories of the images -- you know, theupside-down animals; the clowns saying, 'No, no, no, no' -- when youlist them like that -- MR. WATTENBERG: The white-on-white squares. I mean -- MR. PLAGENS: Yeah, the white-on-white square. If you were todescribe some of the most hallowed works of modern art in terms likethat, just in simple terms of the iconography, maybe a little bit ofthe style -- Picasso's 'Demoiselles d'Avignon,' you know, a bunch ofwomen in a brothel with African masks for faces, or something likethat -- immediately to a common-sense viewer it seems an exercise,you know, in idiocy. And all I would caution is that, with Nauman,with a lot of other artists, it isn't what you do; it's the way thatyou do it. I can't fully explain why I think the South Americatriangle, for instance -- the steel beams with the upside-down chair-- is moving, but it's moving to me, and it's the way that it's done. MR. WATTENBERG: Is the white-on-white square moving to you? MR. PLAGENS: More intellectually than viscerally. I mean, I seethe date. I know when it was done. The act of courage. The leapforward. It does more for me intellectually than it does, say, youknow, sensuously hanging on a wall in front of me. MR. BENEZRA: I think it has to be said also that thatwhite-on-white square is now 80 -- you know, approximately 80 yearsold. And time passes, and perceptions change. MR. WATTENBERG: We've moved on to black-on-black squares. I mean-- MR. BENEZRA: Well, it becomes -- things become more accessiblewith time, it seems to me. MR. KRAMER: Well, actually, Ad Reinhardt had a predecessor inAlexander Rodchenko in early 20th century Russian art. He did blackon black long before Ad Reinhardt did. So there was already atradition for it by the time Ad got to it. But I think it helps tounderstand both the conflicts within the contemporary art scene andthe differences of opinion about them to understand that the wholemodernist tradition as I read it really consists of two quitedifferent traditions. There's what I would call the -- sort of thetradition-oriented modernists, in which category I would placeMatisse and Picasso most preeminently, who really come out of a verystudied relationship to the artists who preceded them, and then whatI would call guerrilla modernists, like the Dadists preeminently, whodeliberately set out to wage war against established views of art. And what distinguishes contemporary art today in the 1990s for meis the academicization of that guerrilla modernism -- that is, BruceNauman, for example, it's what I call 'graduate school Dada' in thebeginning, and he didn't -- you know, he wasn't an obscure person inthe beginning. I mean, his first show in New York was at LeoCastelli, which was, you know, like opening on Broadway in the artworld. So I mean, you know, even when he was controversial and thecritics didn't like it, I mean, if you're sponsored by Leo Castelliin Nauman's generation, you had it made, right at the beginning. MR. BENEZRA: Well, we could get seriously into Nauman, he didn'thave it made. Nauman had a very -- MR. WATTENBERG: But what difference does that make whether he hadit made or not? I mean, he -- you walk into the museum and you sayhanging dead animal parts. Is that correct? And then, I mean -- MS. TUCKER: You're reducing it, though. MR. WATTENBERG: -- somebody's got to explain why -- MR. BENEZRA: Why? Why do we have to explain? MR. WATTENBERG: Because -- well, you don't have to explain it, butI can ask you to explain it. MR. BENEZRA: It seems to me that one of the primary virtues andone of the most interesting things about contemporary art is that weshould be thinking about it, it seems to me, as a kind of researchendeavor, and some of it will fall out with time. You know, there'sscience that falls out with time. There's research of, you know, manydifferent types. But it doesn't hold up over time. It falls out. It'sdismissed. The same thing with art. Some things will hold up overtime, and some things won't. The jury is out. MR. KRAMER: Yeah, but that's just a cop-out. MR. BENEZRA: No, I don't think so. MR. KRAMER: I mean, saying, 'Well, you know, we don't know yet.'But the curators, like yourself, who selected Nauman or artist X or Yover the other artists available to your institution to confer thisgreat distinction upon and to spend a great deal of money in mountingthis exhibition for, I mean, you've made an intellectual judgment andyou've made an aesthetic judgment, an intellectual judgment, whichyou really should be called upon to defend. I mean, you can't say,'Well, it's research; we don't know if it's going to really beworthwhile.' I mean, you've made that decision; why can't you takethe public into your confidence and explain the basis of yourdecision? MS. TUCKER: Well, maybe it's not important anymore to say, 'Thisis the single most important thing that has happened.' Maybe it'smore important to say -- MR. KRAMER: I'm not arguing -- no, we know -- MS. TUCKER: Just let me finish my sentence. MR. KRAMER: We know the curators -- MS. TUCKER: Maybe it's -- MR. KRAMER: We know the curators -- MR. WATTENBERG: Hold on. Hold on. MS. TUCKER: Just let me finish my sentence. Maybe it's moreimportant to say this is an artist who's dealing with reallyimportant questions and issues in very new and different ways andit's important to invite the public to engage in that dialogue that'screated by that work. The other thing is that, you know, people have a veryold-fashioned idea about what art is supposed to do. It's supposed tobe beautiful? You know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, just asobscenity is in the eye of beholder and blasphemy is in the eye ofthe beholder. MR. KRAMER: Yes, well, I remember very well, Marcia, your -- theexhibition you did called 'Bad Painting.' So you've reallypopularized the idea of bad art. MS. TUCKER: It was -- MR. KRAMER: But you say art raises questions -- should raisequestions. I agree with you. But what questions is Nauman raising? MR. BENEZRA: It seems to me that there's a qualitative differencebetween what the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museumof Art do. MR. PLAGENS: No, but I'm not asking about the National Gallery.What questions is Nauman raising? I've been told he's raisingquestions. MR. BENEZRA: He's raising the most serious kinds of questionsabout how people interact in society, how people treat each other insociety. MR. WATTENBERG: All right. Let me move it on from that. I mean,one of the charges made against modern art, the very modern art, isthat it has become highly politicized, that these are people makingpolitical points. Is that valid? MS. TUCKER: If you go back to Ancient Greece, cultural practiceswere a part of political life -- meaning the life of the polis, orthe city-state. Politics in the larger sense has to do with the waysin which art engages with social reality, with life. And I think thatthat is perhaps a place where we might differ, because the idea ofautonomous art, of an art that exists based on standards that arecompletely separate from -- or aesthetic standards, that there's anidea that there is an aesthetic existing apart, I don't think isviable today. MR. PLAGENS: Well, I'd like to get in here. One of the things thathappens -- and it happened with -- it happened to my mind withcubism, it happened with surrealism, and it's happening now with agenre of art that could loosely be called installation art. I don'tthink there has been much new morphologically on the scene since1975, the late '70s. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, could you explain what morphologicallymeans? MR. PLAGENS: It means in terms of the form. I mean, the idea offilling up a room with various objects -- video monitors, a pilesand, you know, what have you -- has been around for a long time. Imean, I don't know whether 1975 is some kind of Christopher Columbusdate, but that sort of thing has been established. And what hashappened over the last, oh, several years, if not 15 or 20 years, isthat artists have come along, used those forms -- Hilton would callit academization or whatever -- and put their political or socialcontent into it. It happened with cubism after a while. Cubism becamea kind of academic style. People went out and did cubist landscapes,you know, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe there could be a little bitmore formal inventiveness on the current scene. But, yes, in short answer to your question, yes, there is a lot ofpolitics in art, and one of the reasons seems to be that the sort offormal superstructure of installation art has been around for awhile, and artists have come along and said, 'Oh, that's very useful;I can say something with that,' and they've done it. And I have ahunch it'll wane a little bit. MR. KRAMER: Well, it's one of the real tenets of what has come tobe called post-modern art, of which this installation stuff is anexample, that it really rejects aesthetic criteria and does go intopolitics as one of the essentials. I remember the show a few yearsago by -- paintings by Julian Schnabel at the Pace Gallery in NewYork called the Fox Farm paintings. And these were supposed to be --I mean, they were sort of basically abstract paintings with words onthem, but these were supposed to be animal rights paintings -- thatis, the Fox Farm referred to farms in which foxes were raised toproduce, you know, fur for fur coats. And in the introduction in thecatalog of that exhibition, the subjects that were deemed permissiblefor a post-modern painting were listed by the author of the catalog,and there were feminist subjects, AIDS, homophobia, homelessness, andso on -- and animal rights being one of them. Of course, the curiousthing about that exhibition, most of the people in the -- came to theexhibition, who bought paintings, as I observed on a number ofoccasions, were women wearing mink coats. I mean, they had enough -- MR. PLAGENS: But not fox coats. MR. KRAMER: They had enough good taste not to wear a fox coat tothe exhibition in which they were buying a painting, but they werewearing mink coats. I mean, so there is an element of farce involvedin it. MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask this question, and perhaps, Marcia, youcan address it first. Is -- some of this art is objectionable to thevast majority of people. I mean, it has been described as blasphemousas in the Serrano 'Piss Christ.' My question is: Should thegovernment be paying for some of this? MS. TUCKER: Well -- MR. WATTENBERG: Which through the National Endowments for the Artsthat's been a big -- now we're sort of coming back to Washingtonturf. This is real politics, right? MS. TUCKER: Well, let me first answer by saying that the peoplewho object most strongly to that image, that picture, have neveractually seen the work itself, much less seen the work in the contextof Serrano's other work. There seems to be a new school out now ofthe 'I refuse to see it, I don't want to see it, but I'll tell youabout it anyhow.' MR. WATTENBERG: Would you describe it? 'Piss Christ'? MS. TUCKER: It is a golden crucifix, but a very muted one, almostslightly blurry, bathed in a kind of golden light. And it's a largeCibachrome, so that the surfaces are very luminous. MR. WATTENBERG: Photograph. MS. TUCKER: What he did was he took a series of cheap plasticreplicas of very important icons and immersed them in body fluids,photographed them through those fluids, and -- MR. WATTENBERG: In -- you're reversing your a stand when you go'body fluid.' It was urine. MS. TUCKER: It was -- he used several fluids: water, blood, urine. MR. WATTENBERG: I see. MS. TUCKER: Those are also the three fluids in all human beings --all our bodies have in common. But what he did was restore all ofthese icons, including a plaster reproduction of 'The Last Supper' toa kind of almost mythical stature again. So he's playing with that --he's putting the sacred and the profane together. He's playing withthe mind and the body. Should it be funded? I would say that healthy government and asecure government is a government that supports art, andcontroversial art, knowing that these kinds of debates are going tobe raised. MR. WATTENBERG: Would that include homophobic art, anti-Semiticart? MS. TUCKER: I think that -- I mean, again, characterizingsomething as -- MR. WATTENBERG: I mean, that's controversial. MS. TUCKER: Excuse me. MR. WATTENBERG: Wouldn't it? I mean -- MS. TUCKER: Characterizing something as homophobic or anti-Semiticis like characterizing something as blasphemous or obscene. These arevery slippery definitions. They are not legal definitions. MR. WATTENBERG: But you haven't answered my question. MS. TUCKER: I believe that works of art should be funded by thegovernment in order to support the entire endeavor. Some works willbe controversial; other works won't be. In fact, it's very few thatare actually controversial. MR. WATTENBERG: Neal Benezra, you are the chief curator at theHirshhorn. That gets public funds? MR. BENEZRA: Yes, certainly. MR. WATTENBERG: It's part of the Smithsonian. MR. BENEZRA: Part of the Smithsonian. MR. WATTENBERG: How do you come out on this issue? MR. BENEZRA:It's a difficult issue, it seems to me. It's a hard issue, and Ithink that sometimes there are some things that perhaps do violatepublic taste, public standards of taste. But it seems to me that, youknow, we just -- we just observed the Tailhook scandal with the Navy.We don't suddenly throw the baby out with the bathwater and say we'regoing to decommission the Navy because something's violated publicstandards of decency. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, excuse me. The people in the arts community-- the people in the Navy said, 'Okay, we messed up; we won't do thatagain.' The people in the arts community, when you say you haveblasphemed Christianity, they say, 'Well, that's our right of freeexpression; don't put a muzzle on us.' MR. BENEZRA: But it seems to me -- MR. WATTENBERG: And that's taxpayer money. MR. BENEZRA: It seems to me, as Marcia said, it's very difficultand very slippery to talk about these things in the abstract. Youreally have to focus in on a particular case and not speak in bigbuzz words like anti-Semitism, homophobic. These are hot, hot-buttonissues right now, and one has to be -- MR. WATTENBERG: Well, so is blasphemy. MR. BENEZRA: -- very, very careful. MR. WATTENBERG: I mean, so is blasphemy -- MR. BENEZRA: Of course. MR. WATTENBERG: -- and homo-eroticism. MR. BENEZRA: Of course. MR. WATTENBERG: Right. MR. BENEZRA: But so is sexual assault. MR. WATTENBERG: Hilton, I know you must want to get in on this. MR. KRAMER: Well, my own view is that the government should reallyget out of the business of making judgments about contemporary art.The system has -- the system that the National Endowment for the Artshas used, the so-called peer panel system, has been woefully corruptfor years in which members of the panel give each other -- confergrants upon each other. The painter Philip Pearlstein tells the storyabout serving on a peer panel years ago, and when he went down toparticipate in the panel he discovered that all the slides offigurative painters had been removed from consideration before thepanel was convened. There are lots of political agendas at the NEA,and they're most left-liberal agendas. MR. WATTENBERG: Let's wind this up going once around the room,starting with you, Neal Benezra. Is art in America in a healthycondition? MR. BENEZRA: I think art in the United States and in the world isin a very challenging time. It's a very interesting time. As a museumcurator very, very involved with contemporary art, I'm finding a lotto look at and a lot to think about and a lot to be challenged by. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Marcia? MS. TUCKER: Well, I think we are at a particularly dynamic point,because we are able to see and hear so many different perspectivesand ways of thinking about the relationship of art to our lives andour times. MR. WATTENBERG: Peter Plagens, artist and Newsweek writer. MR. PLAGENS: Well, I don't exactly think it's a golden age.Although it's hard to tell that when you're standing in your owntime. But I think it is -- the raucousness of it and the unrulinessof it and the contentiousness of it is, as far as I have been led tobelieve -- my experience -- is a generally healthy state. It would benice if we had a major movement out there somewhere on the horizon,but you can't dictate those things. MR. WATTENBERG: Hilton Kramer? MR. KRAMER: I think we're in a very fallow period creatively inthe arts. There are virtually no major figures. We're living more andmore by deconstructing our great achievements of the past rather thancreating new ones. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Thank you, Hilton Kramer, Marcia Tucker,Peter Plagens and Neal Benezra. And thank you. Please send your questions and comments to: NewRiver Media, 1150 17th Street, NW, Suite 1050, Washington, DC, 20036.We can be reached via E-mail at thinktv@aol.com. And do check out ournew home page on the World Wide Web at www.thinktank.com. For 'Think Tank,' I'm Ben Wattenberg. ANNOUNCER: Due to our special August programming, 'Think Tank'will move to Sunday at 6:30 a.m., beginning August 6th. 'Think Tank'will return to Saturday evenings at 6:30 on August 26th. And thank you. We enjoy hearing from our audience very much.Please send your comments toNew River Media, 1150 17th Street, NW,Washington, DC, 20036. Or we can be reached via E-mail atthinktv@aol.com. ANNOUNCER This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, in associationwith New River Media, which are solely responsible for itscontent. 'Think Tank' has been made possible by Amgen, bringing better,healthier lives to people worldwide through biotechnology. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, theRandolph Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. BEN WATTENBERG Return toThinkTank Online Home Page Think Tank ® is a Registered Trademark of BJW, Inc. All Content © Copyright 1995 New River Media, Inc. Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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