on art viewing:
Your friend comes to visit. You go to whatever exhibit you found on the New York Times website that morning while he was sleeping. At the museum, he talks about the pictures in a voice loud enough to make you uncomfortable. He asks, “What do you think makes this painting so powerful?” Or, “What do you think this artist is trying to say?” The questions are not stupid. It’s just that you can’t think of how to answer them without sounding stupid yourself. Should you say, “I think the vibrant use of orange really enhances the composition”? Or, “She’s critiquing commodity culture, while also reveling in it”? No! Intellectual conversations, as a woman I briefly dated once admonished me, are like public displays of affection—fun to be in, but mortifying to observe, and in a museum you know you’re being observed. But refusing to answer your friend’s questions is no solution either. You’re paralyzed. And you’re not even sure what you’re afraid of. You’re not sure whether your replies will make you look like a philistine or a snob. Which would be worse? Which are you more qualified to be?
You want to seem down-to-earth of course, but if only your desires were that simple. Modesty, after all, is just a means of demonstrating that you’re well positioned within the various cultural hierarchies that preside, just out of sight, like tactful event planners, over all variety of rituals in New York City—hierarchies you can best show you’ve conquered by pretending they don’t exist, by being completely yourself, but gracefully so, sans agape mouth. Museums, with their egalitarian educational goals and their obscurely significant high-culture objects, stage a confrontation between America’s democratic pretenses and the invidious struggle for prestige that these pretenses conceal and enable. At a place like MoMA it becomes painfully apparent that class and status ambiguities in America make for a comfortable blanket, but there’s plenty of room for tossing and turning, for kicking and pinching underneath it.
So what do you say to your friend? You’d think that your education would help you. Shouldn’t the time you spent in college or grad school have taught you how to behave in places like this, how to feel? The problem is generational, I suspect. Very few people leave college these days with the kind of well-developed reverence for high culture that would make it easy to know how to behave in a museum. Most students go to college to learn technological, financial, or managerial skills, and can acquire culture capital outside the traditional ensemble of highbrow pursuits. And those few who do end up majoring in English or art history will likely learn that reverence toward high culture is no longer so fashionable.
You want to seem down-to-earth of course, but if only your desires were that simple. Modesty, after all, is just a means of demonstrating that you’re well positioned within the various cultural hierarchies that preside, just out of sight, like tactful event planners, over all variety of rituals in New York City—hierarchies you can best show you’ve conquered by pretending they don’t exist, by being completely yourself, but gracefully so, sans agape mouth. Museums, with their egalitarian educational goals and their obscurely significant high-culture objects, stage a confrontation between America’s democratic pretenses and the invidious struggle for prestige that these pretenses conceal and enable. At a place like MoMA it becomes painfully apparent that class and status ambiguities in America make for a comfortable blanket, but there’s plenty of room for tossing and turning, for kicking and pinching underneath it.
So what do you say to your friend? You’d think that your education would help you. Shouldn’t the time you spent in college or grad school have taught you how to behave in places like this, how to feel? The problem is generational, I suspect. Very few people leave college these days with the kind of well-developed reverence for high culture that would make it easy to know how to behave in a museum. Most students go to college to learn technological, financial, or managerial skills, and can acquire culture capital outside the traditional ensemble of highbrow pursuits. And those few who do end up majoring in English or art history will likely learn that reverence toward high culture is no longer so fashionable.
middlebrow pretension:
We probably all know an older colleague or friend of our parents who doesn’t suffer from this problem. He talks piously about Beethoven, Rembrandt, Freud. When a ballet performance ends he emits vaguely sexual noises to underscore what a profound experience he’s had and what a dullard you must be if you couldn’t summon the same enthusiasm or happened to be thinking about whether you could put off doing your laundry for another day right as the performance was reaching its crescendo. This is how a previous generation showed itself to be cultured. You look at these people with amusement, especially when they evince unctuous zeal in the face of contemporary art that doesn’t deserve or seek to inspire this kind of attitude. They look at you with perplexity when you report conversations using the phrases, “I was like,” and “he was like,” or declare approvingly that a video installation reminded you of The Matrix.
It’s not that this older art enthusiast is in a culturally secure position—though he may have seemed to be when you were an adolescent, and his erudite conversation at your family dinner table aroused in you those early stirrings of intellectual insecurity and ambition from which you still haven’t recovered today. His painstaking efforts to demonstrate his knowledge are the essence of middlebrow. But so are all the anxieties I’m describing here. If I’m being honest, the feelings I experience when I enter a museum are as middlebrow as the Van Gogh “Starry Night” drink coasters that someone bought for my mom, probably at the MoMA gift shop. I’m looking to improve myself. I feel inadequate. I’m hoping to impress people.
There’s a difference, however, between the previous generation of strivers and ours. For both, trying too hard to show off your expertise is a dead giveaway that you haven’t got as much status as you’d like. But in previous decades there was still a belief that those who took advantage of inexpensive museum fares, public libraries, and so forth were elevating themselves. For my generation, say those born around or after 1968, the sign that you’re at the top of the hierarchy is a readiness to acknowledge that the high ground you’ve come to occupy isn’t actually higher than any other ground.
There’s a difference, however, between the previous generation of strivers and ours. For both, trying too hard to show off your expertise is a dead giveaway that you haven’t got as much status as you’d like. But in previous decades there was still a belief that those who took advantage of inexpensive museum fares, public libraries, and so forth were elevating themselves. For my generation, say those born around or after 1968, the sign that you’re at the top of the hierarchy is a readiness to acknowledge that the high ground you’ve come to occupy isn’t actually higher than any other ground.
