How to Behave in an Art Museum

http://nplusonemag.com/how-to-behave-in-an-art-museum

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.

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.

art is marketing

Alice Gregory has a great piece in the latest n+1 magazine about working at Sotheby’s during the run-up in prices following the 2009 crash. Here’s a taster:

After a few months on the job, I was assigned a new duty—writing the essays that are printed beneath and between the reproduced images in the sale catalogue…

I sprinkled about twenty adjectives (“fey,” “gestural,” “restrained”) amid a small repertory of active verbs (“explore,” “trace,” “question” ). I inserted the phrases “negative space,” “balanced composition,” and “challenges the viewer” every so often. X’s lyrical abstraction and visual vocabulary—which is marked by dogged muscularity and a singular preoccupation with the formal qualities of light—ushered in some of the most important art to hit the postwar market in decades… It was embarrassingly easy, and might have been the only truly dishonest part of the Sotheby’s enterprise. In most ways, the auction house is unshackled from intellectual pretense by its pure attention to the marketplace…

Sotheby’s felt detached from the posturing that happens in Chelsea galleries and the gnomic garbage that counts for art-world conversation. Auction house employees don’t invoke half-remembered poststructuralism or make inapt analogies. They don’t have to. The prices speak for themselves.

hyperreal

Our image technologies have proven so successful in their strategies, that they lead us to question reality itself and make the possible look artificial. When viewing the images and footage of the attacks on the World Trade Centers, many responded by saying, "it looked like a movie." The image is more real than real, hyper real, and we often prefer it that way.

rabbit

Koons' Rabbit appears to warmly embrace our consumer lifestyle while, at the same time, coolly appraise the shallowness of a civilization devoid of deeper meaning.

Jeff Koons - Rabbit (1986)

haim steinbach

why movies often are not high-brow

Movies have never been, with rare exceptions, a highbrow medium. They rejoice in the visceral, the gaudy, and the vulgar. And this has been held against them by critics who prefer the still gray ma,r of the brain to the whirling kalei­doscope of the screen. 16 be sure, there have been art-house movies, with big words in them, and obscure plots, and lit­tle in the way of rush and throb; but this has always been a minority taste—movies today are as philistine as they have ever been. Movies revel in sensation and emotion (often the cruder, the better); deep abstract thought is not their thing. They are a sensory (and sensational) medium, inarticulate, nonverbal, dazzlingly in love with spectacle (the circus is not dissimilar). Brutality and disorder, death and destruction— these are their frequent themes. There is nothing more cine­matic than the sudden shock of a fearsome predator lunging into the screen, eliciting a gasp of surprise from the audi­ence. Even a "sophisticated" filmmaker such as Ingmar Berg­man deals in raw emotion, conflict, and violence of the spirit. This is surely why those of a certain cast of mind have always disapproved of the movies (as they have rock music and, before that, jazz). They rightly sense the anarchic flow of some of our most—what shall I say?—basic emotions (I won't say "animal" because animals don't in general enjoy explosions and knife fights). They correctly discern that movies don't as a rule engage the higher mental faculties.

However, I am here not to condemn this trait of film, but to explain it. Sleep science has shown that the brain is selectively activated during dreaming: the parts that control sen­sation, emotion, and movement are as active as they are in the waking state, but the parts that sustain reasoning and self-reflection are dampened down. Thus J. Allan Hobson writes: "We can see that, when the brain self-activates in sleep, it changes its chemical self-instructions. The mind has no choice but to go along with the programme. It sees, it moves, and it feels things intensely but it does not think, remember, or focus attention very well ."12 Later he says: "The reason that dreams are so perceptually intense, so instinctive and emotional, and so hyperassociative is because the brain regions supporting these functions are more active. The rea­son that we can't decide properly what state we are in, can't keep track of time, place, or person, and can't think criti­cally or actively is because the brain regions supporting these functions are less active."3 Now these results from the study of the dreaming brain must pique the interest of the student of film, for they are eerily reminiscent of what is obviously true of film. Just as the higher intellectual and critical faculties are diminished during dreaming sleep, so the movie watcher is operating at a psychological level at which the higher mental faculties are not in play or are in abeyance. The parts of the brain that are most active in movie watching are connected to sensation, emotion, and movement; and these crowd out the more abstract concep­tual functions of the brain. If we call the parts of the brain that are responsible for sensation, emotion, and movement the SEM brain, then we can say that in movie watching it is the SEM brain that is primarily recruited; the critical and reflective faculties are (largely) offline.

The self that is childlike, instinct-driven, and sensation-fixated. This I distinguish from the critical self, which is reflective, language-driven, and conceptually fixated. (Think Jekyll and Hyde, roughly) My hypothesis is that the base self is upper-most in the dreaming state (the self subserved by the SEM brain) and is also calling the shots in the movie theatre, while the critical self takes a well-earned rest. To put it more pointedly, the crassness of movies is a function of the brain regions that are activated during them, which overlap with the regions of the brain that are active during dreaming sleep. Can we explain the lowbrow character of movies by the fact that it is the dreaming brain that is primarily activated by them? As the physiology of sleep tells us, the brain can be selectively activated, with some parts active and others quiescent. According to the present hypothesis, in the movies the brain likewise shifts its patterns of activation. The preoccupations of the sleeping brain—fear, appetite, wish, and delirious fantasy—are also the preoccupations of the mass movie audience. The movies chemically alter the brain in the direction of its dreaming mode: that, at any rate, is the hypothesis. During sleep the SEM brain wakes up, as it were, and with it the base self, while the critical self snoozes; I am suggesting that something similar might be true for the state of semisomnolence known as watching a movie

- Colin McGinn

art is both commodity and artifact

So, what is the fascination with interdisciplinarity all about? 'The art critic Harold Rosenberg once published a book called The Anxious Object. The title was a reference to the art of the sixties—Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. Rosenberg thought that those art objects were anxious because they were uncertain of their own identity. They kept asking themselves questions like, Am I a work of art, or just a wall of Polaroids? Am I a sculpture, or just a pile of bricks? More existentially: Am I an autotelic aesthetic artifact, or just a commercial good?

What causes anxiety to break out in a work of art? Self-consciousness. Maybe, in the case of the academic subject, self-consciousness about disciplinarity and about the status of the professor—the condition whose genealogy I have been sketching in this chapter—is a source of anxiety. That status just seems to keep reproducing itself; there is no way out of the institutional process. And this leads the academic to ask questions like, Am I an individual disinterested inquirer, or a cog in a knowledge machine? And, Am I questioning the sta­tus quo, or am I reproducing it? More existentially, Is my rela­tion to the living culture that of a creator or that of a packager? 'The only way to get past the anxiety these questions cause is to get past the questions—to see that they are bad questions because they require people to choose between identities that cannot be separated. A work of art is both an aesthetic object and a commercial good. That is not a contradiction unless you have been socialized to believe that it must be.

- Louis Menand