Hey, I've got an idea! Let's build a museum!
Yeah!
We can put all sorts of cool stuff in it, stuff we think is really cool!
Yeah!
Frankie can design it. Jimmy can paint the pictures. And Ricky can make one of his big metal thingies.
But all the stuff in it has to be, like, really cool.
Right. Like, in an important way.
All the flubdubbery about two chic new warehouses for the exquisitely useless has left entirely untouched the question of how (or whether) "high" art functions in the public sphere nowadays. People may be going to museums in record numbers, but the spectacle of throngs filing mutely past Impressionist masterpieces, herded by border collies disguised as docents, hardly paints a vital picture.
Indeed, if you believe the NEA's report, entitled "American Canvas," you may wonder why Americans go to museums at all. "If we look, we will find art all around us," reads one portion of the report, "in ... quilts, knitting, rawhide braiding, pie-crust designs, dinner-table arrangements, garden layouts," etc. The point of the report is supposed to be that Americans remain somehow unconvinced that "elitist" art is of use to them - and that the NEA, therefore, must remain in existence to reach out to them. Yet the report also states that we attend more art-related events than sporting events every year. So which is it - do we want the lady or the Tigers?
Maybe the confusion stems from the fact that many folks don't have much stomach for most modern and contemporary art. But then why build such extravagantly eccentric temples?
Which brings us to the new kids in town. As for the structures themselves, they're so postmodern they're postrecent; to begin with, the materials with which the new museums are made overtly violate all modernist notions of form following function. The new Getty is built out of preposterously pricey Italian travertine (US$1,000 per square foot), while the Guggenheim in Bilbao is made from the merely absurdly expensive titanium, which the Russians seem to have dumped at bargain-basement prices in order to scare up a little cash for Red Kamels and Big Macs. This isn't form following function, it's materials making a milkshake out of modernity.
Then there's the fact that many museums and galleries today are filled with anxious objects that don't even know if they're art or not. While this doesn't apply to the stuffy old collections at the Getty (the domain name for their Web site is, pretentiously, .edu), many curators and critics are smitten these days with the tropes of failure and the pathetic. This is all well and good - it means more pageviews for us, after all - but it probably means the average museum-goer leaves feeling the only art she's seen was the building itself, with the installations and wall-hangings just so many admonishments to keep quiet and absorb.
We don't much care where we get our culture - or even much what it is - but after long days in our cubicles, we do long to mingle with each other, to experience some vague semblance of togetherness. So despite the objections to the big blockbuster shows in recent years, the problem isn't that museums are now malls. This seems at once inescapable and also not entirely undesirable in an era when the whole notion of third spaces has been either largely discarded or left to real-estate poachers and impervious cover cultists. The problem is that we can't run, shout, or munch cookies, and there aren't any blacklight posters in the gift shop.
Instead of heckling, arguing with, or hounding artists out of town, we consume their art passively by listening to their curatorial intermediaries on headsets and overpriced tours. And as for contemporary art, it is (in Andreas Huyssen's words) "delivered to the museum in the manner of in-time production," the better to feed our insatiable desire for new, exotic things to look at. Worse, the interpretive framework offered at the really big shows is invariably intimate and personal, psychologizing to a fault the idiosyncracies of historical context.
As Komar and Melamid have shown with their extensive polling data, an art whose "democracy" resides only in such personalism is usually terrible art. If there's anything we should understand by now, it's that art is a public, impersonal creation intended to provoke not merely intimate personal experience, but also voluble give-and-take. Cultural memory doesn't mean much - even if it is stored in a lovely holding facility - unless it transcends the logic of the bookmark-it-and-forget-about-it mass media. What makes us experts? We've got America's most wanted painting right next to our Dilbert wall calendar.
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This article appeared originally in Suck.
