PARTISAN REVIEW
569
Insofar as the Museum shows itself responsive to art media comment, to either
its antagonism or approval, it exhibits the shift in the power balance between
media and cultural institutions in which the media dominate.
In his interview, Professor Rubin, Director of the MOMA Department of
Painting and Sculpture, posits the eventuality that modernism is a closed or
closing issue. In his view, "Perhaps the dividing line will be seen as between
those works which essentially continue an easel painting concept that grew up
associated with bourgeois democratic life and was involved with the develop–
ment of private collections as well as the museum concept-between this and,
let us say, Earthworks, Conceptual works and related endeavors, which want
another environment (or should want it) and, perhaps, another public." In his
interview, Rubin makes it clear that the museum is not, by definition, an
ambience hospitable to many of the latest art tendencies. In an article on
The
Function ofthe Museum
published earlier by
Artforum,
Daniel Buren, one of the
Eight Contemporary Artists,
articulates in a fairly intelligent manner his hostility
to the concept of the museum. "The Museum/Gallery instantly promotes to
'Art' status whatever it exhibits with conviction," he writes, with gratifying
probity. Buren goes on to attack the concept of the timeless masterpiece as a
fetish ofmuseum culture and to further explore the (to him) repulsive tenden–
cies of museums to conserve the art of the past.
Artists' attacks on museums are no news. The question is, ifboth Professor
Rubin and Mr. Buren concur that Buren's work, which at MOMA consists of
striped panels pasted to the wall, equal in size and shape to the windows they
face in a gallery corridor, does not belong in a museum, what is it doing there?
Buren's nondescript and deliberately ephemeral, nonqualifiable pieces,
vaguely resembling travesties of Stella's stripe paintings, are displayed at the
Museum of Modern Art, one begins to suspect, because Buren has been
particularly clever at keeping his name and images in print. In the world of the
blind, the one-eyed is king; and given the present critical vacuum, Daniel
Buren is a Superstar. To be admired and presented to an unwary museum
public, his works need be neither good nor bad, they need only generate print
and photographs.
At this point, a word should be said about the evolution of the concept of
the "Superstar." The term was invented by Andy Warhol, who learned how to
manipulate the media for his purposes from the original Great Imposter,
Duchamp himself. A Superstar is anybody Warhol happens to notice, whose
image and/or voice is recorded by his indiscriminate camera or cassette. The
gag originally was that Superstars were just ordinary people, with no particular
attributes of distinction. In fact, I recall once taking two insatiably curious
Queens College students to Warhol's old Factory; by the time they left, he had
made them Superstars in one of his lesser vehicles. Now
Interview,
Warhol's
parody of
Modern Screen,
publishes interviews of real celebrities, or new
