KAREN WILKIN
At the Galleries
Too much is expected of Art, that it mean
all
kinds of things and is
the solution to questions no one can answer. Art is much simpler than
that. Its pretentions more modest. Art is a sign, an insignia to celebrate
the faculty for invention.
Stuart Davis wrote this in 1956, but the sentiment still seems appropriate.
These days, art is more than ever expected to "mean all kinds of things"
and be "the solution to questions no one can answer": the inequities of
society past and present, the politics of race, gender, and sexuality, the
devastation of AIDS, the destruction of the environment, and more. The
issues are distressingly real, the artists' engagement usually genuine - no
guarantee that their art is any good, but that's another matter. What's
worrying is the demand that to be taken seriously, work must not only
manifest such concerns, but manifest them overtly and, more often than
not, with words as well as (or instead of) images. It's hard to imagine how
artists could escape being profoundly shaped by their times, much less
how they could exclude their responses from their work, but today's
right-thinking maintains that art without unequivocal references to cur–
rent issues must be devoid of meaning. It's not a question of abstraction
versus figuration, but rather of appropriate allusions and/or an expression
ofappropriate intent.
More insidious is the widespread assumption that works of art bypass
the brain, unless they lend themselves readily to verbal explication. Arthur
Danto, for example, who maintains that you can no longer tell works of
art
from "mere real things" just by looking, offers as a useful test the ob–
ject's ability to be explicated. The very notion that works of art can ap–
peal wordlessly both to our senses and our minds has lost currency, as has
the belief that aesthetic judgment, while different from moral or practical
judgment, is nevertheless valuable. Perception is presumed to be so tied to
the individual experiences of both maker and viewer that questions of
aesthetic worth are irrelevant. Remember that article by Michael Brenson
in
The New York Times,
"Quality, An Idea Whose Time Has Gone"? It's
not that too much is expected of art, as Davis complained, but that not
