***  Haus der Kulturen der Welt: Forum1 Archive  ***
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   [Date]: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 21:22:22 +0100
   [From]: MB <maria@anubia.net>
     [To]: "'forum1@hkw.kbx.de'" <forum1@hkw.kbx.de>
[Subject]: discussion about sensation, NY

dear members of the list,

I haven't taken part in the discussion until now, but I would like to
pass you an article in the guardian newspaper concerning the discussion
about the sensation-exhibition in New York. I saw it here in Berlin and
was very surprised about the hard reactions coming up in NY. I didn'
feel offended by these art works, I just didn't feel anything about
them, except maybe disappointment or being bored. To me it is just big
commercial fancy art which is being bought and sponsored all over now.
Nevertheless the fact that this had lead to a general attack against
'modern' art, based on very very ultra-conservative
'we-know-whats-the-right-thing'-attitude frightens me. I don't feel to
defend these special artists and their contents, but the general topic
of artistic freedom and tolerance.
I couldn't imagine the same here in Germany, but this is not because
people are so very wise and intelligent here, but just because art is
only perceived by a minority with a very specialized codex of
liberalism, well-educated, and well-behaved, with a lot of social
conditioning (...uh, it's art in a first class museum, which means
blessed by the art authorities, so don't say anything wrong about
it.....).
This Saatchi-Collection is art that feeds the system just as well, with
this small portion of little shocking things, nourishing the demand for
provocation (but not too much,.. pleeeease...). To me, there is no
constructive questioning in it.
But how to achieve this aim of constructive questioning in art, I
haven't found out yet.
Only when I see  these reactions in New York, I realize how far we
artists are from 'common' thinking and how urgent this question of
tolerance still is.
In my opinion, it seems like a combination of oppressive politics and
playing on puritan 'values'.


looking forward to the discussions
Maria Best

http://www.zukunst.de
mail@zukunst.de


________________________________________________________________

source:
al Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which had nothing to do with this show.


The behaviour of the Brooklyn Museum has been self-interested and
short-sighted. I want to raise the prestige of art; I want toexpand
opportunities for young artists and to radically increase funding for
community arts projects. The entire future of American art is at stake.
How ironic that Jane Alexander, former NEA chairwoman, rejoined her
actor friends on the barricades last week to support the Brooklyn
Museum; in American Canvas, her valedictory NEA report two years ago,
she sharply criticised the elitism separating American artists from the
communities they should serve. The Brooklyn show is a perfect example of
the improper diversion of public monies - in this case to aggrandise a
single British collector, Charles Saatchi, an advertising executive of
dubious taste.

At the end of the 20th century, when popular culture has triumphed, the
mission of museums must be to evangelise for art, to demonstrate art's
higher meanings and continuing relevance to a mass audience that will
otherwise be consumed in the blood-and-guts literalism of slasher films
and shoot-'em-up action adventures. The Brooklyn show illustrates the
utter bankruptcy and sterility of the avant garde, which collapsed 30
years ago and is now grasping at straws to get a reaction, even of
disgust, from an indifferent public. 

Great works of art, like the monumental Laoco=F6n (with its giant
serpent strangling the agonised Trojan priest and his two sons), can be
made out of Hellenistic sensationalism. But the most lurid works in the
Brooklyn show are pure kitsch. If I want to see carcasses or body parts
floating in formaldehyde, I'll go to the M=FCtter Museum of the College
of Physicians of Philadelphia - a spectacular and grisly 19th-century
medical collection that I recommend to everyone.  Contemporary art, with
its post-modernist gimmicks, is so divorced from science that Damien
Hirst's high school project, rot-and-fly cycle strikes some museum-goers
as a profound revelation. (Wow, nature exists! Rise and shine,
Manhattan!) We're back to Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which four decades
ago showed the cul de sac of modern intellectualism in scenes where chic
partygoers raptly listen to nature sounds on a tape recorder and where
an erudite, angst-dazed father murders his children in their beds.=20

Let's get past this adolescent, wallowing in slack, "oppositional" art.
The Romantic era of "subversive" gestures is over. As I have
consistently maintained since my 1991 defence of photographer Robert
Mapplethorpe (where I derided his sentimentalising, liberal supporters),
no self-respecting avant garde artist should be on the government dole.
Free speech protections do not extend to financial support of "cutting
edge" new art by taxpayers. Commissioned projects - whether by the
Pharaohs, the Medicis, the popes or the French kings - always require
the artist's subordination to the values and publicity needs of the
patron.=20

And I'm as sick of "Catholic-bashing" as Giuliani himself. I may be an
atheist, but I was raised in Italian Catholicism, and it remains my
native culture. I resent the double standard that protects Jewish and
African-American symbols and icons, but allows Catholicism to be
routinely trashed by supercilious liberals. The selection of a parodic
image of the Madonna from the whole of Chris Ofili's dung-bedecked
oeuvre shows either stupidity or malice. The Brooklyn show has fomented
hatred - as witnessed by the placard of a defaced Star of David carried,
according to the New York Post, by a demonstrator outside the museum on
opening day. Is this the destructive train of thought that the
contemporary arts want to foster?=20
Culture has shifted as we approach the millennium. Through
over-repetition and feeble imitation, transgression and subversion have
lost their once-potent charge; we should be concerned now not with
defiling and defaming traditional beliefs but in reconstructing, out of
the nihilistic ruins left by modernism and post-structuralism, some
enlightened new system of affirmative spiritual and political values.=20

I oppose Mayor Giuliani's arbitrary and needlessly inflammatory use of
city power to intimidate and harass an arts institution, but I applaud
the position he has taken against an arrogant, pretentious, parasitic
arts establishment that has made a mockery of art and injured its
reputation. The Brooklyn Museum has turned itself into Madame Tussaud's
waxworks - a collegiate carnival and tinny video game for desensitised
poseurs who fiddle while Rome burns.00=00