*** Haus der Kulturen der Welt: Forum1 Archive *** ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [Date]: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 18:58:36 -0500 [From]: "Pablo Helguera" [To]: forum1@hkw.kbx.de [Subject]: [forum1] Re: Censorship Juan JosŽ, thank you for your comments and your provocative questions (and yes, I do remember our recent meeting). Hereby my straightforward opinions on various topics (and please don't take them personally- they simply are my reflections on your comments): 1. I won't comment anymore on political art, since many have already responded in that regard in better ways than I could. But I think at this point we need to make a distinction as to what we understand by censorship. To my view, censorship consists in repressing, blocking, or negating the existence of some sort of expression. If you go by that definition, "Censorship" is not the exact word to describe what happens to the artwold which ignores certain types of art- at any rate it can be called indifference, lack of support, or even ignorance. It is very different being Giuliani ordering to remove a painting than being a curator or institution who is simply not interested in promoting certain kind of art. It is not censorship for an institution to support only one kind of art- it could be, maybe, in some cases, cultural shortsightedness, but again, not all institutions are supposed to support every kind of art. 2. Art museums obviously are not made to solely show "handicrafts", as you suggest, but they do normally show sophisticated things- although it is a sophistication that lies in their being things who have achieved a certain relevance in our culture to the extent of being given the chance of being shown to many. And yes, there has to be a certain consensus (which will always be subjective to some degree) on which things are more relevant. But this consensus is just part of a very long term process: it varies by the place, the time and whoever gets to participate in that decision. The history of art is really a history and analysis of those temporary consensus, plus the perspective that time has given us to evaluate the cultural production of those different times. Through this process, the fact that we still admire certain artists who have made a really drastic difference in their time - Velazquez, Raphael, Caravaggio, etc. - seem to show that there is some substance to those subjective judgements. 3. Therefore, today I am reluctant to simplify the art world into a right wing conspiracy in which only certain well-promoted artists get to show their work and being admired for it. I think there are, in fact, several injustices in the art world as there are in other places, and it is true that artists who are gifted self-promoters will probably get more attention than equally talented artists who don't know how to self-promote. But I think that we - a collective we, in history and criticism- deserve some credit in being able to roughly differentiate what has been said and done repeatedly from those statements and those artists whose message is revealing of our present, and clearly different from the commonplaces of mainstream creativity and imagination. I think it is too easy an answer to say that the art world -today more complex than ever- is a simple system of promotion and sales. 4. That is why I also think curators' roles have been always regarded way too negatively. Curators, as museums, once and for all, are a necessary thing to have. They are needed to bridge those gaps of communication which often exist between the artist and the audience (some will say in order to be interpreters of the artist, others would say to be simply facilitators, which is what I think it really is). They, its true, have positions of power which can be very misleading to certain audiences, but the entire vision on today's art is not controlled by only one curator or one place, not even New York, nor is there any Gestapo condemning "bad" artists. Maybe public art artists can live without them, but that is only a fraction of all art that is done today. 5. I don't think that, as you suggest by your question, "communication for the masses is necessarily vulgar", but at the same time, it is more than clear to me that democracy is not the most effective recipe to make a great piece of art. As I mentioned in a previous email, I do think that artists have the choice - or the ability- to create a language which can be understood at many different levels by many. In Mexico the novels of Juan Rulfo, for instance, could really be understood by everyone at a basic level, but their richer layers reveal themselves according to the education of the reader and whether you are willing to try to get into them. But Rulfo was a rare example, and it is hard to find that kind of multi-layered work. For the most part, there is a lot of wonderful art which is demanding and difficult, and whose joys will not ever reveal themselves to the masses (who many people have read Ulysses or Finnegans' Wake in its entirety? I don't think Joyce could have written that work "democratically"). 6. Sorry if I seem to be stressing the obvious, but I will continue: Yes, artists don't have to be in museums to be artists. But the idea that the museum is just a political tool, a promotional headquarters, or a mausoleum for old art and dead artists is also based in an old idea of what a museum is. Many museums do function today as effective and powerful vehicles for artists, as are galleries and other exhibition spaces. After Joseph Beuys, we agree that everything can be art and everyone an artist; but if everything is art, then nothing can be art too, and that's a problem that we have now. I think museums serve as crucial catalysts to give order to that chaos. 7. Finally, in regards to your comment about "The artist of today is the one who knows how to write proposals for grants." Yes, it helps to know how to write and get grants, but I can guarantee you that if that person's art has nothing to say, sooner or later the good made by those grants will not amount to anything.