This ought to be a universal law, up there with a-body-in-motion-tends-to-stay-in-motion, but it seems to get forgotten a lot. I’ve been thinking of it a lot lately. In part because of coming changes at the Pew Fellowships that people seem to think will ruin the art world, and in part because, as a teacher, I fret about doing more harm than good. Maybe I was clueless as a young man (okay, I was clueless) but I don’t remember thinking that what a course taught had to be contained within the fourteen or sixteen weeks I was taking it. I thought it was all about what happened afterwards, when things go where they aren’t expected.
But some of the unintended consequences I’ve observed in the last few years have me especially worried. When I heard conservatives employing the kind of theoretical architecture that makes my work interesting as justifications for their actions, I wonder about that genie getting out of his bottle. But the one that keeps me up at night is about the art world, and how it’s moving in so many interesting directions. Or should I say, so many directions I should find interesting but don’t. They don’t interest me. They worry me.
The latest example comes from the Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post. He describes going to an exhibit of Chinese terra cotta figures at Washington’s National Geographic Museum. You know the sort – thousands were buried in imperial tombs 2,000 or more years ago. The show, as Gopnik describes it sounds like a nightmare:
Overall, visiting this exhibition feels like walking through a pop-up version of a fascinating article in National Geographic magazine -- one of those photo spreads that have more sidebars than text.
Gopnik, like a good college-educated critic, goes off on Benjamin and the idea of the aura, but misses the real horror of what he’s just written. What one sees when one sees this exhibit is not the things one went to see, but the idea and history -- embodied in writing -- that surrounds them.
It’s easy to believe the exhibit is a kind of elaborate magazine article. The vast majority of exhibits I see are like heinous, overwrought term papers, made without love or enthusiasm, as if because of the existence of a deadline. (Worse yet, they're statements...what could be more bloodless and bureaucratic than a statement?) And the killer is that I used to think of exhibits as arguments or essays, and that I must have said this a million times in classes and crits. That I didn’t mean bloodless, boring things that bypass what really matters or subjugate the act of looking to the act of reading was a given. But perhaps it wasn’t heard that way. Perhaps I’ve unintentionally contributed to the mess we find ourselves in now.
Now I know the National Geographic Museum is not an art museum, and that exhibits all have different purposes, variously didactic or sensuous (and wouldn’t be friggin’ cool if they could be sensuously didactic or something? But that’s another thing…). But what bothers me is that as the pendulum of exhibiting swings toward greater intellectual engagement (yum..after all, the eye is a part of the mind) it’s swinging away from the pleasures of objects, preferring to ‘reference’ them (or some equally hideous, stale action as arid as 'reference').
One cannot practice art education like one practices medicine (above all, do no harm) because moving students out of their comfort zone is a huge part of the job and it may be unexpectedly dangerous. But one can certainly try to do more good than harm. I am generally optimistic about change. It stirs things up. But soon after change, artists and designers will learn to read the system and will undermine the positive effects of transformation and turn it into a new and dull status quo. Maybe the thing to do is try to teach people never to be satisfied with what is out there…
