Morley Safer questions Jeff Koons, Jeffrey Deitch, and Hilton Kramer about contemporary art and whether it means anything at all.
“YES . . . BUT IS
IT ART?”
by Morley Safer
[Employing his signature wit, Safer (1931-2016), the longest-serving reporter on 60 Minutes (1970-2016), raised both of his eyebrows at some of the costliest pieces in the contemporary art, some of which—to Safer's amusement—featured household items like vacuums. Or, in the case of a Cy Twombly piece that fetched more than $2 million, looked like the scribblings of a child.
[“Yes . . . But Is It Art?” aired on CBS’s weekly news magazine on 19 September 1993. The report infuriated the modern art community, even years after it aired. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, for instance, denied Safer access to a Jackson Pollock retrospective (28 October 1998-2 February 1999) that the newsman had hoped to cover for CBS Sunday Morning.
[The video, labeled a “60 Minutes Rewind,” was uploaded to YouTube on 5 March 2018 (5 of Morley Safer's finest and funniest stories (cnn.com)). There’s no official transcript, but I compiled the one below from the transcript attached to the video; there’s also closed captioning on the video itself, but the text is identical to the transcript.
[Both texts are inaccurate and have no punctuation or identification of speakers. (They’re “auto-generated” and clearly unedited.) I have used my own judgment concerning paragraphing, punctuation, and identifying speakers, as well as correcting mistranscriptions.]
Morley Safer: It may have escaped your notice, but recently a vacuum cleaner just like this one and the one down in your basement was sold for a hundred thousand dollars. Also a sink went for one hundred and twenty-one thousand and a pair of urinals went for a hundred and forty thousand dollars.
All of the above and even more unlikely stuff is art. That’s what the artists say, the dealers, and, of course, the people who lay out good money.
It all may make you believe in the wisdom of P. T. Barnum [American showman; 1810-91] that there’s a sucker born every minute.
The noble auction house of Sotheby’s in New York last November, the long-anticipated winter sale of contemporary art [Contemporary Art Evening, 17 November 1992]—and here it is folks . . .
Auctioneer (Lucy Mitchell-Innes, Director of Contemporary Art at Sotheby's): (referring to a gray, monochrome canvas) At two hundred and forty-two, the Gerhard Richter [German artist; b. 1932]. Please know that the measurements for this work are reversed; it’s actually a horizontal painting . . . I’m sorry, it’s actually a vertical painting, 78 by 59 inches . . . and we start here at a fifty-thousand-dollar bid . . .
Auctioneers: (montage of overlapping voices of auctioneers) I start here at ten thousand dollars but it’s now ten thousand . . . one million, eight hundred thousand; one million, nine, I have one million, nine hundred thousand . . . now say two million . . . .
Safer: This one, a canvas of scrawls done with the wrong end of the paintbrush, bears the imaginative title of “Untitled.” It’s by Cy Twombly [American painter and sculptor; 1928-2011] and was sold for two million, one hundred and forty-five thousand dollars—and that’s dollars, not Twomblys.
Auctioneer: . . . and twenty thousand dollars . . . start this now at twenty thousand dollars.
Safer: There were bargains. ‘Rat’ repeated three times [Christopher Wool, “Untitled”] reached thirty thousand.
Auctioneer: Sold at thirty thousand . . . .
Safer: And “Green Grass” [not the painting’s actual title]—the words, not the plant—went for thirteen thousand.
Auctioneer: Sold! At seven hundred fifty thousand dollars.
Safer: The auction itself was a glittering affair. A bank of phones connected Paris, Geneva, Frankfurt, and London. Among the hottest items . . .
Auctioneer: Lot number 72. This was sold from the catalogue . . . .
Safer: Jeff Koons’ inspired work—three basketballs submerged in a fish tank [Three Basketballs: Total Equilibrium].
Auctioneer: Sold at a hundred and . . . .
Safer: A hundred and fifty thousand dollars, giving new meaning to “slam dunk.”
Jeff Koons: Wow! Dr. J . . .
Safer: And back in his New York studio, Jeff Koons [American artist; b. 1955] has more where that came from and a slightly shaky version of what it all means.
Koons: (looking at Equilibrium, a single submerged basketball) This is an ultimate state of being. I wanted to play with people’s desires . . . that they desired equilibrium, that they desired pre-birth, or I . . . .
Safer: What did he say?
The language is “Artspeak,” the same pitch that convinced the emperor to buy new clothes or waterlogged basketballs.
Koons: I was giving a definition of life and death. This is the eternal, this is what life is like also after death—aspects of the eternal.
Safer: Jeff Koons is a genuine phenomenon. Still in his 30’s [he’s now 69], he’s become a millionaire since he moved on from commodity-brokering on Wall Street to art-mongering to the world.
He doesn’t actually paint or sculpt; he commissions craftsmen to do that—or he goes shopping for basketballs and vacuum cleaners.
What makes them art, Jeff?
Koons: I always liked the anthropomorphic quality. They’re like lungs—so this object [a vacuum cleaner in a glass box] now is just free to eternally just to display its newness, its integrity of birth.
Safer: So what do you say to the man who said: “Fool. You went and paid one hundred thousand dollars. I just got a genuine Koons for eighty bucks.”
Koons: This work would be a signed work by myself or would have a letter of authenticity.
Safer: He’s already had a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [10 December 1992-7 February 1993].
Female Gallery Visitor: Do you think he’s making fun of everyone? Do you think he’s making fun of the art world?
Male Gallery Visitor: No, no. He’s making his money off the art world.
Koons: (in front of Schloss Arolsen, Arolsen, Germany – to workmen) I’m not saying to bring these closer. I’m saying we need here (indicating the sides of his head) and we still don’t . . . . We need out.
Safer: For his pièce de résistance last year, he hired a platoon of German workmen to erect a forty-foot puppy made of flowers. And the art world cheered.
[Puppy was erected in the courtyard of Schloss Arolsen in Arolsen, a Hessian town near Kassel, the site of the Documenta 9 art fair (5 May-22 September 1992); it was created for an exhibit called Made for Arolsen, which ran from 13 June to 20 September 1992.]
Art Critic (Jeffrey Deitch): It’s very much about something extremely banal made into something terrifically heroic and important, so it kind of bespeaks of our own sense of ego at certain moments in our life.
Safer: Of course, most of this art of the ’90s would be worthless junk without the hype of the dealers and, even more important, the approval of the critics. They write in language that, to this viewer anyway, sounds important, but might as well be in Sanskrit.
Of the American artist Julian Schnabel [b. 1951], a critic wrote:
1st Voice: (reading) His is an eschatological art, appropriating the master meanings of life and the master languages of art to reassert the sense of hurt and loss that evades both.
Safer: A book on Christopher Wool [American painter; b. 1955], the ‘Rat, Rat, Rat’ man, said of his work:
2nd Voice: (reading) They communicate not like facile appropriations, but as a honed perfectionist idea of that discourse reduced to the irreducible, then starting all over again.
Safer: Arts magazine said of Robert Gober [American sculptor; b. 1954], who specializes in arms, legs, sinks, and urinals:
3rd Voice: (reading) Installations function as utopian and dystopian spaces. The tableau arrests and its own stillness suspends social time.
Safer: And if you’re still stumped, let Jeffrey Deitch [b. 1952], critic, dealer, and fan, explain:
Jeffrey Deitch: This work in particular shows something of the uncertainty in which artists find themselves today in the human sphere. They don’t quite know exactly where they stand.
Safer: So simple when you think about it—as simple as one of Mr. Gober’s urinals.
A major New York art collector, Elaine Dannheisser [1923-2001], has three, all in a row.
Dannheisser: (leading Safer through her private art display and storage space on Duane Street in SoHo, lower Manhattan) They look like urinals, but they really aren’t.
Safer: I know, because there’s no plumbing attached to them. But, beyond that, does it comment on society in some way, do you think?
Dannheisser: I think it comments on things that we take for granted and that we really don’t see.
[In 1917, French Dadaist painter Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) submitted an artwork to the “unjuried” Society of Independent Artists’ salon in New York—which claimed that they would accept any work of art. Duchamp presented an upside-down urinal entitled Fountain, dated and signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt, 1917.”
[The Society’s board, faced wit what must have seemed like a practical joke from an anonymous artist, rejected Fountain on the grounds that it was not a true work of art. A deeply felt and wide-spread debate followed. One close friend and ardent supporter of Duchamp argued that it didn’t matter whether or not R. Mutt actually created the object, which Duchamp dubbed “readymades,” because he selected it, changed its context, and made us think about it in new way.
[Thus, Marcel Duchamp forever changed the view of art from primarily an object to a concept. (For more on this, see my post on “Dada,” posted on 20 February 2010.)]
Safer: And that is a white rectangle.
Dannheisser: Right. And Ryman has reduced painting to its very essence and a lot of people don’t understand that, but . . .
Safer: I confess, I’m one of them—on this one.
Dannheisser: Well, some of his work has a little more texture in it. This one is a little flatter because he really has reduced it. He’s a minimal artist and . . .
Safer: I would say so.
Dannheisser: (laughs).
[In 1998, a play called Art by Yazmina Reza opened on Broadway. The play, a comedy, raises questions about art and friendship among a group of friends. One has bought a large, expensive, completely white painting and one of the others is horrified. Their relationship is strained as a result of their differing opinions about what constitutes “art.” Art ran for 600 performances and won the Tony for Best Play.]
Safer: (they stop before a large pile of small, colorful, foil-wrapped objects on the floor in a corner) Now, this intrigues me.
Dannheusser: Yes, this is a young artist by the name of Félix Gonzáles-Torres [Cuban-born American visual artist; 1957-96].
Safer: May I touch it?
Dannheisser: You can. As matter of fact, you’re allowed . . . . They’re candies—they’re Italian candies and one is allowed to take them.
Safer: One would reduce the value of . . .
Dannheisser: Well, then, you just replace them.
Safer: I see.
Dannheisser: Yes.
Hilton Kramer: In my observation . . . .
Safer: Art critic Hilton Kramer [1928-2012; see my post “Culture War,” published in Rick On Theater on 8 February 2014] says that people who buy this stuff are victims of a trashy hoax.
Kramer: Just the act of spending that money on an object makes them feel that they are collaborating in creating the art history of their time.
Safer: But is it also a case of the emperor’s clothes?
Kramer: Oh, it’s largely a case of the emperor’s clothes—but they don’t see it that way.
Brian Sewell: When I look at almost all contemporary art, I see nothing, nothing.
Safer: Brian Sewell [English art critic; 1931-2015], a London critic. Is appalled—no other word for it. Imagine the outrage of a man steeped in the work of the masters, when he witnessed at an auction, the sale of a can of excrement, the work and waste of the artist Piero Manzoni [Italian artist; 1933-63].
Sewell: I suppose you could argue that he was making, as it were, a symbolic statement [that] all contemporary art is feces.
Safer: There was a painting—if that’s the word—at the Sotheby sale by a man named Wool—Chris Wool, I think—and it was the word ‘Rat’ repeated three times.
Sewell: Hmmm.
Safer: Art?
Sewell: Oh, I think we’re lucky to have the word. We might just have had a blank canvas. That’s pretty commonplace now.
Man’s Voice: It’s a standard assumption in the art world today that a work is anything that an artist says it is, and an artist is somebody who called himself an artist and there are no other tests.
1st Woman’s in Gallery: I don’t understand it one scrap. I don’t understand it at all.
2nd Woman: We don’t belong to this generation. We must retire.
Safer: The dealers lust after the hype-able, and a few years ago, they struck pure gold when Jean-Michel Basquiat [American artist; 1960-88] came on the scene. His work—giant, childishly wrought graffiti—sent the art world into a spasm.
Jean-Michel was heaven-sent for hype. The story was that this poor, black kid was found in the street by Andy Warhol [American visual artist; 1926-87]. The fact was, he came from an upper-middle-class suburban family and had a keen eye for the marketplace.
But the legend stuck and his work started selling for as much as a quarter of a million dollars per graffito.
Then in 1988, when his popularity was declining, his career was saved: he died of a drug overdose. And now that there would be no more Basquiats, the market fell in love with him all over again.
He was officially declared genius last fall when the Whitney Museum in New York honored him with a retrospective [23 October 1992-14 February 1993].
(speaking to a group of preteens at the Whitney Museum of American Art surrounded by Basquiat paintings) You think you could do as well?
Boy: Yeah. Better than that.
Safer: You could?
Boys: Yeah.
Safer: (pointing at a Basquiat painting on the wall) That looks like—what? Some eggs? Could you draw that egg better than that?
Boys: Yeah!
Safer: It was packed with people and it resounded with Artspeak.
Docent: So it has this multiplicity of potential meaning. It doesn’t mean any one of them. It may not mean a thing . . . .
Safer: I could not have said it better myself.
Auctioneer: (at the Sotheby sale) At one hundred seventy thousand dollars—sure now—at 170, 170 . . . .
Safer: The hammer’s down on the last lot. The end of a successful evening.
Sotheby Employee: We were extremely pleased with the sale.
Safer: Total sales: twenty million, two hundred and sixty-four thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars, and until the checks come in, the treasures wait inside Sotheby’s storeroom. It is, in a way, a little like your basement: the bits and pieces of a lifetime.
(in the storeroom) Is that ladder for climbing or is it for appreciating? And that faucet—we all have one of those—it’s surely a neglected bit of plumbing at Sotheby’s. But, no: it’s a genuine Jan Gibbens [?], bid up to $7,500, a bargain or junk soon to be consigned to the trash heap of art history.
Hilton Kramer is certain.
Kramer: Many of these artists, as I well know, live in great dread if waking up one morning and finding that it’s all disappeared, that somebody blew the whistle and they’re no longer going to be considered important.
Safer: That all the vacuum cleaner does is pick up dirt.
Kramer: That all the vacuum cleaner does is pick up dirt and the day Koons’s vacuum cleaner goes back to being a vacuum cleaner, then the curtain comes down.
[I watched the 60 Minutes broadcast that featured Morley Safer’s . . . what do I call it? An exposé? I’ve never really forgotten it. As casual readers of ROT will know, I had a childhood experience with modern art that left a tremendous impression on me (see my post on “Gres Gallery,” 7, 10, and 13 July 2018).
[I conceived the idea of posting the transcript of this piece some time
ago, but I was chagrined to find that there isn’t really one. It’s taken me till now to put one together
myself.]
[I will be continuing the coverage of this incident and its repercussions in future posts. On 5 April, I will be posting another transcript of a TV show, a panel discussion on the late PBS talk show, Charlie Rose, which featured Morley Safer defending his opinion of contemporary art from the objections of a group of art professionals.
[Following that, tentatively scheduled for 8 April, I plan to post a selection of the published responses of art critics and others after the 60 Minutes segment aired. I hope interested ROTters will come back for those follow-up posts.]
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