[At the end of my post “Morley Safer’s Infamous 1993 Art Story” (Tuesday, 2 April), which was the transcript of Morley Safer’s 60 Minutes airing of “Yes . . . But Is it Art,” his controversial statement of his opinion of contemporary art, I said that I was planning to post a collection of responses to that broadcast.
[I’m about to fulfil that promise, but I’ll also announce that there will be two installments. There were a lot of responses from various members of the art world, from critics and academics to collectors and art lovers. I’m starting with several pieces from the New York Times and then, on Thursday, 11 April, I’ll post some responses published in other outlets.
[A brief explanation for this occurrence: I didn’t want to privilege the Times, which is my local paper, but it turns out that the Grey Lady had the most to say on Safer’s excoriation of the current art scene. I don’t know if this was because New York City is the epicenter of the U.S. art scene, or if it was because Safer’s broadcast was set here (where 60 Minutes is produced.
[If you read “Yes . . . But Is It Art,” you saw that it centered on an auction as the New York Sotheby’s and featured figures from the New York art scene, from artist Jeff Koons to former New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer (who later went on to co-found and edit the New Criterion, a New York-based journal.
[There were other repercussions from Safer’s foray into art criticism. He did two later broadcasts on contemporary art for 60 Minutes: “Yes . . . But Is It Art II” on 5 October 1997, and “Art Market,” which reported on his short visit to Art Basel Miami Beach, a large, annual art fair, on 1 April 2012.
[When Safer died in 2016, all the obituaries across the country made mention of “Yes . . . But Is It Art.” For years after that even, all kinds of publications referred to the segment, often as an example of an opinion piece that riled up its audience. Though most of those who brought up Safer’s report were critical of it—and the reporter’s opinions—he and it had their defenders as well.
The art world, which is more accustomed to complaining about being ignored by the media than being attacked by it, is still smarting from an unusually biting segment aired two weeks ago on the CBS news magazine “60 Minutes.” Entitled “Yes . . . but Is It Art?” the segment, which featured Morley Safer, questioned the very premises of abstract art.
It began with Mr. Safer quoting P. T. Barnum’s legendary statement about a sucker being born every minute. Mr. Safer went on to say that most contemporary art was “worthless junk” given value only by the “hype” of critics, auction houses and dealers committed to misleading the public. As talk of the segment spread through the art world, the furor only grew. Museum curators, dealers, auction-house experts and collectors are scrambling to get their hands on a tape of the show.
Last night “60 Minutes” broadcast a letter from Marc Glimcher of the Pace Gallery stating that the segment “stank of anti-intellectualism.”
The owner of another well-known Manhattan gallery, Andre Emmerich, said the broadcast’s “smug, smiling, philistine approach was appalling.” And the painter Ellsworth Kelly said last week that he was “disappointed that a group of people like ‘60 Minutes’ who are generally respected have slipped up so completely that none of them are more sophisticated about the arts.”
‘Right Where People Live’
“I thought the tone was amusing,” said Mr. Safer, who is involved peripherally in art: he calls himself a “Sunday painter” and has had two shows of his paintings, in 1980 and 1985, at Central Falls, which was a restaurant in SoHo.
“When you approach a piece like this you are going right where people live, not their taste, but where their pride and persona are,” he said in a telephone interview. “These are people with disposable income who dispose of it in a curious way. They buy art as appendages to show how wealthy they are. We weren’t talking about connoisseurship.”
Connoisseurship aside, Mr. Safer remained scathingly dismissive throughout the segment. When describing a painting from the 1950’s by the American painter Cy Twombly that was being sold at Sotheby’s last November, he said, “This one, a canvas of scrawls done with the wrong end of a paint **brush, bears the imaginative title of ‘Untitled.’ It is by Cy Twombly and was sold for $2,145,000. And that’s dollars, not Twomblys.”
Shown with a group of black schoolchildren at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work, Mr. Safer asks, “Do you think you could do as well?”
“Yeah,” responds one of the children. “I could do better than that.” Of Basquiat as an artist, Mr. Safer explained to viewers that “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.”
Antonio Homem, the director of the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo, said the “60 Minutes” report could have been filmed decades ago. “I remember when everyone was saying their child could paint like Picasso,” he said. “The fact that ‘60 minutes’ found that now every kid can draw like Basquiat reflects a sad decline in our society. The argument is so old, it could have taken place in the 1950’s or earlier.”
Much earlier. In another scene, Mr. Safer seems astounded that the urinal sculptures of the artist Robert Gober could be considered art. He did not mention that Marcel Duchamp had signed a real urinal in 1913 and entered it into the Armory Show in New York which brought the European avant-garde to America. (The Duchamp urinal at least had the honor of being publicly dismissed by President Woodrow Wilson.) Mr. Gober declined to comment about the way “60 Minutes” discussed his work.
[As I said in my note in “Morley Safer’s Infamous 1993 Art Story,” Duchamp signed a urinal in 1917 for the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York; he didn’t sign a urinal and display it at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. Vogel was in error, which the Times editor acknowledged on the 15th.]
But others didn’t. “It’s all about history repeating itself,” said Lucy Mitchell-Innes, the director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s. “Avant-garde art is by definition ahead of its time, and it has always been attacked, whether it be the Impressionists or artists working today.”
The segment on “60 Minutes” included clips from Sotheby’s contemporary art auctions in November. After having filmed what Sotheby’s officials estimate was three hours of material, a clip showed Ms. Mitchell-Innes as the auctioneer in one sale, correcting an error in the catalogue. “Lot 242, the Gerhard Richter,” Ms. Mitchell-Innes was filmed saying. “Please note 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.” The camera zooms in on a close-up of the painting as if to underscore the confusion about abstract art.
‘No Regrets At All’
“We knew ‘60 Minutes’ was coming. We certainly stand by the works of art we sell,” Ms. Mitchell-Innes explained. “Sotheby’s has no regrets at all.” (Officials at Christie’s, the auction house that is Sotheby’s archrival, confirmed that “60 Minutes” had also asked them if it could film their sales. Christie’s declined the request.)
Besides using the auction houses to discuss what Mr. Safer described as “the same pitch that convinced the emperor to buy new clothes,” he interviewed two critics, Hilton Kramer, the art critic for The New York Observer and editor of The New Criterion, and the London art critic Brian Sewell, to enhance his argument. Mr. Safer also talked to the New York collector Elaine Dannheisser, who owns one of Robert Gober’s urinal sculptures. When discussing Ms. Dannheisser’s collection, Mr. Safer describes a “white rectangle” by the artist Robert Ryman. Ms. Dannheisser explained that the artist “has reduced painting to its very essence, and a lot of people don’t understand that but—” Mr. Safer interrupted, “I confess I’m one of them.”
Throughout the show, no distinction was made between artists like Robert Ryman and Cy Twombly, who are widely respected in serious scholarly circles, and Jeff Koons, whose brashly provocative work and love of publicity has evoked mixed response among critics. “It was all negative,” said Agnes Gund, the president of the Museum of Modern Art, where a retrospective of Mr. Ryman’s work is on view. “No artists we shown in a positive manner.”
Larry Gagosian, the Manhattan gallery owner, agreed but added that he wasn’t surprised. “They stacked the deck,” he said. “But it’s the nature of the way media and society deal with radical or new art; they devour their newborns. It was a pretty cheap shot.”
When told of Mr. Gagosian’s opinion, Mr. Safer responded: “I resent people saying the show was a cheap shot. If you want to look at a cheap shot, look at Mr. Koons’s or Mr. Gober’s art. By no definition is it art.”
“A FEW ARTLESS MINUTES ON ‘60 MINUTES’”
by Michael Kimmelman
New York Times, 17 October 1993
Watching Morley Safer’s broadside against the contemporary art world on “60 Minutes” a few weeks ago, I felt transported in time. To 1913, to be precise, the year the Armory Show introduced European modernism to a largely baffled American public. When Mr. Safer spoke about “worthless junk” and “the trash heap of art history” and, standing in front of a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, asked a group of teen-agers the familiar question — couldn’t they do better than that? — I thought of one of the Armory Show’s more vituperative critics. He called it “stupefying in its vulgarity” and singled out Matisse for creating “patterns unworthy of the mere ignorance of little children and benighted savages . . . patterns insanely, repulsively depraved.”
The Armory Show critic was, of course, Duncan Phillips, who in the years just after that exhibition became one of the most serious converts to modernism and one of the most perspicacious collectors of Matisse; in 1921 he founded the first museum in the United States dedicated to modern art, in Washington. Phillips developed discrimination, precisely what Mr. Safer’s report lacked — while at the same time it decried that lack in contemporary art circles.
If the show’s aim was to shoot down specific artists and dealers, the target was certainly lost in a scattershot barrage that had the whole contemporary art world ducking for cover. It is self-defeating to enter into a debate in which your opponent’s arguments are as simplistic as the ones made on “60 Minutes,” because you end up sounding simple-minded you[r]self, restating platitudes and defending artists you don’t really like. I frankly don’t know where to begin with a program that lumped together artists as different in age and temperament, not to say quality, as Cy Twombly and Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter and Robert Gober, Robert Ryman and Felix Gonzalez-Torres — as if there were the slightest connection between these people aside from the fact that they are all, more or less, successful living artists. Even a Franz Kline briefly flashed on the screen, thus adding the Abstract Expressionists to the junk heap.
Still, the show nags at me as a symptom of a change in the status of contemporary art in American life. For the first time since perhaps the mid-1950’s, contemporary art seems to be without the guaranteed protection of the mainstream establishment pieties or principles that helped ensure Abstract Expressionism’s reputation — pieties like the new is to be embraced for its newness, art not immediately accessible is not therefore intrinsically bad, and abstraction and the legacy of Dadaism are legitimate avenues of pursuit. There was always the odd Red-baiting or redneck Congressman or provincial lobbing water balloons at contemporary culture, but it is difficult to imagine an attack like the one on “60 Minutes” having occurred on William Paley’s network.
Something seems to have changed, and the show made me wonder in what ways the art world is responsible. I also wonder, as a critic, about how the thoroughly justified chorus of discontent surrounding events like the Whitney Biennial or the Venice Biennale may have helped, even in a small way, to fuel a climate of philistinism far more alarming than anything in those shows.
The Whitney Biennial, and before that the Whitney annual, has always been a target for barbs, but when was the last time so many mainstream critics of different inclinations were united in similar discontent? I don’t want to beat the carcass of the Biennial, except to note that the preponderance of political art and Conceptual work of little esthetic value left even those of us who wish to be open to experimentation frustrated.
The promotion in many quarters of the art world of work that did little more than tweak puritan sensibilities, and work that preached liberal values to the converted, tired many critics sympathetic to the new because the work implied a threat: defend such art or be condemned as reactionary.
At the same time, much of the writing in what might be called the art trade journals, historically obscurantist, has become increasingly unreadable in the last few years, weighted with theoretical and sociological pretensions that the works often couldn’t bear — in fact, without which the works hardly existed.
Mr. Safer is right to attack what he called the Sanskrit of art writing, but he misses the point. Complicated ideas may require complicated explanations; one wouldn’t expect medical journals to be accessible to every lay reader. But the turgid theoretical writings in defense of much meager contemporary art became a kind of wall or barrier, so high that only a few could scale it. Forget the marketing possibilities of such elitism, which have always been exploited by dealers. The point is that defenders of the precepts of modernism began to feel turned off and excluded by such alienating stuff.
I admit to my own crises of faith in the midst of the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale. But I had no doubt about which side to stand on when the lines were drawn by Mr. Safer. No one who genuinely cares about art and esthetics can feel anything but alarm while watching lampoons like the one broadcast into 17 million households the other night.
The show’s seeming blanket condemnation of the contemporary art world is important, then, in part as a reminder that to knock events like the Biennial requires reaffirming the familiar principles: that the new, the experimental and the daring are no less crucial to art than to science, and that raising informed and constructive doubts about some aspects of the contemporary scene doesn’t mean casting doubt on the whole of it.
* *
* *
[As I noted above, Morley Safer did two more segments on contemporary art for 60 Minutes, one of them focusing on a trip to Miami Beach, Florida, for Art Basel Miami Beach in 2012. The review below, by Roberta Smith, the current chief art critic of the New York Times, is a critique of that broadcast, which was headlined “Art Market” and which Smith saw as a continuation of the 1993 segment.]
“SAFER LOOKS AT ART BUT ONLY HEARS THE
CASH REGISTER”
by Roberta Smith
New York Times, 3 April 2012
Was that all there was? The art world was braced for another attack from Morley Safer and his “60 Minutes” crew on Sunday night. It had been nearly two decades since the 1993 segment in which he derisively lumped together the work of Jeff Koons, Cy Twombly, Robert Ryman, Robert Gober, Christopher Wool, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Jean-Michel Basquiat while inviting conservative art critics like Hilton Kramer, who died last week, to confirm that it was all indeed overpriced tripe — “the emperor’s new clothes,” as he put it.
The first time around Mr. Safer did little except talk about money. There being much more money in the art world these days, a reprise must have been irresistible.
But Mr. Safer’s return visit was a relatively toothless, if still quite clueless, exercise. Basically he and his camera crew spent a few hours last December swanning around Art Basel Miami Beach, the hip art fair, and venturing nowhere else, letting the spectacle of this event, passed through quickly and superficially, stand for the whole art world. With money again the driving force and main focus, their look-see had a Johnny-come-lately tone.
In voice-over Mr. Safer discharged an opening salvo or two, calling the art fair “an upscale flea market.” And he also took a parting shot at “the art trade” as a “booming cutthroat commodities market.” But in between he was relatively benign, almost avuncular, schmoozing blue-chip art dealers, brushing shoulders with collectors and the occasional museum director or trustee. Yes, he smirked and laughed up his sleeve a lot. But so what? He can’t really tell good from bad and doesn’t care to put in the time that might make him able to. And times have changed. These days the art world blogosphere produces so much of its own smug, semi-informed, provincial snark that it is hard for Mr. Safer’s to stand out.
Moving down the aisles he uttered some dismissive phrases like “the cute, the kitsch and the clumsy” while the camera passed often inconsequential work that was left unidentified. Mention was made of performance and video art. Occasionally he mustered feeble attempts to be receptive. There was a respectful pause in the aspersions as the camera passed a canvas by Helen Frankenthaler, although her name was not mentioned. Kara Walker was referred to as a “truly talented artist.” At the Metro Pictures booth it was hard to know whether he liked the work of Cindy Sherman, but he noted that her photographs sold for $4 million (glossing over the fact that only one did).
It didn’t help that the emperor’s new clothes cliché was trotted out again, along with “artspeak” to refer to the way that discussions of art can sound to the uninitiated, or the incurious. His act felt tired and formulaic. He couldn’t muster much outrage, maybe because, for the time being at least, the art world is a bit too real as a business. If you’re fixated on money, it tends to impress.
“The art market sizzles,” he observed, “while the stock market fizzles.” Maybe a few too many of the artists whose work he ridiculed back then are still around.
He looked mildly sheepish as Jeffrey Deitch, who appeared in the first segment, pointed out that a work by Jeff Koons that “sold well” for $250,000 in 1993 now sells for $25 million. He deferred to the art dealer Larry Gagosian and the collector Eli Broad, who each said as little as possible on camera.
Tim Blum, an art dealer from Los Angeles, was the most expansive interviewee, describing three categories of collectors: those who buy art for love (because it is “their lifeline”), those who buy on speculation and the superrich for whom art is “the next thing on their queue,” their list of must-have status symbols.
Mr. Safer clearly has no time for love, and no one bothers to explain that even speculators and the superrich don’t stay interested too long unless they have some knowledge of and attraction to art, however you may disagree with their aesthetic choices or be put off by the outrageous prices they are willing to pay.
Have they ruined art? No, they’ve just created their own little art world that has less and less to do with a more real, less moneyed one where young dealers scrape by to show artists they believe in, most of whom are also scraping by. Mr. Safer should visit that one sometime, without the cameras, and try to see for himself, beyond the dollar signs. Either that or he should just come clean: He could not care less about the new or how it makes its way, or doesn’t, into the world and into history. That’s fine.
The obsessions of others are opaque to the unobsessed, and thus easy to mock. Nascar, jazz, baseball, roses, poetry, quilts, fishing. If we’re lucky, we all have at least one.
* *
* *
[I said that Safer entered the fray himself—that C-SPAN interview will in the next installment on Thursday—so I’m going to include some letters to the Times editor the paper printed. They are all in response to specific remarks someone made during the . . . uuuh . . . debate.]
“‘YES . . . BUT IS
IT ART?’”
by Morley Safer
New York Times, 11
October 1993
To the Editor:
Re your Oct. 4 article on the reaction of the art world to my “60 Minutes” segment titled “Yes . . . but Is It Art?”: Far from “questioning the very premises of abstract art,” as you declaim, I was questioning the pretension and esthetic sensibilities of a number of dealers and the talents of certain artists.
If you genuinely believe that the derivative pissoirs, infantile scrawls and the gibberish uttered by painters on canvas and critics in journals genuinely raise the spirit and tease the imagination, then I apologize to our viewers and your readers. If, on the other hand, you were simply doing your civic duty by supporting a sagging local industry, I understand.
Then there are the dealers, ah the dealers, those men and women whose intellectual gifts appear in such sharp outline on any one of Gerhard Richter’s empty canvases.
It was especially amusing to have Marc Glimcher of the Pace Galleries say my report “stank of anti-intellectualism,” in light of last Sunday’s deft dissection in The Times Magazine of Pace and Glimcher, pere et fils. For the stink of anti-intellectualism, Mr. Glimcher, look not to our brains but to your walls.
— New York, 5 October 1993
* *
* *
“‘STUCK IN THE
MUCK’”
by Morley Safer
New York Times, 31 October
1993
To the Editor:
I am at once pleased, offended and puzzled by Michael Kimmelman’s essay “A Few Artless Minutes on ‘60 Minutes’” [Oct. 17]. Mr. Kimmelman grudgingly commends our report for questioning the opaque nature of contemporary art criticism and the objects upon which it heaps so much impenetrable praise. But he condemns us for lumping together such disparate artists as Jeff Koons, Cy Twombly, Robert Gober and Robert Ryman. Mr. Kimmelman does not seem to understand that it was not “William Paley’s network” that lumped them together; it was the spring sale of contemporary art held at Alfred Taubman’s sale room — Sotheby’s.
If Mr. Kimmelman wishes to compare Sotheby’s 1993 sale with the 1913 Armory Show, he has a critic’s right to do so. And if he wishes to compare my thoughts on the importance of Jean-Michel Basquiat with the criticism of Matisse by Duncan Phillips 80 years ago, I accept that too. But if Mr. Kimmelman thinks for a moment that I will one day give even basement closet space to Basquiat’s juvenile drivel, he is sadly mistaken.
The most puzzling, and I admit, charming part of Mr. Kimmelman’s essay was his admission of his own “crises of faith” regarding contemporary art. But he “had no doubt about which side to stand on when the lines were drawn by Mr. Safer.”
I suppose I should feel flattered that a brief examination
of some modern art was responsible for a near-religious experience by the chief
art critic of The New York Times, but I am not. I am troubled by his assumption
that those of us who are not in the thrall of the sale rooms, the dealers, the
hypists and the opportunists represent philistinism and repression. Cross the
line, Mr. Kimmelman, and you will find just the opposite: a yearning for the
truly new and daring and experimental. We are the healthy subversives over
here. You are stuck in the muck of decrepit modernism. It is not a question of
faith or even taste, but of having an open mind.
—New York
The writer is co-editor of the CBS News program “60 Minutes.”
Mr. Kimmelman replies: Mr. Safer’s letter is as amusing and skewed as his “60 Minutes” segment. He flatters himself that my “crises of faith” came from watching him; they came, as I wrote, “in the midst of the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale.” Nor do I have any illusions about his being Duncan Phillips. And regarding his conclusion, suffice it to say that few “hypists” are as deluded about Jean-Michel Basquiat as Mr. Safer seems to be about his own “open mind.”
* *
* *
[Now for some opinions by way of letters to the editor from people who didn’t have their own press outlets. Quite a few sounded off with their opinions of Morley Safer’s critique of contemporary art.
[The first letter was to the International Herald Tribune, which is co-owned by the New York Times and the Washington Post (since the New York Herald Tribune folded in 1966). The article to which the writer’s letter refers was apparently the IHT’s edition of Carol Vogel’s review, “Art World Is Not Amused by Critique,” reposted above.]
“YES, BUT IS IT
ART?”
by David Youtz
International
Herald Tribune, 8 October 1993
Regarding “CBS vs. Art World: Philistines at the Gate” (Back Page, Oct. 5):
Surely there are hundreds of artists, critics, curators and gallery owners who could have described the many reasons why art is not necessarily pretty, is often difficult to understand immediately, and is not what we expect. That would have been interesting and new.
Instead, the CBS program was consistently shallow, and Morley Safer seemed uninterested in anything but an easy laugh. Shame on "60 Minutes" for failing the public with such tired, cheap, marshmallow reporting.
—Hong Kong
* *
* *
[The responses below were collected into an article and published collectively, along with a short introduction. They’re not really “letters,” but answers to a query from the New York Times.]
“IS IT ART? IS IT
GOOD? AND WHO SAYS SO?”
by Amei Wallach
New York Times, 12 October
1997
The debate continues about where art is today and what so
many people still want it to be. For years, the National Endowment for the Arts
has been the target of some members of Congress and their constituents and has
sometimes seemed on the brink of extinction, although Congress voted on Sept.
30 to preserve the agency for another year with $98 million, just slightly
under the previous year’s allocation. Last Sunday on CBS, Morley Safer devoted
a segment of “60 Minutes” to attacking a selection of contemporary art; the
report was a follow-up to a controversial one he presented in 1993 on the same
subject. Again, he asked the rhetorical question, Yes, but is it art?
When artists are as comfortable with video as marble, when paintings bear no resemblance to anything Gainsborough or even Jackson Pollock would have recognized, when a work of art can be mistaken for “a hole in the ground,” as the critic Arthur Danto puts it, many people are wary of where artists are leading them.
What is art, what is good art and who decides are real
questions. The Times asked art-world participants and observers for answers.
—AMEI WALLACH
THOMAS McEVILLEY
Professor of art history, Rice University; former contributing
editor, Artforum magazine
The last time I was in Houston, I went to a place called Media Center, where someone had set up posts as in a back yard with laundry hung all over. I immediately knew it was an artwork because of where it was. If I had seen it hanging in someone’s yard, I would not have known whether it was art, though it might have been. It is art if it is called art, written about in an art magazine, exhibited in a museum or bought by a private collector.
It seems pretty clear by now that more or less anything can be designated as art. The question is, Has it been called art by the so-called “art system?” In our century, that’s all that makes it art. As this century draws to a close, it looks ever more Duchampian. But suppose Duchamp didn’t have Andre Breton as his flack; most of his work could be dismissed as trash left behind by some crank.
What’s hard for people to accept is that issues of art are just as difficult as issues of molecular biology; you cannot expect to open up a page on molecular biology and understand it. This is the hard news about art that irritates the public. if people are going to be irritated by that, they just have to be irritated by that.
ANTONIO HOUMEN
Director, Sonnabend Gallery
We never had any rigid idea about what art could be, and that is why in 1970-71 we began showing movies by artists and videos by artists. Everybody started talking about Video Art, which we thought was silly; we didn’t believe it was Video Art but art made by interesting artists using video tapes and films. Every time art takes a form people don’t recognize, they ask “Is that art?”
RICHARD PRINCE
Artist
With my own work, it’s art when it looks as if I know what I’m doing and when doing it makes me feel good. It’s like a good revolution. I’ve always said art is a revolution that makes people feel good. I don’t think art has a consensus. I don’t think 10 people in a room talking about art could agree about whether something is good or bad art. I think it’s good when I can put myself into another artist’s shoes, and wish I could have done that, or could see myself doing it. With someone like Jeff Koons, I don’t particularly understand how the work is made. A lot of parts are jobbed out. I don’t see the artist’s hand in it, so I don’t relate to it.
ROBERT ROSENBLUM
Professor of art history, New York University; curator at
the Guggenheim Museum
There was a great to-do in the 1950’s about Abstract Expressionism. It just means people are upset when they see something new. In 1959, a lot of people thought Frank Stella’s work was an absolute outrage and a joke. By now the idea of defining art is so remote I don’t think anyone would dare to do it. If the Duchamp urinal is art, then anything is. But there has to be consensus about good art among informed people -- artists, dealers, curators, collectors. Somebody has to be the first to say something is good, but if you put it up the flagpole and nobody salutes it, then there’s nothing there.
WILLIAM RUBIN
Director emeritus of painting and sculpture, Museum of
Modern Art
There is no single definition of art that’s universally tenable. Cultures without even a word for art nevertheless produced great art, for example, the ancient Egyptians. Since the Industrial Revolution, Western societies have felt their social values in continuous flux and their received definitions of art under constant challenge.
There’s a consensus as to what is art in most periods, but it’s not made by the man on the street. It is formed by those deeply concerned with the substance of art. This is not elitist, because anyone may participate. Basically, the larger public makes a subjective determination: I know art when I see it.
JENNY HOLZER
Artist
I think you can rely on the artist’s representation; he or she would have no reason to lie. A viewer with a combination of sensitivity and knowledge will perceive that something is art and is good. Time also helps.
ARTHUR DANTO
Art critic of The Nation
You can’t say something’s art or not art anymore. That’s all finished. There used to be a time when you could pick out something perceptually the way you can recognize, say, tulips or giraffes. But the way things have evolved, art can look like anything, so you can’t tell by looking. Criteria like the critic’s good eye no longer apply.
Art these days has very little to do with esthetic responses; it has more to do with intellectual responses. You have to project a hypothesis: Suppose it is a work of art? Then certain questions come into play -- what’s it about, what does it mean, why was it made, when was it made and with respect to what social and artistic conversations does it make a contribution? If you get good answers to those questions, it’s art. Otherwise it turned out just to be a hole in the ground.
PHILIPPE DE
MONTEBELLO
Director, Metropolitan Museum of Art
There are historical criteria evolved over time that have held up. Maybe one Rembrandt is better than another, but you can no longer say Rembrandt is not a good painter. At his time, unlike now, there were accepted criteria that artists’ audiences -- much more limited audiences -- understood. I think the change began with Impressionism when you had a division among people who saw the academic painters as the accepted norm and the avant-guardists represented the others.
There’s no consensus about anything today; even the notion of standards are in question. But I don’t think art matters less to our lives than it did in past; it probably matters more. Look at the millions who go to museums today. Art has landed in many more households and in the awareness of many more people than ever before. You could argue that because art is so ubiquitous it is even harder to make judgments.
PETER HOEKSTRA
Republican Congressman from Michigan and an opponent of
the N.E.A.
If people want to say, that’s art, great. That’s terrific. Art is whatever people want to perceive it to be, but that doesn’t mean the Federal Government should fund it.
ALEXANDER MELAMID
Half of the artist team, Komar and Melamid
We see art as fun. As long as it gives us some kick, it goes. Sometimes it’s not accepted by the galleries or museums as art, good art, but we believe it is.
BARBARA KRUGER
Artist
I think that art is the ability to show and tell what it means to be alive. It can powerfully visualize, textualize and/or musicalize your experience of the world, and there are a million ways to do it. I have trouble with categories; I don’t even think high culture, low culture. I just think it’s one broad cultural life, and all these different ways of showing and telling are in that. I do know just the idea that because something’s in a gallery, instantly it’s art, whereas something somewhere else is not art, is silly and narrow. I’m not interested in narrowing definitions.
KARL KATZ
Executive director of Muse Film and Television, which
produces films on art.
People look at art as if it were a checklist; the label is sometimes more important than the work of art. My sense is that looking at art is like having a conversation. If it’s not visual and it’s not visceral and it’s not communicative, it’s not a work of art.
ROBERT HUGHES
Critic and author of “American Visions: The Epic History
of Art in America.”
The N.E.A. thing is a convoluted mess now, but in its origins it was about people thinking that immoral and disgusting and offensive works were being funded as if they were works of art, that is, as if they were uplifting, worthy noble things. The Puritans thought of religious art as a form of idolatry, a luxury a distraction, morally questionable in its essence, compared to the written and spoken word. The countervailing argument in the 19th century had to do with the moral benefits to be derived from art. As far as I am concerned, something is a work of art if it is made with the declared intention to be a work of art and placed in a context where it is seen as a work of art. That does not determine whether it esthetically rich or stupidly banal.
MORLEY SAFER
Co-editor, “60 Minutes”
I regard a blank canvas as a joke from beginning to middle to end. When the Museum of Modern Art had the big Robert Ryman retrospective, I said: “Maybe you are a jerk. Maybe you are the philistine everyone says you are.” So I wiped my mind as clean as a Ryman canvas and I walked through the show. Then I walked through the permanent collection. It was like going from an absolute desert to a perfect spring day.
LOUISE BOURGEOIS
Artist
Something is a work of art when it has filled its role as therapy for the artist. I don’t care about the audience. I’m not working for the audience. The audience is welcome to take what they can.
ROBERT STORR
Curator, department of painting and sculpture, Museum of
Modern Art
What’s interesting is when art changes people’s minds. The art historian Leo Steinberg wrote about Jasper Johns that the minute he allowed Johns to be good art, he had to let go of something, of the definition of what art was. Good art makes you give something up. For years what the general public had to give up was Impressionism and the idea that painting should make you feel some human warmth. An Agnes Martin or Frank Stella painting is not just giving up images but about giving up warmth.
With Bruce Nauman, emotion comes through video or somebody breathing hard on an audio track; he makes you take in emotion in a new way and let go of what you’re used to. We expected that people would respond to our Bruce Nauman exhibition with hostility and stay away in droves. The good news is that they do understand video and sound works, and when somebody does it well, they get it.
Inside the art world a lot of these issues aren’t dealt with because people don’t want to be embarrassed. Lay people who react strongly may be better indicators, and the fact that they say it’s not art probably means it has touched a nerve.
LINDA WEINTRAUB
Freelance curator and author of “Art on the Edge and Over
– Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society 1970’s-1990’s.”
When you think about art, you have to think about life. If art doesn’t sensitize us to something in the world, clarify our perceptions, make us aware of the decisions we have made, it’s entertainment.
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“TODAY, IT’S ART
WHEN YOU’RE A SOMEBODY (SORRY, AUNT MILLIE)”
by David Villano
15 October 1993
To the Editor:
Lost in the debate over the “60 Minutes” treatment of abstract art is the question asked for centuries: What makes a work of art? There are countless responses, including the old “I’ll know it when I see it” nonanswer. Clearly, Morley Safer doesn’t see it in a mounted urinal or a whitewashed canvas (news article, Oct. 4). Others see more.
But anyone who is familiar with the art world’s complex power structure will agree with a more cynical answer to that age-old question: art is the exclusive domain of those lucky few deemed “artists.” If my Aunt Millie, for instance, drops three basketballs in a fish tank and tries to peddle the mess down in SoHo she’d be laughed all the way back to Paducah. But when the art-world golden boy Jeff Koons presents the same creation, gallery owners gush about a stunning new masterpiece. Can you blame the “60 Minutes” crew for their skepticism?
Much of today’s abstract art cannot stand alone; it is dependent on the name of the artist penned at the bottom. This standard by which we now define and judge art conjures Marshall McLuhan’s oft-quoted assessment of technology’s impact on society, “The medium is the message.” In today’s art world, sad to say, the art is the artist.
—Miami, 10 October 1993
[Just a reminder: I will be posting further commentary on Morley Safer’s 1993 60 Minutes broadcast on Thursday, 11 April. Please come back for the completion of this series.]
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