More Responses To "Yes . . . But Is It Art?"

 

[My last post, “Responses to ‘Yes . . . But Is It Art?’” (published on Rick On Theater on 8 April), was an assemblage of articles, letters, and reviews published in the New York Times in response to Morley Safer’s broadcast on 60 Minutes on 19 September 1993.  The subject of the CBS News segment was, as readers of ROT will know, he state of art at the end of the 20th century (and, by implication, the beginning of the 21st).

[As I said when I posted the transcript of that 60 Minutes report (“‘Morley Safer’s Infamous 1993 Art Story,’” 2 April), Safer’s opinions raised he disapprobation of many in the art world, from art-lovers and collectors, to artists, to dealers, to critics and academics.  I promised to post some of that conversation—in some cases, admonitions—which is what the last post started.  This is the second installment of that part of this short series, covering the commentary from other outlets from across the country.] 

“YES . . . BUT IS IT ART?:
MORLEY SAFER AND MURPHY BROWN TAKE ON THE EXPERTS”
by Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi 

[This article first appeared in Aristos, a website that styles itself an online review of the arts and the philosophy of art, in June 1994.  (I made reference to it briefly in the afterword to “Morley Safer Defends His Take On Contemporary Art,” 5 April.)]

Twice in the past year, millions of American viewers had the pleasure of seeing the contemporary art establishment get its comeuppance on prime-time network television.

First, there was the segment entitled “Yes . . . But is it Art?” last September 19 on the long-running CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes, which exposed the fraudulence of the contemporary work hyped by most dealers, critics, and curators—work ranging from so-called abstract art to a “piece” consisting of two basketballs submerged in a fish tank. Morley Safer, the intrepid reporter for the segment, aptly derided the art world’s impenetrable Artspeak, and deprecated the status-seeking collectors of such work by invoking the old adage “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Four months later, on the January 17 [1994] episode [“The Deal of the Art“] of CBS’s popular Murphy Brown show, the sit-com’s fictional TV anchorwoman also mocked the fashionable art world, including its pseudo-artists. Undoubtedly inspired by the 60 Minutes segment and its aftermath, the Murphy Brown episode was as trenchant a social satire as any play by Molière—a witty denuding of intellectual pretension and charlatanry.

In one scene, Murphy, facing off against art “experts” on a PBS talk show (a scene modeled on Morley Safer’s appearance on the Charlie Rose show), ridiculed a work entitled Commode-ity, which was nothing more than an actual toilet affixed to a wall. The sit-com writer did not exaggerate. Commode-ity was no more bizarre than the real-life commodities of the postmodernist whose “artworks” consisting of urinals and sinks had been featured on 60 Minutes—or than the urinal that the early modernist Marcel Duchamp presented in 1917 as an artwork entitled Fountain.

[In reality, Duchamp never “presented” Fountain in the sense that he displayed it. It was rejected by the board of the Society of Independent Artists, for whose exhibition he submitted it. After that, it was lost and never seen in public. He had had Fountain photographed, which is why pictures of it are often published—and how reproductions of the original piece have been exhibited.]

In another scene, equally true to life, Murphy succeeded in passing off as a mature work by an unknown artist a painting by her eighteen-month-old son. The scene might well have been inspired by an event reported in the Manchester Guardian in February of last year [10 February 1993]. According to the Guardian, a “blob”-like painting by a four-year-old child was bought by a collector for £295 [$753 today] after being exhibited in the annual show of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts. The child’s mother had submitted the work as a joke, and a panel of six experts, unaware of the age of the “artist,” had selected it because they thought it displayed “a certain quality of colour balance, composition and technical skill.”

In the final analysis, real life has been less satisfying than the sit-com, however. There is no reason to hope, for instance, that the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts will soon alter its selection criteria. When informed that a work by a four-year-old had been exhibited, the president of the academy was unperturbed. “The art of children often has a very uncluttered quality which adults often strive to gain,” she explained to BBC Radio 4, “so I don’t feel in the least embarrassed about it.” She then added, without flinching at the implicit contradiction of her expert panel’s judgment of the qualities they discerned in the work: “Technical skill can get in the way of instinctive response.”

Closer to home, the heated media debate that followed the airing of “Yes . . . But Is It Art?” on 60 Minutes fizzled out in a series of ill-considered letters by Morley Safer to the New York Times and other periodicals, and in his ineffectual sparring with Artspeak experts on the Charlie Rose show [see “Morley Safer Defends His Take On Contemporary Art”]. Safer lost the debate, not because the purported experts’ arguments made any sense but because he, despite the best of intentions, had no consistent argument at all.

In contrast, Murphy Brown prevailed, through witty barbs and an unshakable confidence in her own common sense. In a triumphant moment, Murphy’s co-anchor had earlier declared: “People have been waiting for someone to blow the whistle on this so-called art and the business that feeds on it. It’s a house of cards, and perhaps your piece will help bring it down.” As another of Murphy’s colleagues observed, she had won allies even among viewers who generally disagreed with her stance on other issues. Clearly, the question of what art is cuts across customary political and social lines.

Nevertheless, it will take far more than an exposé on 60 Minutes or an episode of Murphy Brown to topple this house of cards. Too much money and prestige are invested in it for its proponents to yield without a fierce struggle. Major cultural institutions and corporate sponsors—not to mention countless “artists,” dealers, collectors, curators, and critics—have their fortunes and reputations at stake.

What is needed to sweep the art world clean is not merely an intuitive sense of what art isn’t, but a well-reasoned and clearly articulated understanding of what art is. Unfortunately, one cannot look to the majority of today’s academic philosophers of art for guidance. The profession, by its own admission, is in a state of confusion on this question, owing in part to the on-going proliferation of what it euphemistically refers to as “unconventional” art forms. Indeed, the American Society for Aesthetics lamented in a winter 1993 position paper that the central question of esthetics—What is art?—has become “increasingly intractable,” with the result that the very viability of the field as a philosophic discipline is in jeopardy.

Because philosophers have shrunk from defining the concept, the terms “art” and “artist” are up for grabs. It has even become common for critics to resort to such absurdly circular propositions as “If an artist says it’s art, it’s art” (Roberta Smith in the New York Times [“It May Be Good But Is It Art?,” 4 September 1988]) and “Dances are dances and ballets are ballets simply because people who call themselves choreographers say they are” (Jack Anderson, also in the Times [“Just What Is This Thing Called Dance?” 12 August 1990]).

One thing is certain, however, and cannot be repeated often enough. Art, like everything else in the universe, has an identity, which can be objectively defined. An essential attribute of art, we maintain, is meaning—objective and readily discernible meaning. If a work makes no sense at all to an ordinary person without the intervention of an expert, it is outside the realm of art.

That this fundamental truth was conveyed, albeit implicitly, on two of America’s most popular television programs bodes well indeed for the future.

[I can’t say that I agree with Torres and Kamhi’s last statement, in their final two paragraphs above. As for “meaning” being the “essential attribute of art,” I stand with Suzanne Langer (1895-1985), an art philosopher such as those Torres and Kamhi disparage.

[Langer wrote that art is symbolic language and “has no vocabulary, no dictionary definitions.  It is . . . an expression of non-discursive thought.” “Beauty,” she said, “is expressive form.”  In other words, beauty is a function of the artwork’s main purpose: if the work successfully expresses feeling, that is, “may truly be said to ‘do something to us,’” it is by definition ‘beautiful’—whether or not it’s also pretty.

[Langer says nothing about “meaning.”  What a piece of art “means” to any given viewer depends on what it makes her or him feel, and that could be thousands of different “meanings”—or none at all. (See “Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater,” 4 and 8 January 2010.)] 

*  *  *  *

“JERRY SALTZ ON MORLEY SAFER’S FACILE 

60 MINUTES ART-WORLD SCREED”

by Jerry Saltz 

[Jerry Saltz is the senior art critic for New York magazine, which published this column on 1 April 2012. (It also appeared on Vulture, the online platform of New York.) This review is of Safer’s second 60 Minutes broadcast on contemporary art, the one in 2012, “Art Market,” after he made the trip down to Miami Beach for the Art Basel art fair.]

Art is for anyone. It just isn’t for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that’s irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money. That’s when easy hit jobs on art’s bad values appear in mainstream media. A harmless garden-variety example aired tonight on CBS’s 60 Minutes (I didn’t know it was on anymore), as Morley Safer went into high snark. Never mind that he did virtually the same piece in 1993, beating up on institutions like the Whitney [Museum of American Art in New York City] and mentioning some of the same names with the same pseudo-knowingness. (I think he’s got an art bromance brewing with Jeff Koons. This time, at least, he has nice things to say about Cindy Sherman and Kara Walker.) As with that 1993 piece — which he brought up repeatedly, crowing about its notoriety — Safer was on about art fairs, artspeak, high prices, collecting as conspicuous consumption, Russian oligarchs who throw money around, and the ugliness of the market: endemic stuff we all know about and dislike.

In the days before cable TV and the Internet, the art world would get bent out of shape by such sniping. (I remember tittering when, shortly after the 1993 story aired, I spotted Safer downing free Champagne at a Whitney event. The cravenness!) Nowadays, Safer’s cynicism is a good sign: It even performs a service for the art world. He goes to the biggest fish-in-a-barrel scene around, Art Basel Miami Beach, to take a few shots, and (while publicizing the story the other day) complains that there are now “customers who just weren’t there twenty years ago.” He scornfully said, “Now you have China, Malaysia, India, Russia … seriously, Russia.” Ick! Rich people from Malaysia and Russia! (It’s like he’s trying to stop a posh men’s club from integrating. Oh wait, he recently did that, too.) The self-devouring service he performs is being a one-percenter going after other one-percenters. He’s hating art that only others like him pay much attention to. You go, Morley.

In tonight’s segment, Safer delivered cliché after cliché, starting with “the emperor’s new clothes.” Earlier in the week, he was moaning that contemporary art “lacks any irony.” (What has he been looking at these past 40 years?) He worried that the “gatekeepers of art” permit such bad work. He doesn’t know that there are no “gatekeepers” in the art world anymore, that it’s mainly a wonderful chaos. It’s like the scene in Apocalypse Now when Martin Sheen crosses into Cambodia and asks a soldier, “Who’s in charge here?” The soldier, unaware he’s in a place where old rules no longer apply, panics and replies, “I thought you were!” That’s Safer.

Rather than really looking at art, he’s focused on the distraction, on celebrity, cash, and crassness. Safer fails to see that cash simply does what other cash does and collectors basically buy what other collectors have already bought. He’s now doing the same thing: Spotting the obvious. It sounds like he doesn’t regularly go to scores of local galleries, big and small, parsing out what he sees, month by month, deciding on a case-by-case basis what works, what doesn’t, why. He’s not finding his own taste; all he’s doing is not liking what other people like himself like. Or maybe Safer is just what Colonel Kurtz, in Apocalypse Now [played by an obese Marlon Brando], calls “an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.”

Flacking for the piece on Friday, Safer told Charlie Rose and Gayle King, “Even Jerry Saltz says 85 percent of the art we see is bad,” adding that he’d suggest that it’s 95 percent. Whatever. I wanted to tell him that the percent I suggested doesn’t only apply to the present. Eighty-five percent of the art made in the Renaissance wasn’t that good either. It’s just that we never see it: What is on view in museums has already been filtered for us. Safer doesn’t get that the thrill of contemporary art is that we’re all doing this filtering together, all the time, in public, everywhere. Moreover, his 85 percent is different from my 85 percent, which is different from yours, and so on down the line until you get to Glenn Beck [conservative political commentator and media personality], who says everything is Communist. No one knows how current art will shake out. This scares some people.

The reason Safer isn’t able to have what he calls “an aesthetic experience” with contemporary art is that he fears it. It’s too bad, because fear is a fantastic portal for such experiences. Fear tells you important things. Instead, Safer is fixated on art that only wants to be loved. Most art wants attention, but there are many ways of doing this — from being taken aback by Andy Warhol’s clashing colors and sliding silk-screens to being stopped in your tracks by just a dash in a poem by Emily Dickinson. Art isn’t something that only wants love. It’s also new forms of energy, skill, or beauty. It’s the ugliness of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children. Often art is something we cross the street to avoid, something that makes us uncomfortable, that tells us things we don’t want to know, that creates space for uncertainty. Safer goes to the most hellish place on Earth to look for “an aesthetic experience,” then gets grumpy when he doesn’t have one. It’s clownish.

The art world now knows that the more time spent by the Safers out there shooting the wounded, the more time other emerging, on-going, subtler, and maturing art will have to take root before the next generation of Safers takes its aim. The longer these folks are distracted by being riled and right, the better. I understand that Safer makes watercolors of motel rooms or something. So he does have ideas about what art should be. Morley, I challenge you to curate a public New York show of 25 to 35 contemporary artists — those who have emerged since, say, 1985 — whose work you really approve of, plus a few examples of your own art. I promise to review it, fair and square. Deal?

*  *  *  *
“MORLEY SAFER HATED CONTEMPORARY ART.
HE ALSO MADE PAINTINGS. 
HE ONCE SENT A BUNDLE OF THEM TO ME”
by Jerry Saltz

[On 20 May 2016, five days after Safer retired from CBS after 50 years with the network and 46 years with 60 Minutes, and the day after the newsman’s death at 84, Saltz published this column, a sort of obituary. He had mentioned Safer’s painting in his 2012 article above; now he had a first-hand experience with it.]

Morley Safer, the legendary TV newsman, died Thursday at age 84. So why am I, an art critic, writing about him? Like a lot of people in the art world, I feel I have a sort of history with him.

I don’t mean to be speaking ill of the dead instantaneously, and I intend this more as a begrudging compliment: To us, Safer was a persistent pain in the ass, most famously in his September 1993 quarter-hour hit piece for 60 Minutes on the whole culture of contemporary art, snidely titled “Yes, But Is It Art?” In the segment, which quickly became insider shorthand for all the ways the wider world misunderstands and sometimes disdains contemporary art, the irascible Safer — dressed in an almost-tuxedo and dripping with disdainful innuendo that implied that all of this was just a sham — attacked high prices (or what seemed then like high prices), the infamous “political” Whitney Biennial, and, of course, Jeff Koons. And even though every potshot he took seemed slanted, one-sided, his arch insinuations got under the art world’s skin — a sign of different times, I guess, both for art and for television news. I remember how miffed I was when, two weeks after his hatchet job hit the airwaves, I spied him drinking free Champagne at that season’s Whitney Museum benefit dinner. In 2012 he more or less repeated the drive-by, sauntering down the aisles of one of the grossest souks on Earth, the Art Basel Miami Beach Art Fair, for another segment, all the while drolly pointing to this or that fashion victim or crapola work of art, cluelessly assuming that all art was like this.

What most people don’t know about Safer is that he was himself an artist. Or, at least, he made art. In the 1990s I’d heard he made watercolors of motel rooms, and I continuously tried to coax him into allowing me to mount a show of them. I don’t even know if my requests ever got to him, as I never heard from him or CBS. That changed last year, when I was writing an article on art by celebrities, and, after we reached out to him, Safer offered to send a package to New York Magazine.* Before I could say “OMG! The bear is coming out of the woods,” a carefully wrapped bundle of small original works arrived at our offices. I don’t believe they’ve been published, or possibly even seen publicly before.

I didn’t hate them. What I saw had a certain earnest pathos, someone being an artist in a mid-20th-century Sunday-painter way. The work seemed influenced mainly by a very conservative idea about plain modernistic surfaces, depiction, and color. Safer was a careful drawer, and his colors stayed within lines. His subjects were ordinary landscape, portraits, churches, tourist sites, and the like.

                         

Hotel room, Drake Hotel, Chicago, 1980
Safer was known to paint his hotel rooms while on the road.

I wouldn’t have bought any of these if I saw them at a yard sale, except one. His motel-room picture has everything you’d want it to have, and even a little bit more. Which is to say banality, blankness, something sweet, neat, forlorn, and soul-killing. The space is cramped, the décor drab and sterile; a rotary dial phone sits on the bare night table next to one generic lamp. Over the small double bed is just the kind of cliché landscape that Safer liked to paint: two trees on a hill with a yellow sun in the white sky. Ironies extend. The rumpled bed with only one side turned down lets us know Safer has been here, alone on the road. A plain poignancy lingers, even in the uninspired style.

In 1990 he painted a native of Burkina Faso, West Africa. He’s black, sitting on the ground against a stuccolike building, and wears some sort of scarlet robe. Never mind the Orientalizing that most in the art world would spot as colonialist, Safer does the whole thing in an unhurried, controlled Gericault-meets-Matisse air.

[Jean-Louis Géricault (1791-1824) was a French painter and one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement. Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was a French painter, regarded as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century.]

Another work from the same year finds him giving us a scene overlooking bountiful planted summer fields of musky green. (The guy obviously enjoyed his first-class perks and leisure time.) Other than a great tree that feels like it must have been made on the African serengeti, the rest of the work I saw was typical tourist postcard art. The unhurried arid mise-en-scène conjures sparsely peopled retirement communities built around golf courses.

Adding to the pathos of the pictures, after the article came out and he wasn’t included, I got another email asking me, honestly, why not, and what I thought of his art. I never got back to him. Had I, I would have said that it was too bad he never gave art a real chance, as he seemed to have a real feel for a certain strain of painting from observation. And that, had he not set himself against the whole world of contemporary art, he might have picked up a thing or two that might have helped him.

Responses To "Yes . . . But Is It Art?"

 

[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.

[Oh, and he also came to his own defense a number of times, including in a 2012 interview C-SPAN.]

“ART WORLD IS NOT AMUSED BY CRITIQUE”
by Carol Vogel
New York Times, 4 October 1993

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. 

*  *  *  *
“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.]

Morley Safer Defends His Take On Contemporary Art

 

[On 2 April, I posted the transcript of Morley Safer’s 60 Minutes segment on contemporary art from 1993.  That broadcast ignited a lot of opprobrium from various parts of the art world, as I noted in my comments accompanying the transcript.  I decided to continue the coverage of this event by posting some of the responses to Safer’s remarks, 

[I’m starting with the rather lengthy transcript of a panel discussion with Safer on PBS’s Charlie Rose.  I will follow this up with some written comments, including reviews of Safer’s broadcast.  Those will come out on 8 April. 

[One note on this post: it’s longer than my self-imposed maximum.  The discussion was long and all the participants had a great deal to say.  I didn’t want to split the transcript and post it in two installments because I feel that would cause it to lose some of its strength.  Please indulge me—but feel free to read it in installments if you prefer.]

“‘YES, BUT IS IT ART?’”

[The transcript (which I’ve edited and corrected as necessary) is the record of a talk show that aired on 25 October 1993.  The segment, moderated by Rose, presented journalist Morley Safer (Canadian-American broadcast journalist and reporter; 1931-2016), artist Jenny Holzer (American neo-conceptual artist; b. 1950), curator David Ross (b. 1948; at the time of this broadcast, Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art), and art critic Arthur Danto (art critic and philosopher; 1924-2013) discussing Safer’s controversial 60 Minutes broadcast on contemporary art, broadcast on 19 September 1993. 

[Charlie Rose was a television interview and talk show with Charlie Rose (b. 1942) as executive producer, executive editor, and host.  The show was syndicated on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) from 1991 until 2017.  Rose interviewed thinkers, writers, politicians, athletes, entertainers, businesspersons, leaders, scientists, newsmakers, and fellow journalists.]

Charlie Rose: Welcome to our broadcast. Tonight, is contemporary art really art, or is it just media-hyped junk? Morley Safer takes on several art-world critics who are outraged at his 60 Minutes piece condemning some of the work in contemporary art . . . .

It is a rare occasion when the art world actually agrees on something, but when a feature entitled “Yes, But Is It Art?” aired on the popular 60 Minutes program, a cry was heard, “Unfair.” The reaction reminded us that new art can equal controversy. Battles and skirmishes arise when new aesthetics and ideas are introduced.

Joining me now to talk about some of the critical questions in contemporary art, Morley Safer, the co-editor of 60 Minutes, and reporter for the feature in question. Artist Jenny Holzer, whose work is shown around the world. She was the first woman chosen to represent the United States at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1990. Arthur Danto, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, author of the acclaimed Beyond the Brillo Box [Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992] and art critic for The Nation magazine. Also joining us, David Ross. He is director of the Whitney Museum of American Art [1991-98], and has been embroiled in some controversy at that place as well.

Welcome, one and all. I have said to you, what I want to have here is an engaging conversation. Morley’s piece has given us the opportunity to look at contemporary art. I start with that piece. Tell me why you did it. What was the point of view? What brought it to your attention that this was an appropriate subject now for 60 Minutes?

Morley Safer: First of all, it’s something I’ve been wanting to do for long time. Those people who know me well know some of my thoughts about some of that contemporary art. Along with John Tiffin, who is a producer I work with a lot in London, we’re both very interested in art, and in art history, purely as amateurs. I would not claim anyone’s expertise here in terms of art history.

Charlie Rose: And you dabble in painting a little bit yourself.

Morley Safer: And I paint myself. That was the genesis of the piece. The thing that surprised me, most of all about the piece, I knew there’d be some ruffled feathers. I had no idea it would cause the exposure it caused, which to me in a sense confirms the fragility of belief in much of the material we talked about, plus others. I think that it’s a very fragile belief, by the critics, by the dealers who may have no belief at all because they’re in the marketing business, even by the institutions, and perhaps by some of the artists as well.

Charlie Rose: You’re surprised by the controversy. What is it you think you said, or intended to say, that caused this uproar?

Morley Safer: I think—

Charlie Rose: What do you believe?

Morley Safer: I believe, the response to the uproar was to accuse me of being in league with Jessie Helms [Republican U.S Senator from North Carolina: 1973 to 2003, a leader in the conservative movement; 1921-2008], for repression, and for philistinism, among the other things. It’s the old [Joseph] McCarthy [1908-57; Republican U.S. Senator from Wisconsin: 1947-57] technique of don’t attack what the guy said. Create something that you think he stands for and attack that. [McCarthy is the namesake of ‘McCarthyism,’ the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism.]

Charlie Rose: That’s why I’m asking the question. What did you say?

Morley Safer: To that?

Charlie Rose: No, no, to the – What was it you said that reflected your belief?

Morley Safer: You’ll have to ask them. I don’t know. I think everything I said touched a nerve here or there.

Arthur Danto: What was the belief, the fragility of which was exposed? You mean that people in the art world have serious doubts that this was art? Or Jeff Koons said, “I’ve been wrong all these years?”

Morley Safer: No. Certainly—

Arthur Danto: That wasn’t the kind of fragility.

Morley Safer: No, I think perhaps fragility of belief by Michael Kimmelman [b. 1958], for example, who’s the chief art critic for the New York Times [1990-2011; he’s now the architecture critic], who confessed a crisis of faith in—

David Ross: But I think the issue that your piece raised was that there’s a reality out there that artists are confronting, and artists use art to ask some very serious and interesting questions. You returned to a series of questions that seemed to be based on the assumption that what art is is what artists can get away with, that what art is is a kind of a sham, promoted by people marketing product, and promoted by magazines interested in supporting their advertiser base of dealers, and that’s what art is.

But in fact, art asks far more interesting questions about the society we’re living in, about our fragile lives as people living in the late 20th century. It’s those kinds of questions that your piece seemed to just gloss over by assuming that the basic question is, is it art? Is [Cy] Twombly [1928-2011] an artist because he makes scribbles? Is [Gerhard] Richter [b. 1932] an artist because he makes gray monochrome canvases? Is [Jean-Michel] Basquiat [1960-88] an artist because some kid says, “I could do that.” Well, in fact, what that kid was saying was wonderful to me. Because that meant that kid really understood the language that Basquiat, as an African American, was trying to bring out. [These artists are all mentioned in Safer’s 19 September broadcast; see referenced post.]

Charlie Rose: Let me interrupt you—

David Ross: So you asked the wrong questions, rather than any other problem. That’s what I thought. It was a terrific piece.

Charlie Rose: Wait, wait, wait, Morley. I want you to have a chance to respond to that. I’m going to come right back.

Morley Safer: I think that it would be wonderful if artists were asking these questions you speak about, asking truly interesting questions, and presenting their art in an interesting way, and getting to the core of some interesting things about this good country, or this society, or this world. I think what we are getting is this verbal blah, of juvenile questions being, verbal art so to speak. Don’t look at my art. Read my art. The questions are clichés. It makes bumper stickers art. It makes advertising copy art. It all becomes art, because I suspect that most advertising copy is written and believed in in the most heartfelt way possible.

Arthur Danto: You know, it’s really difficult to ask deep questions in the context of an auction room. That was your favorite venue. You showed these artworks up there, like so many slaves being auctioned off.

Morley Safer: That’s where they are.

Arthur Danto: Your question was, how much are they paying for this stuff? How can they be such fools as to pay that kind of money? Without for a moment leaving the possibility that intelligent people are interested in it. Intelligent people discourse intelligently about it, because the art itself is intelligent work made by intelligent people. You made it seem like a commercial sideshow.

Charlie Rose: Jenny.

Morley Safer: Well, much of it is.

Arthur Danto: It is not.

Jenny Holzer: Before we have to start defending art, let’s go back to your original question, which is what you said to start all this. I know what you said that I objected to, which was, and I’ll probably only misquote you a bit, that most contemporary art would be worthless junk without the hype. That’s more or less equivalent to my saying most reporting is hopelessly biased, or most old white men are cruel and destructive. I think you would disagree with those things. I disagree with what you said, because it’s not true. But I had fun saying those things. Did you do the piece so you could have fun saying it?

Morley Safer: Oh, I do everything – I do what I do because it’s fun to do, of course.

Jenny Holzer: But is it true.

David Ross: But journalism might—

Morley Safer: Mostly it’s true.

David Ross: Journalism might—

Morley Safer: Most of all, it is true.

Jenny Holzer: Most contemporary art is—

Morley Safer: Most of what I do, mostly, I do it because it happens to be true.

David Ross: It would be equally unfair to try to analyze journalism, broadcast journalism, by following around an ad salesman for 60 Minutes, watching him pitch why they should buy time on your show, watching that commercial side of what supports your show and your livelihood, or watching the people out there raising money for Channel 13 [WNET, the PBS outlet in New York City, producer of Charlie Rose] and trying to pitch why they should support Charlie Rose, and why they support shows like this.

The commercial side of anything has its seamier aspects to it. Because selling is not something we appreciate, and we actually try to demonize it. But if you look at that work, you took Gerhardt Richter’s gray painting out of context and said it’s silly because they didn’t know which side is up. But Richter is an enormously protean artist, whose work is so complex and so valuable and so intelligent, but out of context to take one gray monochrome canvas and ridicule it, it’s too easy. That’s cheap shot stuff.

Charlie Rose: Before we go any further, let me roll tape. Here is one excerpt from the piece on 60 Minutes, reported by Morley Safer.

Morley Safer: [clip from “Yes . . . But Is It Art?”] For his pièce de résistance last year, he hired platoons of German workmen to erect a 40-foot puppy made of flowers, and the art world cheered.

Unidentified Male [I identified him as art critic Jeffrey Deitch. ~Rick]: It’s very much about something extremely banal, made into something terrifically heroic and important. It kind of bespeaks of our own sense of ego in certain moments in our life.

Morley 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:

Unidentified Male: “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.”

Morley Safer: A book on Christopher Wool [b. 1955], the 'Rat, Rat, Rat' [a reference to a Wool painting at auction] man, said of his work:

Unidentified Female: “They communicate not by facile appropriations, but as a honed perfectionist idea of that discourse, reduced to the irreducible, then starting all over again.”

Morley Safer: Arts Magazine said of Robert Gober [b. 1954], who specializes in arms, legs, sinks, and urinals:

Unidentified Male: “Installations function as utopian and dystopian spaces. The tableau arrests, and its own stillness suspends social time.”

Morley Safer: 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.

Morley Safer: So simple when you think about it.

Charlie Rose: That’s the 60 Minutes piece. I’ve got a couple of questions I want to come back to. Number 1 is that, with respect to the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale, a lot of people have raised questions, is this art? Is this an appropriate thing for this exhibition to be doing? Correct?

David Ross: Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose: You’ve talked about it on this broadcast.

David Ross: Sure.

Charlie Rose: And other people have written about the Venice Biennale. My question is, why isn’t it appropriate for 60 Minutes, or this program, to do a program about the notion, is this art? To raise questions about whether a piece of work is art, and what’s the definition of art, and if in fact you do that, you’re going to raise this piece, and this piece, and this piece, and say—

David Ross: That’s an enormously important question to ask. It’s what artists ask every day that they work. If artists all understood what art is, they would stop making it. If any of us absolutely was sure what art is, this subject would become a dead issue. Art continues to grow and change and evolve. So to ask that question is fine, but you have to do it in a balanced way. The 60 Minutes piece had Hilton Kramer [1928-2012] speaking from the same—

Charlie Rose: Who believes that perspective and British – much of contemporary art is not art.

David Ross: Yeah. So there was no balance in that piece. It was filled with the kind of an approach that it’s all a game. You could have equally found people who – you could have brought Arthur Danto onto that show and had a different kind of balance. It was a piece filled with, unfortunately, cheap shots. I think that’s why people got upset by it, not because it was being questioned.

Charlie Rose: Not because those issues were raised.                                  

David Ross: No.

Charlie Rose: But because the other side didn’t get a point.

David Ross: I think it’s enormously important and raises issues.

Jenny Holzer: It was an editorial. It wasn’t a thought piece.

Charlie Rose: All right. Morley?

Jenny Holzer: The questions weren’t asked. They were asked and answered.

Charlie Rose: Is that a point, that you did not hear from the other side of people who really—

Morley Safer: I think that—

Charlie Rose: —may quarrel with a lot that is being done.

David Ross: I think Jeff Deitch plays the role of the fool on purpose. That’s part of his work. He’s like a Shakespearean fool. That is literally what he is trying to do. To just take that out of context and say, “Oh look at this guy he’s a jerk,” but he’s doing that as—

Morley Safer: Would you say – Would you go further and say conman?

David Ross: No he’s playing the fool. He’s not a conman. I mean—

Arthur Danto: Well, whether he’s a conman or not, the issue that you raised was not raised in the form of a question but in the form of a condemnation. “Is it art” was not a question except in the most rhetorical sense. Your mind was made up. What you wanted to do was implant in the viewer the answer, no it’s certainly not.

Morley Safer: Shall we talk about the creative works of Jeff Koons [b. 1955]?

Jenny Holzer: And worse than that, to jeer.

Morley Safer: Sure.

David Ross: And if we want to we have a chance to talk about other things, too, but I’m happy to.

Morley Safer: Well, it would take somebody extraordinarily creative to have made that puppy out of flowers. I mean that—

Arthur Danto: He didn’t make it.

Jenny Holzer: You kicked the puppy. You kicked the puppy. That’s low.

Charlie Rose: Let me read in which Michael Kimmelman. He says, and this thing – this is from the New York Times – “A Few Artless Minutes on 60 Minutes” [17 October 1993] in which Michael talked about this piece. He said:

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 aesthetics 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.

Now I would assume you would agree with that?

Morley Safer: You assume correctly, however, what I don’t see much of out there, whether it’s a Robert Ryman [1930-2019] or a Robert Gober [b. 1954], forgive me, is anything new, daring or experimental. It’s filled with clichés. It’s all mainly been done before. Tired language, tired phrases. As I say, it makes bumper stickers into art. Anything you want to say, write it down and if that is art—

Charlie Rose: Well, now that’s an interesting question to have about contemporary art. Is it new and interesting and daring and who decides?

Morley Safer: If this verbal toboggan that the art world is sliding down on is art, I’ll go home and eat my library which is full of words.

Arthur Danto: Go home and eat your library, that’s a really good idea—

Jenny Holzer: Read it first.

Arthur Danto: Because the saying ‘it’s been done before’ is the least interesting observation anybody could make. No, each time somebody does something, even if it looks the same, some new statement is being made.

I want to get to a certain other point. I just came back from Canada where they’re also in an uproar over art. They’re in an uproar over [Mark] Rothko [Latvian-born American abstract painter; 1903-70] and [Barnett] Newman [American artist; 1905-70]. The National Gallery paid 1.8 million dollars for the Rothko, 1.5 million dollars for Newman.

Needless to say the Toronto Sun says a child could do it. Get out your crayons kids. The first three best Rothkos will get free passes to dinosaur park. A kid says I can do the Newman.

Here, so there’s a malaise in the country at this point. Last year one thought it might have to do with sex and censorship. In Canada one thought good money by the government which should be spent on other issues is going into that. Here we’ve got a free market. These were the most innocent looking works that you can think of and yeah, there’s this anxiety. How are people getting away with it and so forth.

David Ross: That’s what I was saying before. The problem of art’s value is undercut when the question that’s being asked isn’t did Jean-Michel Basquiat make art that talked about his own identity as a young African-American man.

By the way, wasn’t the greatest thing that could have happened to him that he died. It’s such a great tragedy that he died. For anyone to die of a drug overdose, it’s a horrible thing to lampoon in the way that you did in your piece. [See the post of Safer’s original broadcast.]

The fact that so many young kids came to see that show and understood that there was a vocabulary being involved that was being used by an artist being shown in a real museum that they could understand and would lead them to respect their own creative urges, I found terrific. I wish I knew who that kid was who said he could do it and maybe he can and maybe he will because he saw that Basquiat show. Maybe he won’t question the premises of art’s value to our society

Charlie Rose: This here raises an interesting question about some of contemporary art. Our people say exactly what these young men in this piece by 60 Minutes said. They look at something that is said to be contemporary art and they say, “I could do that.” They see some of Jeff Koons’s stuff and they say, “I could do that.” Now what’s going on here when you see a lot of stuff – They don’t say that about Picasso. They don’t say that about a lot of stuff.

David Ross: That’s not true.

Jenny Holzer: They do say that about Picasso.

David Ross: What is it about contemporary art that makes people say, “I could do that”? Of course they do. They say that because the craft tradition is changing. Because the notion of the kind of academic training that in the 19th century was absolutely necessary to be accepted into the Academy has shifted and now the notion of what’s an appropriate material, what’s an appropriate subject, what’s an appropriate approach to art-making is up for grabs. Take Jenny’s work.

Morley Safer: I hate the word appropriate. Appropriate sounds very conservative. It’s not a question of what’s the appropriate material or what’s the appropriate medium. I think the only appropriate thing is that this object, this painting, this anything somehow touches you.

David Ross: Did you see the Koons puppy in Germany?

Morley Safer: It’s ice cold.

David Ross: Did you see the Koons puppy in Germany?

Morley Safer: In person? No.

David Ross: You would have been moved by it. It was an enormously moving and wonderful experience.

Charlie Rose: This is the thing we saw. The Jeff Koons piece did the flower piece. Yes?

David Ross: An amazing thing. It’s easy to take it out of context and say it’s stupid but—

Morley Safer: Most of this art is ice cold. It attempts weakly to touch your mind. It does not even attempt to touch your heart.

Arthur Danto: Everybody’s in love with it Morley.

David Ross: Even people who hate Koons loved that piece.

Arthur Danto: People who hated Koons and who hated Documenta adored that piece. [Documenta 9 was an art fair near the site of Koons’s topiary Puppy. See the post of “Yes . . . But Is It Art?”]

Morley Safer: I’ll tell you, I thought it was a wonderful joke.

David Ross: If you walked into Jenny’s installation in Venice—

Morley Safer: It was full of wit.

David Ross: If you walked into Jenny’s installation in Venice, which was just words, it was so overpowering that I saw people there sitting crying in that piece. [I write about Jenny Holzer’s art in “Words with Pictures / Pictures with Words,” 16 September 2014.] Filled with colored light coming at you at a million miles an hour, it was almost frightening to be there and yet they were so emotionally moved by the experience of that, I saw people sitting there, reading, thinking, experiencing this color and light and yes, text and crying because they were so moved by it. It was a beautiful, wonderful – Look, that’s why she won the first prize in the Venice Biennale.

The world isn’t made of fools. The world is made of people who are thinking and who are serious. Hilton Kramer aside, who hasn’t liked anything in contemporary art since 1960, there are many serious, thoughtful people—

Arthur Danto: ’47.

David Ross: ’47. I’m sorry, I gave him too much credit. There are serious, thoughtful people who find value and reason in the kind of work that you too easily lampoon.

Charlie Rose: All right let me hear from Jenny because you’re the artist among us.

Jenny Holzer: Can you understand that it’s enormously insulting for your piece to say that artists would, for instance, be awake at night thinking about how to pull a scam, how to pull the wool—

Morley Safer: I don’t suggest that the artists—

Jenny Holzer: No. Wait wait wait. Unless you are saying that the conspiracy is all about the critics and the dealers and that the artists are just too dumb to know what they’re doing. Artists are awake at night trying to figure out how to find the most profound things and then once found how to express them so that other people not only see them but feel them.

Morley Safer: I could not agree more with what you’re saying.

Jenny Holzer: That is what most artists are trying to do. Some succeed better than others but there is no scam. There’s nothing about—

Morley Safer: Let me give you an example. I do not doubt your sincerity and indeed the only one whose sincerity I might doubt might be Koons. I think he is a jokester and a prankster and that’s fine.

David Ross: But he’s sincere about it.

Arthur Danto: But then sincerity’s not that big an issue.

Morley Safer: Well, I think it is because people jumped on me for being critical of Robert Ryman, and I’ll tell you why I think Ryman does serve a purpose in a moment, because Robert Ryman is a man in his 60’s and has spent most of his adult life working at this. How can you dismiss him as a conman or a charlatan? I don’t, but sincerity of purpose is hardly any measure. If sincerity of purpose was applied to novelists, they’d all be Tolstoy and we’d be praising them.

When I say Ryman serves a wonderful purpose – I went to the Museum of Modern Art  the other day to look at the Ryman show [26 September 1993-4 January 1994]. I went through three times, feeling as ice cold when I came out as when I went in. Then I went down 20 feet to the permanent collection. I’ve done the same thing at your museum [i.e., the Whitney], which, as you know, I love.

David Ross: Thank you.

Arthur Danto: There, suddenly, is this wonderful demonstration of the best of experimental art. From Francis Bacon [Irish-born British figurative painter; 1909-92] to [Arshile] Gorky [Armenian-American painter; 1904-48] to [Willem] de Kooning [Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist; 1904-97] and you’re just bathed in this warmth and you feel uplifted by it.

David Ross: But don’t you realize that what you’re revealing right now about yourself is your own comfort zone? The area where you see art that maybe relates to your experience growing up, looking at the art of the Seven in Canada or art that deals with landscape or art that deals the expressionist tradition, but they’re other generations.

[The Group of Seven were Canadian landscape painters from 1920 to 1933 with “a like vision.” It originally consisted of Franklin Carmichael (1890-1945), Lawren Harris (1885-1970), A. Y. Jackson (1882-1974), Frank Johnston (1888-1949), Arthur Lismer (1885-1969), J. E. H. MacDonald (1873-1932), and Frederick Varley (1881-1969). A. J. Casson (1898-1992) was invited to join in 1926, Edwin Holgate (1892-1977) became a member in 1930, and Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald (1890-1956) joined in 1932.]

Jenny Holzer: You’re speaking of your personal relation—

Morley Safer: I don’t know that de Kooning would fall under that category and certainly Francis Bacon wouldn’t.

David Ross: But there are other generations and other languages that are evolved by new generations.

Jenny Holzer: I think we’ve come to something. The piece was about your personal response, which was fine, but you abused your platform to say that because you don’t get it, this is a terrible thing and it must be a fraud. Your piece should have had this subtitle, “This is your lack of response to art.”

David Ross: Or you could have taken the—

Jenny Holzer: You were being – Exactly.

Morley Safer: Or I could say that that piece on 60 Minutes was our occasional attempt to put on a piece of art.

David Ross: Well, I would love it if you did a performance art piece on 60 Minutes and put it out as that, but you have such credibility as a journalist that when you put out a piece that pretends to be balanced and fair in the same way that you’ve looked at serious, hard-hitting issues throughout the years of that program, then it skews the issue.

Charlie Rose: Here’s my question. Is the anger, whatever the reaction you feel about what Morley did on 60 Minutes, in contrast to the reaction you feel about other critics of contemporary art who raise the question, “Is this art, is this art, is this art?” Is it only the impact and the power that 60 Minutes has that concerns you or is it something else?

David Ross: Well, it’s the fact that you know he’s—

Charlie Rose: Because now other people have had the same thing he said.

David Ross: Asking the question is not a problem. In fact, when we first met, I said I was really pleased with that show because it did ask a question. The difference is—

Charlie Rose: Then what’s the difference?

Jenny Holzer: To use a legal term, it was asked and answered.

David Ross: Exactly, and he answered it – you know, before asking.

Charlie Rose: Letting the wrong people answer him.

David Ross: And he didn’t balance the way the question was presented to an enormous public.

Morley Safer: I don’t think that it’s possible to do a balanced piece on contemporary art. Or maybe on art period. I don’t think it’s possible.

Jenny Holzer: That’s a ridiculous statement, that it’s not possible to do a balanced piece about contemporary art.

Morley Safer: I don’t think it’s possible.

David Ross: Why not?

Morley Safer: Because one’s own eye—

Jenny Holzer: Defend that.

Morley Safer: Taste, heart, and mind get in the way.

Jenny Holzer: One’s? One’s? Yours.

Morley Safer: But should that be the test as to whether your eye sees this as art?

Arthur Danto: But this is supposed to be investigative journalism.

Morley Safer: Should David Ross have the right to decide what’s going into a public institution? Of course he should.

David Ross: And I get criticized.

Charlie Rose: Here’s my other question, if we move along. I’m going to look at some art in a moment. Who decides, I mean what enfranchises, to use the word, something as art? You know, an exhibit?

David Ross: Well, it’s part of the process.

Charlie Rose: Does anything that someone who has a reputation as a good artist like Jenny, that she does, whatever she does becomes art because she’s an artist. What enfranchises it?

David Ross: That kind of defining process today is almost unproductive in a conversation.

Charlie Rose: To try to answer it?

David Ross: Yeah, because from my perspective, I believe anything an artist does is art. The rest of us then have to decide what has value and quality that is worth our attention.

Charlie Rose: Then what’s an artist? Who is an artist?

Arthur Danto: That’s when it pushes back. I think it’s an important question but it’s not the whole of contemporary art. To make that issue that’s been discussed throughout the 20th century the defining character of contemporary art and then choose a number of examples that are going to raise the hairs of people who are suspicious in the first place and not to try to give a balanced account of the extraordinary diversity of art in the first place. Secondly the complex institutional structures of the art world, in which that question has to be answered. That is to say how does somebody get into exhibition space?

Charlie Rose: The reason I raised the question in part is because Morley said he thought Jeff Koons was a prankster and essentially not an artist is what he’s saying.

Arthur Danto: But you know if you’d seen his show at the Sonnabend Gallery [Made In Heaven, 23 November-21 December 1991] those gigantic kitsch objects. Those were so frightening you couldn’t—

Morley Safer: That was also at the Sonnabend.

Arthur Danto: —walk into that room and not feel put on edge. He had taken an aesthetic out of everyday life, amplified it in a way that suddenly made it almost unendurable to be in the same space with it. That was not just a charlatanry.

Morley Safer: No, it’s a glorious prank and I’m all for it.

David Ross: It’s not just a prank in the sense that it’s a joke.

Morley Safer: I’m all for language if it has wit.

Charlie Rose: Enough about Jeff Koons. Enough about Jeff Koons. Let me move on. Let me just look [at] some things so that we have a sense of where contemporary art is. Is contemporary art in crisis today?

David Ross: Is society in crisis today?

Charlie Rose: I’m asking about art first, David.

David Ross: I’m not being rhetorical. Contemporary art is a mirror of modern life.

Charlie Rose: Because it reflects a period—

David Ross: How can it not?

Charlie Rose: —of a society that’s in crisis.

David Ross: It’s made by human beings living in this society. Some of it is gonna retreat into safe havens, and present a world of calm and peace. Some of it’s gonna reflect the world and all of its horror and brutality.

Charlie Rose: So maybe I’m falling into traditional criticism when you raise this question. Is there no predominant school of thought or something, and therefore we’re at loose [ends] about what’s going on?

Arthur Danto: We’re living in a very pluralistic art world, at the moment. There’s no single monolithic thing in which you can say that’s in crisis. There’s just too much of it and it’s too diversified.

Morley Safer: I think it’s very fragile.

Charlie Rose: Fragile is the word you’d use.

Morley Safer: I do believe it’s very fragile, and I think the rejection, of figurative painting for example and of drawing almost reached the point where people are questioning that rejection, and there will be—

Jenny Holzer: It hasn’t been rejected. You’ve missed it.

David Ross: Look at Chartreuse.

Arthur Danto: One of the best shows around at the Pace Gallery. I mean, since when is rejecting – it’s true that’s doing faces but he can do them figuratively.

David Ross: Look at Alison Saar [Los Angeles-based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist; b. 1956; her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity], look at people doing figurative work—

Charlie Rose: On this very show, if you remember. Let me look at some stills here guys. We put some together, and so let’s just talk about this. This is a de Kooning composition, 1955, everybody. What’s the point here?

David Ross: I’m not sure – who made the selection.

Charlie Rose: Beth Pollack made it, a producer who knows a lot about art.

David Ross: Obviously de Kooning is a great artist. Recognized as great now. When he made these, all the critics from Hildebrand on down said it was absolute garbage. Now he’s one of our most revered painters, whose career now we can see in retrospect.

I think the point is, Charlie, that we’re so close to what we’re doing right now, and those who are part of it are dealing with it in real time that we don’t have a real distance from it, and you know what? That’s okay. We’ll let historians in thirty years sort it out. Right now we’re engaged in watching it, looking at it. The Whitney and other museums are engaged in supporting those artists and helping put it out there and get the discourse moving.

Charlie Rose: You take me off course, but let me do this just one time. You had at the Whitney Biennial – I said Venice Biennial rather than Biennale. If you had at the Whitney the Rodney King video tape, correct?

[Rodney King (1965-2012) was an African-American man who was severely beaten on 3 March 1991 by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department during his arrest after a high speed pursuit for driving while intoxicated. An uninvolved resident, George Holliday, saw and filmed the incident from his nearby balcony and sent the footage, which showed the unarmed King on the ground being beaten after initially evading arrest, to a local TV news station. The incident was covered by news media around the world and caused a public uproar.]

David Ross: Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose: You said that was art in video. Video art because, what?

David Ross: Well, we believe that it was critical in the last two years of looking at independent film and video, to look at an image made in video by an amateur that transformed American consciousness during that moment.

Charlie Rose: So that becomes art rather than – because of the impact it had on American consciousness.

David Ross: I think you very properly focused on a very marginal work. Not that it was marginal in its impact, but in its definition. I think it was bold of the curator to select that work, because there was no way of looking at a media-influenced culture, whether it’s media art or traditional art, looked at over the last two years that wasn’t enormously affected by those images and what that said about a certain spirit in this country. And that’s what a show like the biennial was reflecting in a number of ways.

Arthur Danto: Well of course I really did object to that.

David Ross: I remember.

Charlie Rose: Where have you been?

Arthur Danto: I thought that was a deep mistake to include that in the biennial. That was supposed to be an art show, not a transformation-of-consciousness show. If art transforms consciousness that’s fine, but everything that transforms consciousness doesn’t belong in the museum. Lots of things, however—

Morley Safer: It may belong in the museum of natural history as an artifact.

Arthur Danto: We’re supposed to be beating up on Morley Safer, but—

Charlie Rose: We’re not supposed to be beating up on one another. What we’re supposed to be doing, and I think we’re doing, is allowing the fact that Morley produced a piece for 60 Minutes and reported a piece for 60 Minutes that’s got the whole art world talking, and we continued that conversation, and that’s important I think.

Jenny Holzer: We just demonstrated is that the art world is too diverse and too feisty to agree on a conspiracy that you seem to think you’ve identified.

Morley Safer: I’ve not talked about a conspiracy. That’s part of the McCarthy tent.

Charlie Rose: That’s just something – I don’t think she meant that. There’s no conspiracy. He may say that the process seems to be run amok.

Jenny Holzer: There’s a conspiracy. I’m taking it from the transcript among the critics and the dealers to perpetuate a fraud. That the art that’s really—

Charlie Rose: I don’t remember the language conspiracy.

Jenny Holzer: Not the word.

Charlie Rose: Let me move on here.

Jenny Holzer: Isn’t that a conspiracy? I think?

Charlie Rose: Fellow art lovers let’s move on, okay, slide two.

Arthur Danto: What happened to de Kooning?

Jenny Holzer: He’s gone. Next.

Charlie Rose: Next. All right—

Arthur Danto: We’re host co-pilots so I’ve actually written about this, now what are we supposed to do?

Charlie Rose: Just tell me why this is art?

Arthur Danto: Why it’s art?

Charlie Rose: Don’t criticize the question. Just answer it.

David Ross: Where we would overlap in like. You were right, we found two artists that we both like tonight. What I would urge you to do is just to open up your heart a little bit and recognize that what artists are trying to do is worth your time of looking and thinking rather than just so quickly and blanketly rejecting the impetus and the value of what you see. It may not have an immediate emotional response. What you did with that piece was give other people license to just walk away without doing the work it takes to really look hard and think hard about art. That’s what pissed so many of us off.

Morley Safer: I’ll tell you, what I would like is for all those people who, I’ll take your word for it, minds open, to really examine their conscience, not read the impenetrable language of Artspeak, but to think for themselves. Forget what the Larry Gagosians [American art dealer who owns the Gagosian Gallery chain of art galleries; b. 1945] and dealer says, what the Arne Glimchers [American art dealer and gallerist, and founder of The Pace Gallery; b. 1938] say, forget what they all say, and go and look and think. Don’t know about this producer just paid $3 million for one of these and to say it is not a commercial sideshow, it’s not beyond this planet and this city at this time.

Arthur Danto: I want to make a comment on that. These objects come embedded in a very wide culture. You can’t just look at them all by themselves and hope you’d get something out of it. You’ve got to have looked at other things and you’ve got to read some things. Some of it’s in not very nice language but notwithstanding you really have to work at art. You can’t just walk in and say, “Wow, I’m knocked out by that.” Sometimes it happens but you can’t count on it happening all the time. That’s why I write so that people will have a piece of thought to work with when they do go look at art.

Morley Safer: What you just described is what brings most people who really love art to art. It’s not really the tedious critics and art philosophers, it’s what it does to their eyes and their minds and their hearts.

David Ross: It’s both things. Either does not have to take the case.

Charlie Rose: All right, last word, to Jenny.

Jenny Holzer: The people will need to forget what you said to be able to enjoy the work.

Charlie Rose: I thank all of you for coming to talk about art and contemporary art. It certainly did what I hoped it would do which was to have an engaging discussion about contemporary art, and Morley’s piece certainly offered us the opportunity to do that. Thank you very much.

[I hope ROTters found this record of the TV program as interesting as I did.  Unlike “Yes . . . But Is It Art?” I didn’t see this Charlie Rose episode, so the transcript was my first time seeing what the art professionals had to say to Safer.

[In an article called “Yes . . . But Is It Art?: Morley Safer and Murphy Brown Take on the Experts” that was posted on Aristos (https://www.aristos.org/backissu/yesbutis.htm), a website that styles itself an online review of the arts and the philosophy of art, Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi concluded that 

the heated media debate that followed the airing of “Yes . . . But Is It Art?” on 60 Minutes fizzled out in a series of ill-considered letters by Morley Safer to the New York Times and other periodicals, and in his ineffectual sparring with Artspeak experts on the Charlie Rose show.  Safer lost the debate, not because the purported experts’ arguments made any sense but because he, despite the best of intentions, had no consistent argument at all.

[On 17 January 1994, an episode of Murphy Brown entitled “The Deal of the Art” aired.  It was a parody of the Charlie Rose panel in which, according to Wikipedia, recounts: “After Murphy [the eponymous investigative reporter for FYI, a parody of 60 Minutes] makes snide comments about modern art, she has to debate a group of artists and critics on PBS [a reference to Charlie Rose].  Is a pile of sweeteners art just because important people say so?  Murphy tests the critics with one of [her 18-month-old son] Avery's finger paintings.”

[Don’t forget to come back to ROT for some more examples of the responses to Morley Safer’s opinions about contemporary art.  It’s still a topic of interest today: 60 Minutes aired a segment with Jeff Koons just this last 10 March—and the only difference in his approach to his medium is that he’s now older and more established!

[The follow-up to this post and my earlier one on 2 April will be on ROT on Monday, 8 April.]