"'The Last Yiddish Speaker': Who They'll Come For First"

by Julia M. Klein 

[Deborah Laufer’s latest play, The Last Yiddish Speaker, is about anti-Semitism (I’ll add more detail on this shortly), and Julia M. Klein’s article from the section called “On The Scene” of American Theatre magazine, was posted on AT’s website (AMERICAN THEATRE | ‘The Last Yiddish Speaker’: Who They’ll Come for First) on 9 April 2024, six months after the terrorist assault by Hamas on Israel last 7 October and the start of the consequent war in Gaza.

[But, as you read Klein's article, you’ll learn that the play, written before last year’s Hamas attack, reaches back not just to the rise of anti-Semitism and Christian Nationalism in the United States in recent months and years—in April 2024, the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Semitic acts increased 140% in 2023 over the previous year—but to 6 January 2011, and even 11 September 2001.

[According to a synopsis of the play published on playbill.com, The Last Yiddish Speaker’s tells this story:

In the years following a successful January 6th insurrection, a white supremacist regime has come into power.  Paul and his teenage daughter, Sarah, live under the radar in a small town upstate as Christian-passing, despite being Jews who fled New York City.  When an ancient[,] Yiddish-speaking woman arrives on their doorstep, Paul and Sarah are forced to decide between fleeing again or fighting for their faith, their heritage and their identity.

[Deborah Zoe Laufer grew up in Liberty, New York, a town of a little over 10,000 inhabitants in Sullivan County in the Catskill Mountains.  (She currently lives in Mount Kisco, New York, a town of about 11,000 in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City about 43 miles north of the city.) 

[She has described her childhood as living in a small town, growing up in the woods, and raising animals.  She had an early interest in theater, and a lifelong goal to be an actress and a stand-up comic.  She studied acting at the State University of New York at Purchase.  

[Laufer worked as an actress along with other subsistence jobs.  She was a member of the Polaris North Theatre Company in New York City, an actors’ cooperative, when she became pregnant with her first son.  During the pregnancy, she wrote her first play, Miniatures, and performed in it at Polaris North.  It was produced at a few small theaters after that, including the Wedge at the Hangar Theater in Ithaca, New York (2002).

[She submitted the play to the Missoula Colony writer’s workshop in Montana, where it drew the attention of playwright Marsha Norman.  Norman invited her to study playwriting at the Juilliard School, where Norman taught.  Laufer accepted the invitation and graduated from Juilliard in 2000.

[Laufer’s plays have been produced at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Cleveland Playhouse, Geva, The Humana Festival, Everyman, Primary Stages, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and hundreds of other theaters around the world.  In addition to full-length straight plays, she’s written dozens of short plays, and two musicals, Window Treatment, and By Any Other Name, written with composer Daniel Green.

[Besides Juilliard, Laufer’s an alumna of the BMI Lehman Engel Advanced Musical Theatre Workshop, and she’s a Dramatists Guild Council member.  She’s also a recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, the Lilly Award, the ATCA Steinberg citation, and grants and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Edgerton Foundation, the National New Play Network, and the Lincoln Center Foundation. 

[Her work has been developed by the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Theatre Lab, PlayPenn, the Cherry Lane Alternative, the Missoula Colony, LOCAL Theatre, Asolo Rep, the Baltic Playwrights Conference, and more. Her plays are published or recorded by Concord/Samuel French, Smith and Kraus, Playscripts, LA Theatreworks, and Premieres.]

Deborah Zoe Laufer’s new play, now kicking off its rolling world premiere at Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre, imagines an eerily plausible fascist future.

When Seth Rozin, founding artistic director of Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre Company, first read Deborah Zoe Laufer’s The Last Yiddish Speaker about a year ago, “I immediately thought it was important,” he recalled recently. “It was timely, a really solid play that has a great story with characters that anyone could care about, very relatable, but also with some unique magic.”

Timely indeed: The drama is set in a near-future dystopian Christian Nationalist America in which the coup of Jan. 6, 2021, succeeded, and ethnic, ideological, and religious conformity is enforced at gunpoint. Its characters are a Jewish father and daughter passing as Christian; the daughter’s initially unsuspecting boyfriend; and a mysterious older woman who embodies a millennium of Jewish history and tradition.

World events have since given the play’s conflicts an even sharper edge. With the war in Gaza, increasing public expressions of antisemitism, and the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency, The Last Yiddish Speaker is “much more than timely, but frankly urgent,” said Rozin, who also directs. “It’s a vital play, a necessary play, to remind us of the stakes when outside events poke at our biases and push people into a corner.”

A Lucille Lortel Theatre commission and a finalist in the Jewish Plays Project, The Last Yiddish [Speaker]’s InterAct bow (March 29-April 21 [2024]) is the first in a National New Play Network rolling world premiere. Additional productions are planned at Oregon Contemporary Theatre in Eugene (Oct. 23-Nov. 10) and Theatre Lab at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton (Oct. 23-Nov. 17), where Laufer herself will direct.

[According to its website (https://jewishplaysproject.org/), “The Jewish Plays Project identifies, develops, and presents new works of theater through one-of-a-kind explorations of contemporary Jewish identity between audiences, artists, and patrons.”  Furthermore, the site states that “The Jewish Playwriting Contest seeks to discover, highlight, and nurture contemporary Jewish drama by engaging with artistic and Jewish communities throughout the English-speaking world.”

[Founded in 1998, the National New Play Network (https://nnpn.org/) is an “alliance of nonprofit theaters that champions the development, production, and continued life of new plays.”  The Rolling World Premiere is NNPN’s program for developing and producing new plays across the country.  Each RWP supports three or more theaters that choose to mount the same new play within a 12-month period, allowing the playwright to develop a new work with multiple creative teams in multiple communities.]

“I like to write about what it’s like to live in the time we’re in, and the time we’re in is shifting so quickly,” said Laufer, who lives in Mount Kis[c]o, N.Y. “I keep saying history rewrites my plays faster than I can.”

The Last Yiddish Speaker takes place in the fictional upstate New York town of Granville in 2029, in a world where Jews, gays, and others deemed outsiders are banished or killed, dissent is punished, and a recent edict forbids women from attending college. A frustrated Sarah, now known as Mary, and her more circumspect father, Paul, are at loggerheads about how to survive without losing themselves in the process.

The play’s surveillance state calls to mind George Orwell’s 1984 [1949], as well as the totalitarian regimes Orwell both satirized and prefigured. Laufer’s counterfactual premise also evokes Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here [1935] and two other novels later adapted for television: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America [novel, 2004; HBO miniseries, 16 March-20 April 2020], in which the isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and ushers in fascism, and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle [novel, 1962; Amazon Prime Video streaming series, 2015-19], which imagines an America conquered by the Axis powers of World War II.

Laufer’s 90-minute one-act is among a spate of recent dramas and musicals dealing with antisemitism and the varieties of Jewish response, some epic in scale. Broadway has featured Tom Stoppard’s semi-autobiographical Leopoldstadt [on Broadway, 2 October 2022-2 July 2023; 2023 Best Play Tony and 2023 Outstanding Play Drama Desk Award], Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic [9 January-3 March 2024], and Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s Harmony: A New Musical [13 November 2023-4 February 2024], a tribute to the 1920s and ’30s German sextet the Comedian Harmonists.

Laufer mentions another similarly themed play, The Ally, by Itamar Moses [b. 1977; playwright, author, producer, and television writer], who happens to be a member of one of her three writing groups. Premiered this winter by New York’s Public Theater [27 February-7 April 2024], The Ally puts a progressive Jewish professor in the crosshairs of disputation about the Middle East.

But Laufer (whose plays include End Days [premièred at Florida Stage (West Palm Beach), 2007], Leveling Up [premièred at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, 2013], and Informed Consent [premièred at Geva Theatre (Rochester, New York), 2014]) said that the initial spark for The Last Yiddish Speaker wasn’t political at all: It was a podcast she heard about a Hawaiian bird on the verge of extinction.

“I was so moved by being the last one who speaks your language, or being the last of your species,” Laufer said. As with stories of “people being lost in space, it’s the loneliest feeling in the world.”

Laufer said her plays tend to emerge “from four or five things that I’ve been obsessing about.” In the case of The Last Yiddish Speaker, which she called “probably the least hopeful” of her works, those obsessions did include some political concerns, namely rising antisemitism and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The Last Yiddish Speaker is also a response to her first professional production, The Last Schwartz [premièred at Florida Stage, 2002], about the Jewish “fear of assimilation and how it tears families apart.   

“There is a criticism of Jews in the heart of that play,” said Laufer, who was raised in rural upstate New York “with a certain paranoia” about being Jewish. “I’ve evolved in the last 20 years. I feel more protective of my Judaism.”

Trained as an actor at SUNY [State University of New York] Purchase, Laufer also has worked as a standup comedian and a director. At a conference in Missoula, Mont. [the Missoula Colony writers; workshop of the Montana Repertory Theatre], Marsha Norman [b. 1947; playwright, screenwriter, and novelist] read a play Laufer submitted [Miniatures] and told her, “You know, you’re a playwright.” On her invitation, Laufer enrolled at the Juilliard School, where Norman headed the playwriting program. “It was the most amazing thing,” Laufer said, “and it changed my life.”

Laufer’s most successful play to date, End Days, inspired in part by 9/11, is a comic family drama featuring a collision between science and religion, as incarnated by the physicist Stephen Hawking [1942-2018; English; director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge] and Jesus. It has received about 90 productions, she said.

In an earlier version of The Last Yiddish Speaker, the eponymous character of Aunt Chava was a more realistic figure—a woman in her 90s. A writer colleague told Laufer, “There’s something missing—it’s not a Deborah Laufer play.” Now Chava is 1,000 years old, a magical element that, to Laufer, makes the show “reverberate in a much larger way.” InterAct’s Chava is portrayed by Stephanie Satie, who coincidentally played Tevye’s daughter Chava in the original Broadway national tour of Fiddler on the Roof [1966-70].

Citing Rozin’s directorial input, Laufer described The Last Yiddish Speaker as comprising three love stories: “between a father and daughter, a boy and a girl, and then this old woman who’s passing on Judaism to this young woman.”

Continued Laufer, “I really see this play as Our Town [Thornton Wilder, 1938]—if there were a really dark backdrop. There still needs to be all the innocence and simplicity and joys and problems of living in a small town. All those things have to be just as alive in the play as the backdrop, which is so dark. I keep saying, ‘It’s Grover’s Corners [New Hampshire (fictional), population 2,642 in 1901-13]—let’s not lose that. It’s a small town and it’s young love.’ The sweetness of these relationships really needs to be emphasized.” In the InterAct production, Gabriel Elmore’s performance as John, the boyfriend torn between allegiance to the new world order and his love for the teenager he knows as Mary, captures that sweetness.

Laufer’s play poses a question, Rozin said, that isn’t limited to Jews, but that defines Jewish history: “The constant question that we ask at every place that we’ve settled is, ‘Do we fight, do we flee, or do we assimilate in order to survive?’” Each option entails some loss. The Last Yiddish Speaker, he said, is both a reminder “of what has been given up already” and, through the character of Chava, a suggestion of a “magical opportunity of reconnecting with your history, your culture, your language.”

“One of the things I like about this play is that it’s very specific,” Rozin said. But, like The Diary of Anne Frank, he said, it “comments on the larger issues of humanity and human nature. While it uses the specific history of Judaism, of the Jewish people and Jewish culture, the play is really about the challenges of living together in community going forward.”

[Commonly known as “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the actual journal was published in English translation as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952. Its popularity inspired the 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank by the screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and they adapted it for the screen for the 1959 movie version. For a report on a pandemic-era Zoom performance of The Diary of Anne Frank, see “The Diary of Anne Frank Online,” 29 May 2020.]

[Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.]

 *  *  *  *

[After reading Klein’s article on Laufer’s play, I thought it would be interesting to see some of the published reviews of the Philadelphia première production.  My first selection—for obvious reasons, I think—is from The Forward, the New York City-based, English-language newspaper for a Jewish-American audience.  This review appeared on the website on 8 April 2024; coincidentally, the reviewer is Julia M. Klein.]

“IN A CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST SURVEILLANCE STATE,
THE FEW REMAINING JEWS STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE”
by Julia M. Klein 

Deborah Zoe Laufer’s ‘The Last Yiddish Speaker’ envisions a dystopian future for America

Deborah Zoe Laufer packs a suitcase full of themes into her passionate and timely new play, The Last Yiddish Speaker, currently running at Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre Company.

In just 90 minutes, with only four characters, she artfully etches a dystopian world in which the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has triumphed. The terrifying result is a Christian Nationalist surveillance state that punishes dissent; banishes or kills Jews, gays and other outsiders; and forbids women from attending college or holding professional jobs.

Laufer’s characters — a Jewish father and daughter concealing their identity, the daughter’s unsuspecting boyfriend, and an older woman embodying the richness and trauma of Jewish history — must negotiate these perilous circumstances while somehow remaining true to themselves.

An experienced playwright (End Games, Leveling Up, Informed Consent, The Last Schwartz, among others), Laufer reveals the contours of her menacing future America, and the stakes of opposing its rules, only gradually and with considerable craft.

On Colin McIlvane’s realistic set, depicting a kitchen, living room and porch, 17-year-old Sarah (now known as Mary) and her father, Paul, argue about how to balance their safety with her ambitions. Disconnected from their heritage, they are passing as Christians in a small, rural upstate New York town, where they must accustom themselves to religious and social conformity, Big Brother-level intrusiveness, and firearms. On their walls, they display a portrait of Jesus Christ and two crucifixes — emblems of their disguise. 

The year is 2029, and the situation for women is deteriorating. Sarah is smart, feminist, frustrated and desperate for opportunity. Incautious and sick of concealment, she is willing to risk everything in a flight to Canada, still a free country, even if the border is protected by a wall.

Sarah admits to being “a loose cannon,” and in Kaitlyn Zion’s somewhat over-the-top performance it’s hard, initially, to fully embrace her. “You’re impossible,” her father says, with some justification. “Every day you leave this house I wonder what you’re gonna say that will get us killed.”

Dan Hodge’s terrified Paul, forever on edge, occupies the other end of their seesaw: He is the timid accommodationist, willing to compromise everything to keep his daughter safe — a stance that leads her to insult him as “weak.” He, too, has his reasons, not least the fate of his outspoken wife [daughter? (Paul’s wife disappeared mysteriously some years before the play.)].

Their survival depends, in part, on her handsome and besotted boyfriend, John (Gabriel Elmore), tasked (in a blatant conflict of interest) with surveilling their home for contraband items and thoughts. A representative of a noxious government, he is nevertheless sweet, sympathetic, and trying to do what he believes is right. Will he truly love Sarah, whom he escorts to both the prom and the gun range, or turn her in? John is the play’s pivot, and Elmore’s subtle, perfectly pitched performance elevates this production.

There is one more complication: the eponymous last Yiddish speaker. Dropped off mysteriously at Sarah and Paul’s doorstep, Aunt Chava (Stephanie Satie) represents the last millennium of Jewish tradition and identity, as well as everyone’s favorite Jewish immigrant relative. Her otherworldliness is signaled by Drew Billiau’s eerie lighting, sound designer Christopher Colucci’s music, and the layers of ethnic dress in which costume designer Katherine Fritz envelops her.

Satie, who played Tevye’s daughter Chava in the original Broadway national tour of Fiddler on the Roof, is haunting as this mysterious figure. Speaking a mix of Yiddish (some of it untranslated) and English, she gives the play much of its humor and poetry. Like Anne Frank, Aunt Chava must be hidden from authorities, putting Sarah and Paul at risk. But she is also a mentor: a purveyor of Yiddish jokes, Jewish prayers, pickles and magically appearing ritual objects.

Mostly written before Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza, The Last Yiddish Speaker is nevertheless very much of the moment. Laufer is attuned to the threat of Christian Nationalism, efforts to undermine democracy, and the judicial and legislative assault on women’s reproductive rights. She is equally passionate about the dangers of political polarization and the challenges of maintaining Jewish identity in a sometimes hostile world.

That is a lot to cram in, a heavy lift. But Rozin’s production mostly navigates the play’s transitions — some of them sudden — with grace, and leaves the audience appropriately shaken and stirred.

[Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.]

*  *  *  *

[On the blog Burd Reviews, Frank Burd posted the following notice on 7 April 2024.]

“THE LAST YIDDISH SPEAKER AT INTERACT THEATRE COMPANY”
by Frank Burd 

An old, Yiddish speaking woman, lands on the steps of the home of Mary and Paul in upstate New York. It is 2027, and they have fled from New York City in the wake of a successful January 6th rebellion that has brought a white supremacist regime into power. They are Jewish, passing as Christians in this small town. Interact Theatre is presenting the world premiere of “The Last Yiddish Speaker,” by Deborah Zoe Laufer at the Drake. It is engaging, suspenseful, and powerful as we watch a father and his 17-year-old daughter try to figure out how to reply, not just to the woman, but to the events around them.

The play begins in the home where Paul (Dan Hodge) and Mary (Katlyn Zion) live. Hung on the walls are crucifixes and a portrait of jesus. But we soon learn that they are trying to blend into a society that doesn’t know their true identities. Mary’s real name is Sarah.

The third major player before the woman arrives is John (Gabriel Elmore), a good-looking young man who is in Mary’s senior class in high school. They have serious crushes on each another, and he is to be taking her to the senior prom. But not only does he not know of Mary’s real identity, he is also part of the youth group that seeks to root out all those who oppose the regime. They are seeking “to take the country back” from the Jews, the gays, the non-whites, and even the women, who are prohibited from attending college. When the old woman, Chava (Stephanie Satie) arrives, they cannot let John know about her and they hide her in the basement. Paul doesn’t even want to keep her there, lest their true backgrounds be revealed.

So who is this old woman? She says she is Mary’s great aunt. She says she’s been married over a dozen times. She says she lived 1000 years ago. The only things we can be reasonably sure about is that she is Jewish and speaks Yiddish. And that is a threat to Paul- revelation of hiding a Jew can lead to serious consequences and his only goal is to protect his daughter. Her mother, his wife, disappeared mysteriously a few years earlier.

Chava awakens in Mary a sense of what is means to be a Jew, and it threatens the precarious situation in which it challenges Paul’s attempt to let them “blend in” to their new life. She makes Mary laugh. She gives her a sense of history.

We are riveted for every moment of this 95-minute drama, but also the effective comedic touches that Laufer has given us, like the results from the downloading of the Yiddish app on Mary’s phone to understand what Chava is saying, before we realize it won’t be needed. And what will happen to many of the professions usually dominated by Jews if they are eliminated? But what struck me so powerfully were the brief descriptions of Jewish identity based upon the centuries of repression.

The ensemble is terrific- so honest, so real, so conflicted. From the challenging daughter to the protective father, from the questioning young suitor to the mysterious yet sweet old woman, they all create memorable characters. Director Seth Rozin does a superb job bringing this dystopian future play to life. I loved every minute!

*  *  *  *

[In the Broad Street Review, an arts and culture website with a mix of reviews and commentary, mostly about events and performances in the Philadelphia area, Josh Herren had a different response to Laufer’s new play.  His review appeared on the site on 9 April 2024.]

“InterAct THEATRE COMPANY PRESENTS
DEBORAH ZOE LAUFER’S THE LAST YIDDISH SPEAKER”
by Josh Herren 

Imagining life for Jews after a successful insurrection

There is a refrain often repeated by my Jewish mother, encapsulating the essence of our holidays: “They tried to kill us, they didn’t, let’s eat.” Existential terror has been a constant in the history of Judaism, spanning both ancient and modern times. In Deborah Zoe Laufer’s new play, The Last Yiddish Speaker, receiving a rolling world premiere at InterAct Theatre Company, this history is personified by a 1000-year-old Yiddish-speaking Bubbe named Chava. This character, funny and pragmatic, offers a striking glimpse into the specificity of Jewish generational trauma.

Unfortunately, these ideas are not able to fully develop in The Last Yiddish Speaker. The world of this play is an alternate near future in which the January 6 insurrection successfully overturned the 2020 presidential election. What this serves to do, besides raising my blood pressure, is to offer up a fictional world open to debate. Rather than following characters through a story, I found myself constantly second-guessing the world of this alternate future being created.

Tension and confusion

In this dystopian projection, set in 2029, the United States has transformed into a hyper-conservative, patriarchal white Christian nationalist ethno-state. Paul (Dan Hodge) and his daughter Sarah (Kaitlyn Zion), now using the name Mary, are living under new identities in a small New York town. There they must open their home, phones, and computers to frequent inspections by repressive agents of the state. Their inspector also happens to be Mary’s boyfriend, John (Gabriel Elmore). Amidst this tense situation, Aunt Chava (Stephanie Satie), a mysterious Jewish elder, arrives on their doorstep. Together, the family must decide how to navigate their identity and plan for their future.

Director Seth Rozin keeps the action moving. The ensemble members do their best to commit to a script that veers into the maudlin. In particular, Hodge delivers a nuanced performance as he wrestles with the dueling needs of safety and self-acceptance. Satie gives a surprisingly grounded performance as Chava. As written, Sarah is a puzzling character. She knows the grave stakes of being discovered yet is seemingly unable to keep her true feelings under the surface. Zion tries to thread the needle between these dimensions, but the character ultimately feels confused. This confusion strikes at the heart of The Last Yiddish Speaker: the play wants to serve as dramatic speculative/dystopian fiction while also using magical realism to explore Jewish identity. Ultimately, it achieves neither.

The possibility of solidarity

More problematically, its focus on the specificity of Jewish suffering in this particular narrative feels misguided. In the context of the story, Sarah and Paul have watched as immigrants, African Americans, liberals, and queer people have been exterminated. They are able to survive by suppressing their Jewishness and passing as white. The focus then on Judaism, in the midst of all that suffering, seems to ignore intersectional identities and the possibility of solidarity. As a queer Jewish person, I walk through the world with two identities. It felt disconcerting to have Jewishness seen as inherently tied to suffering, while violence against queer folks is handwaved away.

Colin McIlvaine’s set conveys the claustrophobia of this family’s situation and nails the small-town Christian aesthetic. The costumes by Katherine Fritz feel a bit dated, which is possibly a nod to the cyclical nature of fashion. She dresses Chava in layers of clothes that effectively symbolize her journey. Drew Billiau’s lights and Chris Colucci’s sound can veer into the cheesy as it tries to convey the play’s more magical elements.

[I’m a little surprised that none of the writers whose articles and reviews I read drew the analogy of the new life of Paul and Sarah/Mary to that of the Marranos, the secret Jews who lived outwardly as Catholics in 15th-century Spain during the Inquisition. 

[(I have a post, “Crypto-Jews: Legacy of Secrecy,” published on 15 September 2009, which relates the tale of some descendants of the secret Jews who traveled to the New World with the Conquistadors and settled in New Mexico, then part of New Spain, and only rediscovered their Jewish past in the late 20th century.)

[There also seems to be a resemblance between John, “Mary’s” boyfriend in The Last Yiddish Speaker, and Rolf, the young Hitler Youth in The Sound of Music who’s courting Liesl von Trapp (“You Are Sixteen”).  No one remarked on that, either.

[Maybe it’s just me.]

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.]