Can Art Be A Crime?

 

[In December 2002, just as New York City was bracing for a transit strike that was called for four days hence, 37 black boxes labeled "FEAR" were found in the Union Square subway station.  The discovery caused significant concern and drew public attention—in a New York-sort of way: people were disturbed, suggested theories of the boxes’ origin, and went about their business—which, in a subway station, meant going someplace or coming back from someplace.

[Aside from the looming strike threat—New York City without public transportation is hell, believe me—we were just over a year past the 9/11 attack; it was fresh in everyone’s memory.

[Now, I live near Union Square and the station, which is under the park at 14th Street and 4th Avenue/Park Avenue South, is one of the city’s busiest.  It’s the station I use most of the four that are near my apartment—though I didn’t happen to have been in it that day.  I do remember the incident reported below, however.] 

“37 BLACK BOXES LABELED ‘FEAR’
CAUSE COMMOTION IN THE SUBWAY”
by Robert F. Worth and William K. Rashbaum 

[The article below was the first I read about the mysterious boxes in “my” subway station.  It ran in the New York Times on 12 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]) while the story behind the discovery was still a puzzle.]

There were 37 cardboard boxes in all – some spray-painted black, some wrapped in black electrical tape, all of them inscribed in white block lettering with a single word: fear.

At some point yesterday morning [Wednesday, 11 December] the mysterious boxes were affixed to the walls and girders of the Union Square subway station in Lower Manhattan. Within minutes, in a city long on edge, there was concern that they contained bombs or presented other dangers. The police were alerted, the station and its surrounding area was evacuated, and passing trains were barred from stopping at Union Square, one of the city’s busiest stations.

After hours of investigation, and the delicate, ultimately uneventful opening of the boxes, the police said they believed that the episode was a stunt but did not know its origin or intent. One possible explanation, investigators said, was that transit workers, who have authorized a strike for 12:01 a.m. Monday [16 December], were somehow behind the prank.

A union spokesman denied that transit workers had had anything to do with the boxes.

Stunt or not, in a city with terror in the back of its mind and rumors of possible wildcat actions by the transit workers’ union, the bizarre boxes seemed to crystallize a host of anxieties, and generated panicky speculation among those who stood waiting above ground to hear what they contained.

“You have to wonder,” said Bob Lamb, 57, as he stood in a frigid rain and stared at the crowd of police officers guarding the subway entrance on the southwest corner of Union Square. “It seems suspicious so close to the strike date, but nowadays I guess this kind of thing is becoming routine.”

A police sergeant first noticed one of the boxes about 10:45 a.m., near a stairwell leading to a lower platform in the station, the authorities said. As he was examining it, a subway rider told him that there were others.

The boxes were about 16 by 20 inches, and about two inches high, the police said. Some were duct-taped to the station walls, some attached to pillars near the edge of the platforms and others scattered elsewhere, including under a bench.

The station was shut down, and subway riders and employees were evacuated. The police bomb squad and the Emergency Service Unit were called in, and they examined each of the boxes, swabbing them for hazardous materials and dusting them for fingerprints before the station was reopened in the early afternoon, the police said.

Police officials said they had no hard evidence indicating who was behind the event. One official said, however, that detectives thought there was “probably a pretty good chance that it’s strike-related.”

Another police official also pointed out that Union Square was the frequent site of antiwar protests and other acts of civil disobedience.

And a third official said a review of videotape recordings from a camera in the sprawling station failed to shed light on the incident.

A transit union official rejected any suggestion that workers were responsible. “Transit workers have never been involved in anything remotely like that, and for people to speculate on that is irresponsible,” said Ed Watt, the secretary-treasurer of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union.

In Union Square, though, there was no shortage of people who said they suspected the transit workers.

“It’s probably the transit people,” said Amy Kalt, who was selling scarves and other clothing at one of the square’s market kiosks yesterday.

Others were more sanguine, observing that the city has its share of apolitical pranksters and attention-seekers. “It’s probably nothing,” one pedestrian, Jane Comfort, said as she hurried off toward another subway station. “I’m a good conspiracy theory person, but it didn’t occur to me that this was about the strike.”

And to some visitors from abroad, the incident said much about New York’s relative inexperience with mysterious threats, terrorist or otherwise.

“In Tel Aviv, we get these things all the time,” said Guy Grossman, a graduate student in philosophy who is spending a month in New York. “If it’s a bomb, the robot removes it in five minutes. You have a lot to learn here.”

[In December 2002, New York City averted a potentially crippling transit strike when the Transport Workers Union Local 100 and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reached a tentative contract agreement.  The strike, which would have halted subway and bus service for millions of commuters, was averted after negotiators "stopped the clock" and continued talks.  An agreement was reached late on 16 December, avoiding the shutdown.

[Robert F. Worth became a New York Times reporter at the metropolitan desk in 2000. He was the Times correspondent in Baghdad from 2003 to 2006, and the Beirut bureau chief from 2007 until 2011.  He’s also contributed to the New York Review of Books and he’s the author of Rage for Order (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

[William K. Rashbaum is a senior writer for the New York Times, covering municipal and political corruption, the courts, and broader law enforcement topics in New York.  He writes investigative stories and news articles.]

*  *  *  *
“AN UNUSUALLY ARRESTING ART PROJECT”
Melanie Lefkowitz 

[The following article, revealing the perpetrator of the Black Box Mystery, ran in the Queens edition of Newsday (Melville, Long Island, NY) on 17 December 2002 (Sec. A).]

Clinton Boisvert’s public-art assignment earned him an A.

A Class A misdemeanor charge, that is.

Boisvert, a freshman at the School [of] Visual Arts, turned himself in yesterday on charges he scattered 37 small black boxes stenciled with the word “fear” in the Union Square subway station Wednesday [11 December], just as worries about a transit workers’ strike were reaching a crescendo.

[SVA, a private for-profit art school, has facilities in both the Chelsea neighborhood on Manhattan's west side, and the ‘Gramercy Park neighborhood, on the east side.  The east side campus is less than a ten-block straight shot south to Union Square.  Chelsea’s a little farther, but only a one-mile/20-minute walk.]

The incident touched off jitters across the city, suspicion that disgruntled transit workers or even terrorists could have been involved, and the evacuation of the transit hub for more than five hours.

But Boisvert’s lawyer said the 25-year-old student only intended to observe the public’s reaction to his project, and wasn’t even aware of the potential transit strike when he planned it.

“It’s an innocent art project that went unfortunately awry, to say the least,” said Boisvert’s lawyer, William Stampur. “It was done in the morning rush hour in full view of hundreds if not thousands of people walking by – it wasn’t done in any surreptitious fashion.”

Boisvert was awaiting arraignment last night on charges of second-degree reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct, officials said.

Boisvert, who is from Michigan, has lived in New York for only three months. He allegedly taped the boxes to walls, pillars and benches throughout the station. A friend who was helping him carry the two bags of boxes will not face charges, police said.

The stunt was part of a class assignment to display art in a public place, police said. Stampur said that Boisvert hung up the boxes, went to class to make his presentation and was planning to return to the station to retrieve his work when he found out the subway stop had been evacuated.

“If it weren’t so serious it would be jocular,” Stampur said.

A spokesman for the school did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Police described Boisvert as “clueless,” not malicious.

“This was not a publicity-seeking stunt in any way, shape or form,” Stampur said.

[Before Melanie Lefkowitz left journalism to enter academia, she was a newspaper reporter for 20 years, and her work has been published in Newsday, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the New York Post, among other publications.  She taught journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.]

*  *  *  *
“ART STUDENT’S PROJECT ON ‘FEAR’
BECOMES A LESSON IN THE LAW”
by Kevin Flynn 

[Kevin Flynn’s report ran in the New York Times of 17 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]).]

Clinton Boisvert’s assignment for his Foundation Sculpture class, according to the police, was to situate art in a specific place, not to create alarm in the subway system.

But Mr. Boisvert, a college student at the School of Visual Arts, succeeded in the latter, if not the former, last week when he taped 37 black cardboard boxes inscribed with the word “Fear” in the Union Square subway station, according to investigators.

After seeing the disruption his project had caused, Mr. Boisvert contacted a lawyer. And yesterday morning, he surrendered to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which intends to prosecute him on a charge of reckless endangerment, a spokeswoman said.

[Formally, there’s no such office as the Manhattan district attorney.  Manhattan is the name of the borough, a city division.  The DA is a state job (which, by the way, is why it doesn’t have term limits, as all city positions do) and the incumbent’s jurisdiction is the County of New York—which covers the same ground as the Borough of Manhattan but is a state division.  (The other four boroughs are also counties, and two of them, like Manhattan, have two names.)]

“The kid is clueless, basically,” a police official said. “He did not seem to know the ramifications his art project would have.”

When the mysterious boxes showed up last Wednesday, taped to the girders and walls in the Lower Manhattan station, they raised the sort of wide-open questions that authorities in a city still anxious about terrorism do not enjoy answering. Were they some kind of bomb canisters? Or a threat from a union member contemplating a transit strike? Or simply an artsy stunt?

The station was shut for hours while the bomb squad examined each box, dusted for fingerprints and checked for hazardous materials. When the station reopened, many subway riders just shrugged. But the Transport Workers Union had to labor to dissociate itself from an incident that some riders mistook for a bit of intimidation.

“No one at the school understood that he was going to do something that was of that radical a nature,” said Adam Eisenstat, a spokesman for the college.

Mr. Boisvert, 25, in his first year at the school, had submitted a proposal to do a different project for the class, but apparently changed his mind, Mr. Eisenstat said. “He chose to make the city, the subway, the topical events, his canvas,” he said. But Mr. Boisvert was trying to mark the tension, not create it, Mr. Eisenstat said. “The tension is at a level that I think he never realized,” he said.

William Stampur, Mr. Boisvert’s lawyer, said his client had arrived in New York only three months ago from Michigan and had not even been aware that a transit strike was being contemplated. Mr. Stampur described the boxes as an innocent art project that had been erected during the morning rush when hundreds of people were passing by. “It was done methodically and in open view,” he said.

As a result, he said, Mr. Boisvert did not anticipate that others would view it as mysterious and frightening. “He feels so bad,” Mr. Stampur said.

Reckless endangerment is a misdemeanor that carries a maximum term of a year in jail upon conviction. A friend who helped Mr. Boisvert arrange the boxes is not likely to be charged because his role was minimal, the police said.

Mr. Boisvert was waiting in a Manhattan holding cell last night for arraignment, and missed one of his final exams, Mr. Stampur said. Mr. Eisenstat said it was unclear just how the subway project would be graded.

[Kevin Flynn is an editor with the New York Times and the co-author (with Jim Dwyer) of 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers New York (Times Books, 2005).  His work as an investigative editor helped earn the Times numerous awards, including a 2009 Pulitzer Prize.  He served as the police bureau chief of the newspaper from 1998 to 2002, when he became investigations editor for the newspaper’s Metro desk.  He’s currently investigations editor for the paper's Culture desk.  He’s also the editor of The New York Times Book of Crime: More Than 166 Years of Covering the Beat (Sterling Books, 2017).]

*  *  *  *
“CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK:
IN NEW YORK, ART IS CRIME,
AND CRIME BECOMES ART”
by Michael Kimmelman 

[This news story was published in the New York Times on 18 December 2002 (Sec. E [“The Arts”]).]

By strange coincidence, New York City’s crime rate was reported yesterday to be the lowest among the 25 largest cities in the United States, New York ranking 197th among 216 cities with at least 100,000 residents. This puts the city below squeaky-clean Provo, Utah, but (thank goodness) still above Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.

At the same time it turned out that those 37 black boxes with the word “Fear” on them, which mysteriously turned up attached to girders and walls in the Union Square subway station last Wednesday, were, as you may have guessed from the start, an art project. The boxes, which spread panic and caused the police to shut the station for hours and call in the bomb squad, turn out to be the work of Clinton Boisvert, a 25-year-old freshman at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, who surrendered Monday [16 December] to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which intends to prosecute him on charges of reckless endangerment.

So now it is left to hapless, fledgling art students, fresh from Michigan, to keep up the city’s gritty reputation for crime. At least New York can still take pride, as the nation’s cultural capital, that even our misdemeanors are works of art. Take that, Rancho Cucamonga.

First things first. Clinton, what an idiotic project. As the saying goes, art this bad ought to be a crime. “The kid is clueless, basically,” a police official said on Monday, demonstrating remarkable acumen as an art critic. The state of public and political art has now declined to the point that plenty of people who follow it simply presumed last week that what happened at Union Square must be a work of art, not a fake bomb by a terrorist or a threat by a union member contemplating a transit strike. In the 1960’s, people might have guessed it was a loony labor activist; in the Son of Sam 70’s, a loony loner. Yesterday’s loony loner is today’s Conceptual artist.

[The term “Son of Sam” refers to David Berkowitz (b. 1953), a serial killer who terrorized New York City between 1975 and 1977, leading to possibly the biggest manhunt in the city’s history. His crimes involved the shooting or stabbing of six individuals and the wounding of eleven others. He also became known as the “.44 Caliber Killer” due to his weapon of choice, a .44 Special caliber Bulldog revolver. Berkowitz also sent letters to the press and police, taunting them and signing them as “Son of Sam,” a name derived from his claim that he was taking orders from a demon that resided in his neighbor’s dog, named 

[Berkowitz appeared calm in court on 8 May 1978, and pleaded guilty to all of the shootings. On 12 June 1978, he was sentenced to a 25-years-to-life term in prison for each murder, to be served consecutively. Berkowitz became eligible for parole in 2003, but remains incarcerated in upstate New York’s Attica Correctional Facility. His next parole hearing is scheduled for May 2026.]

Mr. Boisvert couldn’t be reached for comment yesterday. His lawyer has told him not to talk to the press for a while. Trying to imagine what he intended, I can only guess that he might say the boxes bearing “fear” were meant to make tangible, as sculpture, what New Yorkers have felt since 9/11 – to give physical form to prevalent emotion. But that’s art mumbo jumbo. By provoking fear, the work trafficked in emotional violence. Carried to an extreme, violence as art leads to the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s notorious remark, which he tried desperately to retract, that the attack on the World Trade Center was “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.”

[Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was a German composer, acknowledged as one of the most important, but also controversial, composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He’s known for his work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance (aleatory techniques) into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.]

Mr. Boisvert’s inspiration was evidently Keith Haring [1958-90; pop artist who emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture; studied at SVA], who made his reputation in the 1980’s drawing happy, cartoonish dancing figures and barking dogs in chalk on the black paper pasted on unused advertising spaces in subway stations [including, coincidentally, Union Square Station]. He was a graffiti artist, which made him a harmless, beloved petty criminal. He did not leave dangerous-looking black boxes in crowded public places. Mr. Boisvert is an admirer of his, Barbara Schwartz, one of his teachers, told me yesterday. She stressed that his project wasn’t meant to be a prank. She insisted that he was a very serious young man. The work was intended to get people talking, she said.

Well, it did. She said she had no idea he was planning it. Her assignment for the freshman foundation sculpture class was to make a site-specific work, part of the curriculum for years. A couple of students in the class shot films on subways. Mr. Boisvert had said he was going to paint Fed Ex boxes black and arrange them in a room in the school. Ms. Schwartz had reserved a room for him, she said, but he mentioned nothing about “fear.” He said he wanted a dance floor. She thought he was planning a performance.

Clearly, he changed his mind after he spoke with her. “It was my last class of the semester and everyone was presenting what they had done, and his was the last project before the break at 2 o’clock that afternoon,” Ms. Schwartz said. “He put out snapshots he had taken around the subway station. He said he had taken the boxes to Union Square that morning and placed them in plain view of everyone. He said he had painted the word ‘Fear’ on them.

“We were all saying, ‘Wow, how interesting,’ but I looked at him when it dawned on me. I said, ‘Clinton, you didn’t leave them there, did you?’ One of the other students then said the trains were no longer stopping at Union Square and two others said there was a bomb threat. I said, ‘Oh my God, do you think this has something to do with your project?’ He looked stricken. He never imagined what would happen.”

Ms. Schwartz consulted her superiors at the school. Mr. Boisvert consulted a lawyer.

He spent a night waiting in a holding cell for arraignment. His work thereby became performance art. The history of modernism is littered with artists whose outrageous provocations have made headlines; only an elite few have made it into jail. Mr. Boisvert joins that company.

A night in the slammer probably caused him at least as much fear as he caused straphangers.

[Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic for the New York Times and has written about public housing and homelessness, public space, landscape architecture, community development and equity, infrastructure, and urban design.  He’s reported from more than 40 countries and twice been a Pulitzer Prize finalist.]

*  *  *  *
“LETTERS: TEACHERS SHARE BLAME”
by Louis Torres 

[The letter below pertaining to the guerrilla artist, Clinton Boisvert, was printed in the Queens edition of Newsday (Merrick, Long Island, NY) on 21 December 2002 (Sec. A).]

Clinton Boisvert is the hapless student who planted 37 black boxes stenciled with the word “fear” at the Union Square subway station. If he is found guilty of the misdemeanor of reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct [“An Unusually Arresting Art Project,” News, Dec. 17], his teachers at the School of Visual Arts should certainly be held responsible for brainwashing him into thinking that something like stenciled boxes displayed in a public place would be considered “art.” He probably thought they would give him an A for originality for the place he picked! They still might.

Louis Torres
Manhattan

*  *  *  *
“WARNING: ART AHEAD”
by Lenore Skenazy 

[Lenore Skenazy’s column in the Daily News (New York City) ran on 22 December 2002.]

Whatever happened to the plain old pursuit of beauty?

The artist had a great idea: He would put some suspicious packages in the subway to get people thinking about bombs, terrorism and maybe even deeper stuff, like a change in the balance of power. Cool!

But this was not 11 days ago here in New York. This was 1994, in the London tube. And the artist, Brooklynite Gregory Green, took one crucial precaution: He put up plaques to explain his project, which had been approved in advance by the subway authorities.

[Gregory Green (b. 1959) is active in New York, where he also lives. Green is known for sculptor-assemblage. He creates conceptual pieces that suggest explosive devices, such as pipe bombs neatly packed into briefcases or hollowed out books with nuclear warheads. His purpose is to stimulate creative thought about freedom and personal responsibility. As for the installation connected to the London Underground, it may be related to a work called Suitcase Bomb #10 (London) (1994) which was part of a series that seems to have been exhibited in London, but I was unable to connect it specifically to the Underground.]

That way, nobody had to shut the station for five hours.

Here in New York, Clinton Boisvert would have done well to follow that model. Instead, he placed 38 black boxes [sic; all other reports said there were 37 boxes] labeled “FEAR” around the Union Square subway station Dec. 11. After the cops dismantled the packages, they set out to find a suspect described as “artsy” by a commuter who’d seen him.

The profiling worked. Even as police were seeking, presumably, a guy with a goatee, black clothes and a tattoo, they got lucky when School of Visual Arts freshman Boisvert – goatee and black coat, yes, tattoo status unknown – turned himself in.

Apparently he had no idea his boxes would cause such a commotion. “He’d have to live in a black box to be that dumb,” opined a colleague.

Whether or not he intended to create havoc, I leave to the judge. But clearly he did intend to create art, and that is just as disturbing.

His sculpture class assignment had been to put a piece of art in a specific place and watch the public’s reaction.

That’s pretty broad. If he had placed 38 wads of gum on the subway floor, would that have been any different? How about 38 papier-maché rats? Or condoms?

My guess is, all would have been equally acceptable in class, because almost anything gets to call itself art today.

Beautiful pictures and stunning sculptures? Those are so old hat that sometimes it seems artists are running in the opposite direction, just to be considered legit.

Why can’t they go back to the simple pursuit of beauty? “I don’t think you can go back to anything,” says Dave Tourje [b. 1960], an artist in Southern California. “The only thing you can do is keep moving forward.”

Forward to “FEAR” boxes. Great. “One of the functions of art is to be on the edge of what is permissible,” says James Yood, a professor of art theory at Northwestern University. Provoking the middle class, he explains, is a time-honored artistic pursuit.

That pursuit has lead [sic] to such gross attention grabbers as Andres Serrano’s [b. 1950] “Piss Christ” [1987] – a crucifix hung in a jar of pee – and the infamous dung-covered Madonna [The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) by Chris Ofili (b. 1968)] at the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Sensation” show [2 October 1999-9 January 2000].

[Both Piss Christ and The Holy Virgin Mary are mentioned prominently in my posts “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010) and “The Return of HIDE/SEEK” (4 January 2012).

[I also recommend having a look at “Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater” (4 and 8 January 2010)—I think Skenazy should have as well—which discuss the art philosopher’s ideas about beauty. Langer’s theories are also discussed in “Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 (MoMA)” (2 October 2017). The ideas of Langer (1895-1985) crop up many times in posts on this blog.]

But Yood points out that even Michelangelo [1475-1564; Italian Renaissance sculptor and painter] provoked the public in his day: His “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel was criticized for too much nudity, and parts were soon painted over.

[The reference to Yood didn’t connect. I assume Skenazy means the Israeli rock band, but I couldn’t find any reference associated with them concerning Michelangelo.]

“The first person who did a painting about something that wasn’t a religious subject was considered bizarre,” adds Carol Oster, a Manhattan sculptor. So were such groundbreakers as the now-loved Impressionists, and the wacky Dadaists, whose claim to fame was placing a urinal in an art gallery. After that, it was anything goes [see my report on Dada (20 February 2010), the 2006 exhibit I saw at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City].

Some of that anything is disturbing, but, indeed, does make a point. Those “Suspicious Looking Objects” in London, for instance, were part of Green’s 10-year exploration of power. His bomb-centric art was trying to make people aware of how easily our world could change if a person or group embraced terrorism. Rather prescient.

The difference between Green and the “FEAR” boxes is that Green identified his work as art. He wanted people to think about issues, not about dying on the way home.

Setting out to simply upset people is not art. It’s self-indulgence. The art world has too much of that already.

[Lenore Skenazy is an author, speaker, and syndicated columnist.  She’s known for her advocacy of free-range parenting and her work with the organization Let Grow.  She was a columnist for the New York Daily News for 14 years.  Skenazy has written for various publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Mad Magazine, and the New York Sun, and has given lectures at venues like Microsoft Headquarters and the Sydney Opera House.]

*  *  *  *
“METRO BRIEFING: NEW YORK: MANHATTAN:
ARREST IN SUBWAY INCIDENT”
Al Baker 

[This short notice was part of a regular column in the New York Times on 31 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]).]

Under heightened alert to inspect unidentified packages that may conceal bombs, the police arrested a woman yesterday for placing four cardboard boxes in the Union Square subway station. The incident follows a similar one on Dec. 11, when the same station was evacuated after 37 boxes labeled “Fear” were placed there. The black boxes taped inside the station yesterday were labeled “Fear Art.” Cleaners in the station reported seeing the woman, Ani Weinstein, 26, of East Chatham, N.Y., placing the boxes there. When she was arrested, she had 10 more boxes, the police said. Ms. Weinstein was accused of reckless endangerment and other violations. The police said there was no evidence that the incidents were linked.

[Al Baker was a reporter on the Metro staff of the New York Times for close to 20 years beginning in 2000.  He was a police reporter and the police bureau chief, covered education, Long Island and Westchester County, and was the Albany Statehouse correspondent, among other roles.  Baker also wrote for Newsday and the New York Daily News.

[Clinton Boisvert was initially charged with reckless endangerment, but Lawyer Stampur got that dismissed, leaving only a charge of disorderly conduct.  He was given a ticket, fined, and ordered to fulfill six days of community service and write a letter of apology to the bomb squad.

[He got up early and did manual labor from the back of a dump truck.  Boisvert thus paid his debt to society.]

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.]