Three recent news items, manifesting fine art’s ominous popularity these days, stir miscellaneous summer thoughts. Gaudiest is the kickoff, in Times Square, of “Art Everywhere,” a project to grace billboards, bus shelters, and other advertising sites nationwide with reproductions of fifty-eight American art works from five top museums, fifty of them chosen by a free-for-all vote online and eight added by consulting curators. Scariest is a Times article—featuring a photograph that suggests a rugby scrum but in fact shows viewers of the Mona Lisa, in the Louvre—pointing up what amounts to a math problem at European museums: the mass of the human body, multiplied by the allure of classic art works, divided by the space available.
Most provocative, also in the Times, is an attack, by Michael Kimmelman, on the Frick Collection’s plan to expand by building on the site of its vest-pocket garden on Seventieth Street. For the record, I side with the Frick. The garden, which is often closed off, seems to me a small sacrifice to ease the strain of the museum’s ballooning attendance. I, too, mourn the loss of any civic amenity. But the depredation could have been far worse—as, certainly, it has been in other cases. Change is upon us, with causes that must be admitted before the effects are judged.
At what point does a widely shared yen for aesthetic engagement alter the character of that engagement? We’ve reached that point on many days at the Museum of Modern Art, where the crowds experience mainly crowdedness, and the Picassos and Pollocks take on the glazed miens of traumatized warriors. MOMA’s own planned expansion bodes an architecture keyed to crowd management, which explains the logic behind even the cruel demolition of the intimate former American Museum of Folk Art.
It is idle to lament democratizing developments that have been inexorable for well over half a century, and paralleled by innovations in contemporary art: Abstract Expressionism’s exploded scale, Pop’s mirroring of mass culture, minimalism’s at-a-glance self-evidence, conceptualism’s recourse to boundless thought, installation art’s funhouse sociability. (The newest wrinkle, performance art, may, with admirable efficiency, simply have someone in the crowd behave peculiarly.) But something grim is happening to the reception of the traditional modes, mainly painting, that still define art for most people.
The hundred and seventy thousand people who voted, in “Art Everywhere,” for works that were nominated by the National Gallery, the Whitney, and the chief museums of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas, evinced generally conservative taste, with a marked tilt toward nineteenth-century and early-modern images. (Only two of the selected works, a Robert Mapplethorpe and a Cindy Sherman, are less than forty years old.) Tacit nostalgia consorts oddly with the project’s brassy novelty. Notably wonderful and ironic is the top choice, Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” an echt American painting that neatly symbolizes much of what is imperiled by the massification of art and, for that matter, of life.
Hopper’s glamorously bleak wee-hours diner bespeaks impenetrable private ordeals, and no less enigmatic compensations, to the passerby whose viewpoint each of us assumes as we gaze. The word routinely used to describe Hopper’s work, “loneliness,” doesn’t apply to the depicted characters, who are doing fine in their iffy ways. The inexact term gestures toward a hardly communicable feeling, which we enjoy as we would a melancholy song that is beautiful and true. A similar dynamic characterizes all serious painting—it’s an art that is cultivated in solitude to bear fruit in the fortuitous, real space and the chosen, real time of incarnate viewers. Painting embodies imagination.
Beholding “Nighthawks” disembodied in a big electronic display, above the Spider-Men and the Elmos in Times Square, feels weird, though similar fates have long befallen Hopper’s hooded genius. (I’ve had woefully many occasions to study my dentist’s reproduction of the picture, while fingers and instruments forage in my mouth.) Of course, an ongoing mission of popular culture is to absorb and humble iconic art, as with inflatable toy versions of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” But nowadays the sport effectively dragoons art’s official guardians, too, as the Louvre makes provision for the been-there, done-that takeaway of visitors to the Mona Lisa. Perhaps we must get used to crowd-sourced criticism in art (as we already have in music, movies, and television), while sneaking off now and then, one by one, to commune with actual art objects, at the cost of feeling both renegade and elitist.
But to reflect on the phenomenon, we would need reliable data. I wish I could report on the full tally of “Art Everywhere” votes, but the organizers won’t reveal any ranking below first place because, a publicist told me, they “didn’t want to give the impression that art is a popularity contest.” Oh, but art is exactly that, in its cultural function, unless we cling to the delusion that works possess some metaphysically intrinsic worth, even in the dark. Art history is a chronicle of spats over relative merit among people with varying degrees of assigned authority: cognoscenti in the past, now the rich or the many.
The quantifying of artistic judgment—by dollars in the market and fannies through the doors of institutions—distinguishes our time. Suppressing the numbers for a populist exercise makes sense only if all art, like all puppies and kittens, is held to be universally adorable. That supposition exposes “Art Everywhere” as a frankly pandering promotion of the participating museums and, donning a halo of beneficence, the Outdoor Advertising Association of America. The effect is resoundingly empty fun.
Looking at art, we learn about ourselves. Comparing views on art, we learn about one another. Disputing it, we shape culture. Where there is no argument there can be no consequentially meaningful art. Today, what passes for debate has occluded the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual stakes of aesthetic experience, which assumes the odor of a minor private vice. How we cope with the implications will affect what, as parties to history, we become.
