Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained 9780271082639

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WILD ART EXPLAINED

Small portions of this material have appeared earlier: Carrier and Pissarro, “Painter of Lite,” review of Alexis L. Boylan’s book Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall, Artforum, April 2011; Carrier and Pissarro, “How Modernism Revolutionized Taste: But Left the Art World Prone to the Judgments of the Few,” Art Newspaper, October 2012; Carrier, “How Wild Art Came to Be—and Be Ignored,” lecture given in 2014 in Florence, Naples, and Turin, and later published in Predella; and Pissarro, presentation on Wild Art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, 2015. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Carrier, David, 1944– author. | Pissarro, Joachim, author. Title: Aesthetics of the margins/the margins of aesthetics : wild art explained / David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Examines art that stands outside the margins of the art world, the critical and cultural conditions that made this exclusion possible, and how its recognition radically transforms our understanding of contemporary art”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2018031560 | ISBN 9780271081137 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics, Modern. | Art, Modern. Classification: LCC N61 .C36 2018 | DDC 709.04—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031560 Copyright © 2019 David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

To the memory of Tzvetan Todorov Using some of his last words could not better encapsulate our own efforts: “The ultimate goal of this experience is not truth but love, supreme form of all human relationships.” Tzvetan Todorov was one of the first authors to translate Mikhail Bakhtin’s extraordinary critical oeuvre into French (Michael Holquist accomplished the same task into English). In Todorov’s monograph on Bakhtin, he quotes these few words, which sum up our own project—not only in this book but elsewhere in our work: “We have a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights, each with its own world, combining in the unity of an event but nonetheless without fusing.”

Contents List of Illustrations / viii Acknowledgments / xi

Introduction / 2

1 Modern Foundations

of the Art World / 20

2 The Classical Model: Dogmatism and Alternative Models of Looking / 30

6 The Museum Era / 96 7 Institutionalization of Art History / 116

8 Art Beyond the Boundaries of the Art World / 134

3 Dawn of Modernity / 46 9 The Fluid Nature of Aesthetic Judgments / 152 The Wise, the Ignorant, and the 4 Possibility of an Art World That Transcends This Divide / 60 10 Kitsch, a Nonconcept: 5

A Genealogy of the

The Antinomy of Taste and Its

Indesignatable / 166

Solution: Variations on a Theme by Duchamp / 74

Conclusion / 180

Notes / 197 Selected Bibliography / 206 Index / 211

Illustrations

1. J. Grant Brittain,“Christ Air.” Photograph of skateboarder Christian Hosoi  /  16



2. Thomas Kinkade, Jerusalem Sunset, 2006. © The Thomas Kinkade Estate. All rights reserved / 17



3. Joe Milone and his shoeshine equipment. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York  /  23



4. Bramante’s staircase in the Vatican. Photo: Daryl Mitchell / Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0  /  32



5. Robert Rauschenberg, Dirt Painting (for John Cage), ca. 1953. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / 38



6. Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig in process, 1999. © Mark Dion. Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 40



7. Nigel Poor, Food Stains, 2009–11. With the kind permission of Nigel Poor  /  41



8. Cinderella Castle. Photo: Matt H. Wade / Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 3.0  /  43



9. Neuschwanstein Castle. © Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung  /  44

10. John Rogers Cox, Gray and Gold, 1942. Photo © The Cleveland Museum of Art  /  65 11. Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, 1948. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York. © 2017 Andrew Wyeth / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York  /  66 12. Alfred H. Barr, diagram of the origins and evolution of modern art, ca. 1936. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York / 68 13. Willard Bond, Running Home, 1994. With the kind permission of the Willard Bond Estate / 71 14. Candice Breitz, stills from King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson), 2005. With the kind permission of Candice Breitz. Photo courtesy of Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg / 72-73

15. Alphonse Allais, Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man, 1897. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France  /  91 16. Luke Jerram, Play Me, I’m Yours, 2010. With the kind permission of Luke Jerram  /  103 17. A shot of Burning Man by Pavel Antonov. With the kind permission of Pavel Antonov / 104 18. Thomas Struth, National Gallery 1, London 1989. © Thomas Struth  /  109 19. Mark Tansey, Triumph of the New York School, 1984. Photo © Mark Tansey. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery  /  120 20. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vertumnus (Emperor Rudolf II), 1590–91 / 123 21. Vik Muniz, Medusa Marinara, 1997. Art © Vik Muniz / Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photo courtesy of Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo  /  124 22. Bródno 2000, 2000. Courtesy of the artist and the Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw / 137 23. Bernard Buffet, Self-Portrait, 1949. Photo: Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, New York. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris  /  142 24. Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel. © The Carlyle, A Rosewood Hotel  /  143 25. Barbara Westman, illustration on the cover of the New Yorker, December 11, 1989. © Barbara Westman. Photo © Condé Nast  /  144 26. George Herriman, Krazy Kat daily strip for September 4, 1918  /  148 27. Circle of Nicolas Poussin, Ulysses Discovering Achilles Among the Daughters of Lycomedes. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Daniel Arnaudet) / 149 28. Mount Rushmore. Photo: National Park Service  /  154 29. Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C. Photo © Doug Kerr / Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0 / 154 30. AngloMania at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York  /  157 31. Eric Doeringer at Geisai Miami, 2007. Photo by Lynn del Sol. With the kind permission of Eric Doeringer  /  160 32. William Anthony, Laocoön, 2015. © William Anthony. Courtesy of Thomas Rehbein Galerie. Photo: Simon Vogel  /  169

Illustrations

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Acknowledgments Eleanor Goodman, at Penn State University Press, receives our sincere thanks for her warm support from the incipient stage of this book, and her steady guidance throughout. Many thanks, also to John Morris for his generous support, and to Nicole Wayland for her sensitive copyediting. In Spring 2016, the manuscript of this book served as the foundation for a graduate seminar at Hunter College. The contributions and critiques generated from this class were seminal. We are indebted to all our students: Amara Antilla, Asia Bazdyrieva, Natalie Birinyi, Molly Everett, Daniel Figueredo, Rachel Hillery, Kelly Jost, Mary Mcclave, Carolina Meyer, Patrick Mohundro, Hannah Rozenblat, Lianne Marie Sheplar, Sila Ulug, Ami Yang, Lang Zhang and Wai Ying Zhao. Special thanks to Anna Jimenez, T.A. for this class, who lead with several students an associated curatorial project based on this book. David Carrier is grateful to Howard Singerman, Chair of the Art and Art History Deparment at Hunter, for facilitating his visits to Hunter. The authors of this book are especially grateful to the Ruth Stanton Foundation for a generous grant in order to support research and rights of reproduction.

Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

Introduction There was a time when I . . . despised the common people, who are ignorant of everything. It was Rousseau who disabused me. This illusory superiority vanished, and I have learned to honor men. —Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 20:44 Let’s drop those exclusive shows that depressingly keep a small number of folks in a dark space, holding them tight and intimidated, in total silence and inaction. . . . No, happy folks, these entertainments are not for you! Go outside, gather in the open air, and under the sky: and there, indulge yourselves, and let the sweet feeling of your happiness take over. . . .

Let your own senses of pleasure be free and generous, just like you; let the sun shed

light on your free and innocent shows; you yourselves will produce one of these shows. . . .

But what will be the contents of these shows? What will be shown there? Nothing, if

you will. With liberty in the air, with abundant flows of people everywhere, a sense of wellbeing will overtake everyone. As for contents: just stick a pole there, in the middle of an open space, and garnish it with a crown of flowers at the top, bring the people there, and you will have a show and a party! Go further even: make the audience become part of the show: turn them into players themselves; make everyone see and love oneself in each other, so that they will be even more tightly united than ever. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles; emphasis added

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n our book Wild Art, we made a somewhat terse distinction between works of art that are praised, discussed, evaluated, and interpreted within what we called the Art System (the museum, the art trade, and the academy) and what we called Wild Art (i.e., all forms of art that conspicuously seemed to remain outside the confines of the Art System—graffiti, tattoos, sand constructions, ice art, and all kinds of artistic expressions that we thought would be unlikely to ever permeate the rather rigid barriers of the Art System). That book was primarily devoted to presenting examples of Wild Art, as well as our attempt to outline some of the conceptual or ideological premises of these works. Our initial project comprised two parts. The first part mapped out some of the broad families of artistic objects that stand outside the Art System, while the second part addressed the historical, philosophical, political, and ethical underpinnings that have served as the foundation of a split art world—one, the Art System, having achieved full legitimacy; the other, Wild Art, having mostly been ignored by the Art System but happily functioning without any apparent need for legitimation by that system. That book and this one complement each other, for it is necessary to have a historical and theoretical framework in order to understand our examples, and the examples are required in order to take the full measure of our claims. We now present a full philosophical and historical analysis that defends and develops our way of thinking. This is a self-sufficient volume, but interested readers may find it valuable to consult Wild Art. We began our project with the observation that there are two kinds of art: Art World art, which is found, valued, and interpreted within the Art System, and Wild Art, which for the most part is found outside of that Art World. We model this divide on two distinctions found in the organic world: that between domestic (or tame) animals and wild animals, and that between domestic plants and wild vegetation. Think of an orchid versus couch grass:

one requires high maintenance and frequent watering, and the other grows anywhere, in all environments, requiring no special care. Such distinctions do not equate to value judgments. There is plenty of mediocrity in both worlds, and there is also plenty of great art and fascinating forms in both the Art World and Wild Art. Our definition of Wild Art is topical, or descriptive, not evaluative (although at times both, or each, of us may cast a value judgment when we feel it is pertinent to the argument). Initially, our purpose was to map out a field that was little studied within the Art System. What we are saying, however, is that any value judgment solely based on whether a work of art belongs to this field or that field is inept. In other words, neither field (the Art World or Wild Art) inherently possesses the exclusive criteria of good art or bad art. Throughout the modern era, art critics and historians have mostly focused on art made within or for the Art World. But once one discovers that there are really several kinds of art, one understands the Art World differently. We favor writing Art World, Art System, Art History, and Wild Art with capitals, in order to point to these entities as homogeneous concepts (in a Hegelian mode of expression), which we later critique through a more Kant-influenced model. We suggest that teleological, axiological, and historicist systems of values (largely the legacy of various intonations of Hegelian discourses) have become cumbersome and obsolete and foreclose our visual and intellectual horizons. What we propose is not to confer the same value (or the same grade) on all forms of art (far from it!) but to openly consider the claim to validity of numerous art forms that have never seen the light of day within the Art System. That is all. Our approach to the Art World was sourced largely from three directions: Kant’s aesthetic theory, a consideration of the origin and development of the art museum in Europe and the United States from the late eighteenth century through to the advent and ascension of modernism, and a historiographic approach to Art History in order to highlight the “silences” of the field. Given the volumes of references involved in each of these areas, we have decided to cite only those few publications that are of immediate relevance to our analysis. Our Western cultures are based—from nursery school onward—on the need to stress and develop in all children their creative capacities. There is, Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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at the foundation of our culture, a profound shared need to develop creative instincts in all children. There are, however, paradoxes within this. The first is that while every child is encouraged to develop her inner skills and talents in order to affirm her individuality—her originality—the system of cultural validation (mainly through the museum system) excludes rather than includes. The strange and paradoxical dynamics of the education systems (from kindergarten through high school) go like this: we start with the kindergarten system of universal encouragement of creativity in all children, and we end in twelfth grade with a small minority of students still exposed to the arts. Few people dare critique this state of affairs. Agnes Gund, former chair of the board of MoMA and the founder of Studio in a School, a nonprofit organization that facilitates and supports continuous development of art education in New York public schools, summed up the situation: “Schools need to understand that [teaching art] is as important to children as having math or English lessons, because it gives them a dimension—it allows them to star in something that they might not have otherwise.”1 The Art World, just like the art education system, is based on layers of filters and selectivity, promoting criteria of exclusion rather than inclusion. What is noteworthy is that this system of exclusion, or selectivity, does not just exist as Art World versus any form of art outside the Art World. It is also present within the fabric of the Art World proper, in the form of mini-systems of mutual exclusion. It is as though the Art World might barely exist without these systems of exclusion. It is interesting to hear the voice of one of the leading contributors to October, an institution that itself has often been targeted for its lack of inclusivity. According to Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, the Art World depends upon policing by specialists. Preserving modernism, Buchloh argues, requires their intervention. “What is aesthetically achievable is not in the control of critics, or historians or even artists, unless artistic practice is to become a mere preserve, a space of self-protection.”2 Everywhere, throughout the cultural world, one finds zones of exclusion (what Buchloh refers to as spaces of self-protection), which employ criteria of acceptance and refusal that largely reflect the sympathies and fears of the agents of culture. Contrary to what one might imagine, these terms of exclusion are not the sole preserve of the Western world; they are not just the signature of so-called bourgeois Introduction

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society, either. These criteria of exclusion, in fact, appear to be ubiquitous in every art and cultural sphere. In order to highlight the peculiarity of this situation within the Art System, let us briefly turn to lexicography and to the possibilities offered by language to create an aesthetic situation out of word games through twists, puns, and slang. Specifically, let us look at what the Soviet regime and official culture did to the Russian language in the U.S.S.R. It is not well known that the Soviet regime attempted to outlaw the use of slang at every level of communication. For decades, “slang was off-limits to dictionaries and no research was conducted in this field.”3 Censorship barred the use of slang, not only in all official television and media but also in every form of literary production, including magazines and newspapers. Not only was the use of any “street” expressions or idioms forbidden, but no linguistic or lexicographic scholarly research was allowed in the field of colloquial or slang Russian. “The negative attitude of Soviet scholarship toward slang resulted in significant losses for lexicography; many words of ‘low style’ have been lost forever.”4 Today, of course, countless books, dictionaries, and dissertations have renewed investigations into the fascinating and rich fields of colloquialisms, street language, and slang. This shows that these notions of “preserves of taste,” exclusion systems, and criteria of excellence (to be defended against vulgar forms of expression) are not the appanage of Western capitalist societies. Interestingly enough, both inimical systems—capitalism and communism— have founded their values on vast systems of exclusion. An analogous, and frightening, situation also occurred during the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, wherein all systems of taste (left or right, Western or Eastern) were based on criteria of exclusion. What happens if we decide to open up these criteria and look beyond the peripheries of these preserves of taste? Our tasks in the field of art offer a striking parallel to the situation described previously, with the Soviet authorities barring access to and use of certain forms of language. Indeed, as Rousseau mentioned, it is common and easy to despise what is referred to, with some condescension, as forms of expression, cultural manifestations, and artifacts from “the common people”—who essentially do not count within the confines of the established Art World, or, to be more precise, Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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who count only insofar as their foot traffic (and economic impact) validates the decisions made by the policing agents of the Art World. Testing these premises, and having allowed our illusory sense of superiority to vanish, we began to look outside the Art World without feeling that we were drowning in a quagmire of mediocrity, or descending into the infernal abysses of the Society of the Spectacle. It has felt strangely liberating. We could not believe (and still cannot believe) the vast arrays of forms of art that were available to us as we decided to look and keep looking. What we propose to offer is not an encyclopedia of the unquantifiable forms of art that surround us, but rather a critical glimpse into this garden of delights that has been kept at bay from the safely guarded closures of the established Art World. By the same token, we will begin to question the critical and cultural conditions that made this vast exclusion not only possible but, in fact, wholly accepted and so utterly taken for granted that whenever we broach the subject of these millions (if not billions) of art objects that lie outside the gaze of art professionals, we continue to be met with looks of astonishment, if not outright suspicion. One notable exception was our students who attended a seminar we taught at Hunter College in fall 2016 titled “Aesthetics of the Margins,” in which a large part of this manuscript was offered as a text to explore art outside the confines of the Art World. We are immensely grateful to them. Indeed, this book is more an ongoing dialogue and exploration than a final and closed report. Our principal hope is to open up a sphere of conversations that are not likely to stop soon. We begin this book by testing the modern foundations of the Art World as the bedrock of the systems of exclusion highlighted earlier. How did it happen, we ask, that such sweeping distinctions were established? Let us hear the voice of one of the greatest and most effective policing agents of the past century, Clement Greenberg: “The most that is safely known is that the best taste, cultivated taste, is not something within the reach of the ordinary poor or of people without a certain minimum or comfortable leisure.”5 Greenberg had no qualms whatsoever about pitting people against one another: those who knew (the cognoscenti) versus those he refers to through myriad jeers (“philistines,” “Russian peasants,” etc.). As we looked in close detail at the Introduction

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genealogy of the museum system, and the role of Art History in relation to that institution, we saw that the development of such divides appears to have been almost constitutive of the development of these institutions. And so we also decided to look outside the Art World, to the immense domain of what has been left out, in order to test the hypothesis that the taste of those philistines may be worthy of consideration. We then take a special interest in what eventually became known as “Kitsch”—a fairly recent notion that has received little to no serious scholarly curiosity. Kitsch, we argue, is a nonconcept, another barely disguised jeer. It is one of these catchall notions that encompass whatever is not worthy of being included in the vast but limited canons of modernist art. In other words, Kitsch is whatever is not accepted within the Art System. This, by definition, became our field of study, but we refused to use such broad, meaningless, and condescending notions as “Kitsch,” “self-taught art,” “outsider art,” or any other such non sequiturs to designate the vast layers of art at which we were looking. How can we deal with the array of artifacts that lie outside the Art World? In the end, we made two observations, with critical help from our students. There is not one or two but an unfathomable number of judgments of taste that are activated throughout any art situation (within or outside the confines of the Art World), and similarly, there is not one but an equally varied quantity of art worlds (no capitals here). These worlds compete with each other as far as taste is concerned, and, even though they overlap to various extents, they tend largely to ignore each other. Each is incapable of satisfying the other’s aesthetic claims. This book is about these mutually exclusive spheres of taste. It presents samples of the vast multitudes of art worlds that proliferate outside the ever complex and porous boundaries of the Art World to which most professionals—critics, art historians, artists, auctioneers, collectors, dealers, and those who combine several of these denominations—belong. This variety of art worlds is often reduced, for practical and political reasons, to two mutually exclusive art worlds. The high and the low are placed in a binary opposition that surreptitiously introduces a class distinction—the elite versus the masses—and barely conceals another major distinction—a Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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racial one—between the largely white Art World and its Other. This opposition between the cognoscenti and the hoi polloi is a secular—or millennial—one that was at work in the early Roman version of democracy with the distinction between the plebeians and the patricians. One would think that the modern democratization of the arts, having begun around the Enlightenment, would have eliminated, or at the very least eroded, these differences—but far from it. Or, later on, one would have thought that Marxism, the very ideological system that drew attention to the class struggle and advocated “the overcoming of the contradictions of each of the alienated spheres of thought” resulting from this class opposition, would have gone a long way in flattening out the elitist system of taste of the past.6 It is the exact opposite. A majority of scholars and curators paying allegiance to various shades of Marxian ideologies have reinforced this divide and system of exclusion. Throughout the past century, academic Marxism has echoed, amplified, and institutionalized this divide between the taste of those who know and the taste of the blind. The polarized vector remained the same, though the terms were inverted. Through Marxist ideology, the time-honored distinction between the elite and the masses was given a fresh coat of political correctness, but the binary distinction remained the same. Although the role of the elite changed slightly, the mechanism remained untouched. It was no longer those who owned a lot but those who knew better who were in charge of deciding what was worthy of being looked at and studied. In fact, from one ideology to the next, the same conservative and exclusive tone presided over new distinctions. Soon, Marxist ideology comforted its conservative opponents by conferring a new gloss on the cultural artifacts that the traditionalists had deemed worthy. They looked at these artistic contents with different methodologies and intellectual ambitions, but the contents and the systems of values were largely the same. Thus, Marxist-oriented specialists were suddenly giving their conservative “frenemies” an added benefit. They introduced new methodologies, perspectives, and a new language to approach essentially the same art objects that their traditionalist friends had been worshipping. It suddenly became “cool” to listen to an opera by Tchaikovsky through a Brechtian lens. It became “cool” to look at Renoir through Arnold Hauser, Theodor Introduction

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Adorno, or any exponent of social art history from the 1960s to the 1980s. The Marxist varnish essentially confirmed older judgments by introducing new approaches and perspectives to elevate the traditionalist belief of the elite in their own taste. Irrefragably, the impact of Marxist studies, within the humanities at large, and Art History in particular, has added considerably to the development and expansion of the field. Content-wise, however, the spectrum of objects to be studied has not been vastly different. “Bourgeois society is exploded by its own immanent dynamics,” Adorno writes. “This is imprinted in Beethoven’s music, the sublime music, as a trait of esthetic untruth.”7 That high music has a dialectical relation to its historical forms, as described by Adorno: “It catches fire on those forms, melts them down, makes them vanish and return in vanishing. Popular music, on the other hand, uses the types as empty cans into which the material is pressed without interacting with the forms.”8 Here again, we return to the inevitable binary of a positive versus a crude form of artistic expression. This book does not advocate replacing one spectrum of art objects with another. It does not advocate pitting one art world against another. Nor does it even suggest that the supremacy of one art world over others should be abandoned. It simply suggests that the old conservative models (whether traditionalist or Marxist) of dividing up taste into a binary and Manichean opposition is no longer yielding appropriate results. Our students argue, and we agree with them, that these binary systems of oppositions are more than obsolete: they have become irrelevant and vacuous. We are addressing the fact that not two but a vast number of art worlds— each with astounding numbers of art objects, or art situations—coexist in silence, in mutual ignorance, in competition, or in mere contempt of each other. What to do with this plethora of contiguous art worlds? First, let us recognize their sheer existence. Are we saying that they are all equal? Of course not. But each one reflects the accumulation of layers of judgments of taste that are almost entirely ignored—and may yield interesting surprises, were one to listen to their claims. The simultaneous existence of these many worlds is certainly not new. It is interesting and entertaining to look at an 1810 short story by Heinrich von Kleist: “Über das Marionettentheater” (On the Puppet Theater).9 This Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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imaginary dialogue sets off Mr. C., a star ballet dancer and the first dancer in the opera house of the city where the dialogue takes place, versus one of his ardent admirers. Mr. C. is very well known and has won over the art public of the city. His protagonist, an avid ballet spectator, admiringly reverent toward the famous ballet dancer, expresses his surprise at having come across Mr. C. watching a puppet theater (Marionettentheater)—a vulgar form of popular entertainment, according to Mr. C’s admirer. The ballet dancer’s reply produces even greater surprise in his protagonist’s mind. Mr. C. explains that not only does he take great pleasure from watching these puppets, but a dancer can also learn a lot from them. Further put to the test, the protagonist is asked whether he had not found the dance movements of these puppets “very graceful.” The astonished ballet dancer’s admirer grudgingly concedes that Teniers would have found these figures “cute” (hübsch).10 What follows is an interesting exchange about the possible aesthetic merits of these “mechanistic” gestures versus the organic and human gestures of the ballet dancer. Mr. C. first admits that the manipulation of the marionettes does not appear to require much art. Conversely, however, he insists that their line of movement carries something mysterious within itself. It is, after all, nothing other than “the very path of a dancer’s soul.” In technical terms, Kleist argues that the marionette operator literally transfers his own center of gravity to the bodies of these marionettes. In other words, he dances. The ballet dancer’s admirer is dismayed to hear the artist he so reveres speak in such superlative terms about a form of entertainment usually considered grossly simple and without a spark of spirit—a form of entertainment that, furthermore, has nothing to do with the world of art, since it was created to entertain ordinary crowds. The star ballet dancer decides to inflict the last, fatal remark on his opponent (and fervent admirer) by claiming that if he were able to commission a marionette that would be made according to his exact specifications, that marionette would be able to execute dances that even Vestris, the most admired dancer of the time, would be unable to accomplish. The author becomes silent under the shock of this comparison. Kleist’s dialogue anticipates this book in more ways than one. Published just two hundred years ago, it allows itself to do something that has seldom Introduction

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been done since. It compares incomparable worlds: the world of high art (operatic ballet dancing) with that of popular entertainment (puppet theater). The fictional text further suggests, through the voice of an eminent ballet dancer, that (1) the two forms of art do not merit being referenced according to different terms (art versus entertainment invented for the masses) and (2) that these two forms of art share far more in common than one dares imagine. Chinese shadow theater raises exactly the same issues. A populist art form as subtle as Art World art but performed for a very different audience, it is one of those rare performing art forms that combines exquisite carving with painting, music, singing, performance, and literature. Already popular at least a thousand years ago, Chinese shadow theater entertained the young and old, the wealthy and the poor, before the onslaught of television and all manner of electronic entertainment of our present age. And, as a recent thesis at Hunter College has just established, electronic and video games themselves can yield surprising results under a careful aesthetic investigation.11 Shadow theater, too, provides a rare window into the mentality of the largest but least studied group of the Chinese population.12 Simple figures, held on sticks, provided popular entertainment in an art form that had no connection with the literary and visual pleasures of Chinese high culture. In traditional China, too, there were multiplicities of art worlds. A few years ago, we witnessed a dialogue between two friends, Illana Hester and Nataliya Chorny, that seemed to echo in real life the fictional dialogue invented by Kleist two hundred years ago. The discussion compared ballet with another form of popular street entertainment, and the dialogue became just as prickly in tone as Kleist’s dialogue, if not more so. One of the protagonists, Nataliya, passionately attends the ballet and is, like most ballet aficionados, exacting in her quality standards. The other, Illana, does not pay much attention to this part of the art world, which she refers to as an “elite playground,” but she is a zealous and fervent admirer of skateboarding. There was little ground these two could find in common to argue for the respective merits and superiority of the art form they advocated. Nataliya launched a laudatory suite of remarks on the astounding aesthetic and physical feat of prowess demonstrated by the truly great ballet dancers—a form of Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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art that stands unrivaled. Illana objected that she found very little of interest in ballet dance per se. Her remarks bear mention: Skateboarding to me is as beautiful as the ballet, more, even! The movements of the skaters, the shapes of the bowls and ramps and pools they ride on, the symphony formed by the relationships between skaters in a park—all of this moves me in ways that the opera or ballet never could move me. Watching great skateboarding, I feel my heart race, my eyes widen. Goosebumps rise to peaks across my arms. It sometimes looks like complete anarchy, but if one watches it carefully, an entire system emerges. Each skater knows when to move, chooses his line across the park carefully and purposefully.The final result is poetry to watch. The interactions between a wooden board and a human being are infinitely stunning to me. From the flip tricks to the huge soaring airs off a ramp, it all strikes me as a marvelous dance, and I would rather watch someone skate than someone do ballet across a stage any day.13

Several parallels can be drawn between the early nineteenth-century fictional dialogue by Kleist and the recent discussion between Nataliya and Illana. Both conversations address the paradoxes at the heart of this book. Starting from a comparison of two forms of art that are usually kept a healthy distance from each other, we end up with two protagonists who are fiercely convinced of the full artistic validity of the form of art each admires, and furthermore, the defender of the “lesser” form of art winds up adopting the high-handed vocabulary of the other in order to describe what she loves about the art they admire. Kleist’s hero describes the puppeteer as a “dancer” himself—and as someone who can execute dances that a professional renowned ballet performer could not. Likewise, two hundred years later, Illana Hester describes skateboarding by borrowing terms that describe her opponent’s favorite art form: skateboarding is like a dance; it is symphonic; it defies gravity. Each form, ultimately, is transcendent to each fervent admirer’s mind. No matter how much education is brought into this dialogue to “prove” to either protagonist the superiority of ballet over skateboarding, or vice versa, it would likely have no impact over each protagonist’s passionate preferences. We then discovered something. Both of us having made careers out of “teaching” taste, or the history of taste, we discovered that taste is not teachable. Introduction

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(Though this was the intuition that drove Kant to write his Critique of the Power of Judgment, it felt weirdly powerful to have come to the full realization of this intellectual intuition through immersion in today’s plethora of art forms.) Moreover, we decided that rather than teaching those who knew less well, we ought to open ourselves up to being taught by those differences of taste. We reiterated the same exercise through our recent seminar on the margins of aesthetics. Now, did this mean that we should abandon any taste preference? Of course not. Did it mean that we should accept all judgments of taste as equal and acceptable in the same way—as in a kind of tasteless and perfectly bland postmodernist pea soup where every particle tastes the same (“everything goes”)? Of course not! This signaled for us that we ought to attempt to listen to every judgment of taste with open ears and open eyes—a stance that is uncharacteristic within the Art World. We were ready to go against the entrenched tradition from which we both came and to let go of the innate thought that we “know better.” Hence, taking risks and exposing ourselves to having our aesthetic preferences bruised became our new program. Surprisingly, we both felt that it was much more painless than we had anticipated, and we ended up discovering a vast array of art objects we never could have imagined existed—objects that led us to reformulate our aesthetic taste, or at least to widen the spectrum of aesthetic possibilities to which each of us had been attached for several decades. In most cases, and most gratifyingly, this journey into aesthetic territories that neither author would have imagined even ten years ago became an eye-opener, a soul-opener, unlike anything we had previously known. The process of creating this book has changed the way we look at the world—and for that we are grateful. The relevance of these two dialogues—one fictional, one real, two hundred years apart—to this book is huge. They both point to the fact that despite the vast cultural, aesthetic, and social distances that separate various art forms, they are comparable, and we believe they are compatible. Kleist’s star dancer loves puppetry, and, to his admirer’s shock, the dancer embodies the values we are discussing here. We are arguing for openness, caring not about right or wrong but solely about what one likes versus what one dislikes. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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It is perfectly possible to like ballet dancing and puppetry in the same way one can look at a sculpture by Donald Judd and enjoy Swampy the Gator (“a prime example of Florida Roadside Kitsch”).14 Each carries a whole set of validity claims. Though these claims appear mutually exclusive of each other, they share a very important fact. Each form of art is a source of enthrallment to its spectators and admirers. Further, even though each form of art inspires contempt, at worst, and ignorance, at best, for the opponent, when it comes to describing each of the aesthetic experiences garnered by each person, the vocabulary used, the terms of praise, and the sense of utter joy are analogous. This book compares these analogous art worlds. We are not, however, saying that they are all equal or identical. We are saying that each art world provides its audience with analogously high yields of aesthetic joy, drawing upon, in each case, very sophisticated criteria of aesthetic judgments. The objects of these judgments are vastly different, and the subjects (or the authors) of these judgments, while opposed to one another, end up experiencing a very similar and fulfilling sentiment: aesthetic joy. We are also saying that it is possible—indeed, this is a fact—to come across an experience of the sublime through watching marionettes, or skateboarders performing the “Christ air” trick. We are not saying that there are no longer canons. We are saying that there is, in fact, a plethora of competing artistic and aesthetic canons, most of which are never mentioned in the world of art history because they do not fit. This book takes us outside the boundaries of art history (and will return to the Art-Historical world) to compare and test the claims of aesthetic validity within different art constellations. Thomas Kinkade’s paintings are everywhere. An estimated one in twenty American homes owns a print of his work. At the same time, his pictures are reviled—if not simply ignored—within the Art World. Why is this? It is not a question of quality per se. It is hardly polemical to suggest that his pictures bear comparison with canonical works of Art History. His Jerusalem Sunset (2006), for example, brings to mind Corot’s Roman scenes; it could, more or less, hold its own alongside a classical Barbizon landscape. Other pictures—those in which fantasy scenes are set in utopian American landscapes—conjure up Thomas Cole. Kinkade’s Parisian cityscapes, meanwhile, are close in atmosphere and execution to many second-generation Introduction

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1  J. Grant Brittain,“Christ Air.” Photograph of skateboarder Christian Hosoi.

2  Thomas Kinkade, Jerusalem Sunset, 2006.

Impressionist works. Nevertheless, for most denizens of the Art World, his work does not even qualify as art: it is the ultimate paradigm of Kitsch. Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall, edited by Art Historian Alexis L. Boylan (Duke University Press, 2011), challenges Kinkade’s exclusion from the Art World’s rarefied discourses.15 In so doing, it surely counts as something of an event. It features chapters by eight scholars and conceptual artist Jeffrey Vallance, who curated a deliberately brazen museum exhibition of Kinkade’s work in 2004 and writes about it enthusiastically. Most of the contributors to the volume, however, approach Kinkade’s work through the aseptic gloves of tested and accepted theoreticians and historians of culture: Theodor Adorno, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Danto, Fredric Jameson, and Linda Nochlin. Although this means that Kinkade’s work is regarded primarily as a sociological phenomenon, the chapters also make plain the hypocrisy involved in the Art World’s rejection of it. In fact, his Introduction

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paintings seem to be a distorting mirror of things the Art World actually (thinks it) desires: a democratic art, a bridging of the gap between art and life, a questioning of the concept of the unique object, not to mention—given the late Kinkade’s multimillion-dollar revenues and network of retail stores—a real-world example of Warhol’s dictum that “good business is the best art.” Yet such ideas, and their immersion in the history of the twentieth century’s avant-gardes, could not be further from Kinkade’s own take on his work. “I always strive to celebrate the beauty in nature and the best of humankind,” he wrote. “Artists, traditionally, have always promoted the concept of the ideal within society.” There is nothing hard-edged or radical in his work; he does not practice first-, second-, or third-degree irony. In one of the chapters in this volume, Anna Brzyski suggests that this is the heart of the problem. “If Kinkade winked,” she writes, “if he gave us an indication of ironic detachment, criticality (on however minimal a level) or even campy complicity, which would create a possibility that his practice functioned as representation and not the thing itself, and that he was, in fact, one of us, instead of one of them, he could be celebrated as one of the most significant artists working today.” Instead, his paintings are openly sentimental and nostalgic. Indeed, they are intended to be as easy to love as a birthday cake or fireworks. It is, therefore, no surprise that myriad people unrepentantly love his work. Yet, almost without exception, these writers are a little squeamish when it comes to granting any validity to the aesthetic judgments of the public. We are not saying that we love Kinkade’s work ourselves, but we would argue that training in academic Art History does not put one in a position to dismiss the sincere emotions of millions of people who do love Kinkade’s art. Rather, these claims need to be taken seriously and, even more, granted respect. And if one accepts that everyone is entitled to judge for themselves, one must also face the problems raised by the inherently patronizing notion of Kitsch (and Greenberg’s essay on this subject, which is cited several times in the volume under discussion). As Monica Kjellman-Chapin writes, “Kitsch . . . seems almost too facile a label for the Kinkadian painted print. . . . Kinkade’s products are not inadequate in the way kitsch is usually perceived; they present themselves as more, as better.” Ultimately, she sees

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a dialectic at work: “Kinkade needs kitsch in order to partake of and try to participate in its elevated Other”16—art with a capital A. Yet perhaps the primary benefit of this book lies in the skill with which it, conversely, teases out the vagaries of the Art World’s love/hate affair with its own significant Other: mass culture. Kinkade was, notoriously, a Republican and a born-again Christian, and several essays here offer a salutary reminder of the persistent distance between the Art World and mainstream America. In a telling anecdote, Seth Feman describes the circumstances of Kinkade’s religious conversion. In 1980, Kinkade was in the middle of sketching a nude model when “the sorrowful face of Jesus materialized before his eyes.” Soon after that, he discovered how to mass-produce and then to market his art, apparently as part of a proselytizing mission. “Consumption,” Feman writes, became “a doctrine of salvation.”17 Is this, perhaps, more similar to the contemporary art world than we can bring ourselves to admit?

Introduction

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1. Modern Foundations of the Art World I, whose profession is to form clouds rather than dissipate them, and to suspend judgments rather than cast any . . . —Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et les muets All too many of us are excessively humble in front of art, fearing to make fools of ourselves if we are unable to see the virtue of one piece or the faults of another. But of what use is art appreciation if it does not give voice to our own personal reaction? —Sister Wendy Beckett, Joy Lasts: On the Spiritual in Art

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onsider the ever-fuzzy relationships between decorative arts and “fine arts” within the Art World. We begin with a presentation of three distinct Art World situations that illustrate the ever-complicated aesthetics of the margins and the institutions that foster aesthetic values deemed worthy of the Art World. The first example, from the mid-twentieth century, led to a straightforward case of exclusion. The director of a major museum lost a battle against his trustees—and his job—as he could not impose his aesthetic choice when proposing that the museum acquire a spectacular shoeshine stand because the trustees of the institution whose charge he carried deemed this object beneath their standards of acceptability. The second case, decades later, shows us the opposite. Here, another major museum welcomed the inclusion of a snare drum, which according to the curator had reached “an iconic status,” showcased as an object of fine art. In this case, however, the instrument was endowed with more than aesthetic merits due to the celebrity status of its owner, a major musician of the second half of the twentieth century and an idol: Ringo Starr. The third example is perhaps the most interesting as it embodies the general context within which today’s art scene operates, which consists of what we might call “indirect inclusion,” or an indirect case of openness from within the Art System. Two producers of marginal art forms (a decorator and a designer), who would typically not hold the attention of a curator of contemporary art within a mainstream art museum, were suddenly featured at the core of the museum’s experimental art space because they were part of a project led and produced by contemporary art star Lucy McKenzie. Hence, it becomes clear that the artist now has powers that even a museum

director did not have half a century ago. He or she is, in a sense, capable of anointing another art/craft producer and placing their works next to hers on display in public, thereby giving them a sense of recognition and justification that they probably would not carry on their own. Some might argue that this is a case of phagocytosis (a primary biological operation that designates one cellular organism gulping down another while preserving the identity of the consumed organism—a metaphor that applies surprisingly aptly to the way in which the Art World absorbs residuals of counterculture).1 Simply put, what or whom the artist deems worthwhile is, almost de facto, accepted by the rest of the Art World, even if the Art World in question would not spontaneously confer accolades on these outsider particles of counterculture. One can think of countless examples of artists who absorb, within their art, elements of culture not welcome by the mainstream cultural world, and subsequently confer a status of (forced) acceptability on these elements. Let us look at these three case studies in further detail. The decision on the part of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the then director of the Museum of Modern Art, to propose the acquisition of an extraordinary-looking shoeshine stand, created by an Italian immigrant, Joe Milone, immediately pushed to the fore the question, what is art? And, more specifically, what is modern art?—or, by implication, what can rightly be deemed worthy of entering the collections and display of the engine that confers worth and recognition on modern art? The dramatic outcome of this decision was recently rehearsed by Thomas Crow in his 2014 book The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design, 1930– 1995. Barr lost the argument against the trustees of the museum (namely, Stephen Clark, the board chair at the time) and lost his job by the same token. (When we published Wild Art, we assumed that this shoeshine stand had been destroyed. Recently, however, Milone’s granddaughter sold it through an auction house to the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. This acquisition is but one instance, in the past several years, in which the widening parameters of the Art World are evident.) Here at stake are two distinct questions. The first of these is, despite the obvious aesthetic merits of this object / work of art and the enthusiastic support of the director and of a leading contemporary artist at the time, Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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3  Joe Milone and his shoeshine equipment were included in the exhibition Joe Milone’s Shoe Shine Stand at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 22, 1942, through January 10, 1943.

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Louise Nevelson, what are the reasons the shoeshine stand was deemed by the trustees of MoMA not to belong to the cluster of works of art acquired by the museum? To exclude, rather than to include, had rapidly become the core vectorial force of the institutionalization of modern art. Modernism, and its early representative, MoMA, defined itself through a series of selective moves and layers of filtering. Modernism and universalism became antonyms. There is nothing unusual about this. The second question to be asked is, according to what criteria was a particular object excluded or included? In other words, how was it deemed “modern” enough, or not? The question that interests us here is not so much the intrinsic aesthetic merits of Joe Milone’s shoeshine stand. We happen to believe (and this is a thesis running throughout this book) that there are no intrinsic aesthetic merits to any object and that all such aesthetic merits are, in fact, accreted to the object by viewers themselves, in a constant process of checks and balances. Given this, how is it possible that the head of the trustees of MoMA and its director—both critical agents within the budding modern Art World of the 1940s—could have had such a hard disagreement? This argument had a direct impact on drawing the line between what is, or ought to be, included versus what remains outside. An object created by a Brooklyn artisan (not deemed an artist) was not granted the right to be shown within the confines of MoMA. The Art World, of which modernism appears as the teleological spearhead, proceeds by exclusion. This is something we should neither lament nor praise. It is a simple fact, yet it is not a light fact. It carries vast and complex repercussions. These acts of exclusion leave out far more than they include— indeed, far more than could ever possibly be included. It is perfectly obvious that there is a very sound and pragmatic argument that because the museum, in its essence, is contained within a limited portion of real estate—even though this portion of real estate keeps augmenting—it could therefore in no case be based on universalist premises or aim to display all artifacts or art objects of the modern era. While we cannot but agree with this pragmatic reminder, we are interested in the next steps: How are and were these selections made possible? Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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By saying that the Art World proceeds by exclusion, we are not indicting the Art World. The grotesque objective to present ourselves as white knights of the non–Art World, rescuing poor objects from the zones of obscurity where they have been confined, is far from our intention. Let it be clear: we are professionals of the Art World we describe and analyze. We simply believe that being insiders does not stop us from attempting to carry what the early twentieth-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called an “exotopic” perspective on the Art World: an attempt to see the world we live in from its outside periphery. The second case under consideration would seem to lead to opposite conclusions. The Art World would appear, decades later, to have become far more inclusive. “On July 7, Ringo Starr’s 70th birthday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will inaugurate a special display of his gold-plated snare drum that will remain on view through December 2010 in the Musical Instruments Galleries,” read the museum’s press release of June 29, 2010,2 announcing what was referred to as a media coup by many Art World aficionados. Needless to say, the Department of Musical Instruments does not draw the highest foot traffic within the museum, not by a long shot. The display of Starr’s drum was guaranteed to bring in many members of the public that the Met had not been accustomed to seeing. By displaying this work of art—but also this artistic instrument—the Met aimed to capture the attention of vast portions of the public often kept at a distance from intimidating art institutions. But of greater interest to us was that this signaled that the Art World had changed considerably in three-quarters of a century. An object such as a guitar or set of drums can now be displayed, and proudly so, within a museum such as the Met. A plethora of other examples abound to show that the long-held traditional divide between “decorative arts” and “fine arts” seems to be eroding. The Art World now functions according to different criteria. Three-quarters of a century ago, it was more like a gentlemen’s club (even though, ironically, it is always healthy to remember that MoMA was created by women—Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller—in 1929). It was intended for the appreciation of the few who dared to engage in a desire to learn and understand what modern art was about. This premise is largely gone. The public who comes to a museum today has numerous different aims, Modern Foundations of the Art World 

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intentions, and incentives, and it is highly doubtful that “understanding what modern art is about” remains the principal one. The museum public is not indifferent to the significance of a celebrityowned object. Most importantly, the apparent irreconcilable oppositions in art (between, say, Kitsch and high art; craft and fine art; or Ilya Repin and Picasso, as Clement Greenberg would have it) have become completely useless to today’s public. Indeed, these old debates have become utterly irrelevant. What is the difference between gazing at Ringo Starr’s snare drum and contemplating the remnants of a saint, meditating on the meaning of Moses’s staff, or analyzing the hair of Mohammed’s beard? The Art World has moved from being a rarefied club for connoisseurs to openly embracing the celebrity entertainment world—and, in effect, competing, with relative success, with the world of entertainment. Indeed, today decorative art seems to be returning to the museum through the front door, and curators of various departments now are seen working together, reinventing possible dialogues between works from departments such as Painting and Sculpture and Architecture and Design. MoMA’s display of its permanent collection in 2016 put a Jaguar E-type roadster (1961), a fabulous-looking convertible, in the vicinity of Robert Rauschenberg’s First Landing Jump (1961), whose powers of fascination remain inexhaustible today. The decision to place these objects in dialogue with each other certainly signals that some of the traditional divides separating genres and departments into a rigorous hierarchy have eroded considerably. The fact that Hyundai, the titan of the Korean car industry, sponsored this display at MoMA may not be incidental to the idea of juxtaposing objects such as a Jaguar and a Rauschenberg. Overall, however, this long-awaited dialogical rethinking of the contents of such a rich collection as MoMA embodies a new approach in the Art World. Hailed by Roberta Smith in the April 7, 2016, issue of the New York Times as a “welcome shakeup of the permanent collection galleries,”3 it also signals what students, in our recent seminar “The Aesthetics of the Margins” at Hunter College, have recurrently reminded us: the old divides are dead and the recent changes in the Art World signal a much more porous and open-ended stage than was ever possible through the strife-ridden and polemical history of modernism. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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In retrospect, McKenzie’s inclusion of wall decorating and carpeting within her own practice—activities deemed lesser species of the Art World and almost antinomic to the forces behind the development of modernism—appear today as an organic development. McKenzie described her 2008 MoMA exhibition, in which she placed decorative art front and center within the institution, as a “scenography” created by “the three of us.” Calling itself Atelier E.B., that group consisted of textile designer Beca Lipscombe, illustrator Bernie Reid, and McKenzie. Defining herself as someone who is “involved in fine art,” McKenzie knowingly dissolved the distinction between “fine arts” and “other arts.” Her decision to include a textile designer and an illustrator in her exhibition, crowned with a stamp of approval from her curator, Christophe Cherix, and the hosting institution, who deemed the results of this mix “cool.” The firm divide between Alfred Barr against the MoMA trustees over Joe Milone’s gorgeously post-neo-Baroque shoeshine stand had begun to dissolve by 2008—and appears close to vanishing today, in 2018. Indeed, one can well imagine that the presence of Milone’s shoeshine stand within the confines of MoMA’s permanent collection could be welcomed as “very cool.” The distinction among “design,” “illustration,” and “fine art” remains alive today, but the hierarchy that presided over the ranking of each activity appears to be defunct. The irony of this was echoed by Cherix, who asked the illustrator, Reid, how he felt about “working in a fine art context like MoMA,” to which Reid replied, “It’s great for me. I just went back to art school, so you couldn’t ask for much more as an art student. I’m studying painting, so it’s great to be able to walk outside of this room and see the Philip Guston paintings.”4 McKenzie’s collaborative and inclusive decision was an unusual case of joint participation among different artistic categories that tended, in the past, to avoid engagement with each other. One can say that this decision on the part of someone “involved in fine art” contributed to a slight extent, if not to corroding the divide between the different forms of art, then at least to questioning the validity of the past systems of exclusion. With this in mind, let us return to our first question. Imagine for a second that Joe Milone’s shoeshine stand had found its Lucy McKenzie, and that it Modern Foundations of the Art World 

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could have been part of an installation commissioned by André Masson or by Pablo Picasso, who would have deemed it essential to have this artifact / work of art as the entry point for his one-man show at the museum. Would the trustees have turned down this unusual request then? Probably not. Famous artists command a presence and a power within the art establishment that even curators and directors can only aspire to. The trustees would have likely frowned upon it, but since it would have come through the auspices of a figure like Picasso, whose representation within the museum’s collection was already considerable, it is likely that even a trustee such as Clark would have condoned this eccentric decision on the part of a major artist wanting to include another minor work (a shoeshine stand) within his own installation. The paradox through which the Art World has gradually, if reluctantly, accepted within its own fabric homeopathic doses, or “tokens,” of marginal aesthetics (these other art forms), whether a set of drums (Ringo Starr) or a display of posters by a graphic designer (McKenzie at MoMA), has had a dramatic impact on the outlook of the Art World today. The Art World prides itself on wishing to operate in more radical or open ways. Curator Cherix’s invitation to McKenzie to invite decorative artists—indeed, a transitive form of invitation—is one of many examples of this effort on the part of the Art World. In logical terms, this follows a chain of transitive functions, by which >> stands for transfer of aesthetic responsibility or decision: Art World agent 1 (curator) >> Art World agent 2 (artist) >> non–Art World agents 1 and 2 (decorative artist and illustrator). This dynamic chain is representative of the twisted logic of the Art World, whereby a homeopathic dose of non–Art World material manages to be injected in order to infect and protect the Art World against what it fears most: mass art, popular culture, Kitsch, or what our October group of friends euphemistically refer to as “Spectacle”—a word that alludes to Guy Debord’s famous critique of our society saturated with distracting images, which he thought to be the aesthetic opiate of the masses. This kind of rejection of every form of popular aesthetic production by reference to Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle is little more than another form of bigotry. Our students have taught us that this divide, too, is perfunctory and no longer relevant. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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Yet, for nearly two centuries, the Art World has continued to function on the same premises that Enlightenment philosopher and writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing presented in Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. It drew a clear dividing line between minor and major arts, and this divide continues to segment whole continents of art activities. It continues to separate, through borders—albeit more and more porous ones—the arts that appeal to all (the lesser arts, merely alluring to the senses, as Lessing would have said) versus those that act “upon the powers of the soul, fantasy, through the very meaning of [their] words.”5 Despite the relativist, postmodern explosion of the past few decades, all is not equal—far from it—within today’s Art World. We agree that there are major differences between vast segments of creative activities. But we do not think that these actual, and obvious, differences are the basis for discrimination, ignorance, condemnation, or condescending judgments from one area of artistic creation to another. We would feel impoverished for accepting blanket negative judgments on a whole category of artworks that do not fit readily within accepted criteria. We feel, in other words, that the only criteria that are valid for accepting and enjoying a work of art are one’s individual subjective judgments. We, the authors, often experience virulent disagreements on particular judgments of taste—and so be it. But we refuse to close our eyes, or ears, in front of each other’s subjective judgment. We claim that openness is a much more gratifying mode of investigation of the arts, within or outside the borders of the Art World.

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2. The Classical Model Dogmatism and Alternative Models of Looking The ancients would have thought it absurd for men to make the law, for the law was inscribed in the order of the cosmos, or else it was God’s revelation. . . . But for modern humanity . . . merit begins with freedom and can only be earned by actions which involve the exercise of free will. —Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century Prior to the eighteenth century, the popular experience of high art, however important and moving it may have been to the mass of people viewing it, was openly determined and administered from above. Artists operating at the highest levels of aesthetic ambition did not address their wider audience directly; they had first to satisfy, or at least resolve, the more immediate demands of elite individuals and groups. —Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris

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enaissance patrons did not have to adjudicate democratic judgments of taste when they granted major artist commissions. Bramante’s staircase in the Vatican, for example, is made for an observer who, coming from the outside, is led to the forbidden and transcendent world accessible only to popes, emperors, and their guests—all deemed infallible, and certainly not subject to the vagaries of public taste. Only a certain elite would have been entreated to walk up or descend those stairs, and only they, the happy few, would then have been in a position to view and understand the art displayed in the statuary court. The fact that today about 5 million visitors from all over the globe walk up and down the steps of the Sistine Chapel every year, having paid about €16 per ticket, generating an annual revenue to the Vatican of approximately €80 million, would have been inconceivable to the founders of the Vatican in the fifth and sixth centuries, let alone to their imperial and fearsome successor a millennium later, Pope Julius II, who was responsible for commissioning Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel. The ultimate paradox became a reality when classical art—made for and under God, to be viewed by a happy few privileged custodians of the gaze of God—became accessible to all. As we consider the economics of taste in the age of democracy, it is interesting that in America, too, the art of the Vatican has continued to hold the same wide fascination within the public taste. The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art (1982) remains the third-most popular exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (with almost 900,000 visitors), behind the 1963 Mona Lisa exhibition and Treasures of Tutankhamun in 1978 (with more than a million and 1,360,000 visitors, respectively).

4  Bramante’s staircase in the Vatican.

While in Rome a few years ago, we decided to be part of this vastly popular cultural event and pay a visit to the Sistine Chapel and to Raphael’s Stanzas. We were, at the time, stationed at the perplexing crossroads between aesthetics and politics, between the vast crowds brought by these extraordinary works of art and the rarefied world of the professionals of Art History, and between the religious world and the secular. Incidentally, none crossed the border between the latter two more forcefully than Pope Julius II, who on Palm Sunday 1507 entered Rome under the combined, though difficult to imagine, disguises of his namesake Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ on his way to Jerusalem—a rare and implausible attempt at connecting the temporal and the atemporal worlds. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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There are few more potent places on earth to address the insanely complex intersections between Art World and non–Art World than the Vatican itself. And there we were, in Rome, addressing the intersection between the art that has received quasi-universal consecration within the Art World and the vast quantities of art objects that have never found a place within the Art World. Blue Guide Rome, a thorough guidebook for the art tourist, devotes thirtyseven pages to the Vatican Museums, describing their masterpieces in full detail.1 Of these thirty-seven pages, only four sentences are devoted to the Collection of Modern Religious Art, which comprises several thousand objects and is dedicated to various Catholic topics of interest. This plethora of objects litters every corridor and staircase on the trajectory from Raphael’s Stanzas to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Mostly uncatalogued, these works have elicited remarkably little interest and even less research. Ironically, they count among the works of art that are seen by the same vast volume of members of the public who congregate to view the Sistine Chapel or Raphael’s Stanzas. Yet, in a sense, these objects remain unseen, having fallen into the darkness of ignorance. We find it difficult to accept the argument voiced by a respected Art Historian and dear friend, Christopher Wood, that these works constitute little more than a pile of mediocre artifacts. Some do, and many may not arouse much excitement, but how can thousands and thousands of works of art in a place like the Vatican Museums fall into utter oblivion? Every visitor to the Vatican sees them, and yet most remain blind to them. As Blue Guide Rome explains, “the collection [is] arranged in no particular order.” Not even the pope has the power, or the interest, to bring these throngs of artworks into the light. We are starting with the Sistine Chapel because it represents a sanctorum within the sphere of art and aesthetics. Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoes— dauntingly more complex than any book can even begin to suggest—stand out as one of the, if not the, pinnacles of artistic achievement of all time. A masterwork by a genius, adulated by millions of visitors and devotees, the Sistine ceiling hovers above our heads. The aesthetic impact is all-powerful. It works without question. These overwhelming fresco paintings, hovering above our gaze, can be held as an example of uncontested and indubitable objective The Classical Model

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beauty. “How dare you,” we once heard at one of our public lectures, “suggest that all artifacts are worthy of aesthetic attention when you stand under the sublime grandeur of the great Michelangelo!” Our response called for a more nuanced approach. In full agreement with those, in vast numbers, who praise to heaven Michelangelo’s utterly awe-inspiring creation, we refuse to believe that aesthetic judgments are reduced to a binary alternative between zero and infinity, between all and nothing. To us, it seems that the incontestably great achievement of one artist can easily accommodate the validity claims of throngs of different works of art that, at least for now, receive practically no attention whatsoever. The all-or-nothing alternative is ultimately crippling and is incapable of bracketing the richly layered, multiple options inherent in carrying out an aesthetic judgment. It is perfectly possible, and rather gratifying, to walk out of the Sistine Chapel and gaze, with aesthetic sensors out and open, at these volumes of works of art lingering along the corridors of the Vatican. More than once, when we pointed out that there were thousands of works of art unaccounted for between the entrance of the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel, the response we received was, “Where are they? Where can they be seen?” They bypassed the radar of so many viewers at the Vatican that we decided to take up this challenge ourselves and find out whether, indeed, these works of art are totally imperceptible next to Michelangelo’s ceilings. One day we had the good luck to arrive at the Vatican by 5 p.m. during a winter month, a truly ideal time to visit the Sistine Chapel. The usual streams of thousands of visitors were reduced to a few dozen people. The Sistine Chapel opened up, offering itself to us in its most extraordinary way. Having the highly unusual luxury of moving about freely, the two of us sat on the benches standing at the base of either wall, which offered an unprecedented opportunity to fully absorb this glorious ensemble. With our heads thrown back, we looked at the nine vignettes of the Sistine ceiling and soon became fully absorbed in a mesmerizing aesthetic contemplation. Even though we had the Sistine Chapel almost to ourselves, this prolonged moment of aesthetic bliss brought us into silent and virtual communion with the many millions of visitors who have come to admire this artistic monument—then, now, and in the future. This powerful emotion resembles a moment of religious illumination. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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Yet, at the same time, the dimensions of the Sistine Chapel—necessarily too vast to absorb, comprehend, or even see all at once—carried within themselves a sense of discomfort and pain, perhaps even a deep-seated sense of inadequacy. The immensity, the overwhelming awe, the powerful beauty of this ensemble brought about Kant’s description of the sublime. On either side of the chapel, looking up and across, in length and in width, gazing at this colossal work of art, dealing with what lies beyond our comprehension, we are fatally returned to our own finiteness, our own limitations, our own inadequacy. This sense of melancholy was realized in two ways. One, Michelangelo dealt with the subject of the infinite generating the finite (God’s creation of man) in a way that transcends illustration and makes the very apprehension of the totality of this ensemble ungraspable and, therefore, literally invisible. Transcendence is made painfully real because we cannot experience it. It escapes us, necessarily. Second, and consequently, after this illusory soaring flight above our own senses, we eventually had to take our heads away from the ceiling, come back to earth, return to the floor of the Sistine Chapel, start walking again, and reenter our human bodily dimensions. Standing up and continuing our visit, we meandered up and down the stairs and through the corridors of the Vatican to finally face these throngs of objects, works of art plainly left around with labels that sometimes appeared to be apologetic confessions on the part of the curators. One work, among hundreds, arrested us, almost randomly. It was a figural sculpture by Mirko Basaldella, an Italian artist and the brother of the more famous (or less unknown) Afro, who once served as the director of the Design Workshop at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard. Among the hundreds of thousands of artists who hover on the nebulous peripheries of the Art World, Basaldella was represented by New York’s Knoedler and Co. in the 1940s, and his work is included in the collections of major museums, though it is seldom on view. At the Vatican, his work is on view but remains unseen. As we faced this sculpture, it generated a strange pathos, a deep, dense sense of awkwardness. Was this ambiguous figure protecting itself? Was the model trying to hide himself from a potential threat? One is not quite sure whether this figure is in pain, and if so, whether this pain is physical, moral, The Classical Model

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or both. With little imagination, the sculpture could be screaming out under the unbearable weight of standing there, unknown and unseen. His arms are positioned in front of his face, with a gesture portentous of what the sculpture itself is waiting for: Never to be seen. It hides itself against the threat of becoming invisible, melting neutrally into our gazes, disappearing in front of us. The lower half of its face appears somewhat serene. Or is it frozen in the dull numbness, the horrendous tedium of waiting to be looked at? It was a perfect, if dolorous, reminder of where we were. Having descended from the contemplation of the Sistine Chapel, we were irremediably back to ourselves. We had traveled from the sublime to the ordinary paths of our quotidian lives and now maneuvered through the meanderings of oblivion. Twenty-five thousand people follow this path daily, going from the sanctorum of the Art World to multitudes of quasi-nameless—and, in this case, faceless—works of art. Many will object that they would rather spend twice as much time contemplating the Sistine Chapel than set eyes upon this sculpture by Basaldella. That is fine. We are simply observing that the path between Michelangelo and Basaldella is there for us to take if we so choose. Indeed, watching the public walk through the Vatican galleries, it is blatantly obvious that almost no one cares. Again, we are not here to say that one should care, but, rather, that we are all given an option to gaze at these objects. Once we had set eyes on this sculpture by Basaldella, it became unexpectedly difficult to look away. Indeed, in the classical age, the distinction between high art and low art remained steadfastly firm. The passage from the heights of the most accomplished artistic projects to the pedestrian level of artistic creation appeared difficult, if not impossible. Perhaps one of the clearest differences between the classical age and our contemporary condition is not so much that there is no longer any distinction between the spheres of high and low art but that the dialogues and passages between these spheres are possible and, as we saw earlier, often are first activated by artists themselves, who do not care about the oughts and ought-nots prescribed by the Art World. Few of us would associate religious emotion with Cy Twombly’s The Italians (1961), yet there is no question that Twombly was greatly drawn to Italy’s classical culture, together with its mythological and religious roots. In fact, his art consistently references the antique. Here, the ideal order of Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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the classical model does not so much dissolve but is reinvigorated via the juxtaposition, clash, exquisite contrast, and synergy with our contemporary sensibility. Twombly, like Nicolas Poussin, adopted Italy as his artistic home, and its history and literary tradition nourished his art. Often incorporating classical references into his painting, he said, “I would’ve liked to have been Poussin, if I’d had a choice, in another time.”2 Twombly interests us here insofar as he juggles supreme grace, elegance, irreverence, and exuberant multilayered literary and pictorial classical references as well as the visual world that he confronted every morning on the streets of Rome. To Twombly, the divide that we observe at every corner of the Art World makes no sense. With his inimitable lightness of being, it was perfectly possible to go from Poussin, to read a few pages of Vergil’s Aeneid, and then to enjoy the view of public graffiti on the walls of a Roman pissoire. The nervously regressive graffiti of The Italians—a transliteration onto canvas of the aesthetic impact of random scribbling scratched on Roman walls—sets these visual stimuli within the high-culture context of American abstraction. That Twombly’s ideal abode was a palace in a rough neighborhood nicely describes this peculiarly Italian synthesis of austere high art and vulgar street culture.3 Through his art and vision, Twombly managed to achieve what we claim is not only possible but desirable. He kept his eyes and aesthetic senses open and just as excitable whether he was looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or at graffiti. Twombly brought street culture straight into the Art World. Although he was certainly not alone, he contributed to the establishment of a bridge between the two worlds very early on, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In Rome, as everywhere, there is a great deal of street art, which could hardly enter the Art System. Among the many others who mine the depths of such street art, Twombly holds a position of great importance because of his ability to simultaneously articulate two voices that are normally at odds with each other. He enabled art that has no name, voice, or representation within the Art World to suddenly acquire something like an echo. He did not give graffiti its full presence, but his work carries the aura of graffiti within the sumptuously sensuous surfaces of his paintings and onto the sanctimonious walls of the Art World. The Classical Model

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5  Robert Rauschenberg, Dirt Painting (for John Cage), ca. 1953. Dirt and mold in wood box. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

One of the first questions that launched this reflection was the recurrent, fundamental question, how is art made? The primal gesture of the artist touching a worthless substance and by that mere touch transforming the object into a thing worthy of interest is potent. The seventeenth-century painter and writer Gian Pietro Bellori, in his life of Poussin, describes visiting the ruins in Rome one day along with the artist and a foreign collector who wanted to take some rare antiquity home. Poussin offered the collector a souvenir of the rich art world of Rome: “‘I would like to give you the most beautiful antiquity that you could desire,’ and reaching down with his hand he picked out a bit of earth and pebbles amid the grass, with specks of porphyry and marble reduced almost to dust, then he said, ‘Here you are, sir, take it to your museum and say: this is ancient Rome.’”4 Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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There is, it seems to us, a direct trajectory of the idea of conferring value on valueless objects, from this very moving seicento account to Robert Rauschenberg’s Dirt Painting (for John Cage) (ca. 1953), “which consists of ‘compacted earth, organic matter, and water glass (a binding medium) in a shallow box support. A pattern of lichen or mold grew on its surface, and this blue and gray presence remains.”5 Inspired by a visit to Alberto Burri’s Roman studio, Rauschenberg eventually used unfired clay, which cracked over time, prolonging this tellurian celebratory trajectory and offering the opportunity to look at a fistful of dirt, a bit of clay, or indeed, a clump of mud, with aesthetic emotions. More recently, very much in the vein of Bellori’s account, Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig (1999) appeared to develop a similarly fecund reflection of photographing sludge-digging scenes on the banks. With a team of local volunteers, Dion combed the foreshore of the Thames at low tide along two stretches of beach at Millbank and Bankside, near the Tate Gallery, looking for fragments of individual and ephemeral histories and collecting such debris as clay pipes, vividly decorated shards of Delftware, oyster shells, and plastic toys. Nigel Poor is also interested in making art from what people discard: When some people get anxious they eat or shop or drink. When I get nervous I throw things out. I think it is an attempt at control but dang it all, I still own too much so I will be working on this until the day I die. But really I want to just own what I need, not have an excessive amount of “stuff.” But I still collect lots of things, like found metal and books with interesting marginalia, other people’s lint and dirt from various places I travel through. I live in this contradiction of collecting and purging, and all that has changed is I grow more aware of it.6

Although visually distinct, the artifacts of Poussin, Rauschenberg, Dion, and Poor carry strong analogies, if not occasional resemblances. They tell us how widely our aesthetic fields could expand were we to start looking at our feet, at the ground, at the soil we tread. While Art Historians are generally concerned with explaining how such materials—which also include the landscapes of Cézanne and Pissarro, and the banal subjects of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns—are transformed into art, we prefer here to write from an anti–Art Historian perspective. We seek, rather, to examine the aesthetic The Classical Model

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6  Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig in process, 1999.

7  Nigel Poor, Food Stains, 2009–11.

qualities of those dense dumb subjects before they become sublimated by artists. In fact, we take seriously the intentions and gestures of artists who look intensely and seriously at all kinds of such materials. Referring back to the final chapter of one of Pissarro’s earlier books,7 we propose a new model of Art History—one written not by and for art experts or Art Historians but by or through artists, or, as in our case, taking seriously the way artists avoid encumbering their gazes with prejudices when they enter into the business of looking. Let us return to our stroll in Rome, where we gazed at the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, in the courtyard of which stands Bramante’s Tempietto, another example of classical greatness. This building is “an image of the world” at large. Earthly and celestial at the same time, it is a “conceptual and visual expression” mirroring the structure of the heavens.8 Indeed, it would be difficult not to fall under the awe and grandeur of this classical gem and its vast, nearly superhuman ambitions. Moving from Rome to Orlando, Florida, may we not describe Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World in terms analogous to Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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those used by Art Historian Arnaldo Bruschi in his description of Bramante’s Tempietto? Does the Cinderella Castle not also purport to take us above the earth, to almost celestial, or imaginary, abodes? Yet one subject here occupies a canonical role within the curriculum of undergraduate Art History surveys, while the other is rarely, if ever, considered in such a context. One is revered; the other is despised. Is it not, however, despite this apparent mutual cultural exclusion, possible to experience valid aesthetic emotions in front of both monuments? After all, Rome and Orlando are both main destination points on the heavily trodden map of world tourism, and millions of visitors of one destination necessarily have inevitably visited, or will visit, the other. Based upon Neuschwanstein Castle, a nineteenth-century Romanesque Revival palace on a rugged hill above the village of Hohenschwangau near Füssen in southwest Bavaria, Germany,9 Cinderella Castle is a construction of cement, fiberglass, and plaster bringing the structure of children’s dreams, of tales, and of fantasy to earth.10 It realizes another kind of heavenly dimension. It is as transcendent as Bramante’s Tempietto. When we compare these buildings, architecture critic Paul Goldberger’s words take on a new dimension: “There is no way to rank buildings on some sort of absolute aesthetic scale—or perhaps it is better to say that it is just as well that attempts to quantify aesthetics have always failed, first because they ignore the fact that art, at its best, involves an instinctive sense that a kind of magic is being performed, a magic that, by its very nature, we cannot deconstruct and reconstruct as a formula to be used by others.”11 It is ironic that contemporary vernacular architecture is often based upon models that can be traced to classical structures. Yet this does not appear to bring any form of credence, or validity, to the buildings in question. In fact, it is almost the opposite. That these popular culture monuments obliquely reference high architecture adds to the sins of popular culture. It appears to cast a shadow of anathema on the whole thing. In Macau, the gambling center of Southeast Asia, gondoliers, singing Italian and Chinese popular standards, row in canals modeled on those of Venice. Detached from its original context, this replica of the Grand Canal is a short walk from a large casino. This reconstruction of Venice contains many shops and faux Venetian paintings but no churches. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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8  Cinderella Castle.

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9  Neuschwanstein Castle.

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Macau recently overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues. More than 3 billion people live within a five-hour flight, and it is predictable that these Chinese casinos will flourish, producing a visual culture difficult to ignore.12 Just as the local architects imitate the buildings of Venice, local artists fill the buildings with Venetian-style paintings. In China, as in Europe, a great deal of Wild Art is derived from Art World art, while many Art World artists simultaneously look to popular culture for inspiration—or merely for their interest and enjoyment. While Appropriation art of the 1980s, reviled by many modern art curators at the time it emerged, is now considered with awe and historic deference, the practice today in China of looking toward centers of Western tradition to sponge off some of its iconic sources is rarely considered seriously within the Art World. Conversely, however, many artists pay no deference to the categories of the Art System and allow themselves to look at everything and anything that stimulates and excites their aesthetic emotions. Thus, rather than add another layer of interpretation to classical modernist paintings, which have acquired great aesthetic and economic worth, we propose looking outside the Art World to the firsthand sources that artists consider. If artists are choosing to look at objects, cultures, and other references that very few critics, theorists, and philosophers consider seriously, are they crazy, or are the rest of us missing something?

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3. Dawn of Modernity Pleasure is the law. —Claude Debussy, Entretiens inédits, d’Ernest Guiraud et de Claude Debussy (1889–1890) Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity, and law-giving through its majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination. —Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Having been denied by the Enlightenment all tasks they [the arts] could take seriously, they looked as though they were going to be assimilated to entertainment pure and simple. . . . The arts could save themselves from this leveling down only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity. —Clement Greenberg,“Modernist Painting”

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n the premodern or classical world, judgments of taste were thought to be objective, the reflection of a higher order stemming from the divine organization of the cosmos. In response to this set order of things, the role of the elite was to commission artists of the highest merit to represent this divine reality. Everyone knew that these expressions of taste were grounded in the metaphysical and pyramidal structure of the world. The lower world aimed at reflecting the higher world. Artists aspired to bridge the gap between these two worlds. With the dawn of modernity came the (shocking) recognition that everyone may have equally valid aesthetic claims, or, at the very least, that taste cannot abide regulation. Judgments of taste cannot be shaped according to prescriptive norms, programs, or theories (Kant’s revolutionary intuition). What followed were daunting doubts regarding the separation between higher and lower worlds. The field of taste was no longer the preserve of nobility, royalty, and the church but belonged to all. Each of us shares with the rest of mankind the capacity to form judgments of taste (Urteilskraft). Everyone can and does experience taste, and everyone can express it. Hence, billions of judgments of taste are being produced every day. The discovery of the universal capacity for forming judgments of taste that do not have to align with any particular normative system was a complete revolution, concurrent with the American and the French Revolutions in 1776 and 1789, respectively—to name but two of the massive sociopolitical revolutions of the end of the eighteenth century. This revolution of the judgment of taste took two radical turns within a few years. The first was in 1790, through Kant’s Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, which recognized that an aesthetic judgment (“this is beautiful” or “this is ugly”) does not enunciate an objective attribute, inherent in the object itself. The attribute “beautiful” or “ugly” does not belong to the object being

judged (a vase of roses) but, rather, to the person making that judgment. An aesthetic judgment (“this is beautiful”) is the reflection of the person who casts this judgment. There is, therefore, after Kant, no such thing as a universally valid and objective statement of taste. Taste, art, beauty, ugliness, and myriad shades of evaluative taste propositions are irremediably locked within the confines of the subject (subjectivity) who expresses such notions, even though—and this is the powerful intuition of Kant’s argument—the authors of the judgments of taste often pronounce those judgments as if they were as solid as mathematical truths. Aesthetic judgments are individual and subjective but claim to be objective and universal. This is what Kant refers to as the “antinomy of taste.” What interests us in Kant’s discovery is what seems to have been of little concern to him: everybody has taste, everybody casts judgments of taste, and in theory (if not in fact), it is impossible to establish a hierarchic pyramid of taste that applies to all. Shifting from Kant’s home in Königsberg to Paris only three years later, a second and massive revolution occurred in the field of arts policy. In 1793, the Louvre, formerly the palatial abode of the French kings, opened its doors to the public to reveal its art collections—and became, by the same token, one of the first museums. It would be wrong to imagine that throngs of the Parisian public flocked to the doors of the Louvre to admire the Portrait of Francis I by Titian, or Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, among the many other masterpieces in the collection. It was a far cry from the first exhibition of the Mona Lisa at the Metropolitan Museum, almost two hundred years later, in 1963, when queues formed around the block to admire this icon. More than a million visitors saw the Mona Lisa at the Met, but even though the painting was definitely at the Louvre in 1793, any visitor to the newborn museum would have felt almost alone in the great galleries of paintings. This political and cultural shift on the part of the administration of the French Revolution paved the way toward a democratization of culture. This is the guiding thread that takes us from the creation of one of the leading museums in 1793 to the creation of one of the first blockbuster exhibitions in 1963. Though the revolutionary decree to open up the Louvre was not the first creation of a public museum,1 it was the first major step toward the development of the museum culture that would explode throughout the nineteenth century and Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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continue to this day, with nearly five hundred museums opening in China alone between 2012 and 2014. Kant never saw an art museum in his life, and so the relationship between his philosophical discovery in 17902 and the French development of the museum system in 1793, while remarkable, is serendipitous, though loaded with implications. These two gigantic thrusts (Kant’s elevation of aesthetics to the same level as metaphysics and the opening of the Louvre) are symptomatic of the first large-scale recognition and acceptance of the fact that all people have taste and are granted an almost unprecedented right to hone and cultivate their taste through free access to art at public museum institutions. Here is the simple logical sequence that sums up more than two hundred years of what we may call the aesthetic revolution. Proposition A: All people have taste (or have a notion of beauty, regardless of what contents we put behind this notion.) (Creation of aesthetics / Kant) Proposition B: The greatest artistic productions belong (at least de jure) to all. (Creation of the first major museum/Louvre) The logical sequence A à B not only summarizes two hundred years of our recent history but also distills in one logical proposition the content of this book. The birth of the museum world and of universal aesthetics signals a double force that is constitutive of modernity: the era of the individual and the recognition that we are all equally inherently capable of casting aesthetic judgments in front of works of art. In the eighteenth century, the question of art and aesthetics was posed in a radically new way. The capacity to say “This object is beautiful” or “This object is ugly” became coextensive with the very definition of humanity. To be an aesthetic subject able to cast an aesthetic judgment is inherently part of being human, and by the same token, this capacity to see beauty or ugliness conjures up the humanity of others. We need to communicate this with others. All humans are aesthetic subjects and, therefore, no one expresses a single aesthetic judgment without expecting some form of response—an agreement, or a refusal to agree. Dawn of Modernity

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The huge paradox of aesthetic judgment, as discovered by Kant, is that the judgment of taste is available to all, while the structure of the judgment of taste is exclusive: what I love is the best, and it can only be this way. This fundamental tension at the core of the judgment of taste anticipates the way the Art System evolved through the nineteenth and, even more so, the twentieth century. Once the elites of the ancien régime disappeared, there was a need for a new kind of elite. This time it was composed of people who had a special interest in the arts, such as collectors, scholars, and archeologists who were looking at and cataloguing art. These people became the agents of the Art System and introduced the notion that knowledge, or even science, is more important than feeling and taste (aesthesis). A serious problem ensued: Can a judgment of taste be turned into a scientific proposition? In this chapter, we hope to demonstrate that this is indeed impossible. Furthermore, this attempt to turn aesthetics into some kind of science—the positivist drift of Art History—has led to some aberrant, though threatening, forms of aesthetic ideologies. If, indeed, there is a right and a wrong in aesthetics, the cast of experts knows what is not only more beautiful but best and can thus prescribe to all how to look, or what to look at. The creation of modern democracy in the Western world (brought about by the American and French Revolutions) was soon accompanied by an equally significant change. Europeans and Americans began to give serious attention to cultures outside their own and to look at an array of artifacts from every part of the world before cataloguing them and placing them in museums—the possession of these art objects having often resulted from war looting and the long and scar-ridden waves of colonization. The discovery of universal aesthetics and the creation of the first major public art museum are also concurrent with free democratic discussion and the assumption that different cultures carry analogous and equivalent claims for aesthetic recognition, and may—indeed, must—mutually respect each other. As Thomas Crow has explained, The Salon was the first regularly repeated, open, and free display of contemporary art in Europe to be offered in a completely secular setting and for the purpose of encouraging a primarily aesthetic response in large numbers of people. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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What transforms that audience into a public, that is, a commonality with a legitimate

role to play in justifying artistic practice and setting value on the products of that practice? The audience is the concrete manifestation of the public but never identical with it.3

In parallel with, and in opposition to, the universal growth of interest in the arts and demand for access to culture, a demand for universal assent, stemming from individual aesthetic judgments, as articulated by Kant, also grew. This demand (what I find beautiful is necessarily the best) never comes to anything more than a demand that may not, and in effect never can, be satisfied. In reality, it is always met by at least some dissent. Therefore, an individual claim cannot be absolute—it relies on the possibility of people arguing about it, either agreeing or disagreeing. It relies on intersubjectivity, a fragile mutual understanding,4 and uncertain democracy. Universal agreement on the beauty of any object does not occur. Take the most sublime sunset, and there always will be at least one individual to find it “too much like a postcard” and hence distasteful. The fact that I am certain that this rose is the most beautiful rose I have ever seen will inevitably be countered by at least one other individual judgment, if not several, from others who will argue that they have seen a more beautiful rose or that they simply hate roses. I am certain of my aesthetic judgment (this rose is the most beautiful), and I expect or demand that everyone should agree with this proposition. Yet this expectation or demand (de jure) is more than likely to be severely disappointed (de facto), and to be met by other aesthetic judgments that will be as obstinately assertive of the “fact” that another rose is indeed the most beautiful. Aesthetics (i.e., a cognitive inquiry into our sensibility, aisthesis) is what distinguishes us from God. God is a spirit unlimited by senses or sensibility, while we are first and foremost defined and limited by our senses and their activation. We are born through our senses and die through our senses. It is through them that the world comes to us and that we come to the world. The data that our senses communicate to us are the very condition and content of any concept or idea we form. By the same token, we are incurably limited and confined by our senses. I can only see the portion of sky that lies ahead of my eyes; I can only touch the sculpture that is at my arm’s length; and so Dawn of Modernity

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forth. Aesthetics poses the question of what it is that activates our senses, what it is that we find beautiful or ugly. As based through and through on our senses, aesthetic choices are resistant to any theories, concepts, or rules. We can think about our aesthetic choices, but our aesthetic choices cannot be the result of thinking. Hence Kant’s famous definition: “That is beautiful which is cognized without a concept as the object of a necessary satisfaction.”5 We cannot escape the fact that our senses and sensibility condition who we are as aesthetic creatures: I cannot possibly think the scent of a rose, nor can I think the beauty of a rose. Our sensibility—the simple fact that we are limited by the space our bodies occupy and the time interval we are spending on earth—frames our lives in the same way it nurtures our aesthetic choices. It is through our senses alone that we form aesthetic judgments. We cannot see farther than our eyes can see, nor can we live longer than the time unit (our life) that our bodies and inner complexion can sustain. We are defined and limited by the particular confines of time and space that confer upon us our identity in this world, our position within history, and our necessarily limited presence wherein. Activated through our senses, our aesthetic judgments cannot reach a universal, objective status, because, by their very nature, these aesthetic judgments are rooted in our flesh and bones (our senses/aesthesis), and hence can only be partial, subjective, and necessarily finite. Nonetheless (and herein lies the peculiar nature of aesthetics), these judgments shoot for some form of universal assent. They aim at some kind of universal agreement, which lies necessarily beyond its grasp. This is Kant’s antinomy of taste: a strange contradiction, locked at the core of all judgments of taste. The history of modern taste for the past two and a half centuries may very well reflect this very contradiction. Aesthetic choices are not just subjective but intersubjective. All aesthetic judgments are necessarily predicated on each of us placing ourselves in the shoes of the other (intersubjectivity: I think while adopting the position of someone else). When I say that I love roses, I hope (and expect) that everyone else, or at the very least the person with whom I share this judgment, will agree with me: everyone ought to confirm and solidify my judgment. The aesthetic judgment (the judgment of taste) is therefore coextensive with intersubjectivity. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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By establishing sensibility as the cornerstone of his system (it is not mere chance that the first part of The Critique of Pure Reason is titled “Transcendental Aesthetic”), Kant produced a true revolution in the field of philosophy. We are primordially about our senses. There is no way we can avoid this inherent condition. Yet there is also no way we can prevent this sense activity from wanting to reach a higher level of access to knowledge, be it conceptual, theoretical, or even metaphysical. As Kant points out, without the data provided by intuition (the information channeled through our senses), a concept is empty, void, null, useless. Kant’s decision to title the first part of The Critique of Pure Reason “Transcendental Aesthetic” is strange but meaningful: Why should a book on reason, on cognitive activities, begin with a chapter on senses—the opposite of reason? Kant explains that the first step of any cognitive activity is intuition (i.e., what is given to the senses). An intuition occurs as an object is given to us: “This capacity (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility. . . . Objects are therefore given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone affords us intuitions.”6 It follows, therefore, that the aesthetic faculty (sensibility, or capacity to receive sensations or intuitions) is the cornerstone of the mind’s activities. This is therefore the prime feature that defines us as humankind, as thinking creatures. And further, this aesthetic faculty is essentially passive. Objects are given to us through these intuitions. We need do nothing. It all comes to us. All we need is to remain receptive and open our eyes and ears, and the flow of sensations rushes to our senses (intuitions). This conclusion is essential to our inquiry for at least two reasons. First, we are addressing here the defining realm of activities of the individual and how each individual carries his/her own unique sensibility. Second, sensibility will be honed through different means according to each individual. Each individual will mark his/her stamp by inflecting his/her sensibility in a particular direction, or emphasis. There are, of course, trends, fashions, and waves of taste that generically apply to given sociohistorical moments. The vast resurgence of tattooing and piercing documented in Wild Art offers ways in which individuals in our current societies choose to impress or express their sensibilities. What Dawn of Modernity

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most interests us here is the implication of this discovery that aesthetics and sense activities are our opening to the world. In their passivity, in their receptivity, they define humankind as one of our inescapable assets and attributes. By the same token, sensibility and aesthetics belong and pertain to all of us equally. The Kantian revolution established that all human beings are different, each through her or his sensibilities, and this very individual difference, this aesthetic DNA, as it were, is what we share with the rest of humankind. The uniqueness of each sensibility is our common lot. Our senses function like the fingerprints of our souls. This points toward the fact that just as we all have senses that carry the site of our individuality, so we all form judgments of taste. Aesthetic judgment (the positive or negative stimulation of our senses in front of a particular object) is universal. And with the judgment of taste, one finds the same paradox (what Kant called antinomy) in the fact that each one of us carries a particular judgment of taste in front of almost any object, any artifact; each one of us can exclaim a different judgment of taste: “This is beautiful”; “This is ugly”; “This is boring”; or any number of intermediate judgments between these different assertions. At the same time, given the fact that we share with all other human beings this capacity to cast judgments of taste, each of us forms his/her own individual judgment expecting that the rest of humankind will join in and agree on the beautiful, or ugly, qualities of this or that object. Several important observations follow for the purpose of this book: The judgment of taste is universal. Everyone is capable of expressing a judgment of taste on any given work of art, object, or situation. The judgment of taste is individual. Everyone wants to communicate his/her judgment of taste and tends to wish for confirmation. The site of the judgment of taste lies in each individual’s sensibility and imagination.7 The judgment of taste, therefore, is not based on any concept or definition. The judgment of taste escapes rules, codes, and, even worse, dogmas. Given that it is based on a chance encounter between our imagination and understanding, it cannot be coerced, prescribed in any way, Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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or even predicted. The judgment of taste, like the act of falling in love, can only happen freely. We now need to figure out why and how the modern age of aesthetics could be so revolutionary yet end up producing an Art System that, through certain intervals in its history, could appear strikingly exclusive. If we accept, with Kant, that the capacity to utter a judgment of taste belongs to all, it follows that there is no need to have a Ph.D. in the history of art—nor any kind of academic formation whatsoever—in order to know full well what is beautiful and what is not. Each individual act of judging establishes distinctions. We all pass judgments on beauty and ugliness. The criteria of what is beautiful and what is ugly, however, are not universal, nor can they be objective. The attribute “beautiful” never belongs to the object that is deemed beautiful. It belongs to the subject uttering the judgment. The proposition “This is beautiful” speaks about the author of the proposition, not the object being designated. In other words, no two judgments of taste are alike, even though these judgments may agree with each other. The judgment of taste is singular. It is individual and highly subjective while, ironically, seeking to be recognized by all and to be seen as objective. Each aesthetic claim wants to reach out to all, yet it can never be fully satisfied. Even the most obvious aesthetic statement—for example, “Michelangelo is a genius, who can doubt it?”8—can be met with some dissent. At the very least, it could be argued that many forms of genius (e.g., the genius of sandconstruction artists) have gone unacknowledged and yet merit praise as much as Michelangelo. Or, instead, to focus on the aesthetic subjects rather than their objects, we should say that we—who continually make judgments of taste—are free to pass judgments of taste on Michelangelo in any way we want. We are also free to pass judgments of taste on works of art by artists who have never been given the time of day within the boundaries of the Art World. We find an extraordinary way to cut through this impossible dilemma in Debussy’s statement in the epigraph to this chapter: “Pleasure is the law.” Here, in a rare interview between the composer and a music critic, the latter, going against Kant, was trying to enunciate objective criteria of musical taste Dawn of Modernity

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and excellence. One immediately senses the difficulties expressed by the critic in front of Debussy’s happy meandering among rules and principles of composition, as he turned or twisted those according to his own whim: Debussy: I have no faith in the supremacy of the C major scale. The tonal scale must be enriched by other scales. . . . Music is neither major nor minor. . . . There must be a balance between musical demands and thematic evocation. [Debussy plays a series of chords on the piano] Guiraud: What’s that? Debussy: Incomplete chords, floating. One can travel where one wishes and leave by any door. Greater nuances. Guiraud: But when I play this [a “French 6th” chord in Ab♭, evidently one of the chords Debussy had played] it has to resolve. Debussy: I don’t see that it should. Why? Guiraud: Well, do you find this lovely? [He plays a series of parallel triads] Debussy: Yes, yes, yes! Guiraud: I am not saying that what you do isn’t beautiful, but it’s theoretically absurd. Debussy: There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law. . . .  Guiraud: Come now, you are forgetting that you yourself were ten years at the Conservatoire. Debussy: True enough, I feel free because I have been through the mill, and I don’t write in the fugal style because I know it.9 Debussy’s case is far from unique. Modernity has produced over the past two centuries what we might call a culture of individuality. In fact, this culture, of going against the rules, establishing one’s own rules—and originality—has become so dominant that it almost goes unnoticed: cela va sans dire. We have become so accustomed to expect originality as a mainstay of

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our education and cultural program. Every four-year-old child is told to hone her individuality the day she enters school. A major paradox of our modern Western societies is that while originality is valued more than anything, ultimately the system continues to honor practices left over from the past. The Art System has long remained fairly exclusive, and conservative. We need to cast a glance at the dawn of the modern era to better grasp how this constitutive paradox evolved. If we were to look for an aesthetic theory to support modern Art History, we would find Kant disappointing. Arthur Danto expresses this disappointment when he says that the Critique of Judgment seems “to have little to say about art today.”10 By contrast, he read Hegel’s lectures with excitement because he found there an anticipation of his own aesthetic. Everything makes sense; there is a system that tells us why things are the way they are. The stories of the museum, Art History, and aesthetic theory are dramatic narratives in which the museum, Art History, and aesthetic theory expand radically to encompass novel forms of art. Art from all visual cultures has gradually entered the museum world and been written about by Art Historians with all kinds of diverse specialties. Contemporary artists, on the one hand, have challenged the older Art System by adopting, de facto, within their own practices or their own aesthetic surroundings, any kind of artifacts or art objects, or simply things they happen to like. By so doing, artists have muddied up the clean waters filtered through generations of Art Historians and specialists who attempted to instill order and meaning within the history of art. Understood in that way, Vasari, Hegel, Gombrich, Greenberg, and Danto tell a story that takes on analogous forms. In each case, one finds a narrative in which novel kinds of objects are added to the Art World, and each addition is meaningful. Artists, on the other hand, do not look for meaning when they add an object to their world. All the aforementioned Art-Historical accounts stem from a historicist vision of Art History. History takes care of itself. There is a vast superengine that activates the historical dynamics and neatly breaks them down into moments, phases, and periods that succeed one another. The end result always makes sense. This is Historicism.

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Kant was not a historicist. According to Kant, each of us makes independent aesthetic judgments, which are not subject to rules. For a Kantian, the history of art does not make sense. It cannot possibly make sense. I judge for myself; you for yourself; and then we must argue with one another, knowing that what is at stake is something other than truth—and it will not result in any clear, transparent, smooth, and meaningful overarching account. As Kant put it, at the dawn of the modern era, a child is a “being endowed with freedom.”11 Modernity’s task has been to play up to this ever so fragile— and, to some, even threatening—endowment of freedom. Yet at the same time, and here is our ongoing paradox, modernity also produced a system that would limit the possibilities of this “endowed freedom” and confine its sphere of action by locking it within a system of values validated by “experts” and “professionals.” From pre-K to MFA and Ph.D. programs, this “expert” system continues to be present everywhere and guarantees that the “accident of taste” is ruled out. Throughout the history of modernity, an ongoing pyramidal system of successive exclusionary moves has ensured that the democratic calls are somewhat regulated, leaving the experts to have the last word. The argument in support of these waves of exclusionary moves is that without this system of exclusion, we would be facing a tsunami of individual claims. Following these premises, this book opts for a different hypothesis: What if we took this multitude of individual artistic or aesthetic claims seriously? What if we looked at these strange objects, or situations, rarely taken into consideration by the Art System? These claims exist. They are fascinating, intriguing, enriching, and innumerable. We see them everywhere, all the time. How can these claims be articulated in relation to a system that has been limited in itself and to itself? The paradox is that while our present culture of individuality has blossomed to an unprecedented extent, the system itself is not equipped to accommodate the demands and claims of those multitudes of individual judgments. Ultimately, the system returns to some form of filtering, an exclusive grid by which it enables itself to “make sense” out of those myriad individual claims. While modernity gave rise to the voices of all, the Art System continues to be a system for “the happy few.”12 The

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third epigraph to this chapter is Greenberg’s famous description of the fear that the Enlightenment would trivialize the arts. We agree here, in part, with Greenberg and his description of the problems (threats, even) posed by the dawn of modernity, but we emphatically reject his proposed solution.

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4. The Wise, the Ignorant, and the Possibility of an Art World That Transcends This Divide Genius . . . is a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given, nor a predisposition of skill for that which can be learned in accordance with some rule. —Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment Who decides what is art and what is not art? And who decides what is good art and what is bad art? Is it the artist, the curator, the art critic, the collector, the art system as a whole, the art market, the general public? . . . Whoever decides anything about art can make mistakes; the general, democratic public can make mistakes—and in fact has made them already many times in its history. —Boris Groys, Art Power

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etrarch referred to Giotto as a genius “whose beauty amazes the masters of the art, though the ignorant cannot understand it.” Boccaccio wrote that Giotto “brought back to life that art which for many centuries had been buried under the errors of those who in painting had sought to give pleasure to the eyes of the ignorant rather than to delight the minds of the wise.”1 In many ways, these two quotes evoke what we are attempting to address. The continuous binary opposition between those “in the know” (whose power to make decisions continues to guide the Art World at large) versus the “ignorant public” (or, let us say now, a more passive public, at the receiving end of the chain of power). There is a major distinction between the trecento and today. No blogs or social media existed then, and thus the voice of “the ignorant” could not be heard, nor did “the ignorant” even dream of being heard. Today, large institutions have created entire departments to figure out who their public is, where they come from, what they like and dislike. Indeed, a great part of the economic well-being of our museums depends on the larger public’s satisfaction. Nonetheless, the structure of the Art System is not that different today than it was during Giotto’s age. At the outcome of our two-century-old modern era, the binary structure alluded to by Petrarch and Boccaccio has, strangely enough, remained largely unchanged. Sets of criteria, principles, and regulations enable experts and art officials to protect the aesthetic preserve of the cognoscenti, in order to please “the minds of the wise” while nodding to the larger public and attempting “to give pleasure to the eyes of the ignorant.” We are, after all, in an era of cultural democracy, and the

economic impact of foot traffic is a vital component of the overall revenues of the museum institutions. This latter point is in marked contrast with the age of Giotto, but the binary structure remains much the same. To put it more bluntly, when have we ever seen a curatorial process take place through a dialogue between the curatorial staff of a museum (the decision-makers) and the larger public (the consumers)? The public is, indeed, polled—but after the fact, not before. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what kind of ideas and projects could germinate through an actual dialogue (online, through blogs or social media) between the curators and the public? In Giotto’s day, the clergy named and chose the artistic commissions—they decided who would be the beneficiary of the commission, what the commission should address, and how much the artist’s honorarium would be. Today, the church has no involvement in what exhibition programs museums put together; the curators are in charge. There are, of course, countless factors involved in any single curatorial decision, and many conversations take place behind the curtains of each institution before a project is officially accepted and announced, but overall, one cast of specialists has replaced another. Secular curators now fulfill the role that once belonged to the clergy. In each situation, the laymen are largely left out of the process of decision-making and are served whatever project the specialists have put together. Reversing the dialectical opposition produced by Petrarch and Boccaccio, we could have titled our book Aesthetics for the Eyes of the Ignorant, except that for us the word “ignorant” does not carry the same ignominious connotation it did for Petrarch and Boccaccio. In fact, we refuse to work within this Manichean logic (cognoscenti/the ignorant), pitting those who know against those who do not—despite this still being a prevalent practice within the Art World. We are certainly not attempting to eulogize or sanctify ignorance for its own sake. We have seen in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century the lamentable impact and hugely destructive and criminal results produced by such obscurantist ideological moves as the Cultural Revolution in China or the anti-intellectual vendettas led by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. We are simply saying that knowledge and connoisseurship, immensely valuable as they are, are not the only indispensable factors when it comes to casting judgment of taste on a work of art. Hence, Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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would it not be gratifying to imagine modes of dialogue, indeed, modes of collaboration, between groups of specialists, decision-makers, and the public itself—a public that is ever more multilayered, complex, smart, and diverse (in every respect), and whose direct impact on the process of developing projects within the museum could lead to fascinating results? We would like to believe that the binary divide set out by Petrarch and Boccaccio (wisdom/ignorance) is soon becoming irrelevant and aberrant, even though the structure of the Art World continues to reflect this timehonored division. On another level, ignorance continues to be an important factor within the Art World, but not in the way one might imagine at first. The Art World is itself ignorant of the multitude of other art worlds out there, which are parallel in function to the Art World (with exclusive value judgments, experts, and criteria of evaluation). Thus, the Art World that our readers know is but one of countless art worlds about which we seldom hear. All of these art worlds function in mutual ignorance—if not mutual contempt. Again, we should immediately say that we have been cautioned by our students at Hunter College that what we first saw as a firm divide between the Art World and the peripheral art worlds (tattoo art, street art, sand construction, car art, etc.) is not as permanent as we imagined. Our students have justly claimed that there are more and more areas of porousness within these different art worlds, and that the Art World itself is fast transforming, becoming far more receptive than ever to these multitudes of marginal art practices. The old regime has long since vanished. In the West, there are no more absolute monarchs, and our remaining kings have donned purely ceremonial robes and roles. The removal of innumerable works of religious art from churches to be displayed in public art museums has long been indicative of a profound and extensive wave of secularization of the—once-religious—Art World, which we hinted at in chapter 1. Yet, notwithstanding our students’ impressive contributions and discussions of our hypothesis, we continue to think that something like the classical model of taste still largely dominates—even though a growing number of cracks in the system are beginning to be noticed. It remains, overall, a top-down Art World in which the rules of experts continue to be the model de rigueur, and knowledge—a certain The Wise, the Ignorant

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type of knowledge that privileges advanced degrees in Art History—carries more impact than taste. This kind of slowly evolving reluctance to any change in the system of values (embodied by the academic grip on the Art World) has little to do with the realpolitik of the art worlds we are referring to here, or Wild Art. Our earlier working assumption had been that the Art World is supported and activated by a group of experts (a few competent academic and administrative officials) who are voted in to understand and select art and to communicate its inner meaning for the larger public. It is true today that a larger number of museum officials—especially in the field of living art and in alternative art spaces—no longer carry the M.A. or Ph.D. degrees once deemed indispensable in the history of art. As far as we know, this includes Klaus Biesenbach, who occupies one of the highest museum positions in contemporary art museums, along with dozens of individuals occupying top curatorial positions in the contemporary sphere. But let us be clear. We are not glorifying the absence of academic knowledge. How could we? We are opposed to any shade of obscurantism. Far from praising ignorance, we would actually like to advocate more knowledge, not less— but knowledge of a different kind, or, more accurately, of different kinds. What would greatly enrich the dialogues within the Art World would be an academic structure that is flexible and polyvalent enough to encourage experimental thinking and cross-semination from a multitude of human and social sciences disciplines, such as philosophy, theology, comparative literature, psychoanalysis, sociology, political science, and ethnography, together with disciplines geared toward the real world, such as administration, business strategy, journalism, and marketing. The plan for this new brand of Art History departments would look like a cross between the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and an MBA program. We feel certain that the students who would come out of such new Art History2 departments would call for immediate attention among museums—an institution with a dire need to renew itself. Indeed, the Art World has evolved from a kind of monarchic stance to an oligarchic structure. When Louis XIV decided he disliked Bernini’s sculpture of him mounted on horseback, the Sun King did not need to ask for public approval—nor for anyone’s approval—to exile the work to a remote part of Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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Versailles. The paradox we have encountered is that in our democratic culture, where public art is available to all and funded, to some extent, by the public, it might sound reasonable to expect that the very same people should have some say in what kind of art should be set in public spaces. Indeed, they have become part of various conversations regarding what is featured in museums. But, as we have seen, this decision-making process has gone from one (monarch) to a few (oligarchs). What we are proposing is to move from an oligarchic Art World to a democratic Art World, where actual dialogues and participation on the part of the public would no longer just be the icing on the cake but have a structuring and determining function. Let us look at an example. John Rogers Cox is a name seldom mentioned within Art History circles. The Cleveland Museum of Art, however, one of the greatest public museums in the United States, owns a masterpiece by this little-regarded artist of the early twentieth century. His Gray and Gold (1942) is one of the most popular paintings at the museum. Christina’s World (1948) 10  John Rogers Cox, Gray and Gold, 1942. Oil on canvas. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund, 1943.60.

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11  Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, 1948. Tempera on panel. Purchase, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

by Andrew Wyeth occupies an analogous position at MoMA. When either painting has been placed in storage or loaned to another institution, the administrations of the Cleveland Museum and MoMA have faced considerable objections from their public. The questions posed by our discussion of these two paintings are simple. These are works that are vastly popular among the public of the museums that hold them, yet they do not feature among the works considered emblematic by the experts in charge of these museums, nor by specialists in Art History. Returning to the title of this chapter, one might say that these two works constitute uncanonical canons. Each has its own merits and is hugely praised by the largest part of the audience of each institution, but it does not fit the artistic or cultural values of the curatorial staff. Cox, a minor regionalist, did not go on to have a high-profile career. But the uncanny clouds and the telephone poles without wires connecting them left a powerful, if bleak, imprint of the mood of America at the onset of World War II—more than many paintings have achieved. Deemed canonical among throngs of museum viewers, this painting has not entered the canon of its own institution. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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Let us look at another institution whose mandate is to collect and preserve canonical works of art, albeit works deemed imbued with everlasting historical and artistic importance. In 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, honoring the retirement of its director, Philippe de Montebello, held an exhibition of works of “canonical” importance accessioned during his tenure.3 These included the Madonna and Child (ca. 1290–1300) by Duccio di Buoninsegna, acquired in 2004; Rubens’s Rubens, His Wife Helena Fourment (1614–1673), and Their Son Frans (1633–1678) (ca. 1635), acquired in 1981; an Egyptian ritual figure of a kneeling man, from 380–246 b.c., acquired in 2003; a ca. 1526–27 manuscript folio of the poet Hafiz’s Allegory of Worldly and Otherworldly Drunkenness, illustrated by Sultan Muhammad, acquired in 1988 and jointly owned with the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard; and Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian Faces (1899), acquired in 1996. This show puzzled members of the public, who found it difficult to understand the relationship among these very diverse objects. Indeed, these canonical works of different continents, media, and cultures, which speak to diverse specialists within the given museum, do not appear to possess a significant common thread among themselves. A private collector can and usually does install their works in a personal way. He can put an eighteenth-century print next to a contemporary abstract painting, but public museums are expected to provide a narrative that speaks to all. As previously mentioned, Art History has a large role in structuring our approach to the present-day Art World. In 2005, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh published the two-volume textbook Art Since 1900, which self-consciously avoided the usual narrative structure of survey histories. Inspired by their reading of structuralism and poststructuralism, the book is organized according to a schema similar to the New York Post’s weekly events calendar. The authors feared any kind of dominating narrative, but of course their lists are made of as many omissions as admissions. Key works of art, exhibitions, and publications of books or catalogues follow a simple event-calendar structure (year after year), without providing a continuous narrative thread. Above all, though, this book does not depart from the traditional Art History book (à la Janson). Rather, it obediently follows a chain of chronological events, organized according to a strictly successive The Wise, the Ignorant

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12  Alfred H. Barr’s hand-drawn diagram of the origins and evolution of modern art, ca. 1936. Pencil on paper. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers 10.A.34. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

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order. This model is accepted a priori within the Art System as the de rigueur model of presentation of an art object. All must heed to Chronos, time’s deity. Time is all. Time surpasses everything. Time orders all. Devotion to Chronos in the Art World goes unquestioned. Deemed radical when it came out, Art Since 1900 has become an emblem of the problems with Art History and its attempt to repackage the same content in new wrappers without giving serious thought to what the contents are about. Mostly, this book—quickly famous for its glaring, and most certainly deliberate, omissions—was a product of its own genesis, or a product of Chronos, famous for devouring his children as soon as they were born. What are we saying? We are questioning the hiatus between official Art History and the stupendous number of works of art ignored by Art Historians. It seems to us that many works of Wild Art have a legitimate basis for claiming to be Art World art, but these claims are either dismissed, ignored, or unknown. Take, for instance, the sand performances by Kseniya Simonova, a Ukrainian artist who won the 2009 Ukraine’s Got Talent contest finale, watched by 13 million people—4 million people more than the total number of visitors to the Louvre in one year.4 Simonova, a well-known sand animator, drew—on a light table, layered with sand and dust—a series of sketches illustrating the lives of ordinary people at the onset of the devastating German invasion of the Ukraine during World War II. A couple is first seen sitting and holding hands on a bench under a starry sky before warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated. It is quickly replaced by a woman’s crying face, until a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns, and Simonova throws sand onto the light table in a scene of chaos, from which a young woman’s face soon emerges. However, this woman then withers away into an elderly widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image morphs into a monument to an unknown soldier. A window frames this outdoor scene as if the viewer is looking out at the monument from within a house. In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man stands outside, his hands pressed against the glass. It is difficult to dismiss the impact of this epic sand animation, other than by using shallow and self-prophesizing criteria. We invite the readers to watch this performance on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo The Wise, the Ignorant

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Or, to change genres again, what is the place within present-day Art History of the yachting paintings of Willard Bond, famous enough to have his obituary published in the June 10, 2012, issue of the New York Times? J. M. W. Turner and other prior Art World artists painted such scenes, but paintings of boats are not generally suitable subjects for contemporary artists. It is common for Art World artists to paint decorative scenes for public spaces. To take an example derived from the spheres of high art, Tintoretto (and his pupils) depicted paradise in the doge’s palace. Dean Cornwell’s Murals on 54 is an elaborately detailed group of history paintings in a public setting. These murals, which tell the story of the Elizabethan-era explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, are located in Manhattan’s Warwick Hotel, directly across the street from MoMA. The Warwick Hotel hosts many visiting guests, lecturers, and curators invited by MoMA. It is interesting to ponder the vast chasm that separates Cornwell and his art from the art that is housed in the museum across the street. In the same way, just as an infinitesimal percentage of viewers of the Vatican have even blinked at the presence of the works by Basaldella (among the hundreds of other artists represented there), it is likely that the great majority of MoMA’s official guests who stay at the Warwick Hotel never even see the works by Cornwell. Art World people tend to be blind to Wild Art, or simply ill-equipped to even glance at what is not deemed to be worthy of being looked at. This is regarded as a mere waste of time. Again, we are not advocating ignorance, nor are we advocating an abandonment of all canons of taste, which provide a useful function in helping to structure art experiences. We do believe, however, that to be servile to canons is detrimental, in that it prevents one, simply, from making a proper aesthetic judgment. We have seen that Art History and the museum world both use landmarks (or canonical references) to structure the itineraries of visual experiences. On their own, these canonical references are perfectly benign, and, in fact, we, the authors, both subscribe to a great number of these canonical examples. Carrier is a great Poussin specialist and aficionado, and Pissarro spends a lot of time pondering and admiring Byzantine icons. We do not see such personal preferences as being in opposition, in any way, to the degree of openness, or the spirit of inclusion, that we propose to take seriously. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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13  Willard Bond, Running Home, 1994.

By contrast, the vast world of Wild Art outside of the Art World is essentially unstructured. Simonova, Bond, and Cornwell, to name but three examples out of millions of possibilities, are hard to place within our Art-Historical narratives. In making these comparisons, we do not propose to set Bond next to Turner or argue that Cornwell is as great as Tintoretto. What interests us, rather, is the way that even suggesting such comparisons seems unthinkable. Simonova, Bond, and Cornwell are not in the Art World, yet we think that, at the very least, they are not negligible. Once one agrees to look at their works, one may discover (as we did) much more in their art than anticipated. We are not resistant at all to canons. We are resistant to the use and abuse of these references as landmarks that stabilize our thinking, grading, The Wise, the Ignorant

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14  Candice Breitz, stills from King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson), 2005. Still from a sixteen-channel installation.

or framing of any art experience. This book’s principal claim is that the world of art (as opposed to the Art World) would gain much through practices of inclusion, rather than exclusion. While Michelangelo has always been considered great among the greats, the reputations of many old masters have changed drastically over time. Only relatively recently have such “iconic” figures as Piero della Francesca and Caravaggio been granted the status of Art History superstars. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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When we look at modern and contemporary art, we find that drastic changes happen much more quickly. Yet again, artists are the ones who give a different pace to the Art World and nudge this slow-moving machine to proceed: as Candice Breitz’s King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson) has made its way into the Art World, it is hard to imagine how the process of inclusiveness and aesthetic generosity, out of which much of Breitz’s inspiration finds its source, will stop. The Wise, the Ignorant

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5. The Antinomy of Taste and Its Solution Variations on a Theme by Duchamp Exclusivity is for everyone. —Virgin Airlines advertisement Kant (who had more insights into the nature of esthetic experience than anyone else I’m aware of) held that the “judgment of taste” always precedes the “pleasure gained from the esthetic object.” —Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste “High culture” is not the contrary of “popular culture”—it is not separated from it by an impassable wall; the one is often a purer, more complex sublimated version of the other. And the products of the two can sometimes achieve the same intensity. —Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations

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he aesthetic revolution of the eighteenth century can be compared to the early Christian revolution. Both historical events unleashed an unprecedented, universally available gift to humankind. One offered a religious message, while the other presented a political, philosophical, and aesthetic message. Christianity brought to all souls the promise of eternal life in another world, while the Kantian revolution, more immediately tangible, established that aesthetic taste is not the preserve of a happy few, but that all of us in this world are inherently capable of casting judgments of taste and experiencing aesthetic joy—without any cognitive or pedagogical prerequisites. No more lessons or precepts are required to formulate an aesthetic judgment (I love this rose) than to fall in love. We all instinctively discern between beauty and ugliness—even though (and this is the major perplexing problem) we all have different criteria for beauty and ugliness, while each of us expects that somehow everyone will agree with one’s own aesthetic preferences. We are all equal when it comes to making judgments of taste, even though no two judgments of taste are exactly alike. If given an option of red, yellow, or blue, some of us will prefer red, others blue, and still others yellow. Some will favor a combination of two, and some will love best an all-out combination of the three primary colors. Some will not want to choose any of these colors because they prefer black. Others will want white. Aesthetic judgments are free—and presuppose freedom. In fact, freedom is a condition of possibility for aesthetic judgments to exist: there can be no aesthetic judgment in a coercive context. These judgments are free, and universal. All of us make them, even almost unconsciously. Each

one of us makes dozens of aesthetic judgments per day, starting when we face ourselves in the mirror every morning, and while each of these judgments is individual, each wants not only to be heard but to reach acquiescence. Each aesthetic judgment is unique and the sole reflection of the individual who casts it. Yet every individual who casts a judgment wants it to be acknowledged and claims that it is valid for all. This kind of double bind is precisely what Kant called the antinomy of taste: “The judgment of taste ascribes assent to everyone, and whoever declares something to be beautiful wishes that everyone should approve of the object in question and similarly declare it to be beautiful.”1 Kant thus describes the peculiar nature of the judgment of taste and its antinomy. He first explains that there is a big difference between an aesthetic judgment and any other judgment of the senses. When one person declares that he or she loves a particular cheese and someone else declares that he or she cannot stand that cheese, this clash of judgments is not generally a source of problems, because for all such sense-oriented judgments, the principle of “to each his own” is perfectly valid. However, when it comes to judging beauty, it is a different matter. With the beautiful it is entirely different. It would be ridiculous if . . . someone who prided himself on his taste thought to justify himself thus:“This object (the building we are looking at, the clothing someone is wearing, the poem that is presented for judging) is beautiful for me.” For he must not call it beautiful if it pleases merely him. Many things may have charm and agreeableness for him, no one will be bothered about that. But if he pronounces that something is beautiful, then he expects the very same satisfaction of other: he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things.2

As Kant said, in discussing how the person who declares something to be beautiful demands that everyone should agree, “He rebukes them if they judge otherwise and denies that they have taste.”3 On a macro-level, this tension between individual taste and the demand for universal assent takes on a different dimension. In the Art World, the bridge between individual judgment and universal agreement is mediated through the museum. The museum expert is trained, educated, and expected Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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to have a natural gift, or a special eye for the beautiful—and that eye should be honed through years of practice and college education, eventually, possibly, crowned by a dissertation. That expert thus assumes an authoritative stance, which is supported by the argument that what she is proposing to be admired by the public will be recognized as having great aesthetic merit by future generations. Two centuries ago, the erstwhile curators were, first and foremost, collectors, or archeologists who had accumulated layer upon layer of art objects—and empirically discovered the lost meanings or functions of their precious collections. Those collections would often be bequeathed, and thus form the core of a museum’s holdings. The model of an individual (or group of individuals) forming a major collection and donating it to an institution accessible to the public formed the core of the earliest histories of museums throughout Europe. Such examples include the Uffizi, in Florence, formed by Cosimo de’ Medici in the fifteenth century and donated “to the people of Tuscany and all nations” by the last heir of the Medici dynasty in 1743 (half a century before the creation of the Louvre), as well as the Amerbach family in Basel, who sadly are not as well known as the Medici family. Starting with Basilius Amerbach in the sixteenth century, the family formed an extraordinary Kunstkabinett, with one of the most important collections of works on paper and an unparalleled ensemble of works by Holbein. The collection was purchased by the city and the University of Basel in 1661, thus forming the cornerstone of the oldest public museum still extant today, the Kunstmuseum Basel. Sixteen years later, in 1677, Elias Ashmole gave his cabinet of curiosities to the University of Oxford, thus creating the foundation for the oldest university museum in the world, the Ashmolean Museum. During the same time period when the Medici and the Amerbach families were building their extraordinary collections, in 1471 Pope Sixtus IV donated to the people of Rome an important group of ancient sculptures, which became the core of the oldest public collection of sculptures in the world: the Capitoline Museums. Thus, when the Louvre was created in 1793, or when, twelve years later, Charles Willson Peale, a painter and scientist, and his friend, sculptor William Rush, founded the first museum in the United States, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, there was already a fairly significant history of The Antinomy of Taste and Its Solution 

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philanthropists, usually individual collectors, or artists, or both, who supported the knowledge of the art of the past through their own collections. The task of all these pioneering collectors/museum founders was to make sense, to recreate history, through the accumulation of extraordinary objects and works of art that, seen as a whole, appeared to offer new configurations of meaning. The role of the curators radically changed when they poised themselves in competition with History—when, in other words, rather than reconstruct the paths of History through looking at objects, curators attempted to predict History’s future course, conferring a teleological function to History that was not part of the vision or thinking of earlier collectors/curators. The champion of this teleological conception of History was Hegel—through this model, History, propelled by its own inner vectorial force, unfolds itself through a multitude of different positions, or movements, that all make sense, forming a chain of periods that negate each other while following, however, an unbreakable logical totality. Each moment or period of this chain reflects itself through a particular group of art objects. This new vision of History (going back to the dawn of the nineteenth century) is called Historicism, and it radically transformed the role of the curator/ collector/expert. Suddenly, if one was smart, one could guess the next turn History would take. Thus, the expert’s gaze gradually changed direction. From looking to the past, the gaze turned toward the future, looking to reconcile the past, present, and future. From the role of an archeologist, attempting to put pieces together to make some sense of the past, the gaze of the expert assumed the function of a seer, trying to guess the next move of History. Thus, if one wins—that is, if one successfully guesses the next move— through each acquisition of a new art object, History is expected to confirm, and conform with, the decisions of the expert, or conversely, the expert, through her natural skills and training, is equipped to preempt the artistic waves produced by History. This inevitably conferred on the expert/curator/ collector a formidable role. Through her findings and acquisitions, she foresees History, almost anticipating the voice of History. Hence, too, the vast chasm that suddenly opened between the expert and the general public. The public comes to the museum as the ultimate validator of the decisions made by the experts, supported and verified by History. Visitors come Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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to the museum to be educated about what is deemed important aesthetically and historically. The expert, if proven right by History, assumes the role of a kind of Pythia—the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, who was endowed with the power to see the future. A good curator can tell what will come next. One thus understands better the vast hiatus that developed right at the time of the Enlightenment as well as the dawn of the modern era—a situation that has continued to inflect our present-day Art World. De jure, as we saw, each aesthetic judgment carries an equivalent claim to any other aesthetic judgment. De facto, however, things took a radically different turn. The aesthetic judgments produced and institutionalized by the experts of the Art System have had to carry more weight than those from members of the public, or from people outside the boundaries of the Art System—because the voices of the experts appear to embody the voice of History. One does not converse with History; one learns its ways. That said, the public, especially of late, has not refrained from expressing judgments, or counterjudgments, sometimes in vehement forms. Similarly, art critics do not allow their judgments to follow or systematically endorse the judgments of the institutional experts. This overall configuration of the Art System as it took shape through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can hold itself together only as long as one grants History the capacity to run its own teleological wheels and unfold, through the forces of some kind of fatal dynamics, every period and movement, one after another. In the past decades we all have heard accounts, publications, and dissertations that glorify or bemoan the end of History4—the end of the grand narratives that produce a smooth, monolithic, teleologically driven ur-meaning from the sources of Art History until today. The paradox underpinning this book is that, even though this vision of History has exhausted itself, the structures of the Art System (museums and universities that have not considerably evolved since the 1940s) continue to operate on antiquated premises. Returning to our abiding paradox, as Kant established, an individual aesthetic judgment cannot bear an overarching institutional axiological system that dictates what is worth being looked at versus what is not. Each individual The Antinomy of Taste and Its Solution 

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judgment establishes a distinction of quality between the beautiful and the less beautiful, the aesthetically pleasing versus the aesthetically unpleasant—but that distinction stems from one’s own subjectivity, from one’s own individuality. As we are all inherently capable of making aesthetic judgments, each of us makes distinctions that form part of these judgments. Those judgments, equal in claim, are factors of inequality among what we judge (objects of taste). Through our judgments, we establish a scale of values or preferences. Our judgments compete for recognition, validation, and acquiescence on the part of other co-judges. As Kant established, while each aesthetic judgment is profoundly subjective and individual, individual judgments claim to apply to all. This is one of the most perplexing and frustrating properties of aesthetic judgments. All capable of this, we pass aesthetic judgments that reflect our individual selves: “I love this rose” says nothing about the rose I love, but it says something about me. The attributes “beautiful” and “lovable” are not attributes objectively attached to the rose (the object of my judgment). Yet, as I pass the judgment “This rose is beautiful,” I act as if the attribute of beauty was inherently attached to the rose, and I claim that this judgment must be true for all. Someone, however, inevitably exists who will hate my rose, or hate all roses, and declare it ugly. Her preference will go to wallflowers or orchids. My judgment on this rose cannot possibly be universal, despite the fact that it claims universality. It does upset me to find somebody who does not join me in finding a great source of pleasure in this rose. Now, this antinomy of taste has, de facto, undergone a whole other dimension through the ossification of the Art System and the rise of the experts who are established by the system as those who determine universal taste. They know better; they know for us; they utter the voice of History, against which there is no dissension. To put it differently, Kant established at an individual level the antinomy of taste. This antinomy of taste, throughout the development of the Art System and the growth of a class of experts, has been transformed into an actual contradiction of forces. What I see as my preferences at an individual level are taken over at an institutional level, where all decisions are made for me. The experts tell me what is worthy of aesthetic admiration (although this vocabulary is no longer part of their language). They say what is worth being acquired by a museum because of its indisputable Historical importance. The language of Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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the aesthetic antinomy does not really exist among experts. Taste is a weak leftover from the Enlightenment and the Romantic ages. Taste is pretty much dead in the Art System. It has been replaced by knowledge, expertise, and a solid reliance on the values of History—an ability to foresee what is coming. The antinomy of taste (at an individual level) morphed into a conflagration of different vantage points where the individual perspective has been swallowed within the system, in which what Jürgen Habermas, in a post-Kantian expression, called the “ethics of discourse” has become a moot point.5 Call us naive, yet we continue to believe that the experience of taste abides with us, even in discrete forms, and we continue to think that these multiple experiences of taste also solicit various forms of intersubjectivity. As Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, “An utterance does not merely refer to its object, as a proposition does, but it expresses its subject. . . . The utterance is always addressed to someone.”6 In a somewhat different context, Bakhtin claimed that an essential feature of aesthetic judgments is, indeed, intersubjectivity. Here, Bakhtin echoes Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: “Only under the presupposition of a common sense, I say, can the judgment of taste be made.”7 In other words, casting an aesthetic judgment binds me necessarily to others. Neither objective (I cannot demonstrate that the rose I love is beautiful) nor merely subjective, the judgment of taste oscillates between the two and is rooted in an arena of intersubjective activities. The closest the aesthetic judgment ever gets to objectivity is when it resorts to universalist and dogmatic statements, or, as we have seen through the development of the Art System and the rise of the expert in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when judgments of taste are pronounced in the name of History and become institutionalized. This does not make these judgments bad; it simply makes it difficult to form an ethics of discourse around institutional canons. It is difficult to imagine a group discussion weighing the aesthetic merits, or lack thereof, of the Mona Lisa or Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In fact, even within the sphere of recognized genius, while many pay significant attention to Michelangelo, Rembrandt, or Elvis Presley, other lovers of the arts never pay attention to these uncontested masters, preferring to pay attention to Botticelli, Vermeer, or John Cage. The series of alternative individual The Antinomy of Taste and Its Solution 

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preferences could go on ad infinitum. Even within the field of “quasi-universal” taste, there is neither agreement nor room for continuous discussion. Judgments of taste are coextensive of each other. They constitute many clusters of cultural claims, and they complement, rather than exclude, each other. They are not mutually exclusive, even if, within the Art World, they are often pitted in opposition to each other. The Art World itself (as a sphere of accepted taste) has pitted itself against all other spheres of contested artistic creation. The antinomy of taste sets up one against all and all against one. To each one’s own taste, yet each wishes his own taste to be approved by all. This antinomy is epitomized and transfigured by the Art World at the institutional level. Modern art institutions have been established on the vision and taste of a small group of curators, artists, and collectors who have sought to have their taste confirmed by all—and proven and sanctioned by History, so that critical discussions of taste become unnecessary and preposterous. Kant solves this antinomy by proposing that one can only claim that one’s aesthetic judgment is universally valid if we place ourselves on the level of the ideals of reason, which are, by definition, unreal and unrealizable. The possibility of everyone agreeing that Michelangelo is a genius is a great idea, but it is nothing more than an idea—a utopian dream, never to be realized. Unfortunately—or maybe fortunately—in the realm of aesthetics, there is simply no right or wrong. There are only different individual and collective judgments of taste—many of which corroborate each other, and many of which do not. Even discussions of the genius of Michelangelo or Leonardo do not go uncontested. Antinomies of taste, however, are difficult to negotiate. Recognizing that a person one admires and loves, for instance, has radically different taste from oneself is a tough experience. It is difficult to reconcile this with the kind of dilemmas that follow from a proposition such as “I love her, but I do not love the art that she loves.” As we have previously pointed out, we, the authors of this book, have notoriously disagreed on a number of aesthetic choices. However, our solution has never been to dismiss each other’s judgments. In fact, one of us, David Carrier, once organized a panel discussion among art critics and historians at the New York Studio School, with the premise being that there were no agreements among the speakers about given examples of contemporary art. Everyone Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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had to attempt to justify their claims (for or against the work of a particular artist, e.g., Damien Hirst) in front of the other speakers without resorting to dismissing, condescending, tangential, or unprovable judgments on the superiority of one artist over others. It would have been very difficult (and courageous) for art institutions to develop their programs and missions with the intention of opening up wider spheres of discussion. However, these institutions, out of a need to validate their choices, anchored themselves on the rock-solid foundation of History rather than on the unreachable and fragile claims of the ideals of reason. A Hegelian model is far more solid and convenient than a Kantian one, because it is “verifiable” by the eventual outcome of History, made palpable, measurable through the early investments of art institutions. The yields, at all levels, are far more rewarding than the more modest—though not inconsequential—claim that the “modernist” vantage point represents one among many constellations of taste. But, and this is the modest claim of this book, the aesthetic claims, however discrete or unheard of, of these multiple constellations of taste will not go away. Our purpose is to give voice to these, and pose questions, and articulate answers as to what to do with these numerous claims. Again, our students have contributed considerably to this process. Modern art, as it began to be institutionalized around the turning point of the Salon des Refusés in 1863, before gaining gradual representation in public art museums and universities, had to be accompanied and supported by a mission statement. Broadly, this statement was what we know as modernism—a sophisticated ideological and axiological system that argued and defended the values of modern art from a moral ground. Modernism is to modern art what Historicism was to history: both are ideological systems of interpretation that stipulate that History and modern art are inherently equipped with a selfpropelling dynamic through time. According to this modernist/historicist ideology, an inner, necessary logical force pushes a succession of different art movements, or periods, through time. The second part of the conceptual equipment of these ideological forces (modernism/Historicism) is that they advance through time with an indisputable axiological system. The main points of this axiological system are that it is better to subscribe to modern art than to its adversaries (official, bourgeois, Kitsch, vulgar, easy, pleasing art The Antinomy of Taste and Its Solution 

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forms stemming from popular culture, the Spectacle); the public has inherently bad, even toxic, taste; and the avant-garde, the enlightened spearhead leading this dynamic force forward, is inevitably lonely and removed from the crowds who cultivate mediocrity. This enlightened avant-garde carries a historical predestination by thrusting the Art World forward toward the recognition of great, and worthy, art forms (modern art). The defense of modern art became a kind of mission. Early defenders of the values of modern art (e.g., Maurice Denis, Roger Fry, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Katherine Dreier, Clement Greenberg) saw it as their mission (in a moral and quasi-religious sense) to teach, develop, and disseminate a taste for modern art. They were the new preachers—and in the case of Barr, a remarkably gifted one as well. But what were they defending modern art against? Two things: tradition, which soon became associated with conservatism, or reactionary taste; and the vulgar and ignorant taste of the masses. To be modern was to be anti“Kitsch,” and to be modern became hip. If one wanted to appear to be in the know, one declared one’s allegiance to the modern. To be seen and accepted among those who had vision and were working for the future became the instantaneous mot de passe to be accepted in the budding Art World. Modern was enlightenment; antimodern was obscurantism. Even if the pioneering era of modernism is long gone, the structure of the Art World developed around these combative values—and to declare oneself for this camp or that camp continues, even today, to carry over some militant connotations.8 The double claim of this book is that this combative stance ultimately served no great function other than comforting those who led the fight against the windmills of bad taste, and that, comically, the enemies against whom this vendetta was being fought did not know they were enemies of anyone, nor did they know anything about this ongoing combat. Those consumers of bad taste, those retardataires, or reactionary lovers of Kitsch, have never known themselves as such. They do not lead a fight, or counterfight, against modernism. Nobody told them that they were the losers of History, the victims of the great conquests of modernism. They just went on with their own aesthetic preferences, having no idea that these taste values were the target of a long-standing academic crusade that helped entrench modernism on firm, if exclusive, ground. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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Our aim is not to engage further into this combat. We are not about to lodge another fight or counterfight or crusade against modernism—which has long fallen into obsolescence, anyhow. Modernism itself has seen plenty of fighting in the past decades within its own ranks, and we are not interested in adding another layer to these somewhat futile quixotic battles of the past century. What we wish to look at is what modernism—epitomizing the Art World—has chosen not to see by casting a blanket of ignorance over it and characterizing it as bad taste. Unhappy with this dichotomous, Manichean stance, we claim that there simply is no universal truth in art—nor even a dominating truth. Claiming a universal truth in art is like seeing all six facets of a cube at once: an impossible task for the finite and limited creatures that we are, though the idea of seeing all facets of a cube at once can make sense and does appeal to our reason. Some die-hard academics will never get tired of wanting to prove themselves right in this fight against illusive enemies within the arena of taste, where (we claim) there is no right and wrong but simply preferences and distastes. Each judgment might appear to exclude the possibility of the other—on the ground that there is only room for one universally great artist—but, in fact, these judgments complement each other. We are not suggesting that all things are equal—far from it. Rather, there are a multitude of art constellations, many of which have fascinating surprises in store for us. This discovery of the fact that we all pass judgments of taste that have equivalent claims had no precedent—and forms one of the bases of our modern Art World. All people are capable of forming judgments of taste because no special requirements are needed: no special education or any training is necessary, even though one may choose to elaborate an empirical cognitive approach to any fields of objects of taste. No touch of God, no class status, no ethnic or sexual identity or any particular knowledge is required in order to enjoy those objects of taste. My sociohistorical or class conditions necessarily limit the boundaries of my aesthetic realm, but these do not causally determine my aesthetic choices. The fact that I am a worker in a Soviet car factory does not determine that my two favorite cars are Tabans and Skodas. In fact, I may well prefer aesthetically a Ferrari, even though these are totally unavailable and unaffordable. The fact The Antinomy of Taste and Its Solution 

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that I belong to a country club in the Midwest where every member tends to drive a Range Rover or a Jaguar does not necessarily imply that I have to subscribe to this limited, and expensive, range of possibilities. I may prefer to drive a 1969 Charger (even if I become the laughingstock of my comembers). But then again, one or two of them may recognize that this is one of Richard Prince’s favorite cars, which might add to my judgment of taste a certain cachet. Aesthetic enjoyment and knowledge of objects of taste are separate entities, though they may complement each other. I do not need to have any knowledge of botany in order to find this rose beautiful. Being human is the one and only condition of passing judgments of taste. It is as simple and instantaneous as for a newborn’s face to light up when it sees its mother. Passing judgments of taste is as natural as breathing. However, one can hone specific breathing techniques. Likewise, one can choose to develop particular tastes, or wish to acquire certain tastes. One can cultivate certain predilections and exclude others, but the foundation of the judgment of taste is not based on any rules or pedagogical programs. There are no limits to where our judgments of taste will take us. At the onset of modernism stands a monumental paradox. Marcel Duchamp is often held as the example de rigueur of the artist central to the Art World, who yet pulverized the traditional boundaries of what is acceptable in art by proposing to look at objects from outside the Art World as aesthetic objects and, even more, as works of art. While it is now accepted wisdom that his gesture, in 1917, of submitting a urinal for display within an art institution has made a huge impact on art, it is seldom acknowledged that this gesture prompted us to consider the primary aesthetic experience of a urinal as a possible object of taste (or distaste). We may find it disgustingly ugly—most of us do, possibly because of its utilitarian function. We may also find some pleasing qualities to it, and some of us do. These are two examples of a primary aesthetic response to this object—untainted by the oblique, irony-driven, second-degree approach to this object, embodying the “transfiguration of the commonplace,”9 and having taken the Art World on a whole new trajectory. Incidentally, this gesture continues to be mused over by artists such as Sherrie Levine, with her precious-looking, shiny bronze remake of a urinal, titled Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp: AP) (1991), or, lately, by Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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Maurizio Cattelan’s recent intervention, America (2016), in which he placed a fully functioning solid gold toilet inside the restroom of the Guggenheim. Both of these projects, loaded with irony, coated with layers of (not so shiny) cynicism toward the Art World that embraces both of these artists, also inevitably pose again, insistently, the simple, naive, primary question, Is this urinal or toilet a beautiful object? Or, is it possible to cast an aesthetic judgment on a plumbing fixture, and if so, what kind of aesthetic judgment? The question of the very possibility of casting an aesthetic judgment on a urinal was inherent in Duchamp’s decision—even if most critics preferred by the Art System have proven incapable of grasping the full implication of such a gesture. What Duchamp was, at least partially, pointing out was the fact (among others) that all objects may potentially become objects of aesthetic contemplation—even the most outrageously prosaic. This was, in effect, the logical complementary link to the premises of the Kantian revolution. If all are capable of casting aesthetic judgments, and if aesthetic judgments know no rules nor boundaries, since the author of each judgment is free to cast it upon anything of her liking, then it necessarily follows that all and any objects may become the source of aesthetic contemplation. Instead of taking in the full implications of this gesture—and beginning to look at all possible taste judgments as carrying equally valid claims—the Art World swallowed whole this Duchampian move, largely encouraged by Duchamp’s binary opposition of “retinal art” versus art at the service of the brain. One forgot to look at this object, beneath its new function as an early tool of institutional critique, as an object of possible (or not) aesthetic, sensual contemplation. Then, in a self-congratulatory and narcissistic move, the Art World later praised itself for having the strength and bravura to embrace Duchamp’s transgression and subversive move. Instead of focusing on the huge aesthetic implications of Duchamp’s introduction of objects that do not “belong” to the exclusive arena of the Art World, what became a subject of quasi-endless investigation among curators, scholars, and philosophers was the originality of this conceptual move, or later on, as per Arthur Danto, the discovery that once any given object (e.g., a urinal, a box) is set within an institutional context, it becomes ipso facto a work of art. All these investigations share a similar feature: they place emphasis exclusively The Antinomy of Taste and Its Solution 

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on the author of this conceptual move, not on the objects of taste (or distaste) selected by Duchamp himself. It has often been argued that the Duchampian move, hailed as a stroke of genius, has consisted in de-aestheticizing the Art World, or stripping it bare of all the unnecessary, petit-bourgeois traditional aesthetic paraphernalia. And all applauded in chorus. The same move can be interpreted as an act of pan-aestheticization, rather than an act of de-aestheticization. In other words, the choice to set a urinal or a shovel in an art context can also be regarded as a way to draw specific aesthetic attention to objects that are usually not considered aesthetic objects. The artist who understood the full implications of this move is Jeff Koons, who incidentally has in his studio his own replica of Duchamp’s Bottle Rack. To Koons, many (if not all) objects in everyday life may be endowed with aesthetic gratification. Equally radical and revolutionary (if not more), this move could then suggest that all objects be elected as objects of aesthetic attention. A snow shovel may be a source of aesthetic pleasure in the same manner as a sunset on the Adriatic. It all depends on who is viewing it and how it is viewed. Another fascinating, though little-mentioned, facet of Duchamp’s wild and wide gamut of aesthetic choices is the fact that he curated and acted as an art broker / art dealer for several collectors, first and foremost Katherine Dreier. The most sensational result of this aspect of his activities was the constitution of the Société Anonyme, the grand name given to the personal collection of Katherine Dreier as it was presented as a gift to Yale University. It was included among dozens of works by the epigones of European modernism, such as Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky, and many more. Duchamp also chose to buy for Dreier works by an eccentric, little-known landscape artist, Louis Eilshemius. Such a gesture on Duchamp’s part was analogous to the decision to cast an aesthetic eye, in the field of art, on an object equivalent to a urinal or a snow shovel—the leftovers, the never seen, the “crumbs of History,” as Hegel would say. If one goes beyond the somewhat shallow sensationalism usually attached to this, what is striking is that Duchamp’s aesthetics were far more elastic and diverse than the aesthetics of those in the Art World who hailed him with awe and admiration for having pushed art away from the retinal. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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If anyone may see aesthetic merit in any object or work of art, it follows, logically, that any object may be held as an object of aesthetic taste. Here again, artists were the first who perfectly absorbed and communicated this lesson. From Richard Prince to Rachel Harrison, a throng of artists have chosen, with seemingly no end, to expose us to objects of “popular” taste that would never otherwise make it within the Art World. Consider, for example, Harrison’s inclusion of cheap junk objects and references to NASCAR culture, and Prince’s images of pinups, Marlboro ads, and blue-collar yard ornaments made out of car parts. Such objects, seen through the lenses of these two artists, from sources completely alien to the Art World, become not only acceptable but worthy of serious attention—because artists in the Art World have deemed these layers of objects of popular culture worthy of being reconsidered through and within their own art practices. A pinup poster in Playboy is clearly outside the boundaries of the Art World, but the same image, co-opted by Prince, becomes a major work of art, proudly displayed on the walls of significant art institutions, auction rooms, seminar projection screens—and in the dwellings of important collectors. Indeed, even though it appeared as a supreme joke at the expense of the Art World, looking at a toilet as an object of aesthetic pleasure is far from a joke for the artists who have followed Duchamp’s lead in producing an astonishing array of art objects—a tradition of toilet art. Likewise, Duchamp’s admiration for the work of Louis Eilshemius did not save him from dying rejected and ignored by most of the Art World, but it did have a continued impact on the stance of the Art World toward such artists. In 2000, MoMA hung two paintings by the artist, and a few years ago Jeff Koons acquired a work by Eilshemius, which is featured in his Antiquity series. The larger meaning of Duchamp’s move and its implications need to be regarded more seriously than as a mere joke at the expense of the elitist Art World. True, there is nothing the Art World enjoys more than to be made the butt of a joke and then to take the joke and turn it into a quasi-sacred event. Duchamp himself, a supreme manipulator, took plenty of advantage of this situation, often making jokes at the expense of his own patrons, Walter and Louise Arensberg. No artist working today has understood this dynamic better, and profited more from it, than Cattelan, the official jester of the Art System. The Antinomy of Taste and Its Solution 

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Indeed, today, certainly in large part due to Duchamp, the Art World is actually capable of accepting almost anything as art, simply because the artist (already sanctioned by the Art System) has been endowed with alchemical powers to transfer (or, to use Danto’s term, “transfigurate”) any object into an object of artistic worth. One may choose, as did Danto, to focus on the effect of the art institution on any object shown within its perimeters—or vice versa. We prefer to point out that Duchamp’s move (as well as the moves of his successors) teased out the exclusionary nature of the Art World by inserting within its perimeters odd objects and, indeed, odd works of art that did not belong but that nonetheless carried (according to Duchamp) potential aesthetic merit. In 1914, Duchamp declared to Brancusi that a propeller could be as beautiful as a work of art, and Léger was notably interested in the aesthetic qualities of window mannequins in New York.10 Further, it could be argued that in 1884, when Duchamp was not yet born, a group of artists who called themselves the Société des Incohérents did “remarkably premonitory works.” For example, a silent composition they published, Funeral Mass for a Deaf Man, subtitled Grief Is Mute, eerily anticipates John Cage’s 4'33"—a musical composition made out of four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence. The humorist Alphonse Allais, also a member of the 1884 Société des Incohérents, displayed a sheet of pure-white paper titled First Communion of Anemic Young Girls in Snowy Weather.11 One can expound on the reasons why this prescient artist remains oddly unknown, or why there is still not a single monograph on him. One of the main reasons, in our view, is that he, further and faster than all, brought the naught equation of the Art World full circle. The fullest metaphor of the contemporary Art World is the figure 0: zero. More importantly, he spoke the voice of History before History itself, thus turning the teleological games of Historicism on their heads. Just like the tragic mythological figure Cassandra, who had predicted the Trojan War but whose voice was never heeded, Allais brought, almost a century too soon, the logic of modernism to its own self-propelled aporia. History started and ended right there. Contemporary artists, such as Prince and Harrison, also declared that everything and anything could become art, while another group of Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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15  Alphonse Allais, Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man, 1897.

contemporary artists took Duchamp’s message in another direction, declaring that nothing (0) itself could be art, too. Yoko Ono’s pioneering video SKY TV (1966), in which the artist shot a frame of the sky through her video camera for twelve hours, represents a culminating moment in a long chain of fascination with and exploration into the possibilities of zero, or what Duchamp very smartly dubbed the “infra-mince.” In addition to SKY TV, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), John Cage’s 4'33" (1952), Giovanni Anselmo’s Oltremares (1978–79), Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), and Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings series (1951) explored the fecund possibilities of nothingness, subsequently opening up a new aesthetic universe within the Art World. From nothing to anything, the range of aesthetic options appeared suddenly infinite. From the purity of the void to the abjectness of a dumpster (from Arman to Paul McCarthy), everything and anything could be determined by an artist to become an object of contemplation. Everything—including the very mechanism of aesthetic contemplation—became a rightful object of investigation by contemporary artists. Early on, conceptual artist Robert The Antinomy of Taste and Its Solution 

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Morris likely went further than anybody else by drawing up a legal document declaring one of his works totally devoid of aesthetic merit. This conceptual legerdemain remains most interesting in that Morris touched there one of the infrangible limits of art. He appeared to ignore the fact that aesthetic choices made by others do not belong to him, and that aesthetic judgments can neither be prescribed nor proscribed. In the same way that I cannot compel anybody to love the beauty of the rose I am admiring, I cannot stop anybody from swooning in awe in front of a pile of garbage that repels me. Morris, through an act of supremely arrogant irony, claims to control the uncontrollable. Whether anybody finds any aesthetic fulfillment in his work—the very conceptual work that he declares bereft of aesthetic content—is not up to him but up to the spectator. We, for instance, do indeed find a source of aesthetic joy in this act of denial, which has a certain conceptual beauty in its acrobatic intelligence, convoluted logic, and acerbic humor. Even though it is inevitably capped by failure, its audacity and its ability to hit at the very core of the aesthetic game touch us both. But Morris, in his lighthearted arrogance, also dons the robes of an all-powerful alchemist. What he did not take into account is that here he borrowed the robes of a master of aesthetics, oblivious, though, to the fact that aesthetics knows no master. Aesthetics obeys nothing: no rules, no dogmas, no laws. An aesthetic judgment can neither be imposed nor opposed. A judgment of taste necessarily establishes distinctions, but those are the result of a free will—and it can neither be forced nor stopped. Numerous artists have trained their artistic attention on the limits of the Art World, and through them alone the Art World has been gently forced to open itself to what it usually cannot stomach. In the past decades the space of the art institution itself has become a focus of critical engagement. From Louise Lawler, Thomas Struth, and Andrea Fraser, whose practices have centered on the very mechanism of aesthetic judgment, to artists such as Fred Wilson, Michael Asher, Hans Haacke, and Maurizio Cattelan, attention to the foundations of the art institution, and its limits, has become a mainstay of the art business. Wilson and Haacke, for instance, and for very different reasons, have pointed to some of the embarrassing lacunae that evade exploration within the Art World. “Wilson’s work encourages viewers to reconsider Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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social and historical narratives and raises critical questions about the politics of erasure and exclusion.”12 Haacke’s installations, meanwhile, have criticized funding sources of art museum exhibitions.13 Morris’s conceptual gesture is actually symptomatic of the contemporary Art World’s paradoxical stances. The artist sets himself free and opens up a vast number of possible options, but this process has ironically resulted in a self-contracting and shrinking of the Art World. The Art World more and more appears like a vast snake biting its own tail. The Art World has become increasingly professional and far more inward-looking than ever. While it is true that art publications, manifestos, critical essays, and doctoral dissertations have never been so abundant, it is also true that by far the largest proportion of this vast production is directed at Art World figures themselves—professional curators, collectors, dealers, and critics, as well as students and academics. How often does one find a copy of Artforum or, even better, October on a pile of periodicals in a dentist’s waiting room or an airport lounge? Never. The Art System is geared toward self-consumption. Through a particularly strange antinomy, it claims to be open to all challenges and possibilities, yet in actuality it has become more foreclosed than ever. In a largely tautological move, it is destined to speak to itself. All across the globe, biennials of contemporary art are proliferating—yet, amazingly, the same twenty curators tend to be responsible for one biennial or another. What is the reason for this paradox? Is it the quasi-divinization of the artist and the sacralization of the curator? How exactly did we evolve from the early premises (and promises) of modern taste—with judgments of taste universally available and open to all—to an Art World founded on a pyramidal hierarchy of tastes, cultivated by a particular elite, kept to an admittedly large number of consumers that is still infinitely small with respect to the billions of individuals who form aesthetic judgments every day? A perfect example of this conundrum of “exclusive art for all”—or the juxtaposition of two constellations of taste that have very little, if anything, to do with each other—was found in the center of Kiev, Ukraine, before civil war raged through this city. Directly across the street from the Pinchuk Art Centre, funded by billionaire Victor Pinchuk, which displays to the public a large and impressive collection of works by artists including Jeff Koons, The Antinomy of Taste and Its Solution 

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Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman, is a fruit and vegetable market run by local farmers, most of whom have never set foot in the private museum across the street. Yet they are confronted daily with one of the realities of the Pinchuk Art Centre: a gigantic photo installation by the contemporary Russian artist collective AES is wrapped around the tall steel structure of the vast market, covering the fruit and vegetable stalls. Asked what they thought about it, the women who work in the market said that they appreciate how it blocks some of the sky-lit openings, reducing the torrid heat, which averages above one hundred degrees during the summer months. Pressed further for their opinion of this decoration—whose narrative resists, to say the least, a fast and immediate deciphering—the women answered in Ukrainian that “it took a while to get used to it.” Again, we ask how it is that we have evolved from a situation wherein the judgment of taste was diagnosed as belonging to all to an Art System that has become increasingly professional and insular, resulting in an almost total chasm of communication between the Art World professionals and regular folks. How did we move from the all-out openness of the judgment of taste to an elite-driven Art World? How did we go from the all-inclusive notion of the judgment of taste to a hyperexclusive Art World—even if, paradoxically, many directors of contemporary art museums proudly announce their high attendance numbers? Much of our present conundrum has to do with the duplicitous structure of the judgment of taste. It is as though the history of the modern Art World was a live enactment and aggrandized projection of the Kantian antinomy of taste. Those responsible for the fates of the art institutions have seemingly enjoyed dancing a two-step between the public and the elite. There are few greater joys for a curator of contemporary art than to “discover” an artist before anyone else and to have his/her foresight confirmed and verified by the public or by a parallel institutional accolade (such as inclusion in a biennial acquisition by a major museum). These various seals of approval feel as though History has bestowed its approval of the bold, but astute, taste of the farsighted curator. This is what used to be called “having an eye,” in older Art World jargon. The aspect of the judgment of taste that interests us is that its structure is fundamentally egalitarian (each judgment of taste has the same validity Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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claim as any other) and essentially anarchistic (it does not need any rule to entrench its validity claim). Elitist culture is not the opposite of popular culture, and, as Todorov pointed out in his book The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations, the products of both cultures may very well reach a similar intensity and richness.14 Todorov also notes that Goethe found the same beauty in popular songs from Serbia that he did in works by the most celebrated poets. For Goethe then, as for us now, the two are simply compatible. As mentioned before, the only members of the Art System who are able to shake the system are the artists themselves. Those with enough cachet can more or less choose to bring in anything and anyone they want. Indeed, it carries a very different weight to say “Goethe enjoyed popular songs from Serbia” than to say “Carrier and Pissarro are aficionados of popular songs from Serbia.” Artists, as agents of taste, are taken seriously when it comes to their own personal taste. Through them, the Art World is surreptitiously exposed to layers of creative activities that it would never otherwise see. This is, in part, a remnant of the Romantic era, during which the artist was held to possess heroic virtues and was placed high above humankind. In short, through Romanticism, art became an attribute that links humans to the divine. As humans create art, they elevate themselves toward a quasi-divine position. Two centuries or so later, the residuum of this is that the artist still operates within a zone of the Art World largely unchecked and, to a large degree, revered. The artist is thus the one catalyst that can gradually open the Art World to its contiguous constellations of taste, which are still largely unexplored. The artist has carte blanche to do more or less all she or he deems worth attempting, and if she or he decides to bring in a segment of street art or lobby art within the sanctorum of the Art World, her or his word will likely be heard, and heeded.

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6. The Museum Era The greatest aid to study and intelligent enjoyment is a historical arrangement. Such a collection, historically ordered . . . we shall soon have an opportunity to admire in the picture gallery of the Royal Museum constructed here in Berlin. In this collection there will be clearly recognizable . . . the essential progress of the inner history of painting. —G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art; emphasis original The unique spirit in its dialectical becoming, understood in Hegel’s sense, can only generate a philosophical monologue. Monist Idealism is the least favorable ground for the flowering of a multiplicity of unmerged consciousnesses. —Mikhail Bakhtin, in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle

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e have seen that there is an intimate historical relationship between Kant’s transcendental and aesthetic philosophy (establishing a method to explore the inner mechanisms of the aesthetic judgment) and the charged political contexts of the day. The opening of the Louvre, shortly after the ownership of the collections of the French monarchs was transferred by revolutionary law to the French nation, carried a huge political and historical weight. The spectacular gems covering the span of a few millennia of artistic tradition, having been amassed by the French kings through centuries, were suddenly there to be enjoyed by all—though this in itself (public access to collections established by monarchs) was not unprecedented. At the time of the French Revolution, royal collections became the legal property of the people, thus enabling large numbers of people to exert aesthetic judgments on art objects that had previously never been available to them. As discussed in the previous chapter, in Königsberg in 1790, three years before the opening of the Louvre to the public, Kant produced an equally radical break by establishing that the judgment of taste is not reserved to any particular group of, say, cognoscenti, or enlightened viewers. We all produce judgments of taste, regardless of who we are or where and when we were born. But, throughout the eighteenth century, access had already been given to vast swaths of the public through major collections: the British Museum, founded in 1753, stemmed (as almost all the earliest museums did) from the collection of a collector, in this case the scientist, physician, and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, who bequeathed his entire collection of more than seventy thousand objects to the British nation. The British Museum became the first national public museum in history. It opened to the public in 1759 and received at that time about five thousand visitors per year. It now receives about 6.8 million visitors and is among the most-visited institutions worldwide.

The case of Russia is also interesting, as it has several analogies to the French model. Catherine the Great founded the Hermitage in 1764, having acquired 225 paintings by Dutch and Flemish masters from the collection of Friedrich II of Prussia, soon followed by five more collections of astounding masterpieces representing a superlative selection of the arts of Europe, in all media, from all periods. Within less than twenty years, Catherine had amassed a collection of works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Tiepolo, Van Dyck, Reni, and many others, equivalent to what it took her peers in the kingly courts of Europe centuries to acquire. Catherine the Great became one of the most acquisitive sovereigns in the history of collecting in the courts of Europe. Her grandson Alexander I opened the museum to the public in 1852—contrary to the false impression that the museum gave access to the public only after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. It was at that time, however, that the museum’s name was changed from the Imperial Hermitage to the State Hermitage. The Art World has long been under the spell of historicist ways of thinking. As new forms of art are constantly being brought into the Art World, the claims of museums, Art History, and aesthetic theory need to be adjusted. By the 1820s, Hegel had historicized Kant through his lectures on Art History: he did this by shifting the focus of Kant’s aesthetic (the subject or the author of the aesthetic judgment) back to the object. What interested Hegel was not what the author of the aesthetic judgment feels or experiences. Rather, Hegel was interested in the objects produced by human creativity—and how to set these art objects into meaningful and historically valid sequences. The preeminence of aesthetics over art was threatened. Hegel was preparing the way for Art History and the art museum, and the Königliches Museum (now the Altes Museum) was built in Berlin while he lectured at the university there. He was also laying the foundation for the substance of the Art System, with its three prongs (museum, academe / Art History, and market) all powerfully evolving in relative sync. Once Johann Joachim Winckelmann published his History of Ancient Art in 1764, an unprecedented historicization of Greek and Roman art, analysis could be extended into what Hegel called the “historical development of painting.”1 In an 1829 lecture at the museum in Berlin, Hegel announced that Germans were finally in touch Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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with “the essential progress of the inner history of painting. . . . It is only such a living spectacle that can give us an idea of painting’s beginning in traditional and static types, of its becoming more living, of its search for expression and individual character, of its liberation from the inactive and reposeful existence of the figures.”2 Even though today’s Art Historians seldom appeal to Hegel, their modes of thinking continue to function in similar historicist terms. To understand when and why something becomes art, and to place it properly in the historical narrative, historical analysis is necessary. Identifying the successive steps in the evolution of any given artistically creative period continues to be one of the axioms of almost any analysis in Art History. The museum as an axis in the institutionalization and publicizing of art became a major vector of transformation of the Art World, paralleling the growth of academic Art History taught at the university. The museum and the academy appear as two buttresses supporting the Art System in its institutional essence. Indeed, the common link that cemented these two facets of the Art System was the fast-prevailing notion that art has a History, indeed, functions as History, and is inapprehensible outside the categories of History required in order to make sense of it. The shared mandate of these institutions (museum and academe, each with its distinct emphases and internal quibbles) was to teach and best represent the sense of the History of Art, or the sense of History through Art. Here, the double meaning of the term sens in French is essential. History confers sens (meaning) to Art, and this sens (meaning) is configured as a vectorial direction (like an arrow, it is a moving projectile and follows a certain sens [movement, direction]). With a few precedents from the seventeenth and even the sixteenth centuries, the museum as we know it today is largely a creation of the eighteenth century that grew exponentially throughout the nineteenth century and exploded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is no mere accident that the museum, as a major public institution where art is displayed, preserved, and interpreted, developed contemporaneously with what we described earlier as the aesthetic revolution. From its inception, the Art World was articulated around two notions critical to the modern era at large: publicity and freedom. In other words, The Museum Era

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the development of the museum era was inherently linked with the budding democracies that launched the modern era. These democracies did not occur all at once and certainly did not all follow the same model. Yet one of the major features shared by all democratic models is an enabling of public access to large and important art collections. Just as the Louvre became a public museum after the royal collections were confiscated and their ownership was transferred to the French nation, the creation of the first museum in the United States closely followed the foundation of the new nation, although it was based on a more legitimate model. When Charles Willson Peale, William Rush, and other artists and business leaders founded the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1805, it became the first and oldest art museum and art school in the young American nation, simultaneously linking the museum and the academy. Opened twelve years after the Louvre, the Academy set itself the mission to “promote the cultivation of the Fine Arts, in the United States of America, by . . . exciting the efforts of artists, gradually to unfold, enlighten, and invigorate the talents of our Countrymen.”3 These different examples, which could easily be multiplied, take account of a (then) totally new conception wherein art belongs to all—or, at the very least, should be seen by all. The great paradox here is that as the institutional Art World evolved, it began to establish various layers of filtering and control systems in order to moderate, or regulate, the free access to art presented within art institutions. Art for all, and by all, had to be superseded by a carefully filtered, curated, regulated, and responsibly controlled vision of what art is about, what it means, and sound and objective methods of evaluating its quality in order to prevent falling into anarchy. The potentially vast democratic claim upon which early art museums were founded grew into a system of control based on criteria that turned the Art World into an exclusive domain. The growth of public interest in art museums throughout the world is synchronous with the belief that taste must be regulated—it needs to be taught, and one must learn in order to gain access to the proper taste. Directly opposed to Kant’s great intuitions, the Art World evolved in such a way that all expressions of taste could not possibly be given equal claims or

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recognition. Taste would now have to be taught, exactly against the grain of what Kant had established. Through the budding Art World, taste—the right sort of taste—would have to be acquired through teachers and curators. The Art System thus was born, and the proliferation of expressions of taste that can take many different forms, or situations, fell behind, or outside, the Art System. As the Art World grew into what it became, the early realization (at the core of Kant’s aesthetic revolution) fell into oblivion and became superseded by the Art System’s exclusive and cohesive system of rules. The Art World began to make sense. Here we ask: At what cost did this transition occur? The aesthetic revolution in question could well have led to a truly democratic (or even anarchistic) artistic arena whereby the creative forces and aesthetic attentions of a new and widening public happily merged with each other, opening up to conversations and exchanges in which creators and their publics could, for instance, be in direct contact with one another, rather than being mediated by a caste of experts. However, things did not quite happen this way. Rather, custodians of art institutions (curators, academics, and critics) became the professionals whose charge was to transmit the meaning of art to the larger public. Making sense out of art, pronouncing statements, and establishing values (historical, axiological, and monetary) and meaning about art became pivotal activities within the Art System. The art custodians wrote and taught Art History—a discipline born during the second half of the eighteenth century alongside the development of aesthetics and the museum institution—which became a preponderant function within the Art System. While aesthetics establishes that judgments of taste are free for all and the museum brings art to the people, Art History came to regulate this potentially anarchistic (and threatening) flow. Art institutions, predicated on selective judgments and on lists establishing the rankings and merits of art objects, could not possibly cope with a potentially vast, indeed countless, explosion of artistic and aesthetic possibilities suddenly made visible and available. A perfect illustration of this fact is given by Napoleon I, who in 1800 asked his brother Lucien, a fervent art

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admirer and supporter of his brother’s regime, to establish a list of the ten best living artists in France.4 The emperor thus wrote to his brother on September 10, 1800: To the Citizen Lucien Bonaparte, Minister of the Interior I hereby request, Citizen Minister, that you hand over to me lists of our ten best painters, of our ten best sculptors, of our ten best composers, of our ten best musicians (other than those who play in theaters), of our ten best architects, as well as a list of artists in other genres whose talents merit to draw public attention.

Creating lists and ranking hierarchies continued to be the basis of what curators, teachers, and critics did. In fact, the three prongs of the Art System are structured the same way. Whether through price records (in the auction language), awards and prizes (e.g., the Prix de Rome, granted by the French Academy), or the selection of artists to represented in the collection of a given museum, the Art System functions by a series of selective, distinguishing moves. Establishing which art objects and artists are worth remembering became more important than the instantaneous act of looking itself. The act of looking became ancillary to the act of selection established by experts. It lost its present; one no longer looked for the present moment but for the future. What will count for History became a far greater concern than activating one’s instant aesthetic gratification. Actually, the search for instant aesthetic gratification would become highly suspect in the twentieth century, as we shall soon see. Put differently, the act of looking at art became mediated through selections resulting from the decisions of the experts responsible for the Art World. Today, however (and our students have amply insisted on this new development), this tendency is finally being seriously contested. A growing segment of the public does not turn to, or is not even aware of, the taste mediators. And artists themselves, together with a larger number of younger, or alternative, curators and even collectors, are refusing to defer their taste decisions to others. They look everywhere and anywhere they want and have resolved to tap into the vast and uncharted flow of aesthetic creativity available where we decide to open our eyes. Luke Jerram’s Play Me, I’m Yours is a perfect example of an artwork acting as a catalyst, or a silent conductor, of Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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16  Luke Jerram’s Play Me, I’m Yours in New York City, 2010.

the musical fiber that lies in almost all of us. Touring internationally since its debut in Birmingham, England, in 2008, Jerram’s project involves placing dozens of pianos throughout urban landscapes and making them available to all to perform and play as they wish, what they wish.5 Art institutions can no longer stop, contain, or absorb the immeasurable quantity of today’s artistic production and the vast democratic aesthetic revolution that echoes the premises of the eighteenth-century revolution of taste, even though a situation such as the one presented by Jerram would have been difficult to conceive in the late eighteenth century. Artists at that time did record street performances, as in Tiepolo’s Triumph of Pulcinella, a superb depiction of a commedia dell’arte performance. But these performances did not enter the confines of the museum world because there was no room (either physical or, above all, ideological) for street art or other forms of creative aesthetics that did not fit the rules, canons, academic dogmas, and codes put in place by the museums. At their onset, these institutions needed to introduce levels of distinction, as the museum clearly could not contain all artistic creative products. Today, however, a new burst of aesthetic and artistic energy is taking place throughout the world: what Jeffrey Deitch initiated as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles offers The Museum Era

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17  A shot of Burning Man by Pavel Antonov.

an excellent example of a brave attempt to reconcile irreconcilable entities.6 The Art World evolves at extraordinary speed; what used to be seen as irreconcilable is no longer seen that way. Growing numbers of interchanges are taking place between forms of art that would have been excluded from the purview of the Art World a few years ago. In truth, these waves of creative energy that have exponentially transformed the artistic/creative demographics appear to demonstrate Joseph Beuys’s prophetic statement: “Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler” (Everyone is an artist).7 To a large degree, the museums are no longer needed. Look at the Burning Man festival, seen here in Pavel Antonov’s photograph. Each year, in a vast desert space, a mind-boggling multitude of all kinds of creative energies is not only tolerated but encouraged, leading to a truly extraordinary creative synergy among individuals of all stripes, genders, social-political milieus, and geographical zones. The result, as far as can be from any museum, is a feast Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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for the eyes, the senses, the mind—with no concern for what History will retain of any of this, given that it is all burned down upon the ending of the festival. In effect, we are not far today from the ideological premises on which the early museum model was founded. Following the steps of the Encyclopedists, the early museum officials sought to represent the gamut of possible creations. Thus, all forms of creation—human, natural, and genealogical— found a home under the roofs of these impressive new institutions. The earliest ambitions of the museum world paralleled the invention of universal aesthetics. Few museums continue to function on this model, as through the nineteenth century the model of the natural history museum became severed from that of the fine arts museum. As the dinosaurs, the slabs of geological formations, and the fossilized hippocampuses began to be taken out of the fine arts museums, two different conceptions of history developed apart from each other, with the museum of fine arts developing its own set of rules, as we discussed earlier. The history and evolution of organic, geological, and biological species appeared to have little to do with the representations of Art History, which now demanded their own space, practice, regulations, and selection criteria. Suddenly, through the pressure to represent History at its best, the fine arts museum was seen as reintroducing precise criteria of selection and distinction. The universal availability of the judgment of taste was no longer a consideration in the fast and intense growth of the museum institution.8 The mid-nineteenth-century museum institution continued to foster its educational mission, but through notably distinct perspectives and goals. Take, for instance, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, who was appointed director of the National Gallery in London in 1855. Former Tate director Nicholas Serota explains that Eastlake was seen as “introducing a more rigorous historical framework for the Gallery”9 and was largely responsible for increasing the scope and richness of the National Gallery’s collection and consolidating its historical framework. He relentlessly pursued the acquisition of works by early Renaissance artists, acquisitions that guided his decision to hang the works in the collection according to school—thus periodizing the collection as though illustrating an Art-Historical survey manual. The function of the The Museum Era

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museum display—and ultimately the function of the work of art itself—was now to teach rather than to provide aesthetic rapture. It could do both, of course, and this was acknowledged but deemed secondary, a mere symptom of the unquestionable greatness of the masterpieces displayed in the National Gallery. The moment of aesthetic rapture was (and could only be) the effect of the historical greatness of the work of art, not the other way around. Eastlake’s accomplishments, nonetheless, should not be underestimated. Originally a historical painter (as were many of his peers), he became the second keeper (director) of the National Gallery. His tenure only lasted ten years (1855–64), as he eventually decided to go back to painting and writing. During this short period, however, he acquired nearly 140 masterpieces, including some of the signature icons of the National Gallery, such as Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (1440), Bellini’s Madonna of the Meadow (1505), and the magical Baptism of Christ (1440–50) by Piero della Francesca. Eastlake himself embodies, almost by himself, the virtues of the budding Art System. He not only translated Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors, 1840)—his translation prompted huge praise from Arthur Schopenhauer—but he later married Elizabeth Rigby, an accomplished Art Historian seldom given her due within the very discipline to which she so importantly contributed. Rigby was one of the pioneers who bridged the gap between the tradition of Art History in Germany, where it was already almost a century old, and in Britain, where it was making its first inroads. She translated several key books: the second edition of Franz Kugler’s Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei seit Constantin dem Grossen (Handbook of the History of Painting: The Italian Schools), in 1851; and the first part of Gustav Waagen’s two-volume work evaluating English collections, Kunstwerke und Künstler in England und Paris, which appeared (without the part dedicated to Paris collectors) in 1854 as Works of Art and Artists in England. Waagen himself also combined training in the budding museum world and Art History. He was the first ever professor of Art History at the University of Berlin and was appointed director of the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. It is thus very clear that from the very beginning of the Art System (Art History, museum, art market), these forces were working in very close connection with one another. Lady Eastlake, a prominent Germanist and pioneering Art Historian, is reputed Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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to have taken part in some of the most critical acquisitions made by her husband. In 1857, only two years after his appointment, Eastlake reported to his trustees that “this room is now almost exclusively appropriated to works of the fifteenth century. Seventeen early Italian works are placed together and give a distinct character to the room, illustrating the quattrocento schools of Italy.”10 These were the beginnings of the “chronocracy” of the Art System—a neologism we coined deliberately for this context to designate the complete servitude of curators, museum directors, and Art Historians toward time sequences: what comes first must be placed, within the space of the museum, before what comes next. This very strange dependency on time sequence has organized the Art System for a century and a half. We believe, however, that there is simply no irrefragable argument why time sequences should organize the presentations of the collections in any given art museum. Serota rightly emphasized this novel conception of the function of the work of art. The assembly of these works in a particular display was ancillary to the knowledge of art and its history. What followed was a totally new convention of hanging works of art that eventually led, in 1887, to the principle of “the single-line hang,” by which museum walls look like a conveyor belt in a car factory. The overarching principle of hanging pictures by historical groups, schools, or movements became the paramount new language of Art History, and, interestingly, it was duplicated in Art History classrooms. Two slides— two inseparable slides—would always be shown next to each other: the before and the after. In the constant search for a prior moment, this situation is not dissimilar to the metaphysical pursuit for the prima causa, that which stands before all, the source that makes all clear. Of course, the prima causa has never been and will never be available to Art History, but the discipline structured itself as though a prima causa exists, and all artworks, through one form or another, one direction or another, descend from this metaphysical tree that infuses sense to all. The two-slide display on one screen, endemic to all Art History classes, became the embodiment of one of the principal ideological beliefs in Art History: post hoc, ergo propter hoc: this came after that, therefore that is the The Museum Era

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cause of this, and this is the effect of that. Quid demonstrandum. This is how Art History was formed and functioned for more than a century and a half; this is how it was taught; and this is how it took plastic form on the walls of museums. In the meantime, the notion of the work of art as yielding an infectious dose of aesthetic joy—or its opposite—had long been forgotten. It could by no means hold as the principal consideration in this conception of the art institution, or the Art System at large. The possibility of experiencing intense pleasure in seeing a work of art was not fully neglected, but, on the whole, aesthetic pleasure was supposed to be a catalyst directing the viewer toward what mattered: the ultimate aim of the art institution, which was to impart knowledge and a clear understanding of a given work of art through the inherent values conveyed by Art History. The curator who does her job best is the one who makes the voice of History clear and blatant, with no need for further explanation.11 Yielding to aesthetic pleasure alone, in such a context, cannot be a prime consideration. History (and Art History) are serious matters: there is no place within them for thrills or squeals. The professionalization of the Art World came with an establishment of boundaries and clearly defined stoppages between the wild flow of uncharted and unwieldy aesthetic activities and “serious” art. Distinctions and a new language were necessary. In the same way one is expected to wear a coat and tie in a Michelin-starred French restaurant, it became de rigueur to adopt certain mannerisms, certain forms, in order to be accredited to speak of, to approach, to “consume” the elixir of art. Yet, without question, the professionalization of the Art System has not pushed out the door all possibilities of aesthetic rapture, or any other forms of aesthetic response to the awe-inspiring contents of the National Gallery in London. No artist has better captured the all-out publicization of the institutional Art World than German photographer Thomas Struth, whose work centers not so much on works of art displayed in museums as on the aesthetic impacts these works have (or do not have) on their public viewers. Struth’s photographs often establish some kind of hard-to-believe dialogue between the figures depicted in the paintings displayed on the walls of the museums and the individuals who are viewing these works. In a sense, Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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18  Thomas Struth, National Gallery 1, London 1989.

Struth turns these museum collections—described as mausoleums by some theoreticians—into live spaces of interaction. Even though his works can be read with a fair amount of irony, the central theme of Struth’s museum photographs is the fascinating gamut of options and forms that are available through one’s aesthetic judgments. In essence, Struth’s photographs chart the museum era through the public, highlighting how deeply individual each aesthetic judgment is and reminding us that all individuals do not necessarily share the same thrill and excitement in front of these “masterpieces.” Figure 18 demonstrates Struth’s vision of the National Gallery. Earlier custodians, such as Sir Charles Eastlake and Lady Eastlake, had begun to establish two things. They established a process of historicization of the museum collections first, and then an increased professionalization The Museum Era

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of the Art System. In a little-known but fascinating text, Roger Fry, another British Art Historian and a pioneer of modernism, expressed his frustration at the English language’s need for new terms to differentiate true creative human activities that have an aesthetic goal (which he refers to as “art”) from all kinds of human creative activities that have no aesthetic goal (which he refers to as “crafts”): Pompier, applied generally nowadays to the art of the official salons, implies that the work in question appeals to the general public rather than to those familiar with the principles and methods of serious art. (our emphasis)

It is certainly desirable that some word should be discovered which would classify so-called

works of art which are made to please the average public and generally merely for gain.

As the same problem arises in literature over the “best-seller,” it would be a good thing if

a general term could be found that would cover all similar instances, and distinguish works created mainly for immediate gain from works which aim at serious aesthetic expression.12

Fry’s wish was soon realized: the word “Kitsch,” used from the 1930s onward as an anti-Art-Historical marker, served to designate, with condescension, what is not worthy of serious attention because it merely appeals to the public taste. Keep in mind the productions that, as per Fry, are not worthy of being called art. It is this very stuff—unnamable, unmentionable—that was purposefully left out of the art institutions and the Art System. Not unlike the Eastlakes, Fry occupied more than one occupation within the Art System: he actually occupied three key professions at the onset of modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century. He was a professional Art Historian, specializing among other things in the Italian Renaissance; he was an art critic and contributed seminal essays to the Art-Historical periodical the Burlington Magazine; and he served as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, helping the institution establish the foundations for its early modern collections. The double push toward the historicization and professionalization of the museum, initially encouraged by Eastlake and Fry, makes sense for the professionals that we are today. It is doubtful, however, that most members of the public participate fully in what curators—such as Eastlake, Fry, and about a dozen pioneers who shaped the museum profession in both Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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Europe and the United States into what it is today—have tried to achieve. This lack of communication between the organizers responsible for the way things are placed on a museum wall and the members of the public gazing at these walls appears to be at the center of Struth’s artistic concerns. One of Struth’s viewers (see fig. 18) leans incredulously over Cima da Conegliano’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. It is a supremely funny and ironic twist on Struth’s part, alluding to the search for truth, in which the public (following the path of the incredulous Saint Thomas) is invited to participate without being given the tools or the language to fully engage. Beyond this, one can ask whether being given access to the Art-Historical facts and truths about the three works displayed on the wall in Struth’s photograph are necessary for a full, indeed fulfilling, aesthetic appreciation of these works. As we have said before, we are not advocating ignorance. We are simply asking about the relevance of specific factual, and specialized, historicizing knowledge in order to gain a deeper and resounding appreciation of these works. Let us see what the National Gallery itself has decided to tell us about this painting: The picture was commissioned in 1497 by the Scuola di San Tommaso dei Battuti for their altar in the church of San Francesco in Portogruaro, north of Venice. The Scuola was a penitential and charitable lay association which administered four hospitals in Portogruaro. The altarpiece was completed in 1504 but was probably started several years before; Cima did not receive full payment until 1509.

Numerous paint losses, due to blistering as a result of flood damage, have been

restored.13

Can we seriously pretend that anybody who has not already been exposed to the dreary, facts-only/dates-only, say-nothing-real type of insipid Art History verbiage can get any sense of what this painting is about? Can anyone reading this trivial and brutal sheet of facts derive aesthetic joy from looking at this glorious work by Cima? This is what we believe is wrong today with the Art System, principally Art History itself: its autotelic mechanism. It has created a language produced by specialists and geared toward specialists. Sir Charles Eastlake’s seminal declaration of intentions about how a museum should be run appears to be in keeping, more or less, with the way The Museum Era

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things are today, 170 years later. Art History, and the Art System as a whole, is a formidably resilient discipline coated with a full-metal jacket to protect against change. A near-total lack of imagination and a crippling incapacity for self-criticism constitute the main pivots of the discipline: stasis versus dynamis. The convention of reading works of art in a linear sequence, organized according to the logic of a yearly calendar (think of Art Since 1900), has no more rhyme or reason than the previous convention of filling every empty space of every wall from floor to ceiling. Within the National Gallery, two works of relatively equivalent size by Giovanni Bellini, Madonna of the Meadow (1505) and his portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan (1501–2), flank Cima’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1502–4). The close proximity of an altarpiece, a devotional painting, and a political portrait makes no historical sense whatsoever. These works essentially belonged to distinct historical contexts: a private home (Bellini’s devotional Madonna), a church (Cima’s altarpiece), and, most likely, a political or institutional space (the portrait of a famous doge).14 But the curator who put these works together essentially evacuated aesthetic judgments from the museum sphere in order to leave room for didactic clarity, positive knowledge, and assured cognitive evaluative judgments. Cima’s Incredulity is set between two works, of lesser size, by Bellini to illustrate the fundamental impact Bellini had on this artist—and to show what an important mediating role Cima occupies within the canon of Art History, between Bellini and Titian, whose work is seen later on. Interestingly enough, the creation of one museum of modern art after another in the twentieth century—and later on, of museums of contemporary art—has not fundamentally altered this devotion to daily calendar chronology. Modernism, the ideology that defends and supports the values of modern art, is another form of Historicism. The short version of the modernist shibboleth resembles a syllogism: 1. The modern artist fights the values of art inherited from the tradition. 2. Soon, however, the battle led by the vanguard artist is won and the tradition that he fought must withdraw.

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3. Finally, the victorious artist holds a place of merit within the art world as she or he gains recognition, and eventual representation (sometimes posthumously), through History—embodied in the top museum institutions. History is always the victorious vectorial force within the story of the evolution of art. If an artist is on History’s side, then that artist will become of notable importance. All pioneers of the modernist ideology share, despite numerous internal disagreements, a need to anchor the practice of modern art within the bedrock of History. This was a difficult dialectic leap to make given that modern art stands largely against what precedes it, in other words, History. This conceptual tour de force was accomplished through a recourse to the notions of quality and masterpiece. In other words, despite its opposition to tradition, modern art was capable of creating just as many prodigious masterpieces as any of the greatest artists of tradition were. This is very much Clement Greenberg’s stance; he was following Fry, who was following Hegel. According to these authors, all makes sense, even when it does not. Progressive development is the ultimate goal in any kind of art, and it seems preordained by a certain logic—that of History. As Greenberg wrote, “Abstract art is not a special kind of art; no hard-and-fast line separates it from representational art; it is only the latest phase in the development of Western art as a whole, and almost every ‘technical’ device of abstract painting is already to be found in the realist painting that preceded it.”15 Do we read correctly that “the latest phase in the development of . . . abstract painting . . . is already to be found in the realist painting that preceded it?” And further on: “I cannot insist enough that Modernism has never meant, and does not mean now, anything like a break with the past. It may mean a devolution, an unraveling, of tradition, but it also means its further evolution. Modernist art continues the past without gap or break, and wherever it may end up it will never cease being intelligible in terms of the past.”16 And just in case the point had not been made clearly enough: “The phase of Modernist art in question finally takes its place in the intelligible continuity of taste and tradition. Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the

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idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is—among other things—continuity and unthinkable without it.”17 Greenberg’s Art-Historical conception was largely drawing upon Fry’s slightly more complex (and subtler)—and Hegel’s far more complex—views, according to which modern art, in its thrust to produce a radical and novel impact, had to return to the point in history, prior to Raphael, when forms still held sufficient force to express powerful emotions. The fundamental error that is usually made is that progress in art is the same thing as the much more easily measured and estimated progress in power of representing nature. All our histories of art are tainted with this error, and for the simple reason that progress in representation can be described and taught, whereas progress in art cannot so easily be handled. And so, we think of Giotto as a preparation for a Titianesque climax, forgetting that with every piece of representational mechanism which the artist acquired, he both gained new possibilities of expression and lost other possibilities. When you can draw like Tintoretto, you can no longer draw like Giotto, or like Piero della Francesca.You have lost the power of expression which the bare recital of elementary facts of mass, gesture, and movement gave, and you have gained whatever a more intricate linear system and chiaroscuro may provide in expressive power. But the more complex does not really subsume the simpler.18

Fry’s supreme acrobatic mental twist was to claim that the whole mission of modern art should be to retrieve from the history of primitive art (i.e., trecento art) the potential of emotions that had been lost (since the Renaissance) through too much representational skill at the expense of “zest and enthusiasm.” Fry’s solution was to the point: “The biggest things demand the simplest language.” With this shibboleth in hand, he announced that the French artists he passionately defended—from Manet to Cézanne and Gauguin to Matisse—had restored the lost genius of Cimabue and Giotto by “learning once more the ABC of abstract form.”19 With these recent masters, skill was downgraded and superseded by sincerity. Just like the works of the primitive or masterpieces of oriental art, “they do not make holes in the wall.” (Fry alluded here to the illusionistic perspectival space created by the Renaissance—a point resumed wholesale by Greenberg later on in America.)

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The whole rhetoric of modernism was essentially in place by the early years of the twentieth century and was about to become the beacon by which most modern art institutions would orient their missions and define themselves. What is interesting, however, is that, in his brief text, Fry reveals some of the conceit inherent in the logic of modernism that was never fully confronted. If, indeed, the point of modernism is to extol the virtues of sincerity and search for the simplest forms of expression, isn’t every human being more or less capable of doing this? Isn’t every human being a judge in her own right, as far as her own aesthetic judgment is concerned? And if casting a sincere aesthetic judgment indeed puts us close to artists themselves, Fry, in 1910, surprisingly and ironically, came dangerously close to the same conclusion that Beuys uttered sixty years later—that we all are artists: “What, indeed, could be more desirable than that all the world should have the power to express themselves harmoniously and beautifully—in short, that everyone should be an artist. The beauty of the resulting work has nothing to do with the amount of effort it has cost. While no effort is in vain that is needed to produce beauty, it is the beauty, and not the effort, that avails. If by some miracle beauty could be generated without effort, the whole world would be the richer.”20 Perhaps, if we are willing to take Fry’s unexpected premonition to its word, the whole world might begin to appear all the richer—and Fry, ironically, could have anticipated Beuys.

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7. Institutionalization of Art History Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. . . . The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude [Dare to know]! —Kant,“An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’”; emphasis original Everywhere we search for the Absolute and nowhere do we ever find anything other than objects. —Novalis, Pollen and Fragments Many people today think that the Enlightenment only taught what was obvious, and that people in those days had a rather simple view of the great mysteries of nature and the world. This is true. But you must realize that what seems obvious to us wasn’t in the least so then, and that it took a great deal of courage, self-sacrifice and perseverance for people to keep repeating them so that they seem obvious to us today. —E. H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World The uttering subjects of high declamatory genres—priests, prophets, preachers, judges, leaders, fathers-patriarchs, etc.—have left life. They have been replaced by the writer, the simple writer who inherited their styles. —Mikhail Bakhtin, in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle

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ur previous book, Wild Art, dealt with art on the fringes of the Art World. We were looking at the manifold forms of art that lie outside the perimeters of the Art World. What we now propose to do is different: we wish to ponder the quasi-complete silence our objects of study have received through Art History. Given, of course, that these objects exist, by definition, outside the scope of mainstream Art History, we should not be surprised. More interesting and fruitful for us methodologically is to attempt to reverse this dynamic (Art History being silent about the field of Wild Art) and ask, instead, not so much what Art History failed to say on the subject but what Wild Art objects can say about Art History, a discipline whose claim is to lay out the historical lineage of artistic practices. We will now follow an analogous path to that in the previous chapters. We found that the best way to understand our Art World is to look outside of it, having identified huge areas of art practice that lie beyond the perimeters of the Art World, and then to turn back inside from outside its periphery. Similarly, considering the vast array of artistic propositions, or possibilities, that never attract the attention of Art Historians enables us to question and examine the very limits of the practice of Art History inside out. We propose to look at Art History as a discipline to which neither of us are autochthonous; we both came to it from other horizons—essentially philosophy, whether analytical (Carrier) or continental (Pissarro). Following Bakhtin and Todorov, we believe that “in the realm of culture, exotopy is the most powerful level of understanding. It is only to the eyes of an other culture that the alien culture reveals itself more completely and more deeply (but never exhaustively, because there will come other cultures, that will see and understand even more).”1 Here is a summary of our position, which can be described as an epistemological inquiry into the cognitive limits of Art History—a discipline

that claims to produce meaningful, historical sequences out of clusters of art objects, through all periods. Our project’s premises were based on the observation that Art History is unique among all humanities (or human sciences) insofar as it selects its own field of objects through its own selfestablished and self-defining criteria. What we have decided to call “the ruse of Art History” (after Hegel’s famous “ruse of reason”) functions as both a descriptive system (as all humanities do) and a prescriptive system, equipped with its own value system from the get-go. Art History’s descriptive system is itself based on an axiological scale. In other words, Art History has (from Winckelmann onward) never claimed to be all-inclusive but has sought instead to categorize objects, not only according to chronology but also in terms of importance, value, and significance. The descriptive project almost immediately gave way to the axiological project—or the descriptive and the axiological dimensions are both inherently bound together in the development of Art History: only those objects deemed important enough were worthy of being described. Chronology is an objective category (i.e., x comes before y). Lining up objects in terms of their successive emergence is a factual, analytical skill. Axiology (evaluating the importance or value of an object) is a deeply subjective category. Art History, as a discipline, lies at the intersection of these two forces. Hence, it has been, certainly in the past several decades, constantly challenging itself. Like oil and water, Art History consists of two irreconcilable vectorial forces. Indeed, it becomes clear, with this axiomatic system at its core, that Art History can only proceed by exclusion, not inclusion. Art Historians choose what is worthy of being studied versus what is not worthy of being studied. The axiological move precedes the analytical move: what is worthy of being studied is then put to the study. Yet, and this is our main point, what Art Historians choose not to study leaves out an astoundingly vast number of art objects and art situations that simply do not fall under the Art-Historical self-defining axiological criteria. As a result, treatises in Art History exclude far more art objects or art situations than they include. The paradox that interests us, then, is that those excluded art objects are nonetheless unquestionably intended as artistic objects by their Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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creators and are attended by vast audiences who look at them as art objects as well: this crux between a creative intentionality and an attentive audience constitutes, in our opinion, the condition of possibility of a work of art. Yet vast layers of works that fulfill this essential condition were left out of Art History. To take an analogy from the field of linguistics (another human science), this would be as if specialists in languages worldwide decided that the eight hundred or so Austronesian languages spoken in Papua New Guinea are not worthy of being studied because most of these languages are spoken by no more than one thousand people. This would be scientifically aberrant. So, we ask, how does Art History get away with excluding (or remaining totally silent about) hundreds of millions of art objects (in our estimation) that are never featured in any Art History books or projected on the screen of an Art History survey class? Art History gets away with this sort of exclusive move by having declared, from its inception in the mid-eighteenth century, that only the “most representative” objects are worthy of study and consideration. Let us only think of Winckelmann’s description of Laocoön as one of the most highly representative examples of classical excellence. (The fact that Laocoön does not belong to the classical period is irrelevant here.) Yet Art History, from its inception, has been inherently bound to an axiological system: only the highly representative examples of this or that excellence are part and parcel of the Art-Historical business.2 Ultimately, Art History is founded on a kind of tautological move. Only the art objects that are deemed to be of historical importance or significance become objects of study by Art Historians. Let us look at a few emblematic examples, starting with a fun and scary painting by Mark Tansey, Triumph of the New York School (1984). This work offers a smart, cynical, and humorous allegory of modernist Art History as seen from the inner core of the Art World, with “Made in New York” Art History at its center, in the persona of critic / Commander-in-Chief Clement Greenberg. The joke is an insider Art Historian visual pun, accessible only to those familiar with the dissension and competitive games between the European and American Art Worlds around the mid-twentieth century, right after World War II. More specifically, it refers to the takeover by the New York avant-garde of the Paris art scene in the immediate postwar years, with Greenberg as the Institutionalization of Art History

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19  Mark Tansey, Triumph of the New York School, 1984.

emblematic champion of the New York Abstract Expressionist moment. The painting depicts the protagonists wearing the military regalia of the Allied Forces in World War II—except here, the French (the losers) are pitted against the Americans (the victors). The work portrays the capitulation of the French (artistic) army to the victorious (artistic) Americans. Abstract Expressionists on the right, led by Greenberg, accept the surrender of the French, whose leader is Pablo Picasso, with Matisse visible in the background. Greenberg was famous for arguing that Jackson Pollock and other Americans were the inevitable successors of the long-standing, torch-carrying French avant-garde. For him, establishing this canon was like waging war—or claiming victory without a war. Tansey’s painting is supremely apt. This brings up the question: How may we address, in meaningful terms, the presence of artworks that are literally unspoken for—and that never have been part of these war games? We are fully cognizant that the situation we know today has considerably expanded throughout the development of Art History. It is largely through Art History consistently opening up its canons that the Art World at large has changed, and that our knowledge of art has been vastly enriched as a Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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result. Two hundred years ago, the budding museums that we looked at earlier would have had little to do with what we see at present, including medieval art from several continents as well as artworks from Islamic cultures, Aboriginal tribes, and the different countries and cultures of South and Central America—none of which were represented within the confines of earlier museums. Naturally, art in media that have been invented in the recent past was absent. Few early twentieth-century museums had photography departments; the first film department was created at MoMA in 1935. Video, performance, digital art, and a whole additional array of art forms have been brought, or newly displayed, into the museum in the past decades in ways that have utterly transformed the museum world—but also, inevitably, the way Art History apprehends its own objects of study. We are thrilled with all these radical changes that have transformed the museum world, considerably enlarging the spectrum of art objects and, by the same token, enabling the revival of Art-Historical writing and aesthetic theory. Our focus, however, is different. We are looking not at the numbers of works of art available within the Art World but at the way art objects are selected to enter into the Art World. Here we are forced to admit that the process of selection has not changed much. The demographics of the museum world have exponentially increased, but an art object is required to pass the same basic rules of acceptance, the criteria of which are established by Art World experts. The criteria of acceptance have evolved; the system of legitimizing an art object has not. Over the past one hundred years, artists such as Duchamp, Eva Hesse, Warhol, Elaine Sturtevant, Koons, and many others have developed forms of art that challenge the Art World’s consensus. How, exactly, did their claims get adjudicated? Why did these artists experience, at different points in their careers, definite recognition from the Art World during their lifetimes, whereas Norman Rockwell and LeRoy Neiman, to name but two obvious cases, did not? Our students argue that the fact that it is gradually becoming “cool” to exhibit works by these long-forbidden artists is a sign that the Art World itself is in rapid transformation, and we would agree. Yet the binary system of inclusion/exclusion remains, in its mechanics, unchanged: the boundaries of inclusion of many push further the boundaries of exclusion of many more. Institutionalization of Art History

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Do the artists take part in this process, or is it up to the curators, critics, and collectors? Obviously, the artists cannot co-opt themselves, but their words are taken more seriously than perhaps any other components within the Art System. Ultimately, this process of co-optation is particularly complex, and frazzled. What happens when there is disagreement among the diverse components of these authorities? This happens all the time. It is a quintessential part of the Art World and does not prevent a larger dynamic from emerging out of these inner dissensions. What is assumed here is that there are some rules— organic and ceaselessly evolving—that determine what is excluded and what is included within the Art World before it is sanctioned by Art History. Those rules and criteria change, and the situations evolve. The Art World in 1963, the year Warhol acquired his first studio outside his home and the year of Duchamp’s first retrospective at the Pasadena Museum (two events that signaled the history of contemporary art in the making), is not the Art World of today. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to name two events of comparable importance. Even then, the rise of Pop, Warhol’s antecedent in the Art World, and the continuing influence of Duchamp on Conceptual and post-Conceptual art could not have been anticipated. What we have attempted to illustrate is that the membrane separating the inside from the outside of the Art World is very porous—and our students actually believe that the distinction (or distinctions) is becoming increasingly difficult to make. Take Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus, one of the latest, and perhaps the very best, of the surviving examples of the artist’s “composed heads.” He painted it in 1590–91, during his final visit to his native Milan. The fruit and flora in the picture suggest the features of Emperor Rudolf II, Arcimboldo’s patron. Vertumnus nicely anticipates an important vein of inspiration among Wild Art. Another example where the present is reactivating the past is Vik Muniz’s (Medusa Marinara) (1997), which redoes Caravaggio’s Medusa (ca. 1598) through the unorthodox medium (in the Art World) of a plate of spaghetti, which is then photographed. This work has been accepted into the Art World. Yet a quick glance at food art aficionados on the internet soon reveals scores of other artists, some known and some unknown, some simply anonymous, who Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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20  Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vertumnus (Emperor Rudolf II), 1590–91.

carry out the exacting labor of creating trompe l’oeil images with chocolate sauce, ketchup, and innumerable other media. We are fully prepared to grant the objection that Muniz is “the best” of these scores of artists. Our position is different, however. We are suggesting that creating images using food, by which Muniz has achieved a very successful career through the Art System, is huge, and enormously popular. Yet it goes practically unnoticed within the Art World proper. Why? The work by Arcimboldo, mentioned earlier, also anticipates wild food art forms, such as the work of Colorado-based artist Jason Baalman, whose Institutionalization of Art History

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21  Vik Muniz, Medusa Marinara, 1997.

output includes Elvis Presley Painting with Cheese Puffs, a portrait of the King made with Cheetos, and Speed Painting with Ketchup and French Fries, in which he uses ketchup and fries from McDonald’s to depict Ronald McDonald. The latter appears to owe a great debt to Muniz as well, but these works are very unlikely to make their way into the Art World. Our interest in these works is at least twofold. Baalman is, like Muniz, a talented artist, yet he has not been vetted by the system. We feel that an actual confrontation between these two artists, and others who explore the same field, would be fascinating. Furthermore, we do not feel that it is responsible of us to simply discard these art forms, or the huge number of followers these artists have acquired through public visibility and social media. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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This divide between inside and outside is never more visible than on the sidewalks outside our favorite museums. Entering MoMA or the Metropolitan in New York, you will pass by a great deal of art sold by street vendors—works that will probably never enter the Art World. The fact that these works are there for us to see, and are physically so close to the museums, makes the boundary between this “Kitsch” and the Art World–approved art more real than anywhere else. As the New York Times described the situation regarding street art in a March 2008 article, “Where to look? On and around doors, on shuttered windows, above your head, near the ground, on poles and street signs and traffic signals and newspaper boxes and scaffolding. In other words, everywhere. But not anywhere: side streets and alleys work best, but street art also has a strong survival instinct in our gentrifying city, clustering on a few buildings where property owners are either more tolerant or more lazy.”3 In Chelsea, once the center of the contemporary New York Art World, it can be hard at times to distinguish the art from commercial advertisements that carry definite artistic merit. The physical proximity between Wild Art and the Art World offers in no way a right of entry to the Wild Artists. On the whole, art critics focus on the art that, because it is inside galleries and museums, is within the Art World. What concerns us, in part, is understanding how arbitrary, at a certain level, the distinctions are between Art World art and the Wild Art that lies outside. When Ai Weiwei does a Study of Perspective (1995), giving the finger to Mao’s portrait at the entrance to the Forbidden City, we understand him as doing a Seinfeld version of Conceptual art.4 The same is true of the Gao brothers, whose photograph Mass in Tiananmen Square (1995) depicts the youthful, rebelliouslooking, pop-star-like Gao Zhen (the younger of the brothers). He stands alone in Tiananmen Square, blithely smiling at the camera as two police security officials flank him. Is it gleeful innocence or a provocative gesture? Both works, historically located in the era after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, are loaded, perhaps too self-consciously, with political allusions of all kinds. Ai gives the finger to Mao, whereas one of the Gao brothers is photographed so that his head makes the large painting of Mao, which stands above the entrance to the Forbidden City, suddenly invisible. This is Art World art. But when thousands of Chinese tourists take photographs in the square, it is Wild Art—hundreds and thousands of these images are posted daily on WeChat, the most popular social Institutionalization of Art History

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network in China. While we agree with our students that the divide between the two art worlds is increasingly porous, the divide is still present. We would like this book to contribute to opening up a dialogue between the two, to encourage and enable new generations of artists and art lovers to explore further the relationships, numerous and complex, between these two worlds. Some pictorial subjects are practically taboo within the Art World. Images of sporting events tend to fall within this category, although LeRoy Neiman, a forebear of Wild Art, was successful enough to endow professorships and a center for print studies at Columbia University.5 Warhol, a compulsive collector who would definitely not have looked down upon many of our favorite forms of Wild Art, depicted Muhammad Ali, but few other Art World artists have made any forays into this field. Art depicting religious subjects poses even greater problems. How often have we come across a contemporary art gallery staging an exhibition dedicated to religious art? One of the constitutive and abiding paradoxes inherent in the Art World is that, whereas the European old master tradition is filled with religious subjects, almost all contemporary religious art is deemed Kitsch within the Art World. When, for example, the aesthete Sebastian Horsley (1962–2010) had himself crucified,6 he went too far outside the realm of Art World performance art, even though Italian artistic traditions, from the duecento onward, are replete with representations of Christ and are one of the central axes of the Art World. There is today an expansive live artistic force that produces Catholic art and continues to depict subject matters in the lineage of the Renaissance. Yet this form of art is highly unlikely to enter the Art World.7 Such paradoxes abound throughout the Art World and constitute part of its fabric. Art Historians such as Rudolf Wittkower are interested in Andrea Pozzo’s ceiling in Rome, an allegory of the Jesuit missionary life, which is discussed by scholars interested in the baroque, but they do not study Julian Beever’s three-dimensional pavement drawings in chalk. And yet both depend on vast talents and considerably complex trompe l’oeil effects. Several years ago, the department store Barneys, which for some time employed artists, such as Johns and Rauschenberg, to design their window displays, paid tribute to Warhol, showing his Soup Cans and other artifacts from the Factory in an imaginative window display.8 Before entering the Art Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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World, Warhol earned a living as a designer of display windows. Often criticized for doing commercial art, Warhol remains for us an essential example of someone who kept an open mind—and who constantly kept his eyes open too. Throughout his life, he rejected the facile distinction between commercial and Art World art. That installation, which presented scenes from Warhol’s life as a commercial artist, belongs to a commercial establishment. Similarly, although the stairs at the Armani store on Fifth Avenue brilliantly allude to and improve upon the ramp in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, they too are outside of the Art World. Armani is a commercial establishment; the Guggenheim, an art museum. John Miller—an artist very much part of the Art World—has been flirting, ever since the 1980s, with hybrid categories such as “Bad” Painting (which, because it conveys a sense of irony, sounds more acceptable than the previous generation’s idea of “Kitsch”). Miller’s works include a painting of a locomotive train puffing steam, a painting of girls at a concert screaming their adulation for a singer, and paintings of touristic landscapes that present more than a few kinships with Kinkade. What is fascinating is the way artists such as Miller, very much within the Art World (not to be confused with his contemporaries just outside), need to participate in a certain discourse, or conceit. In his case, “Bad” Painting is practiced—but knowingly. It is okay because it is ironic. It is fine because it does not play the “populist game.” It does not fall into the trap of easy, toxic, seductive games that ooze from cheap accessible art, which has nothing to do with the Art World. In conversation with curator Beatrix Ruf, Miller discusses his own historical precedents, which confer renewed legitimacy on his own practice: Bad painting was ascribed to some Pictures artists too, like Walter Robinson—and I do feel a certain affinity to Walter’s work. The Pictures artists were tied into the New York punk scene and both had a decidedly Warholian orientation. If you look back at old issues of ZG magazine or watch Eric Mitchell’s Underground USA, this connection becomes obvious. David Robbins once described Pictures artists as the children of Warhol and Coca-Cola.“I couldn’t care less about re-enacting the Factory and I don’t like soft drinks. In short, I didn’t have the same love/ hate relationship with mass media that the Pictures artists did. While they typically invoked a media hegemony, I arrived at what I was doing more through linguistics and the decadent Institutionalization of Art History

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tradition of French literature (all of which I read in English). So, in that sense, I wasn’t interested in badness in terms of kitsch or bad technique. I thought of it more along the lines of a potentially non-authoritarian discourse.”9

The conclusion of this interview is quite remarkable, for the discourse Miller alludes to is the epitome of the kind of authoritarian, setting-you-straight discourse that the Art World consumes and demands. This text also interests us in that it appears to produce a negative echo of a 1971 essay by Greenberg in which “sub-kitschig art” is vilified: Art that realizes—and formalizes—itself in disregard of artistic expectations of any kind, or in response only to rudimentary ones, sinks to the level of that unformalized and infinitely realizable, subacademic, sub-kitschig art—that subart which is yet art—whose ubiquitousness I called attention to earlier. This kind of art barely makes itself felt, barely differentiates itself, as art because it has so little capacity to move and elate you. . . . Ironically enough, this very incapacity to move, or even interest you—except as a momentary apparition—has become the most prized, the most definitive feature of up-to-date art in the eyes of many art followers. . . . Tastefulness—abject good taste, academic taste,“good design”—leaks back constantly into the furthest-out as well as furthest-in reaches of the vacuum of taste.10

These two texts written across the two ends of a tunnel—the end of modernism, on the one hand, and a new era, on the other—appear to be mutually exclusive, but they emanate from the same axiological system that constitutes the moral spinal cord of the Art World. One celebrates “bad art,” while the other denounces it as a source of misfits. But this does not matter because both the major art critic and the successful artist are serious performers within their respective practices. They think hard. Wild Artists do not. They act. Insiders who claim to flirt with values that appear to be inaesthetic can use the term “bad art.” The irony here is that those insiders do not step outside the Art World to produce their form or visions of “bad art.” Alchemists of the Art World, they turn “bad art” into good (serious, thoughtful, solidly conceived) art. Unlike the late Kinkade, they are careful when they present their “bad art” (note here that the quotation marks are absolutely de rigueur) in order to stage, contextualize, and intellectualize it within the Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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proper boundaries and perimeters so that there may be no doubt about the fact that we are squarely within the Art World.11 Our Art World is ruled by experts, authorities whose judgments (whose “authoritarian discourse,” to reverse Miller’s statement) very much govern the choices about what art we see and how it is interpreted. When it comes to judging films, pop music, and television shows, we all rely upon our own direct responses. Of course, scholars write about Clint Eastwood, Radiohead, and Seinfeld. But the claims of these writers do not carry the same kind of authority. After viewing the movie or hearing some new music, you can look online and find critical commentaries by people who think their judgments are as worthy as those of the experts. When people go to an exhibition of Nicolas Poussin, Jackson Pollock, or Sue Williams, they defer to the experts. The film and pop concert reviews are printed alongside the art reviews, but they have very different status. In the film and music worlds, a crowded concert or a resounding box office success is not looked down upon as threatening signs of populism. It is understandable that the public defers to the Poussin connoisseurs with expert knowledge and to the old master specialists who have read the literature. When the Kimbell Art Museum purchased a ravishing painting previously attributed to “the Master of the Clumsy Children,” only connoisseurs could debate that attribution.12 But knowing today that it is by Poussin does not tell you how you should or could judge it aesthetically. Rembrandt’s Portrait of the Artist (ca. 1665), in the Kenwood House, London, is a notorious conundrum. What is the significance of the drawn circles behind the painter?13 Seemingly only experts are qualified enough to enter into that debate, which involves much erudite speculation. But knowing their conclusions does not tell you whether you will (or should) admire the painting—or what you make out of these drawn circles, notwithstanding the conclusions reached through connoisseurship. Learning that these circles may allude to a famous story about the Greek painter Apelles does not tell you how to judge the painting aesthetically. This will always, irremediably, be left to each and every single individual viewer—by herself. Here, then, we see the crucial difference between art critics and Art Historians. Sometimes we may think the difference is that critics focus on contemporary art, while historians look to the past. But that cannot be correct, Institutionalization of Art History

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because journalistic critics do review exhibitions of old master art and historians now often deal with contemporary art as well. The true difference is that critics are less afraid of engaging in aesthetic judgments of works of art whereas historians provide authoritative attributions, discuss iconography, or deal with the social history. Art Historians anchor the realm of art in the solid ground of cognitive certainty—or at least bravely attempt to do so. The real distinction between these disciplines, then, is that the information provided by historians does not at all tell us how to judge art. In fact, it tends to dismiss the merit or the need to cast an aesthetic judgment on a given work of art, superseding aesthetic sensibility with cognitive assurance. The Art Historian Anthony Blunt regretted that he did not produce an account of “Poussin as a painter.”14 That statement may seem strange, since he studied Poussin extensively and published volumes on him. But Blunt was reasoning soundly, as all he had done was produce complex accounts about “Stoic philosophy, early Christian theology, classical archaeology, and a number of subjects which do not normally take so large a place in a monograph dealing with a painter,” rather than focus on the paintings themselves. There is a distinction in kind between his elaborate scholarly investigation of iconography, influences, and social history and understanding “Poussin as a painter.”15 We like to think that there is plenty of room to begin fresh studies on Poussin that will begin and end with looking at Poussin as a painter—as a source of aesthetic joys (or pains), as the case may be. It is true, too, that historians of esoteric old master art inspire deference. But in contemporary art, this role of the specialist historian, who produces “authoritarian discourses” and assertoric judgments, is just as clear. Rosalind Krauss and her colleagues associated with the journal October, as well as Michael Fried (and a whole host of their followers and opponents), introduced, in the 1960s, high-powered theories that functioned with more or less the same awe-inspiring results as Blunt on Poussin. All of these authors, and more, force our admiration, and we sincerely salute them. They have produced monumental work and indeed have enabled us to learn and understand a whole universe of facts and relationships. However, if their basic claims are correct, then understanding contemporary art requires, among other intellectual skills, mastering subtle and Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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complex streams of often poorly translated poststructuralist literature. Just as, according to Art Historians, one cannot understand Poussin’s paintings without knowing the esoteric iconography in which their imagery is embedded, so, these academics claimed, it is preferable to read Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault in order to comprehend contemporary art—or at least the segment of contemporary art that matters. With all our admiration of these authors, it is difficult for us to accept that monolithic way of thinking. A 2004 monograph on Jasper Johns’s “Catenaries” offers a highly complex reconstruction of the thinking behind these works, explaining the esoteric sources of his painting.16 Important as these sources may be, what counts aesthetically is what you see—and how, in the case of Johns’s paintings, what you see can almost touch you. It is possible, of course, that learning about the artist’s concerns may inflect one’s judgment—that is, if one has taken the time to form a judgment in the first place. While on a studio visit in Beijing, one of us expressed great enthusiasm for a painting by a contemporary Chinese figurative artist, Chao Ge. Hal Foster, who happened to be there that day, simply delivered this terse reply to our enthusiastic comment: “I can see that we have different criteria.”17 Indeed, Kant himself could hardly have put it better. We all have different criteria. Each of us casts dozens of aesthetic judgments per day—all one’s own. Art critics tend to follow a broadly Kantian orientation of thought, and Art Historians tend to lean on a Hegelian methodology. The best situation might be to oscillate between the two, sometimes taking risks and sometimes seeking cognitive security, and to always be ready to let go of reassuring cognitive results and go back to the risk-taking games of casting an aesthetic judgment. It is both essential and interesting to know the latest conclusions about Poussin’s proper attributions, Rembrandt’s iconography, and the sources of Johns’s “Catenaries,” but all of that knowledge is entirely irrelevant to judging their art as art. Rather, cognitive analysis and aesthetic judgments ought to be cultivated in tandem. The problem within the tradition of the Art World is that the former has pushed away the latter. Strangely enough, Greenberg heeded this fundamental point. Famously abrasive, notably abusive (especially to women), and the source of “authoritarian discourse” par excellence, he nevertheless had an essentially democratic Institutionalization of Art History

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view of aesthetic judgment. That he was a friend of Pollock gave him no reason to make privileged aesthetic judgments about Pollock’s art. Yet, altogether, the radically democratic implications of Kant’s analysis remain difficult to reconcile with the present structure of our Art System founded upon entrenched, but exhausted, authoritarian ways of thinking. Experts are authorities who know what is best for us. It is easy enough to use this present account to critique the claims of our (friendly) academic enemies. But that is not our goal. It would be absurd to even hope to replace the present consensus with our own opinions. We prefer to suggest that reasonable disagreements within the Art World are not only possible but, surely, inevitable—and often fecund. We believe, following Kant, that one of the great pleasures yielded by art is its capacity to provoke (almost infinite) discussions. Once you abandon the belief that it is a matter of fact whether some work by Poussin or Johns is a great work of art, which anyone who is not “blind as a bat” (Greenberg liked to use that dismissive phrase) can see, challenging pleasurable social intercourse becomes possible. In other words, abandoning (or critiquing) the positivist long-standing trend in Art History will reopen the possibility of true dialogue not just among experts or academics but, we hope, among much broader segments of the art public in its real diversity, including those traditionally kept out of the professionals’ art-circle discussions. Our critique of the Art World needs to be understood with reference to our context. We as educators and authors are part of the establishment we are critiquing. But our voices probably count as a minority within the Art History profession in that we do not think that our social or professional (and professorial) status gives our taste any special validity above or against anybody else’s. For a Kantian, there is no reason whatsoever to think our judgments are any more valid than those of our contentious colleagues, our students, or even that proverbial figure, the man (or woman) on the street— even if we all seek to have our judgments be met with universal assent. Here an analogy with political judgments is instructive. Intellectuals study public policy, but when it comes to voting, each citizen counts as one. That is the essential principle of democracy. A good citizen may inform herself by reading what the experts say, but in the voting booth she alone is responsible for her choices. As a moral agent, you cannot delegate your Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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responsibility. It is no good appealing to the judgment of someone who is better educated or smarter than you. You must judge for yourself. (This, of course, often requires consulting these experts.) Otherwise, we are caught in the world of Plato’s philosopher kings. This view of democratic politics is familiar, but the equivalent way of understanding aesthetic judgments is less so. Kant’s view of aesthetic judgment, enunciated more than two centuries ago, retains its radical character. We find it easier, it would seem, to accept democratic judgments in politics than in visual art. Free discussion allows everyone to express an opinion. Reliance upon authorities makes high art a relic of the old regime. The museum preserves not only the art of the old regime but also an old-regime attitude toward all art, including contemporary art. If the museum presents History, October’s Hegelian History, who are you to resist or question its judgments? We are not arguing that most art is good—and less even that all art is equal. Today, as always, we find, like so many members of the Art World, that most art, Art World art and Wild Art alike, is mediocre. For every Cézanne, there are one hundred Bouguereaus and Gérômes—and not all Bouguereaus and Gérômes are bad, and not all Cézannes are good. But, more importantly, for every Cézanne and for every Bouguereau, there are thousands of artists who, unlike either of these artists, have been utterly dropped from History, or from the art establishment. The humble question we raise today is, what aesthetic claims do these artists have? And the question is only amplified exponentially when it comes to today’s art. What happens if we look behind the mirror of modernism? Institutional art (the critical mass of artworks collected in museums, taught in art schools and Art History departments, and sold at auction) represents only an epidermal fragment of the mass of works that inherently claim to have artistic value (whatever this value is—for now, we shall call it “noninstitutional value”). Institutional art is the simple, arithmetical result of having excluded hundreds of millions of other art objects. Wild Art is art that has some claim to some aesthetic/artistic merit. Having empirically put this hypothesis to the test in our previous book, and having gained so much insight and aesthetic fulfillment, we humbly ask our readers to accept this invitation au voyage.

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8. Art Beyond the Boundaries of the Art World Where the advocates of modernism would disentangle from the broad sprawl of kitsch a small, select lineage of true art, their critical successors, facing an even broader expanse of instantly reproducible imagery, tended to find every sort of picture-making equally suspect. In either case the underlying impulses were themselves fairly suspect: a mean-hearted cultural nervousness and an urge for intellectual superiority. —Julian Bell, Representation and Modern Art I like Mickey Mouse and I like King Lear—but do I have to read about them in the same text book and study them with the same set of tools? There was a time when treating Mickey Mouse with the same interest as Shakespeare was really cutting edge and dangerous, but now it just seems like business as usual. —Jonathan Weinberg, via personal correspondence

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hat would an Art World without what Bell aptly calls “mean-hearted cultural nervousness” be like? For so long, many layers of Wild Art were missed simply because they lie outside the periphery of the Art World proper. Indeed, this situation is evolving so fast that the once-solid ramparts of the Art World are rapidly being eroded. But the question we pose here is: how has history, and more specifically Art History, managed for so long to keep the “contamination” by these undesirable cultural objects at bay? What kinds of objects have we, as Art Historians, or as more or less regular members of the museum circuit, been trained to ignore because these objects would never be seen on the walls of our favorite museums, nor included in our treatises of Art History? In chapter 10, we indicate how these diverse materials were gathered together under the misleading, and mercifully almost defunct, noncategory of Kitsch—a derogative notion that addresses much of the material we examined in our previous book. Let us now review a few more examples of such Wild Art. In many American cities, there are elaborate displays of Christmas lights. At first sight, such forms of Wild Art clearly stand outside the boundaries of the Art World. Yet some displays of lights, quite spectacular in some cases, can and do belong to the Art World. Think of Dan Flavin, for instance, and his epiphanic fluorescent light sculpture with a yellow glow, The Diagonal of May 25, 1963; or of Robert Rauschenberg’s recurrent inclusion of bulbs and various light fixtures in his Combines; or, closer even to us, Félix GonzálezTorres’s magical-looking, fragile, and ever-so-beautiful curtains made out of strings of lights (1992); or the pioneering, extraordinary Electric Dress (1957) by Tanaka Atsuko, among many other examples.

For many Art World aficionados, it would seem an aberration to bring up any of these fascinating late modernist art experimentations, and exploits, with light in the same context as the fairy-like explosion of Christmas lights throughout Dyker Heights in Brooklyn or almost anywhere through the streets of Dallas at Christmastime. Touring the extraordinarily sophisticated light displays seen on multiple rows of houses around Christmastime certainly does not count as an Art World experience, yet it is magnificent.1 We feel it is reasonable to ask why no claim of legitimacy can be granted to these irrefragably advanced forms of aesthetic expression—and why this discrimination? Indeed, the relationships between Art World and non–Art World become even more complex when the dialogue between the two worlds is articulated or orchestrated by artists themselves. Pawel Althamer, a Polish artist born in 1967, could be hailed as the Joseph Beuys of the twenty-first century in that he sees an artist in almost everyone. He has, however, considerably diluted the heroic and epic mood of Beuys’s days. A resident of a vast housing block in the Bródno district of Warsaw, Althamer observed, collected, and documented legions of examples of the spontaneous artistic activities of his neighbors. He has also organized projects in cooperation with them. If Beuys’s ambition was to move through the darkness of life with a blazing torch, Althamer seems to be more interested in looking into the simple but mysterious corners of daily life with the help of just a light bulb.2 He is seeing art where we (art-educated people) do not. He is in the same position that Duchamp was when he declared a found object a work of art, except that what Althamer actually finds is art—art done by anybody, everybody (jeder Mensch): art trouvé. For the Bródno 2000 project, another one dealing with lights, Althamer convinced two hundred neighborhood residents to turn on or off, as needed, their apartment lights so that the year 2000 could be seen brightly illuminated on the facades of the buildings.3 During this nightly performance, folk music was played and free meals were provided. Gerhard Richter, under no suspicion of belonging outside the Art World, once declared, “I consider many amateur photographs better than the best Cézanne.”4 Is this a display of poor taste on Richter’s behalf? We do not Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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22  Bródno 2000, 2000. Documentation of an action.

think so. In fact, here again, it is via the agency of an established artist, by the mediation of such statements, that such layers of artistic production as “amateur photographs” may have begun to be taken more seriously. While photographs by recognized artists (think of Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Patti Smith [1976] or the status attained by such artists as Andreas Gursky and Jeff Wall) have taken a prominent position within the Art World in the past half century, ordinary photographs, by anybody, by jeder Mensch, remain on the periphery of the Art World—even though the membrane defining the Art World is becoming more and more porous, an important and urgent qualification. Why did this difference between ordinary photographs and those that belong to the Art World survive until very recently?5 A collector puts her family photograph on her desk but displays her art photographs on the wall. Painting and sculpture obviously represent more traditional art forms. Within Art Beyond the Boundaries of the Art World 

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them, the distinction between good art and Kitsch usually relies upon some kind of historical analysis (what we referred to earlier as Historicism). Good art, so goes the argument, is propelled by History, while Kitsch impedes this progress, or worse, encourages History to recess.6 With newer art forms such as photography, film, video, and more recent internet-based practices, the debate takes on a different tone, for it is harder to maintain such distinctions.7 In her book On Photography, Susan Sontag initially distinguished between canonical photographs and ordinary amateur photographs. The photographs she decided to reproduce and interpret were masterpieces by famous photographers—and, unlike Richter, she made no concession to “amateur photography.” She was doing Art History, not sociology or cultural studies. But, then, almost organically, she came to this fascinating, and promising, conclusion: “There is no reason to exclude any photographer from the canon. . . . With photography, eclecticism has no limits.”8 All we have done through our research, and our dialogues with our students, is to take this warning by Sontag, echoed by Richter, seriously. Pierre Bourdieu, in his Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, also discusses ordinary photographs. Photography, he observes, “is often the object of an immediate attachment indifferent to the privileged classes, doubtless because no one poses the question of whether it belongs to the universe of art.”9 Bourdieu was a Marxist sociologist, not an Art Historian. As it turns out, Art Historians and museum curators have been grappling with this dilemma for generations. There have been many different criteria involved in deciding whether photography could be considered an art or not. Curators and historians have tended to agree that one of the essential criteria was that the photographer possess a basic understanding of the complex mechanical and technical components that make up a photographic camera. In other words, a person who shoots a spontaneous snapshot with her iPhone will not be considered a photographer. Our response is that even this basic, simple quasi-automatic gesture, deprived of any technical skill as it might be, still requires a certain aesthetic apparatus—aesthetic emotions and responses in front of a given motif—and that these emotions ought not to be discarded or ignored. Even selfies in their most basic form are not deprived of aesthetic concerns. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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The case of photography, therefore, is of particular interest to us, as the argument about whether it is art is much more complex and subtle than with more traditional art forms. This argument (Is it art? Is it not?) also runs parallel to our own concerns. We are asking the same question not just about amateur photographers but about worldwide artistic and aesthetic productions. Common wisdom has it that trained painters and Sunday painters make characteristically different kinds of art—the merits of the former versus the lack of merits of the latter are almost inherent in the practice of painting: the differences are staggering, blatant, even brutal. This argument does not, of course, consider that Gauguin himself was a proper Sunday painter (who learned to paint in the 1870s with Camille Pissarro, as he was occupied making money during the weekdays as a stockbroker). One could multiply these examples ad libitum. Is Wallace Stevens—who worked as a top executive in an insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut, while also becoming one of the leading modernist poets of the twentieth century—considered a Sunday poet? Did his weekday career limit the scope of his literary genius? But the debate around painting and sculpture (or traditional art forms) versus photography and more recent art forms is structurally different. The distinction between serious painting and recreational painting in no way implies that all painting is bad, or that painting is not an art. Whereas with photography, the question of whether photography is an art form involves photography per se. It is extraordinary to consider that even today, according to the popular website debate.org, the question “Is photography art?” receives 66 percent positive answers versus 34 percent of respondents who declare that it is not an art form. The argument used by the naysayers is that photography is produced through a mechanical device, and that one can no more claim photography as an art than a typist who can type two hundred words per minute on her computer can call her skill an art form. Photography has entered the Art World relatively recently,10 but it has come at a price. The mechanical practice of photography made curators uncomfortable, as any photograph could in theory be reproduced, or copied, ad infinitum. Modern Art World photographers gradually introduced the practice of numbering each photo, thereby creating limited editions, following Art Beyond the Boundaries of the Art World 

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the exact model of sculpture and engraving. No one would purchase photographs by Cindy Sherman for the high prices they command if they were mass-produced. Meanwhile, the recent push to make contemporary art photographs large has brought attention to artists such as Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky, both of whom have had solo exhibitions at MoMA in the past decade. The imposing formats of their oeuvres made their works fit happily within the awe-inspiring walls of the museum. Today, photographers have received the undeniable sanction of success amid the art market, with two photographers (Gursky and Sherman) featuring among the wealthiest artists. With the explosion of online venues such as YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and myriad other social media outlets, this problem of distinguishing between art and nonart has exponentially multiplied. Just as Kitsch was once proclaimed to be different from Art World paintings, so art videos are claimed to differ inherently from amateur family scenes, thus doubling up the problematic surrounding the entry of photography into the Art System. But today any distinction between Art World art and Wild Art is becoming increasingly hard to maintain. We love the idea that countless forms of art continue to multiply. The more art, the better. The collapse of classical dogmatism opened the way for the present Art World (or what we have called the Art System), constituted by the art museum and Art History, both of them sanctioned by the art market. How does the vast array of art outside the Art World fare in comparison to established art forms? We are looking here at the astronomical gap between the relatively small, rarefied Art World—with its art critics, its codes of acceptability, and its system of values—and everything else. In describing “the nature theater of Oklahoma,” Franz Kafka writes in his novel Amerika that “everyone is welcome! If you want to be an artist, join our company! Our Theater can find employment for everyone, a place for everyone!”11 These words ironically echo the passage by Rousseau quoted in the epigraph at the onset of this book: art outside the Art World is made by anyone for everyone. There are a number of nuances, however, that oblige us to qualify a too-simple, binary opposition. There are artists who, one might say, shuttle between the Art World and the Wild Art world. Bernard Buffet, for instance, was once in the Art World, and then became persona Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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non grata, rarely shown within the museum system, until a young curator at the Pompidou included him in an exhibition on representing the human figure since Picabia.12 Trying to explain why Buffet went through decades of purgatory, his longtime dealer, Maurice Garnier, commented, “He sold too well. He made a lot of money. He lived in an ostentatious way. The powers that be hated him for all that.”13 Buffet died in 1999, ostracized by the Art World, but posthumously he has experienced a string of revival exhibitions, most recently crowned by a show at Venus Over Manhattan, the uptown Manhattan gallery, with indubitable gravitas.14 Buffet is not an isolated case. On this side of the Atlantic, Norman Rockwell is another example of an artist who has entered the Art World of late. And there are also artists whose career is split between the Art World and the other. Fernando Botero is not really accepted within the Art World (he is shunned by the museum and the academy, though the art market redeems him somewhat). Yet, when his art suddenly took a political turn during the Iraq War and he set off to address the American abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, he received accolades of admiration from unexpected corners. Illustrators also have a hard time gaining acceptance in the Art World. Maurice Sendak was famous for his children’s books and opera sets,15 yet his illustrations were marginalized due to the modernist prejudice against both narrative and realism. However, by leaving all of his work to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia—an institution known for its collection of rare books—he had a hand in the way his work would eventually be treated by art museums. Indeed, his illustrations for In the Night Kitchen were shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other works of his have been displayed at the Morgan Library and Museum. In exchange for eighteen months of accommodation at the Carlyle Hotel in the 1930s, the famous children’s book illustrator Ludwig Bemelmans did a mural for the bar—another perfect case of an artist who hangs between the Art World and non–Art World, the Carlyle having served as a foil for many crucial Art World exchanges and, of late, having become the subject matter of paintings by Rudolf Stingel. In, out; out, in: the dynamic between the two is complex, if not outright contradictory. Art Beyond the Boundaries of the Art World 

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23  Bernard Buffet, Self-Portrait, 1949. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

On the whole, the Art World ignores restaurant art. Edward Sorel’s lively decorations for the Monkey Bar in Manhattan also count as Wild Art. Saul Steinberg’s image of New York City looking west is one of the most famous, and often imitated or parodied, pictures. Is it Wild Art? Popular culture? Or has it infiltrated the membrane of the Art World? Although this amazingly imaginative illustrator showed with Pace Wildenstein gallery and had Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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24  Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel.

a retrospective at the Morgan Library and Museum, his drawings are seldom exhibited in such institutions. The art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto was famous in the Art World, but he was not as visible as his wife, Barbara Westman, who produced covers for the New Yorker magazine. Her art was thus at every newsstand.16 Few Art World artists could claim to be as famous, or as widely exposed to the general public, as Westman, though her (Wild) art has not yet been collected by museums. Twenty years ago, one of us argued that understanding the street life of Manhattan is highly relevant to viewing its art: “Reading about Ruskin’s entrance by boat into Venice, or [Adrian] Stokes’s by train into Italy, did not prepare me to land at Newark Airport, take the bus through the Holland Tunnel to the World Trade Center, and then walk to SoHo. . . . And yet even I, a modern would-be aesthete who listened to Verdi’s Otello on his Walkman to Art Beyond the Boundaries of the Art World 

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25  Barbara Westman’s illustration on the cover of the New Yorker, December 11, 1989.

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escape thinking about that rebarbative airport . . . , found myself speculating about the relation between my experience of art in the museums and galleries of New York and this visual environment.”17 References to the World Trade Center and the Walkman obviously date this account, but what remains striking is that, as with almost all Art History writing, this account treats the city just as a setting for what matters, Art World art. Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose work, as of this writing, has just sold at auction for $111 million, started off as a graffiti artist and made his way into the Art World rather unexpectedly. Most graffiti artists, with street surfaces as their canvases, do not engage with the Art World. We may think of graffiti as a modern creation, the product of rebellious teenagers in the contemporary city,18 but it is not so simple. The Swiss art publication Widewalls describes David Choe—by far the wealthiest street artist, with a net worth of nearly $150 million—as a genius. In 2005, David Choe was approached by the media startup Facebook. Facebook had just moved up the office space ladder and commissioned Choe to paint a large mural at their new headquarters. For his time and effort they wanted to pay him $60,000. Choe, however, opted that he’d rather have $3.7 million in shares of the company instead. When Facebook enlisted at the stock exchange the shares were valued at $56 each. And so David Choe, who had been homeless for several months of his life, became the richest street artist there is thanks to his nose for business.19

Graffiti has, in fact, been around in Europe for centuries. In Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, Juliet Fleming notes that in the sixteenth century “the appearance of the mysterious writing on the wall ‘became’ a master parable in narratives of the uncanny.”20 Here is another paradox: insider politically critical art is welcome in galleries and museums, such as the elaborate display of works by Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger in the lobby of Lever House on Park Avenue. Street art, however, lying outside the confines of the Art World, is Wild Art—and has been relatively ignored by most people within the Art World, save a few dealers, such as Jeffrey Deitch.21 When it comes to films, most would now agree that at least a few of them are works of art, but this was not the case when Iris Barry established the Film Art Beyond the Boundaries of the Art World 

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Library, now the Department of Film, at MoMA in 1932: this was effectively the first American museum institution dedicated to cinema as a new form of art. She succeeded against waves of negative sentiment that this newly born medium, cinema, could not claim to be an art form. She won. Iris Barry, a true pioneer—we salute you. Yet, her victory, supported by Barr, was not without paradoxes. Barry truly intended to have film be considered as a proper high modern art form. In the 1930s, during the Depression, cinema was one of the chief forms of entertainment available and was vastly popular. Barry, together with Barr, was determined to have the status of film acknowledged as a fully legitimate form of new art. Hence, she introduced a new code of behavior within the MoMA film theater, prohibiting any kind of loud or boisterous behavior and even barring loud laughter during the screening of a film. She was determined to turn film, which clearly could be regarded as a form of Wild Art at the time, into a serious form of art. The distinction pervades today; a systematic division remains in place between serious “art” films and popular Hollywood or Bollywood films. The medium, only 120 years old, is either taken as seriously as forms such as music, poetry, and painting—see Cahiers du cinéma, founded in 1951 and the oldest surviving publication dedicated to film per se—or it is discarded as a(n enjoyable at best) medium of entertainment, lacking significant impact. Either a film must be understood on its own terms, and must be acknowledged for its distinctive novel characteristics, or it falls into the pits of lowlife entertainment, airplane distraction far less worthy of respect than a Broadway musical. We think the strict divide between these areas in the film world is not so obvious—especially today. Comics are another important example of art outside the Art World. Every child in the world is familiar with them. And even though they do not constitute the spinal cord of the Art System, they might be one of the few examples of art that binds all of our diverse worlds together.22 Invented in early twentieth-century America to appeal to immigrant audiences whose Englishlanguage skills were weak, these combinations of word-and-image narratives have always been treated condescendingly—if not simply ignored—by the Art World. But here again, artists came to the rescue. Throngs of artists are,

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or have been, interested in, even obsessed with, comics, but these visual artifacts are rarely displayed in galleries or museums except as sources for works of art.23 Although comics are wildly inventive, Art Historians have seldom discussed their visual qualities.24 Nor have scholars discussed the fascinating history of this medium. When comics are discussed by academics, it is often by those in cultural studies, where the interest is in their role as a form of social expression, rather than in their visual qualities.25 Semioticians have discussed comics, but their writings have not influenced Art Historians. For the most part, comics have remained an odd beast—incomprehensible, inapprehensible. Yet we maintain that comics ought to fascinate Art Historians, for they use the very conventions of visual representation favored by Art Historians in highly original ways, combining words and images to tell stories. They use balloons to present thought and speech. While painting usually tells its story in a single image, comics employ image sequences, resorting to a more cinematographic and sequential device. This procedure, however, finds some of its sources in early Renaissance fresco cycles, such as Piero della Francesca’s Legends of the True Cross, painted for the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, Italy.26 George Herriman, who died in 1944, is generally thought to be the greatest comics artist in history. Highly prolific, he was admired by Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning.27 While there are many coffee-table presentations of Herriman’s art, his comics have not been fully reprinted, and only very recently has a full biography on him been published.28 Two attempts have been made to prepare annotated editions of his works, but neither reached publication. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, originally published between 1980 and 1991, is a magnificently successful telling of a very serious story. In 1992, it was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. And there have been other attempts to produce graphic novels, or serious storytelling comics. To cite just one example, portions of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time were published as a graphic novel by Stéphane Heuet. In any good library or bookstore, one ought to find such graphic novels.

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26  George Herriman’s Krazy Kat daily strip for September 4, 1918.

In 2010, the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea, New York, presented The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis.29 Crumb attracts attention because his transgressive images fascinate. Herriman, Spiegelman, and R. Crumb are, indeed, exceptional artists. These works of art invite a comparison with medieval illuminated manuscripts, such as the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry by the Limbourg brothers, which also combine words with images in a rich and compelling way. Starting in the early Renaissance, artists began presenting narrative through visual terms. Words were worthless—worse even, they dumbed down the contents of the painting. Giorgio Vasari describes Bruno di Giovanni, a fourteenth-century painter who, unable to make his figures come alive, was Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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27  Circle of Nicolas Poussin (possibly painted by Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy), Ulysses Discovering Achilles Among the Daughters of Lycomedes. Oil on canvas. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims, France.

persuaded to issue words from their mouths, as, indeed, in a modern cartoon. “This expedient,” Vasari notes, “pleases certain boors to-day, who are served therein by craftsmen as vulgar as themselves.”30 It is interesting that, even then, using words to “explain” pictures was considered “vulgar.” The Frankfurt School did not invent anything. Long ago, the British historian and critic Roger Fry, mentioned previously, offered an instructive analysis,31 claiming that within visual art there is a distinction between formal spatial relations and storytelling. Analyzing a picture he thought to be by Poussin, Achilles Discovered Among the Daughters of Lycomedes32 (now attributed to Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy),33 he found that Art Beyond the Boundaries of the Art World 

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this marvelous exercise in formal composition tells a boring story. Admitting that this way of thinking would not have made any sense to Poussin, he goes on to consider other examples that similarly involve making a distinction between formal relations and the story. A work of art must create formal relations, Fry maintained. Mere storytelling belongs just to literature—this was the diktat of the modernist Art World for most of the twentieth century. While these tenets are eroding by the day, it remains interesting to see where we come from. Elsewhere, Fry compares John Singer Sargent with Édouard Manet. Sargent, who learned from Manet, is not an artist at all, not even a bad painter, but only an illustrator, says Fry. That same phrase has recently been applied to Jack Vettriano, a Scottish painter whose popularity was far more significant than his presence in museums until 2013, when Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, in Glasgow, offered the artist a show—another indicator of the fast-evolving situation that transpierces the once very taut membrane of the Art World. Yet things still are not simple: according to one critic, Vettriano is “not even an artist.”34 Since Duchamp’s presentation of his ready-mades in 1917, attempts to present artifacts that look like nonart as works of art have become very familiar. But it is more difficult to exhibit artifacts that are actual works of art (Vettriano) within the Art World. Things that initially seemed too ordinary or too unattractive to be art are gradually making their way into the Art World, including performance works and various forms of Conceptual art, neither of which necessarily includes physical objects. And so now it is surprising to be told that Vettriano’s paintings—or Sargent’s, for that matter—are not works of art. Whether they are good or bad works of art is another question; and that is left to you, each individual reader, to decide. Just as Fry argued that a work of art cannot, as such, tell a story, so people who do not think that comics are art claim that no combination of words and images can be a work of art. The history of modernism and postmodernism reveals many counterexamples to this claim. Braque and Picasso included words in their cubist collages, and, more recently, many conceptual artists have combined words and images. In the 1970s, Bill Beckley combined photographic images and text in his works, such as Deirdre’s Lip (1978). “A gradual Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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bridging of the gap between word and image,” Thomas McEvilley writes in his account of Beckley, “was one of the central events in twentieth-century art.”35 We might see in this development an early sign of an abolition of the gap between Art World art and Wild Art.

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9. The Fluid Nature of Aesthetic Judgments When trash claims our attention and demands to be noticed the interaction is one that makes an ethical claim on us. The experience entangles us in new networks of obligation, and makes us reconsider our ways. —Guy Hawkins,“Sad Chairs” A blueprint does not predict the cracks that will develop in the future; it describes an ideal state that can only be approximated. —Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

W

hen we offered a short sketch of the analysis presented in this book to an eminent museum director, he was worried, thinking that if what we are saying is right, then perhaps everything he has done was misguided or mistaken. Clearly, we had not correctly explained our claims, for that is far from what we are suggesting. There is nothing wrong with how our museums function. What is wrong is how we have understood and approached them and, possibly, how they have projected themselves to their larger audience. The aim of the canon is to bring stability to our aesthetic judgments. The museum and Art History need some principle of order, criteria of excellence that, in turn, will enable experts/curators to provide guidance to everincreasing audiences. Individuals may disagree among themselves, but public collections and academic institutions require solid structures, or so, at least, goes the general perception. And yet, as we have seen, the canon does not quite deliver on this promise of solidity and objectivity—simply because it cannot. A great deal of art comes into the Art World and a great deal goes out. And there is plenty of art that will never come within the periphery of the Art World. Within the Art World, standards of excellence are continuously shifting. Here, then, we come to this essential paradox. The more labor that goes into laying down these ordering structures, the more the flux continues. Creating a stable canon is as hopeless as building a stable sandcastle near water’s edge when the tide is rising. According to Arthur Danto’s famous observation, which was developed in different terms by the philosopher George Dickie, a work of art is an object that is seen and perceived within an art-institutional envelope.1 What brings

28  Mount Rushmore. 29  Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C.

Richard Tuttle’s 3rd Rope Piece (1974), a three-inch length of cotton clothesline and nails, into the Art World? Danto has said a great deal about the institutions that allow us to distinguish a Tuttle, for instance, from what he calls indiscernibles—visually indistinguishable objects that are not inside the Art World.2 Danto’s analysis was inspired by Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964), which in a very original way extended the realm of Art World art. He offers a very different definition of art from his precursors. What has not Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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changed, however, is the need for some exclusionary principle, some way of picking out the contents of the Art World. How and why do so many art objects remain outside of the Art World? Few works of public art are as well known as Gutzon Borglum’s Mount Rushmore monument (1941), yet it is difficult to place this vastly popular and, by any token, extraordinary artistic exploit within the Art World. Everybody recognizes it, but the name of the artist is scarcely known in Art History and certainly never featured in the textbooks on modernism, even though he encountered Rodin and learned from him when he was studying in Paris during the 1890s. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial raises very similar issues. A similar tension animates works outside or on the periphery of the Art World: although graffiti has been much discussed by sociologists, on the whole it has only very recently begun to enter portions of the Art World—in homeopathic doses. Counting as many as three solo retrospectives at MoMA, Frank Stella’s status within the Art World is undeniable. And so it is oddly revealing, and ironic, that the title of his one published book, Working Space (1986), comes from some graffiti in New York City, reproduced in color in his book but with no analysis and no attempt to identify the artist.3 This is another sign of an increasing exchange between the two worlds. Fashion raises similarly interesting problems. Does clothing belong in the Art World? We do maintain that, to a vast extent, one’s own choice of clothing every morning stems from a set of aesthetic decisions—and hence directly relates to the sphere of decisions that leads to the creation of a work of art. Garments can, of course, be displayed in museums as more than the background to period displays, and curatorial examples have called for much critical notice in the past decade or so, from Giorgio Armani at the Guggenheim to Alexander McQueen at the Met—the latter being one of the ten most visited exhibitions in the history of the museum. Yet the fashion galleries devoted to freestanding displays of garments at the Met are ironically among the least visited parts of this institution. Is this perhaps because of an odd curatorial decision by which garments were once displayed as if they were sculptures?4 In the 2006 exhibition AngloMania, for example, English fashion was displayed to reveal the social history of the time—not as an object of enjoyment for the senses.5 The Fluid Nature of Aesthetic Judgments

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We have argued elsewhere that art galleries can in some ways be compared to upscale clothing stores.6 Just as grand commercial galleries such as Pace resort to elegant displays to sell their products, so, too, do Armani stores. Like discrete galleries, the high-end shops thus embody the familiar modernist aesthetic: less is more. Indeed, the link between clothing and art is strikingly visible at the heart of the Art World: few professionals, outside of those in fashion, enjoy dressing more than curators, successful artists, and art writers. And why not? Why not say explicitly that art and fashion are organically connected? Why not tease out further the links between the two? Baudelaire allowed himself to discuss this topic in his great essay “The Painter of Modern Life”: “Fashion should . . . be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-à-brac that the natural life accumulates in the human brain. . . . Every fashion is charming, relatively speaking, each one being a new and more or less happy effort in the direction of Beauty, some kind of approximation to an ideal for which the restless human mind feels a constant, titillating hunger.”7 Of course, like fashion, which tends to distinguish elite attire from commonplace garments, the Art World defines itself by principles of exclusion. But this used to be the case. Today, an unprecedented explosion of very affordable and no less striking fashion brands has been transforming the world of fashion as it was known. Recent fashion companies such as Part Deux or Café Forgot offer good examples of what we are discussing here and interesting parallels with the worlds of Wild Art. In fashion as in art, an abiding paradox remained unsolved: while almost everyone within the Art World has relied, consciously or not, on some canonical system, there is radical disagreement about what belongs to that canon. We prefer, rather, to turn the terms of analysis around, focusing upon the principle of agreement. A canon is needed because the Art World is structured like a pyramid, built on an axiological system including a few and excluding many artifacts. The focus of our analysis, then, on the arbitrariness of the canon is not intended to undermine the belief in the need for a canon—or to refute the difficult-to-question aesthetic merits of the works upheld within this canon. Rather, it is to urge us to consider that one canon Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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30  AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 3–September 4, 2006.

does not exclude another, that our world, with its vast complexities, contains multitudes of canons. We believe, indeed, in the possibility of a multitude of alternative canons—not superseding or excluding each other but complementing each other. When Leo Steinberg criticized formalism for its concern with just one criterion in his essay “Other Criteria,” published in 1972, he very much anticipated our analysis. What our Art World needs now is many other criteria. Similarly, in fashion today, there exists an innumerable diversity of new and often short-lived brands that have absolutely transformed the world of fashion and bear deep analogies with the grassroots Wild Art phenomena. The Fluid Nature of Aesthetic Judgments

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Another paradox: Art World artists are generally permitted to appropriate other people’s work, such as when Philip Taaffe made a version of Barnett Newman’s Zips. But when artists outside the Art World make appropriations, like Luciano Pavarotti’s painting that quotes Ingres’s Thetis Appeals to Zeus, they are not taken seriously and are barely even noticed within the Art World. Why is that? Art Historians trace genealogies, identifying the sources of pictures. They are interested in how the early nineteenth-century German painter Johann Friedrich Overbeck recreated Raphael’s Madonnas, but little interest is paid to Meatloaf ’s album covers, which, like many popular illustrations, are similarly derived from Renaissance and Baroque art. Although generations of Art Historians have been hard at work analyzing Raphael’s Saint George, one is unlikely to find discussions of the fascinating and diverse ways in which this theme has been carried into popular art. Why? A more borderline example: Boris Lurie, in his drive to go against the grain of History, resisted the all-powerful forces of the Art World. In 1960, along with fellow artists Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, he established NO!art, an anti-art movement that openly rebelled against the dominant artistic currents at the height of modernism. Against Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, Lurie, himself a Holocaust survivor, produced Railroad Collage (1959), in which a half-naked pinup girl is placed over a mass of corpses stacked on a railway flatcar. Lurie’s work counted among the billions of artworks mostly rejected (or simply ignored) by the majority of curators, although there has been some recent attention to his work from curators interested in exploring the liminal spaces of the art world and Lurie’s antiestablishment stance. His case is highly interesting in that he fought back by creating a rebellious movement and left behind a foundation whose mission statement proposes a program of grants of up to $25,000 to “unrecognized, innovative artists in all media . . . whose work broadly embraces the spirit of the NO!art movement.”8 An inverted paradox: well-established Italian postwar artist Mimmo Rotella (who made décollages, or vandalized commercial posters), together with fellow “Affichistes” Raymond Hains and Jacques de la Villeglé, is often discussed under the ideological umbrella of Guy Debord’s Situationists—a Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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stamp of the highest sanction within the Art World. “All the artists had to do was select a composition and remove it; the deep subversiveness of the project lay in the fact that no singularly privileged individual could take credit for the fashioning of the work.”9 Now, however, despite the ennobling resonance of these works with Situationism, anti-capitalism, and anti–Society of the Spectacle, these objects have made their way into the commercial Art World—and have become somewhat spectacular themselves. Lurie’s art has not really entered the Art World, even though it is beginning to be shown, but the Affichistes lie at the core of the Art World, having activated very analogous mechanisms. The boundaries of the Art World are increasingly porous and open, and unpredictable, as our students have reminded us, and we join them in finding the recent complex and surprising interchanges between the Art World and Wild Art worlds felicitous. Banksy, long self-positioned as an outsider, has suddenly enjoyed significant Art World success, including a presentation at Sotheby’s. His art is available for sale on eBay, and books have been written about him. The triangulated vector of the Art System (museum, academe, and art market) has seemingly embraced Banksy, who beforehand, for a while, vehemently rejected it and epitomized the anti–Art System. Yet it would be wrong to assume that the Art World does not continue to depend upon and defend its own boundaries. When Eric Doeringer sold art bootlegs in Chelsea, several art dealers, failing to see the irony of the situation, called the police, treating him similarly to the way sellers of fake upscale clothing and watches on Canal Street are treated.10 The film Avatar, released in 2009, had, within months, been evaluated by an enormous number of viewers.11 An instantaneous box office success, the film nonetheless failed to convince many film department curators or “serious” film critics. Furious arguments ensued about its validity and novelty, following the same line as prior hackneyed debates within the cinematographic world: Can this film be hailed as having significantly pushed the boundaries of the industry and introduced a new genre, or is this a mere façade on another box office spectacular exploit of little consequence? The debate is still not settled. The nineteenth-century critic Friedrich Schiller, a major figure of the Romantic era, declared that the reason the political revolution of 1789 failed The Fluid Nature of Aesthetic Judgments

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31  Eric Doeringer at Geisai Miami, 2007.

was because humankind first needs to go through “a complete revolution in [our] . . . way of thinking” in order “to clear a way . . . from common reality to aesthetic reality, from mere life-serving feelings to feelings of beauty.”1 Today, it seems that the conditions Schiller was hoping for are becoming closer to our daily experience. The early Romantic conception of the artist as a solitary hero, ahead of the masses, whose task is not only to run far ahead of, or above, the crowds but, in effect, to prepare the ground for a full revolution to follow once he has succeeded in propelling a complete revolution in the way people feel, had a very long legacy. “In art,” stated Nietzsche in his Twilight of the Idols, “man enjoys himself as perfection.”13 This is the syndrome of the avant-garde agent: Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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a military concept that has been operating as the central theoretical and historical engine to promote an interpretation and validation of the avant-garde artist as the forerunner engaged in reconnaissance—preparing the ground for the troops that will follow and take over a particular field (whether a physical field or, as in this case, metaphorically, a historic field). It is, therefore, no surprise to find that almost every revolutionary model—as it carries forward its share of utopian ideals and messianic promises for the future—will look at avant-garde artists as establishing a cultural and ideological base from where the revolutionary programs will have all the more chance to blossom fully. As Anatoly Lunacharsky, the people’s commissar of education in the newly formed Soviet Republic of Russia, said to the composer Sergei Prokofiev (almost quoting Schiller without knowing it), “You are a revolutionary in music as we are revolutionary in life—we should work together.”14 Interestingly, as early as 1917 (or 1918), the Proletkult was founded with about two hundred associations with artistic programs; by 1920, it counted four hundred thousand members all over Soviet Russia. But it would have been difficult then, even in a revolutionary context, for anyone to imagine that art could be found anywhere outside galleries or museums. Today, one would find such a stance limiting or frustrating, for one would be deprived of layers upon layers of artistic/aesthetic creations that can be seen almost anywhere. No sooner does one discover that the distinction between high and popular art is a mirage than one finds new possibilities for all sorts of surprises and enjoyment in art-outside-high-art experiences. Much acknowledgment of pluralistic values has been made in the fields of sociology, the social sciences, and cultural studies. The fuller impact of these findings has yet to find its proper expression in the field of Art History. We find here Gregory Lewis Bynum’s comments very useful in this context. He resorts to Kant in a different field from ours (human rights education) but from a perspective very close to ours: Kant’s philosophy is especially useful for provoking us to think afresh about situations where great stress and challenge are entailed in teaching and learning about human rights, such as situations where cross-cultural challenges arise—challenges that may require difficult self-criticism, criticism of one’s own society, and efforts to step outside of one’s own cultural The Fluid Nature of Aesthetic Judgments

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perspective. In such situations people are particularly susceptible to feeling that they have little in common with others, prompting them to ask “What possible commonality could I have with these people, who appear different from myself in such an alienating way?” For bringing us back to ourselves, and into sound moral relations with other people, in such crisis situations, Kant’s philosophy—conceived in and for a time of moral crisis—has useful resources.15

And in the field of Art History, we found that Keith Moxey also made a claim that echoes and supports our way of thinking: “A future museum of global tourism would effectively take the opportunity to draw attention to the incommensurable differences that characterize aesthetic response in different cultural contexts. In other words, rather than present works of art as if their value were established and universally recognized, they would be presented in such a manner as to allow the viewer to think about the circumstances that enabled certain artifacts to be recognized as ‘art.’”16 But, as we reach the end of this book, let us return for a moment to the account of Heinrich von Kleist’s story “On the Puppet Theater,” found in the first pages of our book: “Just as two lines intersecting at a point after they have passed through infinity will suddenly come together again on the other side, or the image in a concave mirror, after traveling away into infinity, suddenly comes close up to us again, so when consciousness has, as we might say, passed through an infinity, grace will return; so that grace will be most purely present in the human frame that has either no consciousness or an infinite amount of it, which is to say either in a marionette or in a god.”17 What would an Art World activated according to Kantian lines of thinking look like? It would be far more human, less dogmatic, more open, and ready to be challenged rather than defensive and set in its ways. It would be about others as much as about ourselves. It would be about dialogues rather than monologues. It would be more prone to ask questions and seek reflections than find answers and make assertions. It would no longer be about valuing such terms as “criticality,” “société du spectacle,” and “historical avantgarde.” It would be a world that encourages curiosity rather than cognitive foreclosure. It would stay away from ideological a priori and accept the principle that each may have a valid claim to utter his/her aesthetic preferences. It would be opening up to the ethics of discussion rather than comforting an Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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authoritarian system of recognition of those who know versus those who do not. It would be a world in which specialists would welcome nonspecialists to round-table discussions, in which nonspecialists, respecting the knowledge and experience of their specialist hosts, would be equally welcome and valued for what the specialists do not have: a freshness and openness about artworks that the specialists could never retrieve. Kant wrote extensively about politics but, alas, never wrote about the politics of the Art World, which was then in its utter infancy. In “What Is Enlightenment?,” he lays down his qualified optimism, writing, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. . . . The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude [Dare to be wise]!”18 If free discussion is permitted, as was not the case under the old regime (Kant’s Prussia was part of that world), then we may arrive at the truth—but a truth that is the result of a process, of an ongoing system of checks and balances, of a continuous dialogue, not the truth uttered through some monolithic dogmatic judgment. In the Art World, if we are all permitted to freely discuss our aesthetic judgments—at times, obviously, in dire opposition to each other— then it is possible that we may achieve some consensus of a new kind. Such consensus, despite the tendency to attack anything attached to consensus, is not the equivalent of some abstract and vapid common denominator among diverse positions but an actual serious attempt to take this multitude of diverse options seriously. This is why much of the traditional mode of teaching Art History (in which we have participated) is misguided. Instead of teaching students to trust, or to develop, their own aesthetic judgments, we offer and reproduce for them the same old accounts of what is best in art. This practice discourages independent thinking as well as development of the faculties needed to form aesthetic judgments (Urteilskraft). Yet free discussion does exist. It takes place, to a huge extent, within the realm of popular culture—films, music, and fashion especially, but also a quantity of various new art forms that are the by-products of the creation of the internet in 1989. Go online and you will find quasi-endless open debate about these contemporary art forms. We are not contending that these media The Fluid Nature of Aesthetic Judgments

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are themselves inherently democratic. But the Art World, as it stands, even through the various attempts to popularize access to the museum, remains a product of the authoritarian system that presided over these institutions for decades, indeed, centuries. Our analysis involves great faith in the process of open debate. People who believe in the primacy of expert opinion, whether they are on the political left or on the right, will reject this account: left and right are here two equivalent forms of conservatism, especially when they are embedded within the fabric of an academic art institution. It is ironic to think that our own US-branded, Marx-inspired academic university professors, often heading important departments in the Ivy League system (hardly known for its propensity to advocate change), are as attached to preserving the established status quo as their frenemies in the Republican camp: none of them welcome challenge to their positions of power; none of them would seem willing to rethink their capacity to orient the ideological trends that have, by and large, dominated the values of the Art World. We have come to think that the Art System, pitted between two poles of arch-conservatism, to the right and to the left, can only benefit from a real change from its base— from the perspective of its actual users, artists, students, and outsiders who, free from any investment in the established powers of the Art World, can acquire the maturity “to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” Kant’s words, in this text of 1783, have never sounded so urgent.

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10. Kitsch, a Nonconcept A Genealogy of the Indesignatable Good and evil flow out of the same spring. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations No work of art, no thought, has a chance of survival unless it bears within it repudiation of false riches and high-class production, of colour films and television, millionaire’s magazines and Toscanini. —Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life There are some people who feel that fiction should be easy to read, that it’s a popular medium that should communicate on a somewhat conversational wavelength. On the other hand, there are those who feel that fiction can be challenging . . . that it’s okay if a person needs to work a bit while reading. . . .

Much in the way that would-be civilized debates are polarized by extreme thinkers on

either side, this debate has been made to seem like an either/or proposition, that the world has room for only one kind of fiction, and that the other kind should be banned. . . .

But while the polarizers have been going at it, there has existed a silent legion of

readers, perhaps the majority of readers of literary fiction, who don’t mind a little of both. —Dave Eggers, foreword to David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

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hat is of paramount interest to us in this venture is the art that lies beyond any kind of legitimizing or ideological system. Our interests draw us, with the same gratifying intensity, to art made within the system as to art made outside the system. In Dave Eggers’s funny words, we “don’t mind a little of both.” But for more than a century and a half, ever since the birth of the so-called avant-gardes (later renamed, through Peter Bürger’s oxymoronic twist, the “historical avant-garde”), art production has been pitted between the significant, historically valid, politically valiant, first known to few, and eventually recognized by most art forms versus facile art, immediately appealing to the “masses” and deprived of any “critical” content. It was William Powell Frith’s The Railway Station versus Manet’s Olympia, or Kitsch versus the avant-garde, to borrow a term from Clement Greenberg’s pivotal modernist essay. The convenient, and somewhat lazy, designation of this mass of indefinable, unwatchable art by the nondescript term “Kitsch” is symptomatic of the problem that we are tackling here. It was eventually replaced by another moniker: art of the spectacle, which has come to designate the same artistic reality. Let us first look at this strange term: Kitsch. It is a nonconcept, defined not so much by what it designates but by its distance from its opposite, by what it is not. Kitsch functions as a repellent logical engine. It offers a buffer, or fence, to refer to what is not high art. However, the simple (simplistic) logical binary opposition that underpins the use of this term is then reinforced by a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) moral undertone: Kitsch is not only low; it is bad (for one’s mental and moral health). High art is good. Kitsch designates what art ought not to be. Kitsch is often subsumed under a

whole umbrella of pejorative adjectives: garish, vulgar, facile, tacky, lowbrow, crowd-pleasing, commercial, over-the-top.1 The second definition given by Merriam-Webster is interesting: “a tacky or lowbrow quality or condition / teetering on the brink of kitsch—Ron Miller.”2 Indeed, Kitsch is seductive but dangerous. One may easily fall prey to its allure and temptation, but there is something pernicious, toxic, and harmful about Kitsch. Something devilish lies therein. And here we face an interesting aspect of the use of this repellent: there is a remnant of a puritanical attitude underneath this defensive move on the part of the Art World officials. This is, after all, a fear of being contaminated by something too easily pleasurable. Art should not be so pretty. It should be compelling, impressive, awe-inspiring, and demanding. It should not be fun. That is much too light a notion to be attached to such a highbrow, spirited activity as art. Or, to refine this distinction, if fun (much too vulgar a term) or aesthetic fulfillment is to result at all from one’s confrontation with a work of art, it should only come as the result of an assiduous reflective effort, as the yield of a serious engagement in the criticality of the work—the essential virtue to be derived from works of art that matter. One of us can remember the astonishing experience of entering a Chelsea gallery to encounter an exhibition of William Anthony. His images, drawn in a regressive, childish style, often caricature old master and modernist art, to comic effect. There is little such self-consciously funny art in galleries today. A symptom of this puritanical undertone at work within much of the Art World is the fact that we seldom come across anyone laughing out loud within the Art World. The Art World is serious. Laughing is pernicious, futile, a bothersome noise. One laughs in a circus, not in an art museum. Art can be sensuous, but this sensuousness by itself is of little good: it must be sublimated. It needs to be directed toward the substance of all artistic endeavors that are worthy of this name. (Kitsch is simply unworthy of this name; it is unnamable.) As Herbert Marcuse wrote in 1977, “The sensuous substance of the Beautiful is preserved in aesthetic sublimation. The autonomy of art and its political potential manifest themselves in the cognitive and emancipatory power of this sensuousness.”3 Therein lies one of the most notorious conceits of the Art World, largely inspired by Frankfurt-style Marxist critique, according to which art—versus Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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32  William Anthony, Laocoön, 2015. Oil on canvas.

Kitsch—properly understood and properly sublimated, is endowed with emancipatory powers. How does this process occur? What kind of examples have we seen of a painting by Mondrian, or any work of art for that matter, that has emancipated the laboring masses from the daily alienation of the oppressive capitalist system?4 This beautiful idea that one finds consistently throughout the ranks of the “liberal Marxist” tradition, from Adorno to Buchloh via Peter Bürger, Marcuse, Greenberg, and others, has magnificently enabled aesthetic thinkers of the “Left” to remain in good faith while continuing along with their daily jobs, deciphering the coded messages of the work of art. It is an interesting argument and a paradoxical means of sustaining a socially responsible society, as noted by Robert C. Morgan in the introduction to Greenberg’s late texts: “Responsible criticism relies on aesthetic experience as the source of its value judgments. To make such judgments requires an actively engaged dialogue with a work of Kitsch, a Nonconcept

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art. . . . Whether one agrees with the critic’s judgment may ultimately be less important than how we come to terms with a critic’s experience.”5 Yet this nonconcept has performed a remarkable service in the Art System, as it has essentially served as a kind of buffer zone (fuzzy and indefinable as it may be) around the circumference of the Art World. Andrei Tarkovsky’s extraordinary film Stalker offers a good and poignant visual metaphor of this strange and intriguing zone: an aesthetic marsh composed of unrecognizable species and filled with apparently threatening elements that linger in an indefinable space beyond the perimeters of the Art World. The history of this term, interestingly, is coextensive with the history of modernity. It is unthinkable to talk about Kitsch in a medieval context, for instance. “Though Kitsch is a phenomenon that can be traced back at least to late antiquity, some of its modern forms spring directly from the fussy and flamboyant decoration that weighed down many baroque churches,” wrote legendary MoMA curator William S. Rubin in 1961. “Manipulated by a master like Bernini, such materials are magnificently transformed, but in lesser hands they degenerate into superfluous trash.”6 In fact, an odd and ironic aspect of Kitsch is that it is supposed to refer to the taste of the uneducated masses prior to any contact with the avantgarde. The commoners, born ignorant, may shed this ignorance if they accept the toll of education. Indeed, one of the foremost implications of the term “Kitsch” is that taste is a matter of education—of which the masses are characteristically deprived. And in order to resist the pervasive, alluring, illusory pleasure derived from these lowlife forms of popular culture, the masses must make a supreme effort. Here, we quote Adorno encouraging those who can to forbear the fun of listening to pop music: “Resistance is regarded as the mark of bad citizenship, as inability to have fun, as highbrow insincerity, for what normal person can set himself against such normal music?”7 Kitsch became operative as a taste buffer as soon as the masses became part of the taste-making social mechanism. With the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions, taste became the preserve of all, requiring a new means of establishing distinctions. Let us refer briefly to a remarkable book: Gillo Dorfles’s Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, published in 1968. This book, we should be clear, does not aim to condone bad taste. Neither of us Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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would be remotely interested in such a perverse effort. We are convinced that there is plenty of bad taste around us, but we are unconvinced that the line of demarcation between good and bad taste is one that can be traced clearly and neatly through various competing areas of aesthetic interest. Our intention lies elsewhere. First, we do not think it is possible to boil down infinitely complex aesthetic diversities to a simple Manichean opposition, whether good versus bad (as Clement Greenberg had it) or art versus Kitsch. We are not so much defending Kitsch as hoping to demonstrate the vacuous, obsolete, and inoperative function of this concept—a truly modern concept that has, to devastating effect, created a kind of apartheid throughout the worlds of aesthetics, an apartheid that, alas, when we look at the representation of minorities through statistics of most European and American museums, appears to be more cogent than mere metaphor. Kitsch is a kind of onomatopoeia (suggesting disgust) that points to the forms of mass art and cheap popular entertainment that Adorno tells us to resist. Dorfles offers, even before the table of contents, an etymological definition of the term: “Certain writers claim that the word derives from the English ‘sketch,’ while others attribute it to the German verb etwas verkitschen (‘knock off cheaply’). Giesz attributes it to kitschen, meaning den Strassenschlamm zusammenscharren, literally ‘to collect rubbish from the street’ which in effect is the interpretation closest to the concept of ‘artistic rubbish’ and might be linked to the term ‘junk art.’ This latter term has been used by English and American writers for a certain type of art which makes use of refuse taken bodily from the rubbish dump.”8 The entire construction of the nonconcept of Kitsch is based on the idea of trash aesthetics. There is no doubt that all of us, in front of certain objects, experience nausea or horror. Yet there is no particular family of art objects that can simply be described as trash aesthetics. In the same way that each one of us holds a particular notion of the sublime, each one of us will experience disgust in front of different types of art objects. A noteworthy paradox here is that, while the notion of Kitsch is built around the concept of trash, a whole layer of modern and postmodern aesthetics is also built on this concept. “There is nothing wrong with the arbitrary process that presides over establishing those [historical] values. . . . Kitsch, a Nonconcept

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We all have preferences and act somewhat arbitrarily when we opt for one work of art rather than another. There is something wrong with this arbitrary process only when it conceals itself in the guise of a historical authority or institutional power that claims universal truth.”9 So what modernism values (trash aesthetics, cf. Rauschenberg) is also what the theory of Kitsch (the bastion of defense of modernism) abhors, another example of the conceit and superficiality of this binary system of exclusions. The simple binary opposition (Kitsch / high art) that could still make sense in the 1970s has become all the more problematic today with the proliferation of images that has inundated our daily worlds for the past decades. Simultaneously, the frontiers between the Art World and the non–art worlds have become increasingly porous and hazy. Artists, above all, love to tamper with materials that the Art World of the previous generation deemed barely acceptable. Consider the amount of Kitsch that has been appropriated in the past forty or so years—a shift signaled in New York by curator Douglas Crimp’s 1977 Pictures show at Artists Space. Writing on the significance of the moment, Douglas Eklund, curator of photography at the Met and organizer of the museum’s 2009 Pictures Generation, explained, What these fledgling artists did have fully to themselves was the sea of images into which they were born—the media culture of movies and television, popular music, and magazines that to them constituted a sort of fifth element or a prevailing kind of weather. Their relationship to such material was productively schizophrenic: while they were first and foremost consumers, they also learned to adopt a cool, critical attitude toward the very same mechanisms of seduction and desire that played upon them from the highly influential writings of French philosophers and cultural critics such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva.10

One might say that from the late 1970s onward, it was cool to use Kitsch as a source of artistic production, provided it was seasoned with a good dose of Barthes or Kristeva. It was fine to recycle trash images borrowed from pop culture as long as one made sure to signify to the viewers that this was done with irony and criticality. Poststructuralism rendered looking at Kitsch acceptable again, but only with a certain insider sensibility, indicating that Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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one knew exactly what one was doing. Kitsch was critically deciphered and, therefore, was made inodorous, painless, tasteless, and ultimately un-Kitsch. Kitsch is to the Art World what barbaros is to anthropology or geography. Barbaros was used by the Greeks to designate those who did not belong, who were un-Greek. It is believed that the word refers to those who make incomprehensible sounds when they speak, or those who do not speak the proper language (Greek).11 What the two terms (Kitsch/barbarian) hold in common is their convenience. Both are there to be used by lazy people who are unwilling to make an effort to comprehend those who speak an incomprehensible language, or to assess those whose sense of taste differs from their own. The late Tzvetan Todorov conducted ample research on this, arriving at the extraordinary conclusion that the idea of barbarism is not so much about who does not belong but about who rejects the other: “The concept of barbarity is legitimate and we must be able to draw on it to designate, at all times and in all places, the acts and attitudes of those who, to a greater or lesser degree, reject the humanity of others, or judge them to be radically different from themselves, or inflict shocking treatment on them.”12 In short, the first act of barbarism is to call others barbaroi, refusing to give them the time of day or any serious consideration because of their ultimate difference. Because they do not speak one’s language, they produce nothing but superfluous verbiage. Fortunately, many Greek intellectuals in the ancient world (Strabo and Eratosthenes, to name just two) vehemently stood up against such discriminatory and exclusive attitudes. Our point is that today, alas, over two millennia later, such discriminatory and exclusive attitudes remain alive within the field of aesthetics, as indeed in other areas: race, religion, class, and gender distinction. The other (the barbaros) is seldom spontaneously welcome. The ties between the concepts of barbarism and Kitsch are even clearer to us when we look at Todorov’s secondary tier of distinction: “treating others as inhuman, as monsters, as savages is one of the forms of this barbarity. A different form of it is institutional discrimination toward others because they don’t belong to my linguistic community, or my social group, or my psychological type.”13 The Art World is indeed prone to carry on such discriminatory practices, and we believe that this is one of the abiding reasons why the museum world Kitsch, a Nonconcept

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remains the preserve of a largely white, undiversified public. On the whole, it is resistant to the idea of looking outside its own boundaries, as other spheres of taste are deemed incompatible and unacceptable to its set of values and too risky. Following precisely the definition of barbarism given by Todorov, we may logically conclude that the Art World can, to some extent, be described as a barbaric entity. Saint Paul was familiar with this as he wrestled with a large linguistic and cultural diversity: “However many diverse languages there are in the world, none of them is not a language. If then I don’t know the meaning of the sound, I will be a barbaros to him who speaks it, and he who speaks it will be a barbaros to me.”14 Saint Paul’s definition of linguistic diversity, and the ensuing mutual disregard that occurs as a result of a lack of mutual understanding, applies surprisingly well to our current cultural and aesthetic diversities, with the continuing unlikelihood that occupants of a particular sphere of taste will communicate with occupants of a different sphere of taste. Is a barbarian the one who does not speak my language, or the one who holds different tastes from mine or fails to see the sophistication of my aesthetic choices? Montaigne in the sixteenth century already directed a few sardonic lines at the narrow-minded vision of his compatriots who, while traveling abroad, would only seek and celebrate the company of other Frenchmen. They would then solemnly declare that such and such customs appeared decidedly barbaric: “and why shouldn’t they be barbaric, since they are not French?”15 It is difficult not to laugh at such an absurdly narrow-minded vision of the world, but one is forced to admit that such mind-sets still prevail—and, alas, not only in France but everywhere. We therefore adopt the sense of the term “barbaric” as proposed by Todorov, who borrows it from Montaigne. Those who do not fully acknowledge the humanity of others are barbaric.16 And since the capacity to have taste is one of the principal criteria defining the humanity of others, then the refusal to recognize that those who have different tastes from ours are nonetheless capable of having taste indicates a certain prevalence of barbaric attitudes among the Art World, or any other world, for that matter, established on such discriminatory values. To not fully accept another’s capacity for taste is, to a certain extent, to refuse to completely acknowledge that others are fully human. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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The Art World is certainly not the exclusive preserve of such barbaric tendencies. Supporters and defenders of other forms of taste (totally alien to the Art World) are also capable of casting outrageously dogmatic and hostile judgments. Locked into these mutually exclusive declarations of rejection, no one, from one sphere of taste to another, recognizes the others. The inhabitants of the Art World, though infinitely divided among themselves, have adopted various codes, rituals, and behavioral habits that enable them to identify and filter anyone who fails to understand these codes. We are not proposing that the Art World suddenly open its gates to what lies outside its periphery. Nor are we suggesting that the Art World is doing wrong in closing its gates to what is not itself. We have seen in the previous chapters that the situation is not simple. The peripheries of the Art World, like the membrane of a cell, are porous and regularly admit elements that may not inherently belong. The Art World is far—very far—from being a homogeneous constellation. It is plural. It is diverse in itself. It is conflicted. It refuses easy generalizations and categorizations. We are not saying that the Art World is wrong. We are simply noting that, on the whole, it has been exclusive. Once in the Art World, we may want to wander around in other worlds. Many of us do just that. Then the questions become truly fascinating. What to do with this diversity? How to shuttle judiciously between one art world and another? What connections might there be between these different spheres of taste? We are not saying that all things are equal in the world of aesthetics. Any aesthetic judgment is, by definition, an evaluative judgment, creating a difference. It creates distinctions and establishes claims both positive and implicitly negative. One of the most frustrating, and at the same time fascinating, aporias of the Art World is that it established criteria that were supposed to be (almost) universally valid in order to legitimate the choices within which it operated. This became especially sensitive and exciting within modernism (although it was present within all other fields too). We saw earlier what a wondrous service History rendered the Art World—because History is not anybody’s history, it is not any curator’s capricious decision. It transcends all our mere individualities and enables us to bridge the gap between the truly radical parts of our present creators and the tradition that has been upheld by History as indubitably great. History served (and still serves) as a means Kitsch, a Nonconcept

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of confirming great institutional choices. Likewise, a set of negative criteria was needed in order to exclude le grain de l’ivraie (the wheat from the chaff). One needed to be sure that what was liked outside the Art World remained decidedly outside the Art World. This is where the notion of Kitsch performed a monumental task. Let us be clear. Kitsch does not designate any particular body of taste. It designates what can never be designated within the Art World. When Hegel was asked by one of his students why street accidents and university janitors’ lives had no place within his conception of Universal History, his answer was simple: these mere incidents constitute the dust of history. Analogously, the dust of the Art World is Kitsch. Unmentionable and nameless, it has no definition, despite hundreds of books on this vast segment of art. Kitsch is not to be seen, and if it is seen, it is to be laughed at. It calls only for sneers, jeers, and condescending remarks. It must be excluded in order to guarantee the validity of what is included within the Art World. Kitsch is a modern concept. Indeed, it is constitutive of modernity. The term “modern” sanctions a tiny portion of the creations of the vanguard artists to be recognized eventually by History. These works become institutionalized and the subject of academic investigations, thus becoming an integral object of the Art System. Alternatively, Kitsch, being whatever is left out, will never make it within the Art System. There is a moral undertone to the fight against Kitsch. Being art for everybody, Kitsch is the art of the masses, who are hysterical and dangerous. Left to their own devices, they are seduced by the lure of totalitarianism. This, at least, is the principal thesis of Frankfurt School member Hermann Broch’s 1943 essay “Eine Studie über Massenhysterie: Beiträge zu einer Psychologie der Politik.” This line of thought has had a long life in the tradition of critique against Kitsch, or its more recent avatar, the art of the Spectacle. It is also instructive to look at philosopher Roger Taylor’s radical leftist account, which accepts the familiar distinction between high art and Kitsch but reverses the customary relative evaluation.17 The problem with high art, he argues, is that it may corrupt popular art. Whether this claim is meant to be taken seriously or not, it shows at the very least the superficiality and arbitrariness of any such binary systems of oppositions. Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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Over the last three decades of his life, Tzvetan Todorov led an exemplary effort to analyze and understand what he calls “transcultural” relationships. This is precisely what this book is about. Any type of absolute judgment in cultural matters (“Michelangelo is a genius; everyone knows this”) carries the risk of being, in effect, simply a limited ethnocentric statement and an expression of blind dogmatism. It is a totally different matter to proffer a different kind of aesthetic judgment: “I find Michelangelo an artist with sublime qualities; he is unsurpassable to me.” This latter form of aesthetic judgment, while being just as emphatic as the first, leaves room for one to counter that one finds Michelangelo’s artistic production lacking. Whoever is certain to hold the absolute truth in matters of aesthetics—or in any other field, for that matter—inevitably runs such a risk. And, indeed, it is this type of universal value judgment (the art and cultural values of Western Europe are obviously superior to those of other parts of the world) that formed the core of the ideological equipment of the major colonizing powers in the nineteenth century. For half a century in our academic practices, we have been reaping the benefits of postcolonial theory—and have learned to see the vast theoretical prejudices produced by such universalisms—but this has so far amounted to little more than paying lip service to the message of so-called postcolonial theory. We have probably not wanted to acknowledge, however, that the Art World in general, and Art History in particular, is also structured on such universalisms. And we continue to use general reference books ( Janson, Art Since 1900) that are heavily slanted toward white Euro-American art production and, of course, make next to no reference to art outside the Art System. Some will likely object that the Art World has become more global than ever, pointing to the international circuit of biennials as proof. Indeed, the contemporary Art World can claim to have become truly present on all continents (except Antarctica). Documenta has just been split between Kassel and Athens: how daring! We all have witnessed the astounding proliferation of the now nearcountless global biennials. In 1994, one of us attended the Quinta Bienal de la Habana, which took over the whole city, occupying more than a dozen buildings, and constituted one of the first efforts to represent a vast diversity Kitsch, a Nonconcept

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of art and artists. Indeed, the selection of hundreds of artists and thousands of works came from every continent and a great many countries. After a couple of days spent wandering through this very beautiful city, from one site of the biennial to another, we could not help but think that it was as if all the artists had decided to cooperate and work on the same themes: racial violence (South African artists, still under the burden of Apartheid even though the first nonracial government had just been elected that very year, were heavily represented), female oppression, gender inequity, the fight against AIDS, and the vast economic and human gaps between the North and the South—or, as was insistently emphasized then, between the capitalist world and the socialist world—formed the core of the great number of works of art displayed. None of the artists from the G-10 countries were then represented. It absolutely goes without saying that the themes presented at the Quinta Bienal were, and continue to be, of extreme importance: they address the continuing and growing injustices in the world. But not all artists tackle these issues. Does that make them bad artists? Likewise, the symmetrical question arises: Does the fact that all these artists from different continents are addressing, in an often dramatic and urgent tone, these gripping issues make them great artists? In either case, a connection between the issues addressed and the aesthetic judgments one could cast on the works in question was neither necessary nor obvious.18 Of course, nobody would dare raise such questions, for fear of political incorrectness or being seen as an opponent of the causes presented. Some of these works were powerfully impressive; others were remarkably dull, in our opinions. The irony was that in a country that was still under the grip of Castro, the chocolate magnate Peter Ludwig, one of the richest individuals in Germany at the time and the founder of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, had flown to Cuba and had started buying a large number of the works on display. Suddenly, in one of the last bastions of anticapitalist society, the bug of capitalism managed to infiltrate the biennial. The question of the commercial value of these objects was now running coextensively with the question of their sociopolitical merits and in parallel with the question, often unasked, of their aesthetic merits. Leaving aside for now the collapse of the opposition between the capitalist and the socialist worlds on a cultural ground, the fact is that biennials Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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such as the one in Havana articulate a language that has now become internationally recognizable and seems to be endlessly in demand. When one looks through the catalogues of Documenta today, one is forced to admit that not much has changed. Alas, not much has changed in the grounding socioeconomic conditions that resulted in the plights of nine-tenths of the global population either. It was deemed “cool” for Ludwig, one of the first large-scale “biennial collectors,” to recognize the importance of this plight, as expressed often powerfully through these artworks displayed in Havana in 1994. It goes without saying that the dire human issues addressed by the Havana biennial were and continue to plague the present and future of our planet; yet, as we have previously discussed, no matter how grave an issue considered within a work of art may be, there is no connection between the impact of its message and the aesthetic judgments we may cast upon it; furthermore, one can be an ardent supporter of a particular cause and find its pictorial or artistic representation utterly uninspiring. Throughout the 1990s, the organization of biennials (a daunting project) became a prevalent feature within the contemporary Art World, and, interestingly, out of the hundreds of biennials in existence today, there are only about a dozen international curators—all well-known professionals and respected for their flair and knowledge—who tend to be selected to curate one biennial after another, all around the globe. A new profession has developed out of this unprecedented situation: the “biennial curator.” The Art World has undoubtedly become global, but it remains far from “civilized” if one accepts Todorov’s definition of civilization as the opposite of barbarism, or, as the capacity to look at the other—even though, and maybe precisely because, this other definitely makes no sense for us—with open eyes, compassion, and weakness. The Art World is strong, stronger than ever. But civilization is not its strength.

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Conclusion Civilization has never held any given value without first respecting weakness and carrying within itself a certain dose of femininity, softness, compassion, nonviolence. . . . The first relationship of a child with civilization is his relationship with his mother. —Romain Gary, La nuit sera calme The worst thing in the world is to say,“well I’m going to see this exhibition.” The work should instead be somewhere in between your house and where you’re going to see it, it shouldn’t be at the gallery. —David Hammons, quoted in Jeffrey Deitch, Art in the Streets

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ur approach is not new. Many have pointed out the inherent limitations of the Art World. In fact, for the past few decades, this has been one of the dominating features of what has become known as institutional critique. One of us remembers once walking into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and seeing a Michael Asher installation, in which the artist had invited a group of twelfth-grade students to curate the museum’s collection. An interesting proposition on its own merit, this, of course, turned out to be something that many among the public dreaded. The walls were painted deep purple, and works of art were hung at any given height, some even upside down. Even though this came as a shock to the system usually comprised of pristine walls, it also provided an opportunity for the general public to see what high school visitors to the museum might want a museum to look like. This project, in our opinion, opened as many promises as it revealed inner flaws. The Art System is not equipped to receive twelfth graders and treat them as curators who have acquired extraordinary responsibilities within our society. This tongue-in-cheek exercise by Asher, a champion of institutional critique, revealed the extent of the gap, despite the best and worthiest efforts of education departments, between the museum world and the non-museum world. Some, many, would be discouraged with such a gap; we feel encouraged by it, seeing there an opportunity for creating a bridge between two communities that seldom speak to one another. Again, this book is not a condemnation of the Art World; we are optimists. It is an “invitation to a voyage,” as Baudelaire would put it. Or perhaps it is an invitation to greater and multiple dialogues stripped of condescension. We are interested in mutually nurturing exchanges founded on the notion of sharing different perspectives rather than dialogues dependent on the

separation of roles between those who know and those here to learn. If and when such conversations become possible, it is highly probable that the Art World as we know it will have accomplished a quantum leap—even, perhaps, a revolution. Here we consider the words of Mohand Cherif Sahli, a historian of colonialism who was interested in “decolonizing history”—a phrase barely heard in the 1960s and still rarely heard today—in the context of Art History and the Art World: Pour sortir de l’impasse, il faut une nouvelle révolution copernicienne. Réviser l’outillage intellectuel, enrichir, élargir ou renouveler les postulats, les notions, les définitions, les théories et les valeurs afin d’exprimer, avec une “sympathie”, l’humanité dans sa totalité et sa diversité. Cette révision passe, en particulier, par la décolonisation de l’histoire et de la sociologie.1 In order to find a way out of this impasse, a new Copernican revolution is needed: namely, to recalibrate our own intellectual devices and enrich, broaden, and entirely renew our assumptions, our concepts, our definitions, our theories, and our value system so that we can begin to express, with real sympathy, humanity in its entirety and its full diversity.This massive revision will be taking us, in particular, through an act of decolonizing history and sociology.

Civilization requires a serious dose of femininity, as Romain Gary tells us in the epigraph above; civilization also requires us to rethink history, as Sahli posits, through the categories of sympathy and humanity. We feel confident here that Sahli understood sympathy in its etymological sense: συμπάθεια (sum-patheia), in other words, the possibility of feeling (pathein), listening genuinely to each other’s feelings—not necessarily agreeing with them, but granting full respect to each other’s feelings and to each other’s aesthesis (sphere of sensibility). Let us take this call for the decolonization of Art History—and of the Art World at large—seriously for a moment. We have already pointed to the intellectual vacuity of the entrenched ways of thinking that sustain the division between the active and passive parts of the Art World. We also have attempted to trace some of the historical and ideological threads that have brought this false division about. Here, in the conclusion, we are concerned

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with the consequences of such a division. We do not believe that one form of art, or one Art World, should supersede the previous one, as if November should succeed October. Nor do we believe that another kind of taste police should be introduced. We are not advocating one orthodoxy over another, one new chapel over an old one. In place of modernism, or its poststructuralist surrogates, we do not advocate a neo-postmodernist sequence, as many commentators did in the 1980s. Nor do we believe that ours is a posthistorical era, as Danto claimed in the 1990s. Finally, we do not believe that we should focus on a new and definitive definition of contemporary art, as Terry Smith has argued.2 We are not interested in entering this sequential game, this litany of chess moves by which our pawn should push another, waiting for ours to be pushed next. Rather, we believe that the whole chess game (from Duchamp to Damisch) should leave room for the carnival, the medieval fair, where questions of being a winner or a loser do not mean anything, and where binary systems are out of place, leaving room for all-out participation from audiences not used to being given the light of day. As we announced earlier, we are hoping, if possible, to sit on the margins of the Art World and suggest ways by which a systemic change within that world could be brought about or, as our students have rightly suggested, has already begun to take place. Indeed, we propose something akin to what Sahli proposes—a new Copernican revolution in which the central perspective changes, enabling the beginning of decolonization to take place. There are two levels, we believe, on which this can start (or continue) to happen: the subjective (or intersubjective) and the objective. The former would occur through a greater engagement between the active and passive parts of the Art World, and the latter by allowing a greater diversity of art objects to penetrate the fabric of the Art World. Intersubjectivity

We recently interviewed Thelma Golden, one of the greatest museum directors of her generation, for the Brooklyn Rail and were struck by an anecdote she shared with us about visiting a museum outside of New York and the spontaneous engagement she had with museum guards.

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Golden: . . . My experience with museum guards remains transformative. They are frontline staff, and sometimes have profound interactions with the public. When I was visiting the National Gallery a couple of weeks ago, a museum guard, an African-American man, saw me looking at the Glenn Ligon neon Double America. He came up to me and very politely said, “You know, he’s an African-American artist.” And, “they”—referring to the museum—“bought this.” He knew what that meant. What he saw in me was an African-American woman visiting the museum. He didn’t see me as a curator or museum director. He wanted to make sure that I, as a museum visitor, had a direct connection to the work. Pissarro: How did you respond? Golden: I said, “Thank you for telling me that. Do a lot of people look at it?” He said, “Yes, I talk to them about it. It’s about America.” I have this sort of experience all over the country, and I tell my colleagues about it. It’s inevitable. I was at the Whitney at the Danny Lyon show (Message to the Future, 2016), and a guard said to me: “You have to watch this video, today.” Here we were in the world, feeling what is meant to be yet another moment of the intensity of this brutality to black bodies. And there’s this guard literally in real time, saying that to me. So I feel deeply about this. What’s interesting is when I do out myself to a guard, and I say, “I’m a curator,” they usually say, “Never met an African-American curator.” That opens up some of the most profound conversations I’ve had about institutional ideals. Many guards from the city visit me here because we have these conversations about access, audience, what it means to welcome.3 Mostly people of color, guards tend to be ignored, invisible behind their uniforms. Yet we fully share in Golden’s experience. Conversations with guards about what they keep an eye on often open the gate to serious reflections and exchanges. A few artists, such as Fred Wilson and Andrea Fraser, have based their work on the peculiar marginal role assigned to guards in museums. As a first possible step (among many other promising options) toward a gradual decolonization of the Art World, we believe that guards, who are always present, ought to be given a different status—one in which Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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they are not just present but responsive and engage with the audience; one in which they are not just responsible for the physical safety of the objects under their custody but are given a curatorial role and a real voice in establishing dialogues with viewers, assuming responsibility in engaging in exchanges with the public. This would go a long way toward breaking down the intimidation inherent in most museum institutions. We fully support Thelma Golden’s encouraging words and add, from our curatorial perspective, that working together with security staff through meaningful exchanges has always led to gratifying results. Interobjectivity

Why not open the confines of the museum world to the multitude of parallel worlds of aesthetic and/or artistic objects? We posed the question earlier of what we could do with the great mass of art that is never addressed by the majority of our colleagues in museums and universities. Based on the observations in this book, we can verify that there is not one Art World but a proliferation of art worlds that are essentially competing or in conflict with each other or that function in utter ignorance of each other. These various art worlds possess different operating systems, criteria, and systems of values. And so we propose to establish new ways of traveling through these galaxies. The recognition of a plurality of competing systems is not a novelty. However, the pragmatic and ethical implications of this recognition have never been taken fully into consideration and explored.4 Certainly, Art Historians and their curator colleagues have been slow in exploring these. Pluralistic values have often been acknowledged in sociology and the social sciences, but the full significance of these findings has largely been ignored in visual art and aesthetics. What, then, are the practical consequences of our analysis? The Art World as we think of it today is light years away from whatever the early modern art scene looked like at the end of the eighteenth century. Notwithstanding Kant’s enormous influence, his account of aesthetic judgment has been largely overlooked, or partly misunderstood. Our concern here, however, is not merely to offer a historical account of why these misunderstandings have developed. Many other scholars have already critiqued the present Art Conclusion

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System, and mere critical analysis has a limited range. Our aim, rather, is to conclude with a few constructive suggestions. Given the problems that we have discussed in the body of this book, how can we best proceed? In chorus with Kant’s injunction, we profoundly believe that an aesthetic experience is predicated upon a full and unrestrained exercise of freedom. Hoping that our present, precarious and threatening political framework will preserve, at the very least, the minimum necessary liberties to continue to exert aesthetic judgments, we suggest simply that we open our eyes—unafraid, unrestrained, and unfettered—to the vast diversity of possibilities offered to us when we allow ourselves to see it. When we do that, no longer blinded by preconceptions and unspoken expectations, we can begin to measure the rather narrow confines of our Art World’s concerns and realize how much is to be gained by looking beyond its framework. There are many art chapels. And while the chaplains of many of these chapels may not hold each other in great esteem, we are all able to visit these chapels freely and explore one after the other. As, indeed, in the religious world, nothing should stop one from going to a chapel, or a mosque, or a Shinto shrine, or a Bahá’í house of worship. The metaphor between art and religion is both useful and limited. Whereas there are indeed a great number of different cults and organized religions, it is virtually impossible to be, say, both a Bahá’í worshipper and a Muslim (as the situation in Egypt has recently proven). Conversely, while the tensions and mutual exclusions or ignorance between the many different art worlds are real, nobody will stop us from going to watch a skateboarding competition one night and listening to Tosca the next night—even though, we admit, we know relatively few people who would enjoy both experiences in succession. Religious persecutions have, alas, been part and parcel of our most ignominious history—and have claimed the lives of many millions of people, continuing into the present. The comparison between art and religion stops right there. Mercifully, the Art World does not enforce its dictates, unless it falls under the rule of an authoritarian regime. Aesthetic judgments remain claims and do not turn into matters of fact and violent threats. Again, nothing and nobody stops us from observing one form of art or another that is apparently very distant from the first, even though occasional professional Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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guardians of the Art World might in the past have dreamed of clear divisions and proscribed certain forms of art as being tainted—almost in a moral sense—and therefore undesirable. Today’s Art World, though, is beginning to open itself up to other fields of study—comparative literature, anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and beyond. It is becoming aware of subcultures that would barely have been noticed a few decades ago. Even within the time lapse between the publication of Wild Art and the completion of this book, we can notice great changes: the street art scene is now booming. While we had to look hard to find great examples of graffiti in Brooklyn, one can now book organized tours of the graffiti scene, going from block to block and admiring the proliferation of these wild and often spectacular spurts of expression on the surface of vast concrete or brick walls. Such examples can be multiplied. Let’s look for a moment at another binary distinction—that between Art History and Cultural Studies. Art History, with its pyramidal structure that excludes anything deemed to have lesser merit and any artistic or aesthetic object considered historically inconsequential, is, as we saw, not particularly welcoming to other fields of interest. Cultural studies, in contradistinction, is a flat table on which every object is of equal value and is worthy of consideration and study, almost regardless of its aesthetic merit. Many of our readers will by now think we are proponents of a Cultural Studies approach to the Art World, but we are not. We are looking for a space in between these two epistemological zones. We are hoping to open up the field of Art History to incorporate a number of cultural and social practices not currently considered within this discipline. Instead of a model dominated by a singular pyramid or the alternative flat table with no hierarchy, we propose a third model, by which we recognize that there is an unquantifiable number of value systems of taste that may not even compete with each other, because, on the whole, they ignore each other. Beyond, or beside, the deep aesthetic satisfaction we have experienced in front of the objects we feature here, we would like to suggest ways in which rapport with this aesthetic material can become individually enriching and transformative for those of us tempted to have an aesthetic encounter with it. We truly are looking forward to the rich possibility of a cross-pollination Conclusion

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between Art History and Cultural Studies whereby the Art Historians that we both are would keep our eyes open and our horizons expandable and whereby the would-be Cultural Studies specialists that we might have been would instill value judgments into everything they look at. An essay by philosopher Richard Rorty provides us with a clue as to what these new aesthetic rapports may yield. Thinking more specifically about examples from literature, Rorty refuses the use of terms such as “knowledge” or “truth” in order to apprehend the positive results from immersing oneself in a novel. He claims that our experience with literature—and it is highly tempting here to extend this claim to all the creative fields we have seen— offers a cure far less for ignorance than for egotism. As we live our experience through a novel, the illusion of self-sufficiency is broken down. Rorty goes so far as to suggest that reading a novel can best be compared with meeting new people. Getting to know the characters of a novel is, indeed, close to a deep encounter with people we had never met. With visual art as well, whether or not we personally know the artists who produced the plethora of works that surround us, encountering their work can, indeed, be comparable to establishing a new relationship (as complex and indefinable as all human relations can be).5 Commenting precisely on this fruitful analogy, Todorov concludes, “What novels bring us is not a new mode of knowledge, but a new mode of communication with beings that are different from us. In this sense, novels have more to do with morals than science. The ultimate goal of this experience is not truth but love, supreme form of all human relationships.”6 As mentioned in the epigraph of this book, we take the program offered by Todorov within these few words very seriously. We apply this passage, word for word, to our experiences with this vast field of visual works. For nearly half a century now, we have witnessed many attempts to promote relativistic pluralism or skepticism. Poststructuralists and others have argued against our belief in the possibility of objectivity in the human sciences, and even in hard sciences. Our analysis, it is clear by now, has nothing directly to do with those concerns. Following Kant’s powerful intuitions in his Third Critique, we look at aesthetic judgments as a mode through which to experience visual joy, pleasure, or distaste rather than as sources of truth. We suggest that engaging in an aesthetic experience ought to be the bedrock of our engagement Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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with all fields of knowledge within the Art System. This does not negate the possibility of a cognitive approach, but the aesthetic moment ought to come first, filling in the void left by the collapse of the religious values in the ancien régime. Since the Enlightenment, the Art World has been an essentially secular place.7 Few major Art World artists have been religious, and when they dealt with religious projects (Dalí, Matisse), this was only as a tangential or marginal aspect of their careers. When paintings were transferred from temples or churches to museums, and when they became the object of serious study by academics, curators, and conservators, they ceased to be held as sacred artifacts. Instead, what would have been inconceivable for the artists who created these works occurred: their paintings were suddenly stripped of their once inherent religious telos. Have you ever witnessed curators crossing themselves in a museum in front of a Madonna and Child or a crucifix? This tendency toward secularization is part and parcel of the self-critical process to which Kant alluded in his analyses of the Enlightenment. History shows that once a culture becomes self-critical, it is likely to become skeptical about the claims of revealed religion, or any form of time-honored ideology. What is less obvious, however, are the ways in which Art World art has become a substitute for religion, or, indeed, occasionally a substitute religion. The interpretative battles we have surveyed about the canon have a remarkable resemblance to historic battles fought between various religious sects, with one group seeking to outdo or excommunicate the other. Each group of critics defends itself against its adversaries, in much the same way that theologians battled in the past. Though there is much contentious disagreement, everyone implicitly agrees that there can only be one canon—their own. Analogously, in most religions, everyone assumes that their own theological dogma is the only right one. Here, therefore, we find it useful to apply Kant’s critical ways of thinking to the Art World as he himself once applied it to religious dogmas in eighteenth-century Prussia. Paradigmatically, the great new architecture in our culture is often found in our art museums, not in churches. It is far less frequently found in churches or temples, with a few notably moving exceptions, such as the Church of Light by Tadao Ando in Japan or the Chapel of Saint Lawrence by Avanto in Vantaa, Finland. The fact Conclusion

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that a majority of individuals today claim some degree of religiosity does not diminish the fact that religion and its values no longer dominate our secular modes of life and systems of values. Pronouncements on art have tended, by and large, to assume a quasi-religious tone. The writings of aesthetician Jean-Marie Schaeffer offer a particularly fitting description of the end point of the two-hundred-year trajectory we have been examining: “In more or less bastardized forms, the sacralization of Art has largely permeated most of modern artistic life, and has constituted the Western art world’s aesthetic horizon of expectations, as it were, for nearly two centuries.”8 Schaeffer also sees an interesting connection between the “failure of rationalist theodicies” in providing answers to today’s world, thus leaving a void, and the sacralization of art and its installation within modern temples (museums). Finally, he, too, sees that this process of erecting art into a transcendent form of relation to the world has implied “the rejection of a supposedly common enemy: prosaic reality in all its many hideous guises.”9 Schaeffer’s conclusions and ours strongly echo each other. Looking at the overall process of idealizing particular forms of art to the detriment of others, Schaeffer thus diagnoses the type of discourses on art that has flourished as a result: “It is always a discourse of exclusion, as is shown in particular by Hegel’s Aesthetics, which excludes or at least marginalizes with a sweeping gesture all the artistic and literary genres considered impure or inessential.”10 We could not agree more with the accounting Schaeffer proposes of the losses that resulted from two centuries of what he calls “the mirage of Art”: “Through our addiction to the [philosophical] mirage of Art, we have cut ourselves off from the multiple and changing reality of the arts and artworks; by claiming that Art was more important than this or that work, here and now, we have weakened our aesthetic sensibility [and—often—our critical sense]; by reducing artworks to metaphysical hieroglyphs, we have rarefied our paths to pleasure and denied the cognitive diversity—and thus the richness—of the arts.”11 We conclude by presenting two examples, a book and an exhibition, that support our way of thinking. Neil MacGregor’s book A History of the World in 100 Objects mixes art and varied artifacts.12 Because the British Museum, of which MacGregor was the Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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director from 2002 through 2015, includes a heterogeneous array of objects, it provided a perfect staging point for such a discussion. Consider one of those objects, Throne of Weapons (2001) by Cristóvão Canhavato, a chair made from a weapon. While grand chairs are often displayed in art museums amid the decorative art, and contemporary artists have created chairs as works of art,13 it would be difficult to place Throne of Weapons in a traditional art museum, because it is a sculpture, a decorative work of art, and a political statement about the role of guns in the war in Mozambique. What it shows, then, is that a work of art can play all three of these roles—it can be an artwork, it can be a (modified) decorative artifact, and it can make a political statement. Meanwhile, the exhibition Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History (2011), co-curated by Ivan Gaskell and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, asked: what is the difference in kind between works of art and the many objects that intrigue historians?14 Like artworks, these artifacts offer information on the cultures in which they were made and very often reveal the history of cultural exchanges. The modern public art museum was created in part by folding artifacts from ethnographic museums into collections. Now these museums display the most aesthetically attractive objects, while ethnographic and history museums exhibit artifacts that provide historical information. Thus, Harvard University has the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology for ethnographic objects, and the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Arthur M. Sackler Museums for art. Also worth mentioning, to complicate the mix, are the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments housed in the Putnam Gallery of the Science Center, a Museum of Natural History, and the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, housed at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. What, exactly, are the distinctions between these institutions that house multitudes of diverse objects and histories? To understand Tangible Things, viewers participated in a treasure hunt of sorts, seeking out six items in the Museum of Natural History, two in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, two in the Sackler Museum, one in the Schlesinger Library, and two more in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. Objects on view included the palette used by John Singer Sargent, held in the Collection of Historical Scientific Conclusion

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Instruments in the Putnam Gallery; and Henry David Thoreau’s unsharpened pencil, presented within a large vitrine containing samples of graphite rock, from the Houghton Library and displayed at the Museum of Natural History. Within the Houghton Library was Hans Peter Müller’s Mounted Carved Coconut Goblet Decorated with Scenes from the Story of Samson (with Lid) (ca. 1600), a German coconut-and-gilded-silver construction from the Busch-Reisinger Museum. At the Science Center, an installation displaying the pioneering Mark I computer included a photograph of an engineer with a corncob pipe from the Economic Botany Collection, University Herbaria. And at the Schlesinger Library was The President’s Chair, the chair used for ceremonial occasions by the president of Harvard, a turned three-square great chair, ca. 1550–1600, from Harvard Art Museums. Looking long and hard to locate these artifacts inevitably prompted reflection on the organizing structures and somewhat arbitrary compartmentalization of art museums. Placing a helmeted hornbill skull, Rhinoplax vigil, from the Museum of Comparative Zoology in the art museum next to eighteenth-century representations of birds raises questions about the distinctions between animals and their depiction. Similarly, the decision to put Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Floriform Vase, from Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, in the Museum of Natural History next to the famous glass flowers elicited questions about the differences between craft and art. So, too, did setting a silver head ornament made by the Passamaquoddy people from North America, ca. 1875, usually displayed in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, within an art museum. A History of the World in 100 Objects and Tangible Things challenges our taxonomies and the now somewhat familiar ways in which museums have been configured. They address the issue we dubbed “interobjectivity” by inviting objects, traditionally not seen together, to be brought out of their usual homes and acquire a novel aesthetic and poetic life by propinquity with other objects also seen out of their normal contexts. In “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?,’” Kant writes that all that is needed for enlightenment is freedom, “freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.” Only when women and men become enlightened can they become “more than a machine.” Enlightenment, in the Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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sense highlighted by Kant, still has to take place. Optimists that we are, we hope for an “emergence from this self-incurred immaturity”15—and the Art World offers fecund ground for such possibilities, although these are only likely to be realized within an intersubjective realm, with people working together, in dialogue with each other. And there, in our opinion, lies the greater challenge, and the greater benefits. However, significant initiatives are demonstrating that what once appeared to be almost unimaginable goals are, in fact, becoming realities. On April 5, 2018, the Art Newspaper published an article whose title, “Bridging the Divide,” could also have served as a title for this book. Two nonprofit organizations, the Terra Foundation and Art Bridges, Inc., created by Alice Walton, developed a $15 million project in which parts of the collections of major museums will be shared with audiences ordinarily not exposed to major art museum collections. The goal is to share parts of the collections of major metropolitan institutions with local institutions, with a particular focus on “rural areas . . . that do not have a large base of cultural institutions.” Amy Zinck, from the Terra Foundation, commented: “We’re really looking to cull from innovation that can emerge from all corners of our country. . . . I think what’s going to be exciting is to see in some of these non-metropolitan areas, some of the innovation that they’ve borne out of necessity that they’ll be able to bring to the conversation.”16 The first two museums to participate in this major effort to “bridge the divide” are the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts. This remarkable initiative offers a great example of fecund, humane, enriching ways to activate greater awareness and enjoyment from audiences unused to being exposed to art institutions. Another significant and highly encouraging initiative was announced in a press release published by the Walton Family Foundation on November 28, 2017. This organization, together with the Ford Foundation, announced a plan called the Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative, in which both foundations “will support innovative strategies and programs to advance diversity across the sector, including hiring professionals from under-represented populations and offering fellowships, mentorships, and other career development options for diverse professionals.” This initiative is founded Conclusion

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on a recognition of the vast discrepancy between the 16 percent of people of color who occupy leadership positions in American museums and the 38 percent of Americans who define themselves as African-Americans, Asians, Hispanic, or multiracial. Alice Walton commented, “For museums to be truly inviting public spaces, they must better reflect the communities they serve. Achieving diversity requires a deeper commitment: To hire and nurture leaders from all backgrounds. This initiative creates the opportunity for museums to build a more inclusive culture within their institutions.” To be “inviting” and to create a “more inclusive culture” are notions and sentiments that have been infrequently heard in the older Art System. These two vast initiatives are, indeed, likely to change the way the Art World functions and to transform it from an inward-looking system to an outward-looking system. We salute in these two huge initiatives the signs of a sea change in the Art System. It is our deepest hope to see analogous new ideas develop in the museum world, not only in this country but internationally—especially in China, where the growth and development of museums has been exponential in the past two decades. The concluding words of Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, are also enlightening: “To ensure the future health and vibrancy of the arts in America, we need more arts leaders who understand and relate to the deeply varied perspectives and life experiences that weave the rich fabric of our nation.” We began this book with an unusual citation from the late Tzvetan Todorov that places emphasis on the value of love over truth. This priority of love over truth, unusual as it may have been within the traditional Art World, is very well illustrated and embodied by the two initiatives we just referred to. What exactly can love mean within the context of the Art World? We might find an interesting and fecund answer by returning to Kant. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, a book seldom mentioned in the context of an art discussion, Kant establishes a distinction between two types of love: No doubt this is how we should understand the scriptural passages that command us to love our neighbour and even our enemy. We can’t be commanded to feel love for someone, or to Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics

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simply prefer that he thrive. There are two sorts of love: practical love that lies in the will and in principles of action, and pathological love that lies in the direction the person’s feelings and tender sympathies take. The latter of these cannot be commanded, but the former can be—and that is a command to do good to others from duty, even when you don’t want to do it or like doing it, and indeed even when you naturally and unconquerably hate doing it.17

We feel that this direction might be one of the most fruitful avenues for the future of the Art World, one in which new communities relating to art together might become the nexus of a whole new range of intersubjective, interhuman relationships, whereby the goals will not only be governed by prior notions of truth and expansion of knowledge but also be geared to new modes of communication, understanding, and sympathy toward one another.

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Notes Introduction

1. Elena Bowes, “Agnes Gund: Art for Good,” Sotheby’s Magazine, September 2016, http://www.sothebys.com/en/news-video /blogs/all-blogs/sotheby-s-magazine --september-2016/2016/08/agnes-gund-art -for-good.html. 2. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 2:675. 3. Vladimir Shlyakhov and Eve Adler, Dictionary of Russian Slang and Colloquial Expressions, 3rd ed. (New York: Barron’s Educational Series, 2006), v. 4. Shlyakhov and Adler, Dictionary of Russian Slang and Colloquial Expressions, vi. 5. Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 28. 6. See Cliff Slaughter, Marxism and the Class Struggle (New York: New Park Publications, 1975), last chapter. 7. Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 214. 8. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 26. 9. First published in Berliner Abendblätte, in 1810. We are using the original text available on http://www.kleist.org, accessed June 16, 2010. Translation is Joachim Pissarro’s. See also Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Writings, trans. David Constantine (London: J. M. Dent, 1997).

10. See Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1995), 106–7. 11. Elizabeth Legere, “The Possibilities of the Video Game Exhibition” (master’s thesis, Hunter College, 2017). 12. Fan Pen Li Chen, Chinese Shadow Theatre: History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 3. 13. Conversation between Illana Hester and Nataliya Chorny, recorded at 2 Water Street, New York City, in 2012. 14. See http://www.alamy.com/stock -photo-swampy-the-gator-is-a-prime-exam ple-of-florida-roadside-kitsch-17936247.html. 15. Alexis L. Boylan, ed., Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 16. Boylan, Thomas Kinkade, 227. 17. Boylan, Thomas Kinkade, 93. Chapter 1

1. See http://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=a1xPpsxvhVA. 2. “Ringo Starr’s Gold Drum on View at Met Museum in Celebration of the Musician’s 70th Birthday,” The Met, June 29, 2010, https://www.metmuseum.org/press/news /2010/ringo-starrs-gold-drum-on-view-at -met-museum-in​brcelebration-of-the-musi cians-70th-birth​daybrbr.

3. Roberta Smith, “MoMA Takes on the ’60s in a Welcome Shakeup of the Permanent Collection Galleries,” New York Times, April 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com /2016/04/08/arts/design/moma-takes-on -the-60s-in-a-welcome-shakeup-of-the-per​ manent-collection-galleries.html. 4. From a conversation among Christophe Cherix, Beca Lipscombe, Lucy McKenzie, and Bernie Reid, published at https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibi​ tions/projects/wp-content/uploads/2011/11 /projects88_interview_v7.pdf. 5. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Sämmtliche Werke, III (Berlin: G. Grote’fche Derlagsbuchhandlung, 1882), 158.

quoting Walter Hobbs, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s (Houston: Menil Foundation, 1991), 162. 6. See http://www.nigelpoor.com/. 7. Pissarro, Cézanne/Pissarro, part 5. 8. Arnaldo Bruschi, Bramante (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 129. 9. Bruschi, Bramante, 129. 10. Bruschi, Bramante, 129. 11. Paul Goldberger, Why Architecture Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 70. 12. James Fallows, “Macau’s Big Gamble,” in Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China (New York: Vintage, 2009), 67. Chapter 3

Chapter 2

1. Alta Macadam with Annabel Barber, Blue Guide Rome (London: Somerset Books, 2010), 438–71, discusses the Vatican museums, including such masterpieces as Giotto’s Stefaneschi Altarpiece and Raphael’s Transfiguration in the Pinacoteca; Laocoön and other Greek and Roman sculptures; the Raphael Rooms; and, of course, the Sistine Chapel. One short paragraph, on p. 464, is devoted to the Gallery of Modern Religious Art. 2. From “History Behind the Thought,” an interview with Nicholas Serota, in Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, ed. Nicholas Serota, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 2008), 46. 3. Kirk Varnedoe, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 36. 4. Giovanni Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 325. 5. Joachim Pissarro, Cézanne/Pissarro, Johns/Rauschenberg: Comparative Studies on Intersubjectivity in Modern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 206, Notes to Pages 26–54

1. Das Amerbach-Kabinett, the institution that led to the formation of the Kunstmuseum Basel, was founded by the city of Basel in 1661, more than 130 years before the Louvre. 2. Alex Baumgarten is the author who first wrote a treatise, indeed his doctoral dissertation, on aesthetics, Esthetica, in 1750. Kant turned aesthetics into a full-fledged academic discipline. 3. Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 5. 4. Pissarro, Cézanne/Pissarro, 7. 5. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124. (The emphasis is ours.) 6. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 55. 7. If we want to follow Kant’s technical definition, a judgment of taste occurs when, stimulated by a “beautiful” object, the imagination meets the cognitive faculty on its own ground, per chance. There is, one could say, no rhyme or reason to why this chance encounter between imagination and understanding (or cognitive faculty) occurs. 198

2. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 98. 3. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 98. 4. For Arthur Danto, Andy Warhol was the key figure here. Duchamp’s readymades show that “art did not need to be beautiful,” and then “Warhol . . . took the question of what was art to the next stage. . . . Duchamp was trying to liberate art from having to please the eye. He was interested in an intellectual art. Warhol’s motives were more political. Andy really celebrated ordinary American life.” See Arthur C. Danto, Andy Warhol (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 52, 56. His evocative phrase “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace” has an interesting source, as he explains in the preface to his book of that title (The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981], v). In Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, after an erotic adventure the central character becomes a nun and publishes a book with Chapter 4 1. John Larner, “The Artist and the Intel- that title—that book exists only in the novel. lectuals in Fourteenth-Century Italy,” History With Spark’s permission, Danto took it over 54, no. 180 (1969): 13–30; emphasis original. for his book. 2. The term “Art History” itself might well 5. See William Rehg, Insight and Solidarity: become perfunctory and leave place instead The Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas for a much more practical, professional, and (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). polyvalent platform—these new depart 6. Quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail ments could be called “Art Studies” and be modeled on multidisciplinary departments Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad such as American Studies, Gender Studies, Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 53; emphasis original. Queer Studies, and so forth. 7. Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin, 122. 3. We thank Philippe de Montebello for information about the public response. See 8. Jed Perl, “The Cult of Jeff Koons,” https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions The New York Review of Books, September 25, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/articles /listings/2008/philippe-de-montebello. /2014/09/25/cult-jeff-koons/. 4. We invite our readers to watch this 9. In his treatise on aesthetics, The Transextraordinary clip: https://www.you figuration of the Commonplace, Arthur Danto tube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo. developed his basic theory without more than a passing reference to Hegel’s idea of Chapter 5 1. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, the end of history. Then, in the 1980s, he read with great interest Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures 121.

Hence, it is forever impossible to say why one finds a particular object beautiful or ugly. Hence, the infinite and inexhaustible debates about taste. 8. This is referred to as the Sandler Argument. 9. M. Emmanuel, “Entretiens inédits d’Ernest Guiraud et de Claude Debussy (1889–90),” in Inédits sur Claude Debussy, Collection Comoedia-Charpentier (Paris, 1942). Guiraud was Debussy’s erstwhile teacher. (Thanks to Geoff Burleson for this reference.) 10. Arthur C. Danto, What Art Is (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 116. 11. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 281, 99. 12. Henri de Bayle (Stendhal), The Charterhouse of Parma, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 2006) (in English in the original), 508.

Notes to Pages 55–86

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on Fine Art, which very briefly in the introduction mentions this idea: “Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (trans. T. M. Knox [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], 1:11). And, also, he read Hans Belting’s The End of the History of Art?, trans. Christopher Wood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), which develops this idea at length. And so, his 1995 A. W. Mellon lectures, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), made this claim central. Hegel, Danto says, was wrong about the date of the ending of art’s history but right to claim now it has ended. 10. Arthur C. Danto, The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 178. 11. Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 192. 12. See http://www.pacegallery.com/art ists/507/fred-wilson. 13. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Hans_Haacke. 14. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations, trans. Andrew Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 47.

à 1870 (Paris: Rousseau, 1903); François Benoît, L’art français sous la révolution et l’empire: Les doctrines. Les idées. Les genres, ed. L. H. May (Paris: Société Française d’Éditions d’Art, 1897); Pierre Lacome, “Chronique d’un curieux”; and Béatrice Edelein-Badie, La collection de tableaux de Lucien Bonaparte, Prince de Canino (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997). We thank Prince Bernard Murat for this information. 5. See http://www.pbs.org/newshour /art/stitch-stitch-history-knitting-activ ism/# is a good example of this Wild Art. 6. See our interview at http://www.brook lynrail.org/2013/10/art/jeffrey-deitch -with-david-carrier-and-joachim-pissarro, October 3, 2013. 7. See Pissarro, “Joseph Beuys: Set Between One and All,” in Joseph Beuys: Make the Secrets Productive, ed. Joachim Pissarro, Eugen Blume, and Heiner Bastian, exh. cat. (New York: PaceWildenstein, 2010), 11–16. 8. Two references (alas, neither translated into English) have been precious for us to retrace the first steps of the modern museum history: La jeunesse des musées, an exhibition catalogue on the early formation of museums in France throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, by Chantal Georgel and published in 1994 by the Musée d’Orsay; and L’âme au corps, a voluminous Chapter 6 research catalogue, organized by Jean-Pierre 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Claren- Cuzin and Claire Marchandise, on the occasion of the celebration of the two hundredth don Press, 1975), 2:869. anniversary of the creation of the Louvre, in 2. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:870. 3. December 26, 1805, Academy Charter; 2003. 9. Nicholas Serota, Experiencing or Intersee “Timeline,” PAFA, https://www.pafa .org/history-pafa/timeline, accessed Febru- pretation: Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 7. ary 14, 2018. 10. Minutes of the Trustees of the National 4. The letter is found in CorresponGallery, November 16, 1857; quoted by Giles dance de Napoléon Ier: Publiée par ordre de l’Empereur Napoléon III (Paris: Plon, 1861), Waterfield, “Picture Hanging and Gallery Decoration,” in Palaces of Art: Art Galleries in 6:457; Emile Levasseur, Histoire des classes Britain 1790–1990 (London: Dulwich Picture ouvrières et de l’industrie en France de 1789 Notes to Pages 90–107

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Gallery, 1991), 54. Also mentioned by Serota, Experiencing or Interpretation. 11. See Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 12. Logan Pearsall Smith and Roger Fry, Words Needed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928); reprinted as “Words Needed in Connection with Art,” in A Roger Fry Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 426. 13. See http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk /paintings/giovanni-battista-cima-da-coneg liano-the-incredulity-of-saint-thomas, accessed February 14, 2018. 14. Hanging arrangements are discussed by Ivan Gaskell in Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory and Art Museums (London: Reaktion, 2000). 15. Clement Greenberg, “The Case for Abstract Art,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 82. 16. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4:92; emphasis added. 17. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4:93; emphasis added. 18. Fry, “The Grafton Gallery I,” Nation, November 19, 1910, 332; republished in Roger Fry Reader, 87. 19. Fry, “The Grafton Gallery I,” republished in Roger Fry Reader, 88. 20. Fry, “The Grafton Gallery I,” republished in Roger Fry Reader, 88–89; emphasis original. Chapter 7

1. Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 109–10.

Notes to Pages 108–129

2. See Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 82–83. 3. Seth Kugel, “To the Trained Eye, Museum Pieces Lurk Everywhere,” New York Times, March 8, 2008, www.nytimes.com /2008/03/07/travel/07iht-09weekend .10790192.html. 4. We Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chap. 5, discusses such uses of the square by Chinese artists. 5. See http://arts.columbia.edu/neiman/. 6. See http://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=DUPxjC7yf BA&feature=PlayList &p=B5584EF6F6617950&playnext_from =PL&playnext=1&index=12&has_veri fied=1. 7. See Neil MacGregor with Erika Langmuir, Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 8. See http://www.shelterrific.com /wp-content/uploads/2006/12/barneys .andyhead. 9. “John Miller in Conversation with Beatrix Ruf,” in John Miller: A Refusal to Accept Limits (Zurich: jrp|ringier with Kunsthalle Zürich), 20; emphasis added. 10. Clement Greenberg, “CounterAvant-Garde” (1971), in Late Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 17. 11. On Kinkade, see our “Painter of Lite,” review of Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall, ed. Alexis L. Boylan, Artforum, April 2011, 76. 12. See Carrier, “Early Poussin in Rome: The Origins of French Classicism, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth,” Arts, March 1989, 63–67. 13. See Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985), 350–53. 201

14. Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (London: Phaidon, 1967), ix. 15. See Carrier, “Anthony Blunt’s Poussin,” Word and Image 25, no. 4 (December 2009): 416–26, and “The Political Art of JacquesLouis David and His Modern-Day American Successors,” Art History 26, no. 5 (2003): 730–51. 16. See Scott Rothkopf, Jasper Johns: Catenary (Göttingen: Steidel, 2005). Carrier, “Jasper Johns,” ArtUS 2 (April–May 2004): 50–51 offers a critical account. 17. On Chao Ge, see https://www .mutualart.com/Artist/Chao-Ge /7805F5BB03D77E23. Chapter 8

1. We encourage you to watch this clip: http://www.freetoursbyfoot.com/dyker -heights-christmas-lights/. 2. Patrick Nguyen and Stuart Mackenzie, eds., Beyond the Street: The 100 Leading Figures in Urban Art (Berlin: Gestalten, 2010). 3. See http://artmuseum.pl/en/film oteka/praca/althamer-pawel-brodno-2000. 4. Gerhard Richter, 1966, quoted in Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 35. 5. See https://www.moma.org/interac tives/exhibitions/2012/manuals/. 6. Aleksa Celebonovic, Some Call It Kitsch: Masterpieces of Bourgeois Realism, trans. Peter Willis (New York: Abrams, [1974]); Tomas Kulka, Kitsch and Art (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996); and John A. Walker, Art and Celebrity (London: Pluto Press, 2003). 7. Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). 8. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 142–43. Notes to Pages 130–146

9. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 58. 10. MoMA began collecting photography in 1930 and established the Photography Department in 1940. 11. Franz Kafka, America, trans. Michael Hoffman (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961), 284. See also Yi-Fu Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993). 12. Alison Gingeras, ed., “Dear Painter, Paint Me . . .”: Painting the Figure Since Late Picabia (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2002). 13. See https://www.independent.co.uk /arts-entertainment/art/features/bernard -buffet-return-of-the-poser-1645748.html. 14. See http://venusovermanhattan .com/exhibition/bernard-buffet-paintings -from-1956-to-1999–2/. 15. We thank Jonathan Weinberg for this information about Sendak. 16. We thank Danto for sharing this story. 17. David Carrier, The Aesthete in the City (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1994), 76. 18. We thank Samantha Bard for discussion of this idea. 19. See http://www.widewalls.ch/artist /david-choe/. 20. Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 69. See also Jon Naar, The Birth of Graffiti (Munich: Prestel, 2007); Norman Mailer with Jon Naar, The Faith of Graffiti (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); and Ethel Seno, ed., Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art (Köln: Taschen, 2010). 21. See http://www.leverhouseartcol lection.com/collectionsexhibitions/collec tion/193/kruger-collection. 22. See David Carrier, The Aesthetics of Comics (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000). 202

23. See “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” at MoMA, 1990–91. 24. The exception that proves this rule is Ernst Gombrich’s pupil David Kunzle, whose focus is on premodern word-image art; see his The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973). See also Bart Beaty, Comics Versus Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 25. See Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, eds., A Comics Studies Reader ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009). 26. Eve Borsook, The Mural Painters of Tuscany from Cimabue to Andrea del Sarto (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) is a full survey. 27. See http://www.revforum.com /showthread.php?3276-The-New-Criterion -The-Unbearable-Dourness-of-Being. 28. Michael Tisserand, Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White (New York: Harper, 2016). 29. See http://www.davidzwirner .com/artists/77/. 30. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Knopf, 1996), 1:151–52. See Paul Barolsky, Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1991), 14–16. 31. Roger Fry, Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 18. 32. See Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (London: Phaidon, 1967), 4. 33. See Gilles Chomer and Sylvain Laveissière, eds., Autour de Poussin (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994), 35–37. 34. Amy Fine Collins, “The Singing Butler Did It,” Vanity Fair, July 2012, 85, quoting Jonathan Jones, the Guardian’s art critic.

Notes to Pages 147–159

35. Thomas McEvilley, “Flowers Return,” in Bill Beckley: Pathways to a Self (Düsseldorf: Galerie Hans Mayer, 2008), 7. Chapter 9

1. For Danto’s view of Dickie’s account, see his “Intellectual Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto, ed. Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 2013); Dickie’s view is presented in his Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974). 2. See David Carrier, “Warhol, Danto, and the End of Art History,” ArtUS 26 (2009): 92–97. 3. Frank Stella, Working Space (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 140. 4. David Carrier, “WILD: Fashion Untamed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” ArtUS 8 (May–June 2005): 52. 5. David Carrier, “AngloMania, Metropolitan Museum of Art,” ArtUS 15 (October–November 2006): 48–49. 6. See David Carrier, “Fashion Desire: Giorgio Armani’s Art Gallery,” ArtUS 14 (July–September 2006): 25–35, and David Carrier with Darren Jones, The Contemporary Art Gallery: Display, Power and Privilege (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016). 7. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 32–33. See David Carrier, High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996). 8. Douglas Century, “Saying Yes to No!—An Artist Leaves His Fortune to a Foundation That Will Support Works Reflecting His Anti-consumerist Stance,” ARTnews 109, no. 4 (April 2010): 47. See http://borislurie.no-art.info /reviews/100401_century.html. 9. Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 55. 203

10. See http://www.creativethriftshop .com/Artist/images_EricDoeringer /_paint_EricDoeringer_bootleg.htm. 11. See http://www.imdb.com/title /tt0499549/ as of Monday, July 19, 2010. By now, of course, there have been an enormous number of additional reviews—too many to readily count. 12. Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2014), 15. 13. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), ix. 14. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 205, 189. 15. Gregory Lewis Bynum, “Immanuel Kant’s Account of Cognitive Experience and Human Rights Education,” Educational Theory 62, no. 2 (2012), https://sites.new paltz.edu/ncate/wp-content/uploads /sites/21/2014/06/Example-Bynum.pdf. 16. Keith Moxey, “Gehry’s Bilbao: Visits and Visions,” in Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim, ed. Anna Maria Guasch and Joseba Zulaika (Reno: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, 2005), 181. 17. Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Writings, trans. David Constantine (London: J. M. Dent, 1997), 426. 18. Reprinted in Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54. Chapter 10

1. The classic account, the usual starting point for discussions by Art Historians, is Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), reprinted in his Collected Notes to Pages 159–173

Essays and Criticism: Perceptions and Judgments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), vol. 1, chap. 2. 2. See https://www.merriam-webster .com/dictionary/kitsch. 3. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 66. 4. It is worth contrasting Bakhtin’s account of the premodern presentation of popular culture by Rabelais, which is uncondescending; see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968). 5. Robert C. Morgan, “Introduction,” in Clement Greenberg, Late Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xxiii. 6. William S. Rubin, Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 9. 7. Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 464. 8. Gillo Dorfles, Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste (New York: Bell Publishing, 1969), 4. 9. Joachim Pissarro, Cézanne/Pissarro, Johns/Rauschenberg: Comparative Studies on Intersubjectivity in Modern Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 140. 10. See http://www.metmuseum.org/toah /hd/pcgn/hd_pcgn.htm. 11. The current etymology of the term “barbaros” is that it stems from an onomatopoeia by which the Greeks were imitating the sounds of those whose languages made no sense: a mere blah-blah. 12. Todorov, Fear of Barbarians, 36. For discussion of political issues, see his The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984); see also his Éloge du quotidien: Essai sur la peinture hollandaise du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions Points, 2009). 204

13. Todorov, Fear of Barbarians, 36. 14. 1 Corinthians 14:10–11, authors’ adaptation. 15. Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), vol. 3, 9, p. 964. 16. Todorov, Fear of Barbarians, 38. He quotes Montaigne, referring to the first encounters with the cannibals of America. With his characteristic irony, Montaigne writes: “There is nothing primitive nor barbaric among that nation, except that everyone calls barbaric whatever he is not accustomed to.” Montaigne, Les Essais, 1:31, 203. 17. Roger Taylor, Art, an Enemy of the People (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978). 18. See http://www.leftmatrix.com/hava nab5.html.

8. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 12. 9. Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, 12. 10. Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, 13. 11. Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, 13; emphasis added. 12. Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (London: Allen Lane, 2010). 13. See Arthur C. Danto, 397 Chairs (New York: Abrams, 1988). 14. See David Carrier’s review, “Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History,” Curator 54, no. 2 (April 2011): 223–26. The exhibition draws upon Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001); Gaskell’s website, http://www.ivangaskell .com, gives more information. Conclusion 1. Mohamed C. Sahli, Décoloniser l’histoire: 15. “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Introduction à l’histoire du Maghreb, Cahiers Is Enlightenment?’,” in Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. libres no. 77 (Paris: Maspero, 1965), trans. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Joachim Pissarro. Press, 1991), 55, 59, 60; emphasis original. 2. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: 16. See Victoria Stapley-Brown, “Bridging Contemporary Art and the Pale of History the Divide,” Art Newspaper, April 5, 2018, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, https://www.theartnewspaper.com 1997); Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, /news/bridging-the-divide-terra-founda tion-and-art-bridges-fund-collaborative-pro 2009). gramming-between-major-art-institu 3. See http://brooklynrail.org/2017/05 tions-and-smaller-regional-venues. /art/Thelma-Golden. 17. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of 4. See Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds Morals, 15. Kant uses “pathological”—from (Berkeley: University of California Press, Greek pathos, “that which happens to a 2008). person”—simply to mean that this is a state 5. Richard Rorty, “Redemption from that the person is in; there is no suggestion Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual of abnormality. His point is that being a Exercises,” Telos 3, no. 3 (2001): 243-63. loving person is no more morally significant 6. Tzvetan Todorov, La littérature en péril (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 77; our translation. than being a stupid person or a right-handed person. 7. See James Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Notes to Pages 173–195

205

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Bruschi, Arnaldo. Bramante. London: Thames and Hudson, 1977. Bynum, Gregory Lewis. “Immanuel Kant’s Account of Cognitive Experience and Human Rights Education.” Educational Theory 62, no. 2 (2012), https://sites .newpaltz.edu/ncate/wp-content /uploads/sites/21/2014/06/Example -Bynum.pdf. Carrier, David. The Aesthete in the City. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1994. ———. The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000. ———. “AngloMania, Metropolitan Museum of Art.” ArtUS 15 (October– November 2006): 48–49. ———. “Anthony Blunt’s Poussin.” Word and Image 25, no. 4 (December 2009): 416–26. ———. “The Blind Spots of Art History: How Wild Art Came to Be—and Be Ignored,” Predella: Journal of Visual Arts, no. 35 (2014), http://www.pre della.it/images/35/Predella_35_Mis cellanea_02_25-37_III-VI_Carrier.pdf. ———. “Early Poussin in Rome: The Origins of French Classicism, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.” Arts, March 1989, 63–67. ———. “Fashion Desire: Giorgio Armani’s Art Gallery.” ArtUS 14 ( July– September 2006): 25–35. ———. High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996.

———. “The Political Art of Jacques-Louis David and His Modern-Day American Successors.” Art History 26, no. 5 (2003): 730–51. ———. “Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History.” Curator 54, no. 2 (April 2011): 223–26. ———. “Warhol, Danto, and the End of Art History.” ArtUS 26 (2009): 92–97. ———. “WILD: Fashion Untamed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” ArtUS 8 (May–June 2005): 52. Carrier, David, with Darren Jones. The Contemporary Art Gallery: Display, Power, and Privilege. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016. Carrier, David, and Joachim Pissarro. “Painter of Lite.” Review of Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall, edited by Alexis L. Boylan. Artforum, April 2011, 76. ———. “Thelma Golden with Joachim Pissarro and David Carrier.” Brooklyn Rail, May 1, 2017. https://brooklynrail .org/2017/05/art/Thelma-Golden. Celebonovic, Aleksa. Some Call It Kitsch: Masterpieces of Bourgeois Realism. Translated by Peter Willis. New York: Abrams, [1974]. Century, Douglas. “Saying Yes to No!— An Artist Leaves His Fortune to a Foundation That Will Support Works Reflecting His Anti-consumerist Stance.” ARTnews 109, no. 4 (April 2010): 47. Chomer, Gilles, and Sylvain Laveissière, eds. Autour de Poussin. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994. Collins, Amy Fine. “The Singing Butler Did It.” Vanity Fair, July 2012, 85. Crow, Thomas E. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. ———. The Rise of the Sixties. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Selected Bibliography

Cuzin, Jean-Pierre, and Claire Marchandise. Dictionnaire du Louvre. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2003. Danto, Arthur C. 397 Chairs. New York: Abrams, 1988. ———. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. ———. Andy Warhol. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. ———. “Intellectual Autobiography.” In The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 1–132. Chicago: Open Court, 2013. ———. The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. ———. What Art Is. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. De Bayle, Henri (Stendhal). The Charterhouse of Parma. Translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin, 2006. Dickie, George. Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974. Diderot, Denis. Lettre sur les sourds et les muets. In Oeuvres romanesques. Paris: Garnier, 1962. Dorfles, Gillo. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste. New York: Bell Publishing, 1969. Elkins, James. On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art. New York: Routledge, 2004. Emmanuel, Maurice. “Entretiens inédits d’Ernest Guiraud et de Claude Debussy (1889–90).” In Inédits sur Claude Debussy. Collection ComoediaCharpentier. Paris, 1942. Fallows, James. “Macau’s Big Gamble.” In Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China, 106–27. New York: Vintage, 2009. Fleming, Juliet. Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. 207

Fry, Roger. “The Grafton Gallery I.” The Nation, November 19, 1910, 332. ———. A Roger Fry Reader. Edited by Christopher Reed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art. New York: Doubleday, 1956. Gaskell, Ivan. Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory and Art Museums. London: Reaktion, 2000. Georgel, Chantal. La jeunesse des musées: Les musées de France au XIXe siècle. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, February 7–May 8, 1994. Paris: Diffusion/Seuil, 1994. Goldberger, Paul. Why Architecture Matters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Greenberg, Clement. The Collected Essays and Criticism. Vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969. Edited by John O’Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ———. “Counter-Avant-Garde.” In Clement Greenberg, Late Writings, edited by Robert C. Morgan, 14–21. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ———. Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Groys, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Heer, Jeet, and Kent Worcester, eds. A Comics Studies Reader. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Hobbs, Walter. Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s. Houston: Menil Foundation, 1991. Hung, We. Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Selected Bibliography

Kafka, Franz. America. Translated by Michael Hoffman. London: Secker and Warburg, 1961. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Translated by H. J. Paton. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. ———. Political Writings. Edited by Hans Reiss. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Kleist, Heinrich von. Selected Writings. Translated by David Constantine. London: J. M. Dent, 1997. Klonk, Charlotte. Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Kulka, Tomas. Kitsch and Art. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996. Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973. Larner, John. “The Artist and the Intellectuals in Fourteenth-Century Italy.” History 54, no. 180 (1969): 13–30. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Sämmtliche Werke, III. Berlin: G. Grote’fche Derlagsbuchhandlung, 1882. Macadam, Alta, with Annabel Barber. Blue Guide Rome. London: Somerset Books, 2010. MacGregor, Neil. A History of the World in 100 Objects. London: Allen Lane, 2010. MacGregor, Neil, with Erika Langmuir. Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 208

Mailer, Norman, with Jon Naar. The Faith of Graffiti. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978. Marling, Karal Ann. As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. McEvilley, Thomas. “Flowers Return.” In Bill Beckley: Pathways to a Self, 1–16. Düsseldorf: Galerie Hans Mayer, 2008. Meyer, James. Minimalism. London: Phaidon, 2000. Miller, John. John Miller: A Refusal to Accept Limits. Edited by Beatrix Ruf. Zurich: jrp|ringier with Kunsthalle Zürich, 2010. Montaigne, Michel de. Les Essais. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992. Morgan, Robert C. Introduction to Late Writings by Clement Greenberg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Moxey, Keith. “Gehry’s Bilbao: Visits and Visions.” In Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim, edited by Anna Maria Guasch and Joseba Zulaika, 111–19. Reno: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, 2005. Naar, Jon. The Birth of Graffiti. Munich: Prestel, 2007. Nguyen, Patrick, and Stuart Mackenzie, eds. Beyond the Street: The 100 Leading Figures in Urban Art. Berlin: Gestalten, 2010. Pissarro, Joachim. Cézanne/Pissarro, Johns/ Rauschenberg: Comparative Studies on Intersubjectivity in Modern Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ———. “Joseph Beuys: Set Between One and All.” In Joseph Beuys: Make the Secrets Productive, ed. Joachim Pissarro, Selected Bibliography

Eugen Blume, and Heiner Bastian, 11–16. Exhibition catalogue. New York: PaceWildenstein, 2016. Potts, Alex. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Rorty, Richard. “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises.” Telos 3, no. 3 (2001): 243–63. Rothkopf, Scott. Jasper Johns: Catenary. Göttingen: Steidel, 2005. Rubin, William S. Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Sahli, Mohamed C. Décoloniser l’histoire: Introduction à l’histoire du Maghreb. Cahiers libres no. 77. Paris: Maspero, 1965. Saltz, Jerry. Seeing Out Louder: Art Criticism, 2003–2009. Lenox, Mass.: Hard Press Editions, 2009. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters. Translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Schwartz, Gary. Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985. Seno, Ethel, ed. Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art. Köln: Taschen, 2010. Serota, Nicholas. Experiencing or Interpretation: Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. ———, ed. “History Behind the Thought.” Interview with Cy Twombly in Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons. Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate, 2008. 209

Smith, Logan Pearsall, and Roger Fry. Words Needed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928. Reprinted as “Words Needed in Connection with Art,” in A Roger Fry Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Smith, Terry. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Stella, Frank. Working Space. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Storr, Robert. Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002. Taylor, Roger. Art, an Enemy of the People. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978. Thatcher Ulrich, Laurel. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. New York: Knopf, 2001. Tisserand, Michael. Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White. New York: Harper, 2016. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America. The Question of the Other. Translated by Richard Howard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984. ———. Éloge du quotidien: Essai sur la peinture hollandaise du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Éditions Points, 2009. ———. The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations. Translated by Andrew Brown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. ———. Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Translated by David Bellos. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ———. La littérature en péril. Paris: Flammarion, 2006. ———. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Translated by Wlad Godzich. Selected Bibliography

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993. Van Limborch, Philippus. The History of the Inquisition: As It Has Subsisted in France, Italy, Spain. . . . London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1816. https://archive.org /details/historyofinquisi00limb. Varnedoe, Kirk. Cy Twombly: A Retrospective. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994. ———. Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Translated by Gaston du C. de Vere. New York: Knopf, 1996. Walker, John A. Art and Celebrity. London: Pluto Press, 2003. Waterfield, Giles. “Picture Hanging and Gallery Decoration.” In Palaces of Art: Art Galleries in Britain, 1790–1990, 49–65. London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1991.

210

Index Aboriginal art, 121 Abstract Expressionism, 120, 158 Abu Ghraib, 141 academics as custodians of art institutions, 101 Adorno, Theodor, 10, 17, 169 AES (art collective), 94 aesthesis, 50 aesthetic enjoyment Art World, neglected by,108 vs. knowledge of objects of taste, 86, 108, 111 popular culture as source of, 170 aesthetic experience freedom necessary for, 186 as mode for engagement with knowledge, 188–89 aesthetic faculty. See sensibility aesthetic judgment art critics unafraid of, 130 Art Historians avoid, 130 binary distinctions in, 34 consensus, 163 democratic nature of, 132–33 definition by Kant, 198–99n7 (chap. 3) fluidity of, 152–64 Greenberg and, 131–32 as human need, 49 individual judgments, 177 Kant’s account of, 133, 185, 186 mediation by experts, 101–2 as mode for visual experience, 188–89 and political issues addressed in art, 178, 179 universal assent, demand for, 51 universal judgments, 177 Urteilskraft, 163

See also aesthetics; sensibility, taste, judgment of aesthetic revolution, 49, 87, 97, 99, 101 Christian revolution, compared to, 75 aesthetics as academic discipline, 198n2 (chap. 3) discriminatory attitudes within field of, 173 of Duchamp, 88 elevation by Kant to level of metaphysics, 49 God, aesthetics as distinguishing us from, 51 marginal aesthetics, 21, 28 “Aesthetics of the Margins” (seminar), 7, 14, 26 and politics, 32 pluralistic values in, 185 preeminence over art, 98 as science, 50 and sensibility, 51–53 subjectivity in realm of, 82 trash aesthetics, 171–72 universal aesthetics, 50, 105 See also aesthetic enjoyment; aesthetic experience; aesthetic judgment; aesthetic revolution; sensibility; taste, judgment of “Aesthetics of the Margins” (seminar), 7, 14, 26 Affichistes, 158–59 Ai Weiwei Study of Perspective, 125 Alexander I, 98 Ali, Muhammad, 126 Allais, Alphonse, 90

Allais, Alphonse (continued) First Communion of Anemic Young Girls in Snowy Weather, 90 Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Dead Man, 91 Altes Museum founding of, 98 Althamer, Pawel, 136 Bródno 2000, 136, 137 Amerbach, Basilius, 77 Amerbach family, 77 and Kunstmuseum Basel, 77 American Revolution, 47, 50, 170 AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion (exhibition), 155, 157 Anselmo, Giovanni Oltremares, 91 Anthony, William, 168 Laocoön, 169 antinomy of taste, 74–95 and Art System, 79–80 and Art World, 76–77, 82, 94 as contradiction of forces, 80 definition of, 76 in judgments of beauty, 76, 80 Kant on, 48, 52, 54, 76, 79–80, 82, 94 See also Kant; taste; taste, judgment of Antonov, Pavel, 104, 104 anything, as art, 87–89, 90, 91, 140 See also artist, everybody as Apelles, 129 appropriation in Art World art, 158 in non–Art World art, 158 See also Appropriation art Appropriation art, 45 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe Vertumnus (Emperor Rudolf II), 122, 123 and food art, 123 Wild Art, anticipates, 122 Arensberg, Louise, 89 Arensberg, Walter, 89 Arman, 91 Armani, Giorgio, 155 Arp, Jean, 88

Index

art emancipatory powers of, 169–70 vs. illustration, 150 materials of, 38–40 online venues for, 140 religion as a metaphor for, 186 art critics vs. Art Historians, 129–31 Art World art, focus on, 4, 125 as custodians of art institutions, 101 Kantian orientation of, 131 as performers, 128 art education system, 5 Art Historians as agents of exclusion, 118 vs. art critics, 129–31 Art World art, focus on, 4 historicist orientation of, 99, 131 See also Art History Art History aesthetic theory in support of, 57 artists’ practice, disrupted by, 57 Art System, as buttress for, 99 Art World, role in structuring approach to, 67 canon of, 112, 120, 153 canons, use of in, 70, 71, 81 change-resistance of, 112 chronological model of evolution of art, 67, 69, 107–8, 112, 118 cognitive limits of, 117 and Cultural Studies, 187–88 decolonization of, 182, 183 as descriptive system, 118 exclusion, proceeds by, 118–19, 135 expansion of, 57 Historicism, based in, 57, 99 institutionalization of, 116–33 at intersection of chronology and axiology, 118 new media, transformed by, 121 new model of, 40, 64–65 opening up of field, 187 overspecialization of, 111

212



positivism in, 50, 132 as prescriptive system, 118 role of, in museum system, 8 ruse of, 118 self-defining criteria of, 118 standards of excellence shifting, 153 traditional mode of teaching, 153 understanding of, through Wild Art, 117 universalisms, structured by, 177 Wild Art, silent about, 117 See also Art Historians; Art System; Art World; canons; decolonization; exclusion; Historicism; museum system Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, 191 Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 191 art institutions access to art, regulated by, 100 Hegelian model, founded on, 83, 98 modernist rhetoric, guided by, 115 new media, transformed by, 121 space of, as focus of critical engagement, 92 See also Art System; Art World; curators; experts; museums, art; museum system artists as agents of inclusion, 21–22, 73, 89, 92, 95, 137 as agents of revolution of feeling, 160–61 as agents of taste, 95 appropriation by, 158, 172 Art System, co-opted by, 121 as Art World agents, 28 avant-garde artist, role of, 112–13, 160–61 divine reality, as depicters of, 47 early Romantic conception of, 160 as intermediaries between Art World and Wild Art world, 136, 140–41 as performers, 128 quasi-divinization of, 93 everybody as, 104, 115, 136, 137, 140 popular culture as inspiration for, 45, 89 power within art establishment, 28

Index

practice of, disrupting Art History, 57 role of, within Art World, 73, 95 Wild Artists, 125, 128 See also Art World; Wild Art Artists Space, 172 art of the spectacle as term, replacing “Kitsch,” 167, 176 Art Since 1900 (Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh), 67–68, 112 bias toward white Euro-American art production, 177 Art System anti–Art System, 158–59 artists, challenged by, 57 birth of, 101 categories of, ignored by artists, 45 change-resistance of, 112 chronocracy, 107 definition of, 3 evolution of, 50, 79, 106 exclusiveness of, 54, 55, 57, 58, 61–62, 110 Hegel, foundation laid by, 98–99 overspecialization of, 111 premises of, antiquated, 79 professionalization of, 94, 101, 108, 109–10 self-consumption, geared toward, 93 structure of, 61, 79, 102, 132 taste, dead within, 81 See also Art Historians; Art History; Art World; canons; exclusion; museum system Art World aesthetic enjoyment, place of within, 108 artists, role of, 73, 95 art worlds ignorance of, 63 opening up to, 63, 103–4, 187 authoritarian discourse in, 128, 129, 163 barbarism of, 174, 179 biennials, 93, 177, 179 boundaries defense of, 159 establishment of, 108 porousness of, 159, 172, 175

213

Art World (continued) canons, use of, 156 decolonization of, 182–85 development of, 64, 81 discriminatory practices by, 173–74 as eighteenth-century creation, 99 elite, driven by, 93–94 evolution of, 104 exclusiveness of, 24–25, 61–62, 175 experts, supported by, 64 globalization of, 177 and Historicism, 98 inclusion, criteria for, 121–22, 153–55, 175 Kitsch, afraid of, 28 inclusiveness, initiatives toward, 193–94 limitations of, 181 love, in context of, 194–95 mainstream America, distance from, 19 marginal aesthetics, acceptance of, 28 mass art, Art World afraid of, 28 photography, included in, 137–40 popular culture, afraid of, 28 professionalization of, 93, 108 puritanical attitude of, 168 and religious art, 126, 189 regulation of access to art, 100–102 secularization of, 63, 189 selection process, 121–22 self-contracting of, 93 Spectacle, afraid of, 28 spheres of taste, 8, 174, 175 universal criteria, establishment of, 175–76 Wild Art, blind to, 70 Wild Art world, interchanges with, 159 See also Art Historians; Art History; Art System; canons; decolonization; exclusion; Historicism; museum system Art World art appropriation in, 158, 172 Manhattan, as setting for, 144–45 sacralization of, 189–90 subjects suitable for, 70, 126 vs. Wild Art, 108, 122, 125, 140 art worlds, 8–9 Index

aesthetic validity of, 15, 18 Art World, ignorance of, 63 comics, binding by, 146 compatibility of, 14–15, 25, 26, 27, 37 multiplicity of, 8, 10, 12, 63, 185 porousness within, 63 tensions between, 186 See also Art World; Wild Art Asher, Michael, 92, 181 Ashmole, Elias collection of, 77 Ashmolean Museum founding of, 77 avant-garde artist, role of, 112–13, 160–61 birth of, 167 historical predestination of, 84 vs. Kitsch, 167 See also artist; modernism Avanto Architects Chapel of Saint Lawrence, 189 Avatar (Cameron) seriousness of, 159 Baalman, Jason, 123–24 Elvis Presley Painting with Cheese Puffs, 124 Speed Painting with Ketchup and French Fries, 124 “Bad Painting,” 127–29 See also Kitsch Bakhtin, Mikhail, 2, 117 on intersubjectivity, 81 ballet, 12–13 Banksy Art System, embraced by, 159 barbarism, 173–74, 204n11 (chap. 10), 205n16 (chap. 10) and Art World, 174 definition of, 173, 174 and Kitsch, 173 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 22, 27, 84, 146 modern art, diagram of origins and evolution of, 68 Barry, Iris, 145–46 Barthes, Roland, 172 214

Basaldella, Mirko, 35–36 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 145 Baudelaire, Charles, 181 on fashion, 156 “The Painter of Modern Life,” 156 Baudrillard, Jean, 17 Baumgarten, Alex Esthetica, 198n2 (chap. 3) beautiful, the defined by Kant, 52, 76 individual judgment of, 54–55, 75, 80 objective judgment of, 33–34, 55 See also aesthetic judgment; sensibility Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot, 91 Beckley, Bill, 149–50 Deirdre’s Lip, 150 Beever, Julian, 126 Bellini, Giovanni Art History canon, role within, 112 Doge Leonardo Loredan, 112 Madonna of the Meadow, 106, 112 Bellori, Gian Pietro, 38, 39 Bemelmans, Ludwig, 141 Benjamin, Walter, 17 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 64 Beuys, Joseph, 104, 115, 136 Bible Illustrated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis, The (exhibition), 148 biennials, 93 “biennial curator,” 179 proliferation of global biennials, 177 Quinta Bienal de la Habana, 177–78 Biesenbach, Klaus, 64 binary distinctions in aesthetic judgment, 34 Art History vs. Cultural Studies, 187 Art World vs. Wild Art world, 140 elite vs. masses, 8–9 high art vs. low art, 8–10, 12–13, 36, 161, 167, 172, 176 inclusion vs. exclusion, 121 “in the know” vs. “ignorant public,” 61–62, 63 irrelevance of, 10 Index

out-of-placeness of, 183 “retinal art” vs. art at the service of the brain, 87 See also aesthetic judgment; Art History; Art World; elite; exclusion; inclusion Bliss, Lillie P., 25 Blue Guide Rome, 33 Blunt, Anthony, 130 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 61, 62, 63 Bonaparte, Lucien, 101–2 Bond, Willard, 70, 71 Running Home, 71 Borglum, Gutzom, 155 Mount Rushmore monument, 154, 155 Botero, Fernando, 141 Botticelli, 81 Bouguereau, William-Adolphe, 133 Bourdieu, Pierre Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, 138 bourgeois art, 83 Bramante, Donato Tempietto, 40, 42 Vatican staircase, 31, 32 Brancusi, Constantin, 88, 90 Braque, Georges, 150 Breitz, Candice King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson), 72–73, 73 British Museum, 190–91 founding of, 97 Broch, Hermann “Eine Studie über Massenhysterie: Beiträge zu einer Psychologie der Politik,” 176 Bruschi, Arnaldo, 42 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 5, 169 Buffet, Bernard, 140–41 Self-Portrait, 142 Bürger, Peter, 167, 169 Burlington Magazine, 110 Burning Man festival, 104, 104–5 Busch-Reisinger Museum, 191, 192 Bynum, Gregory Lewis, 161 Byzantine art, 70 215

Café Forgot, 156 Cage, John, 81 4′33″, 90, 91 Cahiers du Cinéma, 146 Canhavato, Cristóvão Throne of Weapons, 191 canons art experience, framing by, 71–72 artworks excluded by, 120 establishment of, 120 multitude of, in Art World, 156–57 opening up of, within Art History, 120 photography included in, 138 use of in Art History, 71 in Art World, 156 in museum system, 71 See also Art History; Art System; Art World; museum system Capitoline Museums founding of, 77 Caravaggio Medusa, 122 reputation of, 72 Carlyle Hotel, 141 Stingel, painted by, 141 Carrier, David, 82 Castro, Fidel, 178 Catherine the Great collection of, 98 Cattelan, Maurizio, 92 America, 87 official jester of the Art System, 89 Centre Pompidou, 141 Cézanne, Paul, 39, 114, 133 Chao Ge, 131 Cherix, Christophe, 27, 28 children, creative capacities of, 4–5 Choe, David, 145 Chorny, Nataliya, 12–13 chronocracy. See Art History, chronological model of evolution of art Cimabue, 114 Cima da Conegliano The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 111, 112 Index

role within Art History canon, 112 Cinderella Castle (Walt Disney World), 43 Bramante’s Tempietto, compared to, 40, 42 Neuschwanstein Castle, based on, 42 transcendence, conveyed by, 42 cinema. See film Clark, Stephen, 22, 28 Cleveland Museum of Art, 65, 66 Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments (Harvard), 191, 192 colonialism and art collecting, 50 comics, 146–48, 150 Art World, ignored by, 146–47 art worlds, binding by, 146 graphic novels, 147 medieval illustrated manuscripts, compared to, 148 Renaissance frescoes, compared to, 148 See also Wild Art commercial art artistic merit of, 125 Warhol and, 125–26 Conceptual art, 122, 125 Art World, entrance into, 150 Cornwell, Dean, 71 Murals on 54, 70 Cox, John Rogers, 65, 66 Gray and Gold, 65, 65, 66 Crimp, Douglas, 172 Crow, Thomas, 50 Crumb, R., 148 Cuba, 177–78 Cultural Revolution, 6, 62 culture of individuality, 56–58 curators as archeologists, 77 as Art World agents, 28 “biennial curator,” 179 as clergy, 62 as collectors, 77 dialogue, lack of, with public, 111 dialogue with public, 62 History, approval of, 94 History, foreseen by, 78 216



in museum system, 62, 77–78 public, dialogue with, 62 sacralization of, 93 as seers, 78, 79 as transmitters of meaning of art, 101 See also art institutions; Art System; Art World; experts; museums, art; museum system

Dalí, Salvador religious art by, 189 Damisch, Hubert, 183 Danto, Arthur, 17, 57, 87, 90, 143, 153–54, 183, 199n4 (chap. 4), 199–200n5 (chap. 4) David Zwirner Gallery, 148 Debord, Guy Situationism, 158, 159 The Society of the Spectacle, 28 Debussy, Claude on objectivity of taste, 55–56 decolonization of Art World, 182–85 interobjectivity, 183, 185 intersubjectivity, 183–85 as new Copernican revolution, 183 decorative arts, vs. fine arts, 21, 25–28 Deitch, Jeffrey, 103, 145 De Kooning, Willem, 147 Deleuze, Gilles, 131 Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les (Picasso) aesthetic merits of, 81 Denis, Maurice, 84 Derrida, Jacques, 131 Detroit Institute of Arts, 193 Dickie, George, 153 digital art, 121 Dion, Mark Tate Thames Dig, 39, 40 Documenta, 177, 179 Doeringer, Eric, 159, 160 Dorfles, Gillo Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, 170, 171 Dreier, Katherine, 84, 88 Duccio di Buoninsegna Madonna and Child, 67 Index

Duchamp, Marcel, 91, 121, 150, 183 as art broker, 88 Bottle Rack, 88 influence on Conceptual and post-Conceptual art, 122 found objects, aesthetic implications of, 86–90, 136 ready-mades, 150, 199n4 (chap. 4) Dufresnoy, Charles-Alphonse Ulysses Discovering Achilles Among the Daughters of Lycomedes attributed to, 148 Eastlake, Elizabeth, 106–7, 109, 110 Eastlake, Sir Charles Lock, 105–6, 107, 109, 110, 111 Art System, embodiment of, 106 Eggers, Dave, 167 Eilshemius, Louis, 88, 89 Eklund, Douglas, 172 elite as agents of Art System, 50 Art World, drivers of, 94 vs. masses, 8–9 vs. public, 61, 94 See also binary distinctions; Art System; Art World enlightenment, 163, 192–93 Enlightenment, the, 59, 79, 170, 189 and democritization of the arts, 9 Kant’s analyses of, 189 and secularization of the Art World, 189 and taste, 81, 170 See also aesthetic revolution Eratosthenes, 173 exclusion Art History, proceeds by, 118–19, 135 under capitalism, 6 under communism, 6 criteria of, 5–6, 22, 24 discourse of, 190–92 establishment of, 7 vs. inclusion, 5, 72, 118, 121 institutional art, result of, 133 See also Art World 217

experts Art World ruled by, 129 History, foreseen by, 78 as mediators of taste, 101–2 public, as validators of experts’ decisions, 78, 94 rise of, 81 as seers, 78, 79 universal taste, determined by, 80 See also Art History; Art World; curators; History fashion Baudelaire on, 156 connection to art, 155–57 exclusion by, 156 in museums, 155 Wild Art, compared to, 156, 157 Fenimore Art Museum, 22 film, 121, 138, 159 as art, 145–46 as popular culture, 163 as Wild Art, 146 Film Library (MoMA), 145–46 Fisher, Stanley, 158 Flavin, Dan The Diagonal of May 25, 1963, 135 Fogg Museum, 191, 192 food art, 122–23 as Art World art, 122 as Wild Art, 122–23 Foster, Hal, 131 Foucault, Michel, 131 Frankfurt School, 149, 176 Fraser, Andrea, 92, 184 French Academy, 102 French Revolution, 47, 50 and democratization of art, 48, 97, 170 Fried, Michael, 130 Friedrich II, 98 Frith, William Powell The Railway Station, 167 Fry, Roger, 84, 110, 113, 114, 115, 148–49 Gao brothers Mass in Tiananmen Square, 125 Index

Gao Zhen, 125 Garnier, Maurice, 141 Gary, Romain, 182 Gaskell, Ivan, 191 Gauguin, Paul, 114, 139 Tahitian Faces, 67 Gemäldegalerie, 106 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 133 Giotto, 61, 62, 114 Giovanni, Bruno di, 148 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Zur Farbenlehre, 106 Goldberger, Paul, 42 Golden, Thelma, 183–85 Gombrich, Ernst, 57 González-Torres, Félix, 135 Goodman, Sam, 158 graffiti, 3, 37, 145, 155, 187 Greenberg, Clement, 7, 26, 57, 59, 84, 113–14, 132, 169, 171 Abstract Impressionist movement, championed by, 119–20 aesthetic judgment, democratic view of, 131–32 authoritarian discourse, source of, 128, 131 “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 18, 167 See also Art History; modern art; modernism Guggenheim Museum, 127, 155 Gund, Agnes, 5 Gursky, Andreas, 137, 140 Haacke, Hans, 92–93, 145 Habermas, Jürgen, 81 Hafiz Allegory of Worldly and Unworldly Drunkenness, 67 Hains, Raymond, 158 Harrison, Rachel, 89, 90 Harvard Museum of Natural History, 191, 192 Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm, 57, 113, 114, 118, 176 Art System, foundation laid by, 98–99 on end of history, 199–200n5 (chap. 4) Hegelian discourses, 4 Kant historicized by, 98 218

on teleological conception of History, 78 See also Historicism Hermitage founding of, 98 Herriman, George, 147, 148 Krazy Kat, 148 Hesse, Eva, 121 Hester, Illana, 12–13 Heuet, Stéphane In Search of Lost Time (graphic novel), 147 high art classical distinction, 36 vs. low art, 8–10, 12–13, 161, 167, 172, 176 See also binary distinctions Hirst, Damien, 82, 94 Historicism, 138 definition of, 57 as ideological system of interpretation, 83 modernism a form of, 112 as new vision of History, 78 See also Art History; Hegel; History History experts, foreseen by, 78 as means of confirming institutional choices, 175 teleological function of, 78–79 See also Historicism Horsley, Sebastian, 126 Hosoi, Christian, 16 Houghton Library, 192 illustration, vs. art, 150 inclusion benefit to world of art, 72 vs. exclusion, 5, 72, 118, 121 indirect inclusion, 21 spirit of, 70 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominque Thetis Appeals to Zeus, 158 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) as graphic novel by Heuet, 147 institutional art, 133 exclusion a result of, 133 See also Art World art Institutional Critique, 181 Index

internet-based art, 138 as popular culture, 163 interobjectivity, 183, 185, 192 intersubjectivity, 81, 183–85, 193 Bakhtin on, 81 Iraq War, 141 Islamic art, 121 Jameson, Fredric, 17 Janson, H. W. History of Art: The Western Tradition, 67, 177 Jerram, Luke Play Me, I’m Yours, 102–3, 103 Johns, Jasper, 39, 126, 132 “Catenaries,” 131 Judd, Donald, 15 Julius II, Pope, 31, 32 Kafka, Franz Amerika, 140 Kant, Immanuel, 57, 97, 100, 161–62, 162–63, 189 aesthetic judgment, account of, 133, 185, 186 aesthetic theory, 4, 198n2 (chap. 3) analysis, democratic implications of, 132, 133 “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” 163, 164, 192–93 on antinomy of taste, 48, 52, 54, 76, 79–80, 82, 94 the beautiful, definition of, 52 Critique of Pure Reason, 53 Critique of the Power of Judgment, 14, 47, 57, 81, 188 on enlightenment, 163 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 194–95 and Historicism, 58, 98 judgment of taste, definition of, 198–99n7 (chap. 3) on sensibility, 53 and subjectivity of taste, 47–48, 49, 51, 54, 55, 131 219

Kant, Immanuel (continued) the sublime, description of, 35 See also aesthetic judgment; aesthetic revolution; aesthetics; antinomy of taste; the beautiful; enlightenment; the Enlightenment; Hegel; taste, judgment of Kantian revolution. See aesthetic revolution Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, 150 Khmer Rouge, 62 Kimbell Art Museum, 129 Kinkade, Thomas, 15, 17–19, 127, 128 Art History, relation to, 15 Art World, rejection by, 15, 1 Jerusalem Sunset, 15, 16 Kitsch, relation to, 18–19 as religious artist, 19 Kitsch, 8, 83, 84, 166–79 as anti-Art-Historical marker, 110 appropriated by Art World art, 172–73 vs. art, 171, 172 as art for the masses, 176 vs. avant-garde, 167 and barbarism, 173 as buffer zone around Art World, 170 definition of, 167–68, 171 as dust of Art History, 176 vs. modern art, 84 modern concept, 170, 176 modernity, as constitutive of, 176 nonconcept, 167 religious art as, 126 trash, built on concept of, 171 See also Art World art; popular culture; trash, concept of; Wild Art Kjellman-Chapin, Monica, 18 Klein, Yves Leap into the Void, 91 Kleist, Heinrich von Über das Marionettentheater (On the Puppet Theater), 10–12, 13, 14, 162 Königliches Museum. See Altes Museum Koons, Jeff, 93, 121 Antiquity series, 89 Krauss, Rosalind, 130 Index

Kristeva, Julia, 172 Kruger, Barbara, 145 Kugler, Franz Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei seit Constantin dem Grossen, 106 Kunstmuseum Basel founding of, 77, 198n1 (chap. 3) language aesthetic situation created by, 6 Soviet censorship of, 6 Laocoön, 119 Lawler, Louise, 92 Léger, Fernand, 90 Leonardo da Vinci, 82 Mona Lisa aesthetic merits of, 81 at Louvre, 48 at Metropolitan Museum of Art, 31, 48 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, 29 Levine, Sherrie Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp: AP), 86 light displays as Art World art, 135 as Wild Art, 135–36 Ligon, Glenn Double America, 184 Limbourg brothers Très riches heures du Duc de Berry, 148 Lin, Maya Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 154, 155 Lipscombe, Beca, 27 Lissitzky, El, 88 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 181 Louis XIV, 64 Louvre public opening of, 48, 49, 77, 97, 100 love, in context of Art World, 194–95 low art vs. high art, 8–10, 12–13, 161, 167, 172, 176 See also binary distinctions; popular culture; Wild Art Ludwig, Peter, 178, 179 220

Ludwig Museum, 178 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 161 Lurie, Boris, 158, 159 Railroad Collage, 158 Lyon, Danny, 184 Macau reconstruction of Venice in, 42, 45 visual culture in, 45 MacGregor, Neil A History of the World in 100 Objects, 190–91, 192 Manet, Édouard, 114 Sargent, compared to, 150 Olympia, 167 Manhattan as setting for Art World art, 144–45 Mao Zedong, 127 Mapplethorpe, Robert portrait of Patti Smith, 136 Marcuse, Herbert, 168, 169 Marxism impact of, 9–10, 168–69 liberal Marxism, 169 system of exclusion reinforced by, 9–10 See also Frankfurt School Masson, André, 28 Master of the Clumsy Children, 129 Matisse, Henri, 114, 120 religious art by, 189 McCarthy, Paul, 91 McEvilley, Thomas, 151 McQueen, Alexander, 155 McKenzie, Lucy, 21, 27, 28, 198n4 Meatloaf, album covers of, 158 Medici, Cosimo de’ Uffizi, founded by, 77 Medici family, 77 medieval art, 121 Message to the Future (exhibition), 184 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 48, 110, 125, 140, 155 AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion (exhibition), 155, 157 Index

Montebello, honors, 67 Michelangelo, 55, 81, 82 reputation of, 72 Sistine Chapel frescoes, 31, 33–34, 37 pinnacle of artistic achievement, 33 transcendence, conveyed by, 35 Miller, John and “Bad” Painting, 127 Milone, Joe, 22, 23, 24, 27 modern art History, anchored within, 113 defense of, 84 institutionalization of, 83 vs. Kitsch, 84 modernism, as ideology supporting, 112–13 as mission statement for, 83 trecento art, potential of emotions recovered from, 114 See also Art History; Greenberg, Clement; modernism; modernity modernism ascension of, 4 Art World, teleological spearhead of, 24 Historicism, form of, 112 as ideological system of interpretation, 83 as ideology supporting modern art, 112–13 as mission statement for modern art, 83 preservation of, 5 vs. universalism, 24 See also Art History; Greenberg, Clement; modern art; modernity modernity culture of individuality produced by, 56–58 Kitsch, constitutive of, 176 problems posed by, 59 and revolution in judgment of taste, 47, 49 system of exclusion under, 58 experts, validated by, 58 See also Art History; History; modern art; modernism Mondrian, Piet, 88, 169 Montaigne, Michel de on barbarism, 174, 205n16 (chap. 10) 221

Montebello, Philippe de honored by Metropolitan Museum of Art, 67 works accessioned during tenure as curator, 67 Morgan, Robert C., 169 Morgan Library and Museum, 141, 143 Morris, Robert, 91–92, 93 Moxey, Keith, 162 Muhammad, Sultan, 67 Allegory of Worldly and Unworldly Drunkenness (illustrations to), 67 Müller, Hans Peter Mounted Carved Coconut Goblet Decorated with Scenes from the Story of Samson (with Lid), 192 Muniz, Vik, 124 Art System, accepted by, 121, 122 and food art, 121, 122 Medusa Marinara, 122, 124 museum era, 96–115 chart by Struth democracies, linked with, 100 See also art institutions; Art World; curators; experts; museums, art museum guards curatorial status given to, 185 dialogue with the public, 183–85 marginal role of, 184 Museum of Comparative Zoology (Harvard), 192 Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), 103 Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), 193 museums, art architecture, found in, 189 and ethnographic museums, 191 Hegel, way prepared by, 98 origin and development of, 4 organizing structure of, 192 public first, 50 modern art in, 83 religious art in, 63, 189

Index

See also art institutions; Art World; curators; experts museums, ethnographic, 191 museums, history, 191 museum system and aesthetic revolution, 99 Art History, role of in, 8 Art System, buttress for, 99 canons, use of, 70 in China, 49, 194 curator in, 62, 77–78 development of, 48–49, 77–78, 100, 105, 191 dialogue with public, 62–65, 181–82 historicization of, 109, 110 See also art institutions; Art System; Art World; curators; experts; museums, art; music as popular culture, 163, 170 Napoleon I, 101–2 National Gallery (London), 105–6, 108, 109, 111, 112 Neiman, LeRoy, 121 as Wild Art forebear, 126 Neuschwanstein Castle, 42, 44 Nevelson, Louise, 24 Newman, Barnett Zips, 158 New Yorker covers by Westman, 143, 144 Nietzsche, Friedrich Twilight of the Idols, 160 No!art, 158 Nochlin, Linda, 17 nothing, as art, 91 4′33″ (Cage), 91 Leap into the Void (Klein), 91 Oltremares (Anselmo), 91 SKY TV (Ono), 91 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 91 White Paintings series (Rauschenberg), 91 October, 28, 93, 183 critics associated with, 130 Hegelian history of, 133 222

official art, 83 Ono, Yoko, SKY TV, 91 Overbeck, Johann Friedrich, 158

architecture, 42 art, 158 Art World afraid of, 28 Art World artists inspired by, 45, 89 and elitist culture, 95 Pace Wildenstein gallery, 142 free discussion within, 163 Part Deux, 156 vs. high art, 12, 161, 170, 176 Pasadena Museum, 122 music, 10, 95, 170 Passamaquoddy people, 192 puppet theater, 11–12 Paul, Saint, 174 shadow theater, 12 Pavarotti, Luciano See also Kitsch; high art; low art; Wild Art appropriation of Thetis Appeals to Zeus populist art. See popular art (Ingres), 158 post-Conceptual art, 122 Peabody Museum of Archaeology and postcolonial theory, 177 Ethnology, 191, 192 Poststructuralism, 131, 188 Peale, Charles Willson and Kitsch, 172 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Poussin, Nicolas, 37, 38, 39, 70, 129, 130, 131, founded by (with William Rush), 77, 132, 149 100 Ulysses Discovering Achilles Among the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Daughters of Lycomedes, attributed founding of, 77, 100 to, 148 mission of, 100 Pozzo, Andrea, 126 performance art, 121, 126 President’s Chair, The, 192 Art World, entry into, 150 Presley, Elvis, 81 Petrarch, 61, 62, 63 Prince, Richard, 86, 89, 90, 94 photography, 121 Prix de Rome, 102 as art, 136–40 Prokofiev, Sergei, 161 Sontag on, 138 Proust, Marcel Picabia, Francis, 88, 141 In Search of Lost Time, 147 Picasso, Pablo, 26, 28, 120, 147, 150 public Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 81 aesthetic judgments of, 18 Pictures Generation (exhibition), 172 aims of, in museum attendance, 25–26 Pierro della Francesca bad taste of, 84, 110 Baptism of Christ, 106 dialogue, lack of, with curators, 111 Legends of the True Cross, 147 dialogue with curators, 62 reputation of, 72 dialogue with museum art, 108–9 Pinchuk, Victor, 93 dialogue with museum guards, 184–85 Pinchuk Art Centre, 93–94 diversity of, 63, 132 Pissarro, Camille, 39, 139 vs. elite, 61, 94 Pictures (exhibition), 172 impact on museum projects, 63 Pollock, Jackson, 120, 129, 132 museums, intimidated by, 25 Poor, Nigel, 39 taste mediators, unaware of, 102 Food Stains, 41 as validator of experts’ decisions, 78, 94 Pop art, 122, 158 See also art institutions; Art World; popular culture museums, art Index

223

Quinta Bienal de la Habana, 177–78, 179 issues addressed at, 178, 179 Raphael, 114, 158 Saint George, 158 Stanzas, 32, 33 Rauschenberg, Robert, 26, 39, 126, 172 Combines, 135 Dirt Painting (for John Cage), 38, 39 White Paintings series, 91 Reid, Bernie, 27 religious art Art World, exclusion from, 126, 189 churches, removed from, 63 Collection of Modern Religious Art, Vatican, 33 Dalí, religious art by, 189 Kinkade, as religious artist, 19 as Kitsch, 126 Matisse, religious art by, 189 in public art museums, 63, 189 vs. secular art, 32 See also Art System; Art World; Art World art; Wild Art Rembrandt, 81, 98, 131 Self-Portrait, Kenwood House, London, 129 Reni, Guido, 98 Repin, Ilya, 26 restaurant art, 141–42 Art World ignores, 142 Bemelmans Bar (Bemelmans), 141, 143 Monkey Bar decorations (Sorel), 142 Murals on 54 (Cornwell), 70 revolution of feeling, 159–61 avant-garde artist as agent of, 160–61 Nietzsche on, 160 Schiller on, 159 Richter, Gerhard, 136, 138 Rigby, Elizabeth. See Eastlake, Elizabeth Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich, 25 Rockwell, Norman, 121, 141 Rodin, Auguste, 155 Rorty, Richard, 188

Index

Rosenbach Museum and Library, 141 Rotella, Mimmo, 158 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6, 140 Rubens, Peter Paul, 98 Rubens, His Wife Helena Fourment (1614–1673), and Their Son Frans (1633–1678), 67 Rubin, William S., 170 Rudolf II, 122, 123 Ruf, Beatrix, 127 Rush, William Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, founded by (with Charles Willson Peale), 77, 100 Russian Revolution, 98 Sahli, Mohand Cherif, 182, 183 Salon des Refusés, 83 Sargent, John Singer, 191 Manet, compared to, 150 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 190 Schiller, Friedrich, 159–60, 161 Schlesinger Library, 192 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 106 Schwitters, Kurt, 88 Sendak, Maurice, 141 In the Night Kitchen, 141 senses. See sensibility sensibility, 51–53 aesthetics, as cognitive inquiry into, 51 aesthetic choices, nurtured by, 52 Kant’s system, cornerstone of, 53 sphere of, 182 See also aesthetic judgment; aesthetics; Kant; taste, judgment of Serota, Sir Nicholas, 105, 107 shadow theater as popular culture, 12 Sherman, Cindy, 94, 140 Simonova, Kseniya, 71 sand paintings by, 69 Sistine Chapel, 31, 33–36, 37 frescoes by Michelangelo, 31, 33–34, 37 Situationism, 158, 159

224

Sixtus IV, pope collection of, 77 skateboarding, 12–13 “Christ air” trick, 15, 16 Hosoi, Christian, 16 Sloane, Hans, 97 Smith, Terry, 183 Société Anonyme, 88 Société des Incohérents, 90 Funeral Mass for a Deaf Man, 90 Society of the Spectacle, 7, 162 anti–Society of the Spectacle, 159 The Society of the Spectacle (Debord), 28 Sontag, Susan On Photography, 138 photography included in the canon by, 138 Sorel, Edward Monkey Bar decorations, 142 Sotheby’s, 159 South African art, 178 South and Central American art, 121 Spectacle, 28, 84, 159, 167 art of, 176 Art World afraid of, 28 See also Debord; Society of the Spectacle Spiegelman, Art, 147, 148 Maus, 147 Starr, Ringo, 21, 25, 28 Steinberg, Leo “Other Criteria,” 157 Steinberg, Saul, 142–43 Stella, Frank Working Space, 155 Stevens, Wallace, 139 Stingel, Rudolf, 141 storytelling, vs. formal spatial relations, 148 Strabo, 173 street art, 37, 63, 95, 103, 125, 187 Choe, David, 145 as Wild Art, 145 Struth, Thomas, 92 museum photographs by, 108–9, 111 National Gallery 1, London 1989, 109, 111 Sturtevant, Elaine, 121

Index

Sullivan, Mary Quinn, 25 Swampy the Gator, 15 Taaffe, Philip appropriation of Newman’s Zips, 158 Tadao Ando Church of Light, 189 Tanaka Atsuko Electric Dress, 135 Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History (exhibition), 191–92 Tansey, Mark Triumph of the New York School, 119–20, 120 Tarkovsky, Andrei Stalker, 170 taste artists, as agents of, 95 Art System, abandoned by, 81 economics of, 31 good vs. bad taste, 170–71 a matter of education, 170 public, bad taste of, 84 reliance on values of history, 81 spheres of, 8, 174, 175 See also antinomy of taste; taste, judgment of taste, judgment of duplicitous structure of, 94 egalitarian structure of, 94–95, 101 individual sensibility and imagination, sited in, 54, 86 intersubjective activities, rooted in, 81–82 objectivity of, 81 reflection of higher order, 47 regulation by Art History, 101 not rule-bound, 54–55, 86, 92 subjectivity of, 47–48, 54, 55, 75–76, 80, 81, 82, 85, 92 universality of, 54, 75–76, 105 See also aesthetic judgment; aesthetic revolution; aesthetics; antinomy of taste; taste Tate, 105 tattoo art, 3, 53, 63

225

Taylor, Roger, 176 The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 22, 24, 26, 28, 66, 70, 125, 140, 146, 155 creation of, 25 film department created, 121 photography department created, 202n10 (chap. 8) Thoreau, Henry David, 192 Tiananmen Square massacre, 125 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista, 98 Triumph of Pulcinella, 103 Tiffany, Louis Comfort Floriform Vase, 192 Tintoretto, 70, 71 Titian Portrait of Francis I, 48 role within Art History canon, 112 Todorov, Tzvetan, 117, 188, 194 barbarism, defined by, 173, 174, 179 The Fear of Barbarians, 95 on transcultural relationships, 177 transcendence Cinderella Castle as conveyor of, 42 Sistine Chapel frescoes as conveyor of, 35 trash, concept of Kitsch built on, 171 modern and postmodern aesthetics built on, 171–72 Treasures of Tutankhamun (exhibition), 316 Turner, J. M. W., 70, 71 Tuttle, Richard 3rd Rope Piece, 154 Twombly, Cy and classical art, 36–37 The Italians, 36, 37 Über das Marionettentheater (On the Puppet Theater) (Kleist), 10–12, 13, 14, 162 Uccello, Paolo Battle of San Romano, 106 Uffizi founding of, 77 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 191

Index

Ulysses Discovering Achilles Among the Daughters of Lycomedes (Circle of Nicolas Poussin), 149 universalism modernism, antonym of, 24 Vallance, Jeffrey, 17 Van Dyck, Anthony, 98 Vasari, Giorgio, 57, 148 Vatican, 31–32 Collection of Modern Religious Art, 33 Vatican Museums, 33 See also Sistine Chapel Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art, The (exhibition), 31 Venice Over Manhattan, 141 Vergil Aeneid, 37 Vermeer, Johannes, 81 Vettriano, Jack, 150 video art, 121, 138 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 154 Villeglé, Jacques de la, 158 Waagen, Gustav, 106 Kunstwerke und Künstler in England und Paris, 106 Walker, Darren, 194 Warhol, Andy, 121, 122, 126, 199n4 (chap. 4) Brillo Box, 154 as commercial artist, 126–27 tribute by Barneys, 126–27 Wall, Jeff, 137, 140 Walton, Alice, 193–94 We Chat, 125–26 Westman, Barbara, 143, 144 Whitney Museum of American Art, 184 Wild Art, 64, 135–51 Art History, as tool for understanding, 117 Art History silent about, 117 Art World art derivation from, 45 divide from, 125–26, 151 interchanges with, 159

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claim to aesthetic merit, 133 claim to qualify as Art World art, 69 definition of, 3–4 fashion, compared to, 156, 157 See also Art History; Art World; Art World art; art worlds; artists; Art System; low art; Kitsch; museum system; popular culture Wild Art (Carrier and Pissarro), 3, 53, 117 Williams, Sue, 129 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 118 Wilson, Fred, 184 History of Ancient Art, 98

Index

Laocoön, description by 119 Wilson, Fred, 92–93 Wittkower, Rudolf, 12 Wood, Christopher, 33 words, combined with images, 148–49, 150–51 vulgarity of, 149 work of art, definition of, 153 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 127 Wyeth, Andrew, 66 Christina’s World, 65–66, 66 zones of exclusion, 5

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