Mad Hatters
The other day, Artreview was reading an article in The New York Times about how a curator at the New York Historical Society had marched up to a top-hatted horse-drawn-carriage driver who was minding his own business (while simultaneously touting for it, one presumes) at the south end of Central Park. The curator then flourished a reproduction of a painting of a horse-drawn carriage (plus top-hatted driver, plus passengers he’s explaining the sites to) in Central Park dating from 1945 (the painting, not the reproduction) and recorded the (living) driver’s interpretation of the work, to be exhibited as part of the work’s wall text in the museum. It’s all, the Times explains, about letting outside voices into hallowed halls. About divesting oneself of one’s authority and privilege. Perhaps even, underneath all that, about making art relevant to everyday life… ‘The public interpretation appears on the label directly below the professional insight,’ the Times adds approvingly. Small steps. It goes on to note that the Middlebury College Museum of Art in Vermont recently invited students, ‘some without art backgrounds’, to rewrite some of its labels. Among the students were two from Ghana, who responded to a work by El Anatsui. Who is Ghanaian.
Like Artreview said, small steps. In any case, it’s the idea, not the execution, that counts. Everyone knows that that’s really the basis of the art of our times. The physical object (inasmuch as there might be one) really is the emperor’s new clothes. That’s why Mike Winkelmann invented Beeple and Beeple invented s. To keep it real. But Artreview’s not here to tell you what you already know.
Whether you want to laugh or weep at that New York Times story, it does – amid all the concealed commentary about the learned sense versus the common sense, the professional versus the amateur, the white cube vs the dirty street and its rather basic interpretation of commonality, fashion vs uniforms or folk costumes, and the things we share according to the happenstance of where we were born – highlight an underlying paranoia about art’s relationship to the wider world. More basically, it’s a paranoia about what it’s for (art, not the wider world, although there are, of course, those cloistered, privileged ivory-tower dwellers who, following the lineage of Enlightenment thinkers like Immanuel Kant, still argue the reverse – disgraceful). Particularly after a global pandemic that has reminded us that there are some aspects of the world at large from which there is no real escape. And of course, lockdowns, furloughs and all the stu that comes with that have given those who have survived plenty of time to think about things.
In essence each edition of Artreview’s annual Power 100 is precisely about how the artworld is dealing with its perpetual condition of paranoia. About debates concerning how to value art and about what art is for. About whether it exists in a zone of (to borrow the disgraceful German philosopher’s words) wild freedom or a more rational, purposeful one. And perhaps how it can exist, simultaneously, in both. Of course, all these debates are not something from which Artreview stands apart. But while it may seem, to those cynics among you, that Artreview uses this list to displace its own schizophrenic and paranoid tendencies onto 100 innocent victims selected at random for their more-or-less vague connections with the field of contemporary art, it can assure you that it does not. Someone who wears a hat is not the same as someone else who wears a hat. Unless of course they are. One has to allow for a certain degree of emulation, after all. We all know that that’s also what contemporary art is all about. Artreview
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