Art’s big missed chance

Below, an interesting take on the new show I found in the Globe and Mail today. What are your thoughts?

By: Lynn Crosbie From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

Opines Sarah Jessica Parker, that sly doyenne of modern art and theory: “Art is this sort of intellectual exercise for people.”

I see. Art is like jumping jacks for the mind.

Parker made this declaration in a mildly frantic interview this week, as Bravo TV put its shoulder behind her highbrow reality-TV competition (she is the executive producer), the tritely titled Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. Two weeks after its U.S. debut, the show is generating very little heat, hence the full court press – I also saw hundreds of advertisements this week, featuring a sepulchral critic cruelly pronouncing “What you are doing here, is not ... ahhhht” to a devastated contestant.

We are just getting to know the 14 international contestants’ styles and strengths; the aesthetics and epistemological biases of the four judges, one of whom, China Chow, is a uniquely qualified model, actress and “art enthusiast.” (A guest judge appears each week as well, an artist whose work is related to the project at hand: This Saturday, the mixed-media sculptor Jon Kessler was on hand to watch the New York loft dwellers work with materials salvaged from an appliance graveyard.)

We are also a nation still benighted, just learning that TV, for so long the arch enemy of art and culture, can be – in a Project Runway meets Bathroom Divas: So You Want to Be an Opera Star? sort of way – a significant element in the production and dissemination of high art. Parker’s mother-in-law, she has revealed in interviews, was a largely unknown painter whose work is only now being recognized. With Work of Art, the winning contestant not only nets $100,000 and a show at the prestigious Brooklyn Museum, they showcase their practices to audiences that far surpass the tightly knit, tribal and infamously elitist art world.

Imagine showing a new work (contestants work on their assignments through most of the show) not only to the occasional tightly wound, maniacally attired art connoisseur, but to a (relatively) vast, loosely connected group of reclining, snacky and boisterous people who are, for good reason, suspicious of and disinclined to care about art.

Because if you can make one tired, hostile dude in a recliner tilt forward and say, “That doesn’t make me sick,” you are a real artist. Not in the traditional sense, where art’s merit is assessed within small, refined and moneyed circles, but in the new, collective sense, for art is moving toward community and away from precious little pilasters in the gilded corners of museums filled with jittery guards and sniffy observers.

Parker calls this “accessibility”: In her interview, she declares that all art should be furthered democratically and received by all. (Or maybe she said, “In Sex and the City 2, we take The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert to an edgier, darker place.”)

But accessibility and art-for-all arguments are ludicrous. Art should not be accessible to everyone: One must be prepared to engage in art’s history and various contexts in order to respond to it. Analogously, a book like James Joyce’s Ulysses is not accessible to everyone: It is difficult, inter-referential and slow going, and is that an error on the author’s part? Should he have used big, bright blocky letters and puns instead of his infamous quadrivial gestures?

Yet Parker is right when she says, in the same interview, of art: “You are a part of it.”

Art, ideally, is a tripartite conversation between itself, its creator and its observer(s.)

The average person does not visit museums and galleries because they are designed to repel anyone but the most intrepid viewer, assured in the chin-in-hand, hand-on-hip posture and mistress of the terse, acute remark, such as, “Oh, what a Fauvist nightmare!”

Work of Art, with its struggling iconoclasts and ridiculously pompous judges (“There’s simply no life here! I learn nothing about YOU!” one judge brayed this week, as though “life” and autobiography are the top-secret sine qua nons of visual expression), misses such a good opportunity to break down, to truly demolish the barriers that have always separated precious art from the barbarous hordes.

What if the 14 artists were asked, as critic Lucy Lippard suggests Warhol did, to reserve their comments (they explain each piece interminably) and instead “align” themselves with us, the spectators?

What if, contrary to what one horrible and championed contestant did by sculpting the body of an idiot with a TV for a head, the artists insisted that we collectively participate in the work at hand? This would be like voting for the next American Idol but far more creative: Think of Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree (in which viewers are invited to write down their wishes on scraps of paper and attach them to a tree) expanded into a forest, into a mass dialogue about beauty, politics, self, truth, lies, being and nothingness.

Public art, such as Choi Jeong-Hwa’s installation-homage to recycling (Happy Happy is constructed from plastic donations), is the way of the future – Jeong-Hwa’s work appeared in a show of Korean artists’ work called Your Bright Future.

One hopes this TV art show, laudable for its earnestness, erroneous in its sense of modern art, will make a new appliance voodoo graveyard by reaching through the glass of all the thousands of TV sets, and seizing us with a simple question: “What do you think art is?” Or, more urgently, “Help us!”