While repairing the stone floor at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts outdoor sculpture garden, workers put a velvet rope in front of a bronze bas-relief piece to protect it and secured the burlap with duct tape. Wind pulled loose a corner of the burlap, exposing about 30 percent of the piece. An executive of the construction company described what his crew heard some museum visitors say:
“For about half an hour they discussed the deep symbolism and implication of the artist having covered his work in burlap and why he allowed the public only partial access to what was there. They waxed long and hard about the appropriateness of the texture of the burlap in relation to the medium used. And what the use of the velvet rope meant in juxtaposition to the base materials of the burlap and duct tape. And the cosmic significance of using degradable materials to hide the true inner beauty.”
The confusion was understandable, given what many art museums have become, partly because of the National Endowment for the Arts. If you care about the condition of the culture, read Lynne Munson’s mesmerizing book, “Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance.” Munson, who worked at the National Endowment for the Humanities when Lynne Cheney was chairman, provides much more than a tour of NEA inanities (although the jacket photo is the “performance art” of an NEA grantee wearing a hula-style skirt of dollar bills, his wrist attached to a bank door by a string of sausages). Munson targets the intolerance of the postmodern art establishment. It is intolerance of the West’s cultural patrimony, intolerance masquerading as egalitarianism.
The NEA has preferred video and “performance art” to painting and sculpture, which supposedly are suffering “historical exhaustion” and reinforce “hierarchies of the past.” Postmodernists dislike the “white cube” of gallery space, which they think implies that art is “difficult.” They like, Munson says, making art out of “opinions and unfiltered experience,” making esthetic concerns subservient to social critiques. Increasingly, museums and art schools disparage what used to be their raison d’etre, the cultivation of connoisseurship.
Connoisseurship assumes that high-quality art is rare, rather than equally common to all cultures. Connoisseurship assumes that excellence in art can be defined and identified by scholarly judgments that are more than political acts or manifestations of cultural biases. Connoisseurship assumes that esthetic values have ethical force–that high art is elevating, that it pulls those who comprehend it up from the everyday. Hence the serious symbolism of the steep, stately flights of steps by which visitors used to ascend to a typical museum of fine arts.
The climb was, says Munson, “a metaphor for the effort required to reach a state of knowledge.” The climb brought visitors through columned, neoclassical entrances, the designs of which evoked the Greco- Roman antecedents of a civilization whose grandest works can civilize those who learn how to contemplate them properly. Upon entering the traditional museum, visitors were exposed to a chronological narrative of the unfolding of this civilization, as told through works of genius by heroes of creativity.
All this offends the postmodern sensibility: the idea that enlightenment requires effort is unacceptable because it means that it is not equally “accessible” to everyone. The idea that Western civilization should be “privileged” over others is, postmodernists think, ethnocentric arrogance, incompatible with egalitarianism, multiculturalism, “diversity.” Postmodernists believe that all cultures are created equal and that any cultural presentation that “privileges” the works of a relatively few great artists “marginalizes” common people by suggesting that they are, well, common.
So, many museums have adopted physical statements of postmodernism. To disassociate themselves from the association of art with high seriousness, they bring visitors in down low. In Cleveland, Baltimore and other cities, museums begin their ideological assault on visitors by having them enter through new, small, banal side or back doors at ground level. This, Munson says, emphasizes “that the experiences one has inside a museum are not elevated above, but are merely an extension of, the transactions of daily life.” Such “revisionist” museums “portray the great story of art as a heroless tale.” Entering visitors are apt to pass by a souvenir and book shop, and a coffee bar, before being channeled into the central exhibit–probably of non-Western art, “privileged” by postmodernism.
It is an axiom (Winston Churchill’s): We make our buildings, then our buildings make us. The modernized museum is supposed to make us all equal. But to what?
The NEA is here to stay, which is fine, if it can learn to do no harm and to do occasional good. Government, which subsidizes soybeans, can subsidize art, too, if government can entrust cultural policy to people–postmodernists need not apply–who know how arts differ from soybeans. Art is not a precisely defined category. And you cannot increase the supply of good art, as you can the supply of good soybeans, simply by subsidizing production.
Government should subsidize nothing contemporary–no art or artist of the moment, only canonical works. Cultural policy should be concerned with the preservation and transmission of the best of our heritage, works that have been ratified by the test of time. An entire sensibility–it is called conservatism–is bound up with the idea that time is a test, that some things pass it, but most flunk.
