post-structuralism | Richard Nilsen

Two of the most common complaints I heard at art galleries were: “My kid could do that,” and “It’s the emperor’s new clothes.”

As far as the first, I suspect the kid could do that, although the parent could not. Kids’ art is amazing. As for the second, it implies that the artist is somehow hoodwinking the public, setting out to create something to “fool the rubes.”

But in my 25 years of being an art critic and seeing hundreds, probably thousands of shows, I have to say I cannot remember a single example of an artist deliberately scamming the public. On the contrary, no matter how godawful the art, how silly the conceit, how pretentious the content, every single one of them was utterly sincere.

The issue has been raised by my former esteemed colleague, Kerry Lengel, on his Facebook page: “What percentage of Modern art was created for the sole purpose of making rubes like me scratch their heads and go, ‘Whuh …?’ ” Included is the above photo of a four-panel Minimalist artwork. He seems to have addressed this question specifically to me.

My initial response to his percentage question was “13.7 percent.” But that was merely facetious. He suggested 40 percent. But my real answer is closer to zero.

This is not to exonerate all the really bad art that hangs on gallery and museum walls, but to claim that the miserableness is not by intent. Remember the rule of thumb: 90 percent of everything is crap. (Others calculate that at 99 percent, but I’m not here to quibble).

Nor am I going to argue that many arts professionals aren’t gargling jargon and hiding behind graduate degrees and claiming to have arcane knowledge the ordinary art goer is not privy to. Any profession has its shibboleths. I have complained many times about the ridiculous text that curators post beside the art on the wall, claiming all kinds of political and philosophical content in otherwise simple imagery. Such content may or may not be there, but if it isn’t communicated by the art itself, what good is having an explanation next to it?

The academic and intellectual world has been infected for the past 30 or 40 years with “theory,” and it has deracinated a good deal of the art, both by explaining away the work, or by substituting theory for actual experience. There is much to be learned from deconstruction or semiotics, but it cannot replace just looking at the art itself. All theory is an attempt to replace living experience with dry words. Language is a way to tame the effusive and prolific chaos of human experience. It is a map instead of a voyage.

(I thank goodness that we seem to be leaving the constipated orbit of post-structuralism. I could never understand why we should take seriously any theory that by its own tenets is meaningless. It has been one of the least helpful things the French have ever given us.)

Let’s take a look at the four wall panels above. First, they aren’t just any colors, but specifically the primary colors of the additive color system, that is, the colors in your TV and computer screen. The blue isn’t any blue, but the almost purple blue, the red is a tomato red. If you look closely at the colors and try to ingest them the way you might a salami sandwich, roll them around on your eyes the way you might roll that deli meat on your tongue, you can simply enjoy their intensity. They are a pleasure to look at.

But they may also make you consider the difference between the mediated world of digital experience and the sensuous world that you float in daily. The artist could have chosen the printer’s subtractive primary colors (the colors of the printed page), cyan, yellow, magenta and black (abbreviated to CYMK, where the K stands for black).

So, they are not just any colors. You bring to the art your knowledge of the color choices you use daily on your iMac, the same way you bring your knowledge of biblical mythology to the paintings of Titian, or your knowledge of the French demimonde to Impressionists.

Further, the rectangular shape of the canvases (or panels, I can’t tell from the photo) is the shape of the pixels on your TV or computer screen. If you look with a magnifying glass at the screen you can see them lined up in register. These four panels seem to be about something, not merely four panels of random colors.

What you make of all this is up to you, but you should not simply dismiss the art. I don’t want to make to great a claim for this specific piece of art, but the artist clearly had something in mind.

What we are asked to do by any piece of art is to take it seriously. We may ultimately decide it belongs with the 90 percent that deserves to be flushed away, but we haven’t earned the judgment unless we first allow ourselves to assume its sincerity (even when it is clearly an ironic comment). It’s the art world equivalent of “innocent until proven guilty.” Admittedly, it can sometimes be a short trial, but it shouldn’t be a lynching.

It should also be noted that there is a difference between liking a piece of art and appreciating it. We all have tastes and sometimes we like vanilla and don’t like asparagus. But we can recognize that some people love the vegetable. Liking is not a judgment, it is an expression of personal taste. There are many works of art I recognize as important and distinguished but that I have no taste for. I have a personal animus toward all Victorian literature. Can’t stand the stuff. But just because I was put off Dickens by being forced to read Oliver Twist in eighth grade doesn’t mean I think Dickens is no damn good. I just don’t resonate to Victorian writing. I don’t enjoy Browning, either, or Hardy. Liking is merely personal; quality is something else.

Samuel Coleridge says somewhere in his Biographica Literaria that there is a difference between “gustibus” and “gusti.” De gustibus non est desputandum, he says is merely the personal liking and disliking of something, but taste, he says, is not like that. It can be cultivated and developed.

I remember recoiling at the rather glib statement by artist Jenny Holzer that “Money creates taste.” That should be, “Money creates fashion.” Taste is something else. Just ask Donald Trump.

Taste requires engagement. Spending time and effort. It is not a question of academic degrees, but willingness and openness; and an ability to forget the myriad conventional categories we have been ground down by. Art that is unfamiliar is usually art that is going somewhere beyond the norm, and invites us to go with it.

So, if you don’t recognize value in the four panels of color on the wall, this should be a sign that you should stop and plan to spend an hour with it trying to figure out what the artist might be attempting that you cannot understand with the speed and alacrity you might get the punchline of a New Yorker cartoon. (See: https://richardnilsen.com/2014/07/10/how-to-look-at-a-painting/ )

Engagement — not in the Sartrean political sense, but in the sense of spending your time and attention — is the bottom line both in making art and in perceiving it. Let it absorb you as you absorb it. Seek the pleasure in the simplest things, such as the green; not just any green, but this very specific green. Taste it in your eye. For the time you stand in front of it, let the painting or sculpture, or installation, be everything in the world, a funnel into which you pour your whole life experience, and let it come back out in a torrent.

Obviously, you won’t get the big reward every time. Some art is thin gruel. But you should never just assume it is pabulum. It just may prove worth your time.

People approach the arts generally in one of two ways: with taste and judgment or with curiosity.

You can spot the first group by the arch of their eyebrow, the second group by the gleam in their eye.

The first group includes a good number of academics, critics and — worse — politicians. They all suck the life out of creation (with a lower-case “c”). I speak as a lifelong critic myself. In all three cases, they have criteria outside the issues of art by which they judge the art.

The academic asks whether the art promotes his particular hobby horse, whether it is Marxism, Feminism or Post-structuralism. The politician looks to issues of biblical morality or economic theory or national pride. The critic, too, has his narrows and straits.

They all have ideals — or limitations — they ask the art to live up to and tend to filter out divergent opinions and make moral judgments, not merely aesthetic ones, against those who failed to live up to their standards.

They ran the gamut from the most enlightened connoisseurship to the most craven bigotry.

But each came to a final and immovable resting place, so to speak. They came to a certainty from a certainty. Not much of a voyage.

Curiosity is the libido of art and it is always searching and always finding new pleasures, deeper enlightenment. It begins not with certainty and knowledge, but with openness and ignorance.

There is this one simple truth that we cannot escape: What you know prevents learning. It is only when we give up believing in our knowingness that we can grow. There is nothing so stunted as theory; it is the brain wearing a whalebone corset.

And curiosity is where all the greatest artists have begun. It is also where any art lover needs to start: Judgment is for the censorious; art aims for the unprogrammed curiosity.

Obviously, I have stacked the deck in curiosity’s favor, but that is only as it should be.

The greatest artists have always been open to the world. Rembrandt had his Orientalism, Hokusai his Occidentalism. Leonardo had the most promiscuous curiosity in the history of our culture.

For me, these are the heroes of art.

And I think of them every time the issue of multiculturalism comes up. The concept seems simple and desirable to me, but it is a bugaboo for those who have wished to see culture ossified at a certain time and place, usually late 19th century and Europe.

I am not one to knock European art. I fall in rapture over Beethoven’s late quartets, Rembrandt’s self-portraits, Goethe’s Faust. But I also hunger to know as much as I can about the music of India, China, South America, Africa. I want to hear Ali Akhbar Khan on sarod, the clang of a Javanese gamelan. I want to see sumi paintings of Sesshu, the stonework of Macchu Picchu.

Shakespeare is a prodigy, but I also want to see Noh plays, Shakuntala and Chinese opera.

They all have something for me to experience and something to teach me.

And they have something to teach the finest artists working today, a fact the finest artists are fully aware of. All the best artists borrow and steal from elsewhere, whether it’s Papa Haydn borrowing Alsatian folksongs or Pablo Picasso ripping off African masks.

But there are critics who decry Philip Glass for the Hindu in his minimalism or the Asiatic spectacle of Robert Wilson’s stagings.

But these are the people who are revivifying our high culture, just as Paul Simon and David Byrne, musical thieving magpies, are doing for our popular culture.

And artists have always been awake to these cultural borrowings, as Gauguin borrowed from the South Seas, Bartok borrowed from Hungarian folk music, as Shakespeare borrowed from anything he thought would be useful.

Everything, from top to bottom, is grist for fine art.

I know there is a politically correct aspect of multiculturalism that is ignorance incarnate: the enforced belief that anything from another culture is wonderful and we shouldn’t say anything bad about it. But that is a political consideration, not an aesthetic one.

I’m all for saying bad things about bad art, wherever it comes from, but let’s see and hear it first. Hold judgment in abeyance and just soak it all in.

There is not a culture anywhere on this planet that has nothing to teach us. We should never be so smug.

The critics and connoisseurs are concerned about being right. But much more important is maintaining a lively mind. What is correct and proper in any age is very likely to change over time. Such are not the “eternal verities” that their proponents like to think they are; they are mere fashion.

But a lively mind, whether it is in Third Century China, 18th Century France or 21st Century Brazil, will always be the medium of exchange for thinking, feeling people.

Remember when tomatoes were considered poison? If the reactionaries had had their way, we would not now have pizza. I rest my case.

—Richard Nilsen

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Curiosity is the libido of art