ARTS
Let the past be the future
Roger Kimball on how museums are in danger of becoming emporia for the ephemeral The evening of Tuesday, 25 January was filthy weather in New York. A treach- erous combination of snow and freezing rain — the winter's first real storm brought the city nearly to a standstill. But that did nothing to discourage a crowd of artists and other beautiful people from plonking down $8 apiece and filling the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater at the Muse- um of Modern Art in New York. The sub- ject was 'The New Modern Museum: New York, Paris, London'. The advertised speakers were Glenn D. Lowry, the three- tor of MoMA, Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, and Werner Spies, director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The weather stranded Mr Spies, so his remarks were read by John Elderfield, chief curator at large at MoNIA.
Unanimity is a wonderful thing. The art critic Harold Rosenberg once spoke of 'the herd of independent minds' (the phrase might well be his chief contribution to criti- cism). The herd was grazing away content- edly in the Titus Theater that evening. Messrs Spies (ventriloquised by Mr Elder- field), Serota and Lowry came (in Mr Spies's memorable phrase) to 'throw a grenade at the 19th century'. They were against the imposition of anything like a master narrative' (Sir Nicholas) or a 'lin- ear' or 'taxonomic' (Mr Lowry) approach to art history. They all emphasised the Importance of innovation, new approaches, greater diversity — all wound up repeating the same clichés drawn from the jargon of fashionable literary criticism. (`Any narra- tive is an interpretation,' Sir Nicholas said, sounding like a mini Jacques Derrida.) Most of us think of an art museum as an institution dedicated to the preservation and transmission of important works of art. A museum in this sense remains forward- looking primarily by attending to the past. That may sound paradoxical. But a muse- um, like a university — like any institution entrusted with the cultural capital of civili- sation — must be fundamentally conserva- tive if it is to remain faithful to its vocation. By keeping the past alive a museum pro- vides an antidote to the necessary myopia of the present, thus equipping us to face the future with the resources of the past. Messrs Spies, Serota, Lowry and (it was clear) Elderfield all want us to dispense with this traditional idea of the museum. They want, as Sir Nicholas said, to give the Contemporary 'parity' with the past, even (in Mr Lowry's phrase) 'to privilege the contemporary'. In other words, these dis- tinguished gentlemen wish to transform the great institutions they control into emporia of the ephemeral, 'to dissolve' (in Sir Nicholas's words) 'the distinction between the exhibition and the permanent collection'.
Well, that is part of what they want. Sir Nicholas, like Mr Lowry and (to a lesser extent) Mr Spies, is presiding over an insti- tution whose chief imperative has become `more' — more exhibition space, more art works, more box-office take. The Pompidou Centre in Paris has just finished an expen- sive renovation that added vastly more gallery space to the museum; MoMA is about to embark on the largest expansion in its 70-year history; and the Tate is on the brink of opening a huge new facility devot- ed to modern art at Bankside's converted power station.
The unacknowledged truth is that for all three of these institutions art has increas- ingly become a handmaiden to cultural tourism. In this, they epitomise a cultural trend. Aesthetic achievement matters less and less — indeed, the very idea of aesthet- ic achievement is often held up for ridicule. (Witness the Turner Prize.) And yet it is only by presupposing the importance of aesthetic experience that the art museum means more to us than, say, Marks & Spencer.
It is a curious situation. 'Art' is still a term that exerts talismanic (not to mention financial) power. But many of our most dis- tinguished custodians of art seem deter- mined not only to exploit but also to explode that power. Everywhere one turns 7 can reduce his bank manager to tears.' one hears attacks on the `canonical' narra- tive' that would 'privilege' some works of art over others. But Mr Lowry was unwit- tingly frank when he noted, in the midst of a typical paean to 'alternative ways of see- ing art', that he did not for a moment mean to question the centrality of works like Picasso's 'Demoiselles d'Avignon' or Matisse's 'Dance'. No, those canonical works add lustre to MoMA's collection (and balance sheet).
It is a perfect case of wanting to eat one's cake and have it too. The modern museum director wants to engage in safe little raids on established taste while maintaining his position as a cultural commissar. He wants to compete with the art galleries by mount- ing exhibitions that 'privilege the contem- porary' and treat the public to works that critics will praise as 'challenging', 'trans- gressive' and 'cutting-edge'. At the same time, he wants the cream of society to endorse (and pay for, of course) these episodes of rebellion against the cream of society.
What is amazing is how well it has all worked. Lenin once said that the bour- geoisie would sell its enemies the rope with which they were going to be hanged. Whether or not that is true in political terms, it certainly seems to be the case when it comes to culture. As George Orwell once put it (with reference to Sal- vador Dali), 'Just pronounce the magic word "Art", and everything is OK. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are OK; kicking little girls in the head is OK; even a film like L'Age d'Or [which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman defecating] is OK' The great irony is that, although muse- ums have never before been so numerous or so prosperous, most have entered upon a path of decadence and commercialism that will almost certainly end by destroying them — not physically, perhaps, but intel- lectually, artistically, spiritually. Rehearsing the wonders that await us when the Tate Modern opens at Bankside in May, Sir Nicholas mentioned in passing that the original Tate Gallery — henceforth to be known as Tate Britain — would 'return to Henry Tate's original purpose to show British art of all periods'. One of the fea- tured artists coming to Tate Britain this spring is the Lebanon-born 'body-sculptor', Mona Hatoum, as far as 1 know the only artist to be featured on the web site of the British Society of Gastroenterology. Ms Hatoum, who was short-listed for the Turn- er Prize in 1995, is best known for CoTs Etranger, a video in which (according to one description) 'Hatoum, with the assis- tance of a surgeon, passed a fibre optic video camera through her body orifices to create a video self-portrait.' How pleased Henry Tate would be.
It would be pretty to think that the vision of the museum articulated by Sir Nicholas and his French and American peers was a ghastly aberration that would eventually be rectified by more thoughtful voices. Alas, there are little grounds for such a belief. Everywhere one turns one sees an attack on the past, which means an attack on the indispensable resources of high culture. Consider Matthew Evans's AIM/Sotheby's lecture, 'New Aims, Fresh Perspectives', which was delivered on 18 January, As chairman of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, Mr Evans is well placed to influence cultural life throughout the United Kingdom. It is greatly disturbing, then, that his lecture should turn out to have been a breathtaking example of the new bureaucratic philistinism on the march.
Mr Evans's lecture was full of talk about `the inexorable march of technology', the Internet, and making cultural life 'relevant' to the people. Back in the Sixties, when progressives began bleating about making education 'relevant', sensible people knew that 'relevance' would turn out to be a club with which to smash educational standards. But Mr Evans, like all cultural Jacobins, wants 'a clean break from the past'. He seems to believe that it is bad news that `museums are above fun-fairs in the popu- larity stakes, but below discos'. Noting that 'visiting the pub' remains England's 'out of hours activity', he even suggests that muse- ums should consider exhibiting their collec- tions in pubs. (Don't laugh,' he says, 'it's already being done for libraries in East Sussex.' Who would doubt it? Laughter is hardly the appropriate response.) Mr Evans wants `to fundamentally alter the way in which the public and politicians perceive, use and value museums, libraries and archives'. He tells us that if he suc- ceeds, 'the rewards ... are very great indeed. More funding; more visitors; more and better services; more political visibility; and therefore more clout and influence.' Not a syllable, you note, about substance. Mr Evans seems to believe that the great- est tragedy that could befall a museum would be to lack a connection to the Inter- net.
In a short book called The Present Age, the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard drew a melancholy portrait of 'a revolutionary age that is at the same time reflective and passionless, [and that] transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialec- tics: it leaves everything standing but cun- ningly empties it of significance'. Another word for that process is decadence. The museum as we have known it until recently is the product of the 19th century's attempt to elevate art into a prime spiritual resource — an adjunct if not a replacement for religion. Whatever the liabilities of that effort, it betokened a noble seriousness about culture, an understanding that conti- nuity with the past is the only means by which the present could redeem itself from fatuousness and trivialisation.
The 'new modern museum' as presented by Matthew Evans and by the panelists at MoMA that gloomy winter night disdains the past and embraces the trivial. Towards the end of the evening, Mr Elderfield mused enviously about how young people who visited museums these days seemed much more at home with 'disorder' than people of his generation. Indeed. Once upon a time it was the task of institutions of high culture to rescue us from disorder. Today they encourage us to wallow in it.
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