4 small children at the museum

We took the kids to the Martin Puryear show at the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art. M. P. is probably the greatest American sculpture alive today. My daughter brought a friend and they ended up in a conversation about what makes art…art. Their exact comments were something like, “a lot of this stuff doesn’t belong in a museum.” When J. asked them why some things belonged in a museum and other things didn’t, they had a hard time saying why this object was better and that object was worse, and finally arrived at the decision that in order for art to belong in a museum it had to have narrative. It had to tell a story. No particular story, and interestingly, some of Martin Puryear’s art apparently did, while some of it evidently did not.

I run into this kind of question a lot in grad school. This is art, that is not. One professor told me that art wasn’t great until he wanted to lick it. Making art is hard, as is writing about it. For writing about art, critiquing art, evokes the secret language like that of the sommelier decoding a bottle of wine: this is fruity, and that is not, some toasty oak, a pinch of nutmeg, and a hint of leather in the tannins…

Artist struggle to find meaning in the things they do, it is like writing a great paper.. you put it out there and wait to see if your thoughts held general appeal, for it is one thing to write the most brilliant essay in the world, quite another if no one in the world besides yourself gives a damn about it. I guess that is the artist in me, creating objects and thinking about how they are formed, what goes in to them and ultimately will be viewed, received and consumed.

A central conviction among modern artist, critics and art historians is the existence of an artistic mainstream, the notion that some artworks are more important than others because they participate in some sort of progressive unfolding of a larger historical purpose. Art is not viewed by virtue of its aesthetic quality, rather the overall evolutionary pattern, the "movements" within art if you will, confer value, and any art that does not fit within can be, for the most part, ignored.

One might wonder what system of classification determines the High/Low myth of Modernism. It has its roots in the post WWII malaise of deteriorating civilization. During this time the art critic Clement Greensburg first began championing the idea. Greensburg himself later became famous for identifying the Abstract Expressionist movement and championing the New York School of Painting.
However his idea came under greater scrutiny in the 1970's as Greenburg’s formalism omitted so much of the history of recent art. Observers began to question whether a single dominant mainstream had ever existed. The extraordinary proliferation of artistic styles in the 1960's and 70's greatly contributed to those doubts.

Interestingly Philosophy has its own theories about the rise of artistic movements, Hegel and Heidegger both speculated about the rise of such movements, though neither identified them as such. In fact the whole branch of aesthetic philosophy seems to turn a blind eye to the evolution of the mainstream in art. Art is usually discussed in abstract generalities when discussed at all, its content usually consigned to the realm of divine inspiration. My favorite Philosophy of aesthetics is contained in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Kant asserts that our individual wants and needs do not come into play when appreciating beauty, so our aesthetic response applies universally. In this way we only view art in a disinterested way, not with the finality of reason, In this way, art is allowed to continually renew itself, movements in art, impressionism, expressionism, minimalism, are not ends in themselves, but are possibilities waiting to inspire a new generation of artists, like four small children at the museum.