There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic’s mind. The thunderous popularity of a number of contemporary Chinese artists compels a political analysis. Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. This is more sinister than anything we have seen in the already fairly astonishing annals of radical chic. We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. And as we are also dealing with the house of mirrors that is the art world, I have no doubt that somebody is ready to explain that I am confusing appropriation with approbation or that fascism is just another way of spelling freedom. I must say, the theory people have a lot to answer for. But here is the bottom line: the global art world’s burgeoning love affair with Mao and the Cultural Revolution makes a very neat fit with the current Chinese regime’s efforts to sell itself as the authoritarian power that everybody can learn to love.

For Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, and now Cai Guo-Qiang, having a retrospective at the Guggenheim is like being a Visigoth who has been given the keys to Rome. At the Guggenheim, the staff no longer curates exhibitions. They simply invite an artist to come in and rape the place.

And, discussing the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the New Museum:

Discussing such museums in architectural terms is like discussing a sculpture by Jeff Koons in compositional terms. You would be kidding yourself. These museums are only brands designed to contain brands.

I’ve been struck favorably by some of the art that Perl hates. Whichever of Damien Hirst’s mirrored medicine cabinets was hanging in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice back in 2006 was impressive enough to steal my breath for more than a few seconds.

But far and away the best things at the Grassi were the very uncontemporary Rothkos hanging in a second-story alcove. And so, having found myself almost completely bored by the Whitney Biennial a few weeks back–only Leslie Hewitt’s leaning paintings held my attention for more than a few minutes there–I have to count myself generally sympathetic to Perl’s spite.

That said, I thought it interesting to see how difficult Perl found it to explain what exactly it was that gets under his skin about the Matthew Barneys and Richard Princes of the world. In one paragraph, it’s the fact that

all these artists, in one way or another, are at war with the idea that a work of art establishes a freestanding universe. While their lines of attack are more or less subtle, the result is ultimately the same: they replace the there that constitutes a work of art with a nowhere.

In another paragraph, Perl complains that “Koons and his kind have never been interested in the old avant-garde idea of outraging the bourgeoisie, of shaking up expectations.”

In still another, he works to defend Mondrian’s style against the accusation that his “primary colors and right angles are no less a look, a logo, than Koons’s shiny chromium surfaces and curvaceous forms.” The difference, Perl asserts, “is that for Mondrian a style is a dynamic principle, not a fixed attitude.”

In sum, three very different kinds of arguments–metaphysical, political, and stylistic–for what constitutes the original sin of contemporary art.

But what struck me most about Perl’s attack was how closely it hovered near the territory of Michael Fried’s seminal essay “Art and Objecthood.” Perl sees museums stacked with objects (”The generic spaces created to display contemporary art…are basically big-box stores: cubic footage to be filled with stuff”) when what he wants to see is art (”Whatever happened to the belief that a museum ought to be a unique space that contains unique objects?”).

What makes art art and not an object? For Fried it was the “mutual inflection of one element [of the work] by another.” To put it in more simply (as Fried also does) art has a syntax, objects do not. (For Fried syntax is the condition of possibility of meaning.)

Syntax, in Fried’s sense, is the conceptual nub that Perl seems to circle throughout his essay, though he never really touches down on it. Contrary to what he suggests, the difference between Koons and Mondrian doesn’t really make sense at the level of style. There is such thing as dynamic style, but that isn’t what separates Mondrian from Koons. What does separate them is syntax: Mondrian has it, Koons doesn’t. And that makes all the difference.

Photo by Maya Vidon.

“I told you a long time ago that I would find a way to give them a fist right in the face. That bunch of scoundrels, they caught it.”

—Gustave Courbet, in a letter to a friend.

Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1950-1952), at MoMA.
(Photo: The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

Something must be in the water: now New York magazine has run an article by Jerry Saltz on gender in the art world. The numbers there look even worse than they do for poetry. Saltz counts 400 works of art on display on the fourth and fifth floors of MoMA, where the museum displays art from its permanent collection of painting and sculpture. Of these, fourteen are by women, or 3.5%. Counting artists rather than artworks, Saltz comes up with 11 out of 137, or 8%. (The dates of those pieces run from 1879 to 1969, an obviously important factor that Saltz doesn’t take enough account of, though see below for someone who does.)

Here are more stats from the article’s sidebar:

THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
Men: 85%
Women: 15%
That’s for the permanent-collection items on view; Kara Walker’s show is downstairs.

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY
Men: 85%
Women: 15%
Four women on an otherwise male roster.

THE 2007 VENICE BIENNALE
Men: 76%
Women: 24%
As recently as 1995, the lineup was just 9 percent female.

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2007
Men: 73%
Women: 27%
The upcoming fair will be enormous: 2,859 artists, about 715 of them women.

MARIANNE BOESKY
Men: 75%
Women: 25%
But it’s 50-50 in the gallery right now, with work by Liz Craft and a two-man show.

THE FRICK COLLECTION
Men: 99%
Women: 1%
There are two sculptures and one print by female artists in the collection, plus some anonymous work.

As my astute colleague Joshua Kotin pointed out, the really relevant numbers are those from Art Basel and the Venice Biennale, since those are the best measure of what’s happening right now. Those numbers, at least, should escape the charge of irrelevance leveled by one commenter at the NYMag website:

It is just absolutely irrelevant and inappropriate to evaluate the inclusion of women based on percentages.* You need to explain why particular women deserve to be included in the canon, why these women deserve the status of having profoundly influenced other artists, critics and historians, and our culture in general. And any (honest) list you make would never approach even ten percent, let alone 51. Why? Because large quantities of female artists simply didn’t exist at the level of influence which would warrant their inclusion. Would it be too cliche to suggest that you go back and read Linda Nochlin’s essay “Why have there been no great woman artists” of 1971? Historically women have not had access to training, patronage, or opportunity. This is less true the closer you get to the present, hence the greater inclusion of women in the departments of film and video.

++++++++

*Note: In the aftermath of the “Numbers Trouble” articles we saw a lot of people make a similar claim to this one. Even worse, we saw several examples of people implying that they couldn’t count numbers because they considered themselves postmodern (i.e. third-wave) feminists. For the record, here’s what Jennifer Ashton has to say about when numbers do matter:

So how do the numbers matter in this context? Well, they obviously matter a lot if you think that women are being discriminated against, and if you think that the unequal ratio of women to men in the various arenas of poetic production and recognition is an index of that discrimination. In many of the earliest mainstream anthologies of women’s poetry (and, for that matter, in some of the earliest efforts to collect “innovative” women’s writing) this claim was the key rationale for the focus on women. And while a corrective agenda of this kind does depend on a very basic essentialism, it precisely is not the kind of essentialism I was criticizing in “Our Bodies, Our Poems.” The effort to redress numerical imbalances does depend on thinking that poets are gendered (there’s no other way we could notice the discrimination in the first place) but it doesn’t require us to think that their poems are gendered. If an anthology editor thinks women are being discriminated against, and numbers reflect that, the numbers do matter.

According to Chu, Courbet (who does his best Jack Sparrow in “Desperate Man”)

opened a perspective on a new culture in the art world in which the public’s approval was valued higher than that of the government or an official élite, and money was seen as a more legitimate gauge of artistic success than official honors….[He] demonstrated that controversy need not be harmful to an artist’s reputation, as it was just another form of publicity.

Peter Schjeldahl, reviewing the book for The New Yorker, points to present circumstances that shape the method and thesis of Chu’s book:

The book advances a present tendency among art historians to reconsider the Old Masters with reference to the art worlds that allocated wealth and prestige in their times. This emphasis is a sign of our own times, when money and celebrity—proliferating fairs and biennials, roaring auctions, around-the-clock Web journals and blogs—exalt the grandstand plays of a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, or Matthew Barney.

Schjeldahl’s point is ratified by a quick glance back at another New Yorker article about Courbet, this one written in 1940 by Robert M. Coates. Coates says of Courbet, “it would be hard indeed to think of a painter of his general period who had a more powerful influence on the generation of the Impressionists.” When he speaks of Courbet as a “revolutionary,” he awards the term for the painter’s use of “direct observation, homely subjects, and ‘realistic’ portrayal.”

Chu’s book and Schjeldahl’s article (which includes the exquisitely absurd “reërection,” a construction only the New Yorker could pull off—or want to) present a resolutely different picture of Courbet than the one proposed by Michael Fried. For Fried, Courbet’s importance has to do with his reconfiguration of the field of representation. (Though all three agree that Courbet is proto-modern, if not quite modern himself, none agree on what that means.)

A stifling nostalgia suffuses Schjeldahl’s article, to the point that it can seem claustrophobic even to those who, like the critic, don’t care for “the grandstand plays” of Koons or Hirst. But still it’s hard not to be swayed by his closing paragraph, in which he issues a proclamation worthy of Gaddis’s Wyatt Gwyon—

[Baudelaire] saw that the fate of true artists would henceforth involve forms of internal exile, even in bright circles of cosmopolitan fame.

—before returning to his grumpy elegy:

That sort of compunction was lost on Courbet, and it is hard to imagine, let alone detect, in the conduct of the art world today….Dirty laundry has become the emperor’s new clothes.