From “Mao Crazy,” Jed Perl’s review of Cai-Guo Quiang’s “I Want To Believe” show at the Gugghenheim:

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.

“Postcards from Nowhere,” which appears in this week’s New Republic, is Jed Perl’s latest poison-tipped volley against the ruling elite of contemporary art. Some sample copy:

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. (more…)

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:

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1/ From Don Share’s post at Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog, referring to an article by Richard Rorty that appears in the new issue of Poetry:

Rorty knew he was dying from pancreatic cancer at the time he was working on the piece. When asked by his son whether the reading or writing of philosophy gave him any comfort, he said, surprisingly… no: “neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation.” “Hasn’t anything you’ve read been of any use?” his son persisted. “Yes,” Rorty reports blurting out, “poetry.” He explained:

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Courbet is the new Duchamp. We’re used to genealogies that trace the lineage of contemporary artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst back through Warhol to Marcel Duchamp and his readymades. But Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, in her new book The Most Arrogant Man in France, pushes that pedigree back two generations, to Gustave Courbet.

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.