ART FOR DIRT'S SAKE Three tell-all books strip the art world bare+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
BY DWIGHT GARNER
"Jasper Johns: Privileged Information,"by Jill Johnston. Thames and Hudson, 335 pages. "Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life," "True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World," art didn't end in 1961, the year Piero Manzoni began packing his own feces into cans, then numbering, signing and selling them. (Thirty years later, Sotheby's would auction one of these works, titled "Merda d'Artista," for $67,000.) It didn't end in 1974, the year conceptual artist Chris Burden made a piece called "Transfixed" by nailing himself, crucifixion-style, to the top of a Volkswagen Beetle and then having other artists drive it around. Nor did it end in 1993, the year a young Los Angeles artist named China Adams advertised for a "flesh donor," then ate a chunk of one woman's volunteered thigh-meat — after sauteeing it with garlic and salt — in the Armand Hammer Museum. Yet you don't have to be Morley Safer, the "60 Minutes" correspondent who guffawed his way through a 1993 segment about the pretensions of postmodern art, to realize that we are playing out what can only be called "Art's Endgame." In fact, we've been playing it out for a long time. As Anthony Haden-Guest writes in his vibrant new book "True Colors," paraphrasing an essay by the philosopher and aesthetician Arthur Danto: "[S]ince about 1905 — which was more or less when photography and the movies began taking over so many of the functions of painting and sculpture — art had been investigating a single question: itself. This had taken artists to various extremes beyond which no further growth was possible." Hence Marcel Duchamp's once-notorious "Urinal." And, inexorably, Piero Manzoni's shit, Chris Burden's blood, and China Adams' pan-seared flesh. Art, surely, isn't dead. But can anyone remember a time when contemporary art — and contemporary artists — meant less to America's cultural audience? A bit like poetry, art has become increasingly remote and marginalized, a specialized taste for a rarified few. Like poetry, too, art's greatest achievements seem behind rather than in front of us. Most Americans, even literate ones, would be hard-pressed to name more than one or two working, mid-career artists. (Many of those they might recognize, like Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer or Damien Hirst, are not painters.) Fewer still can summon to mind even a single work made in the past two decades. What's worse, America's passive neglect of the art world is turning to active scorn. "The degree to which the outside world despises us and hates us is truly amazing," says the artist and curator Douglas Blau, quoted by Haden-Guest. Right-wing senators build careers by knocking artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley. And on popular TV shows like "Friends" and "Murphy Brown," Blau adds, the artist figure is "nerdy ... geeky ... pathetic ... dishonest ... a fraud." Part of this scorn is the lingering backlash against the excesses of the art market boom in the 1980s, which tossed up one overhyped, underwhelming artist — Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring, David Salle, Jean-Michel Basquiat — after the next. Part of it, too, is the public's long-simmering resentment over an art world that scorns beauty and cohesion, an art world that (to those not heavily tutored in art theory, anyway) can often seem like merely a compendium of sick thrills. One of the odd side effects of the art world's current doldrums — prices (and enthusiasm) began falling just after the Gulf War, and haven't risen much since — is that much of the writing about the art world has become nearly as decadent as the art itself. It's as if, as the educated audience for art rapidly shrinks, writers are grasping more desperately for the readers' lapels. As a trio of dishy new books demonstrate, long gone are the days when even the most venerated living artists could possibly win the fight to keep their private lives out of the discussions of their work. Two of the books reviewed here are long on gossip, and preciously short on insight and scholarship — though oddly, the dishiest of the three proves to be the most illuminating. Next: Prurient and oddly curdled dish |