The text in question is actually a press release publicizing an exhibition of emerging young artists at one of those new, edgy little contemporary-art galleries in Brooklyn. It came in the mail along with the card–illustrated with a work of art–that customarily announces art exhibitions. In ambition, tone and the liberal use of $10 words, it’s not that different from the rest of perhaps a dozen or so press releases I receive–from unknown and unknown galleries in New York and elsewhere–nearly every day at NEWSWEEK, where I’m the art critic.
Of course my colleagues who cover other arts such as movies, television, music, books, theater, etc., all receive their fair share of hype. And generally they–like me–are grateful for information, conveniently delivered to our office doorsteps, that helps us do our jobs with accuracy and dispatch. If my colleagues have any complaints, their cavils usually regard quadruplicate press kits arriving in rapid succession, or bulky, silly promotional items–like stuffed animals–accompanying them. Only I, however, seem to be on the receiving end of so much hilariously fatuous propaganda.
Before I aver as to why, a couple more examples. “A formalist with an acknowledged interest in the physical world, visible or not to the naked eye, L— makes paintings which are both theoretical, in the spirit of pure numbers and hypothetical shapes, and real, suggestive of shapes we know, or seem to know, or remember.” Hey, I ask myself, what’s left out? I mean, with both sides of the visible/invisible, real/theoretical, and known/remembered dichotomies accounted for, there’s nothing left in the universe that L—’s paintings might conceivably not be about. Finally, this one, concerning a gallery group show of expressionist paintings, that hangs its hat on the academic buzzword “interrogated”: “Often using their own images in their work, these artists have created spaces which allow the broad spectrum of our human experience to be interrogated.” Hmmm. I wonder how you go about interrogating a spectrum. Make it answer through a prism?
Almost a century after Picasso painted his ur-Cubist masterpiece, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” and more than 80 years after Duchamp tried to insinuate his infamous urinal into a sculpture exhibition, many people are still skeptical about modern (and postmodern) art. They still don’t see much sense or beauty in weird paint configurations on canvas, and they don’t regard the proposition that nearly anything under the sun, when placed in an art gallery, can be considered a work of art as particularly enlightening or liberating. So while most contemporary artists have moved on from trying to shock the bourgeoisie with outrageous form and content (or at least they’ve relegated them to mere openers), the myth persists among the general public that the main purpose of most contemporary artists is to make Aunt Nellie swallow her store teeth. And while the art professionals who sell, curate, collect, write about and otherwise broker contemporary art know that the myth is a myth, they still trade on it, by talking and writing as if they’ve got the inside scoop on something that’s too raw, dangerous, outlandish, or intellectual for the public to handle without a lot of rhetorical bubble wrap surrounding it. And that’s where the pervasive mumbo jumbo in art-world catalogs, essays, reviews and–most of all–press material comes from.
Not that movie studios and record labels don’t distribute their own versions of this stuff. But art galleries don’t usually have the money to hire crackerjack PR services. They tend to rely on comparative amateurs: the gallery owner, a gallery employee, or an entry-level art critic looking (understandably) to pick up a few extra bucks. At their most engaging, art-gallery press releases are charmingly mawkish and good-naturedly pretentious, like an astrologer trying to sound scientifically grounded at a dinner party of physicists. “The contemplation of nature is embedded in the process of memory,” reads an introductory sentence from a bulletin about another emerging artists’ show. (Another academic buzzword, “embedded,” is supposed to supply the gravity here.) At their worst, they read like environmental manifestos from a mad bomber: “J—’s work is symbolic of an alternative interpretation of such systems, but one which at once accents the finite nature of each iteration of the cycle, but denies the linear interpretation, rejecting rationalistic notions like ‘beginning’ and ’end’ in favor of a conception of continuation/continuum, and so offers consolation for an anxiety born of our finite conceptions of ourselves as against our conception of an infinite universe.” Hey, I feel better already!
Mostly, however, the press releases simply attempt to endow the art with undeserved profundity. Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German photographers who take elegant mug shots of everyday architecture, for instance, are said to “have created a conceptual art form devoid of their own personalities and deeply rooted in an empirical certainty, which has shaped the way we view the accomplishments and failures of humankind today.” A work of installation art in a gallery at Harvard attends to the augean task of “[engaging] the ever-present conflicted relationships between the body and the mind, between the personal and the public, and between time and the timeless.”
At times, the claims made in gallery press releases collapse inward upon themselves, like stars that have simply acquired too much mass for their own good. “The point [of the abstract paintings on view],” says a gallery flier, “is the richness of the final outcome, which is intertwined with a set of procedures.” That’s just fancy language for, “They look like they look because of the way they were made.”
There’s a certain poignancy to all of these examples from the recent mail. They were all written by somebody trying like hell to make sense of something the reader of the press release suspects, in the end, didn’t make much sense to the writer to begin with. The result is a perversely fascinating species of literature combining gross intellectual overreach, soaring romanticism and deep philosophical murkiness. A wickedly talented writer like Don DeLillo or Martin Amis could probably paste a bunch of them together to make a witty little novel. Me, all I can manage is to compose this message to all the art-gallery press-release writers out there, telling them that, in terms of unintentional comic relief, they’ve got an enthusiastic audience of at least one.
