Overheard at the Art Museum
I was standing in what I call the Gerhard Richter gallery at the St. Louis Art Museum last Wednesday when two middle aged visitors came in accompanied by a guide. The guide, a tall, thin and glamorous woman in high heels, seemed oddly mismatched to the homely looking couple, but you couldn’t doubt her enthusiasm.
She went over the paintings one by one, describing the technique and meaning. She asked the couple what they saw in the abstracts “November”, “December” and “January”. “Pools” said the woman, “Mist”, the man. “Everyone sees something”, the guide said. “Unless”, she continued, “they dismiss it out of hand as something a child could do”.
It always astonishes me that here we are in the early 21st century and pure abstract art has been around for at least hundred years, and yet people still can’t wrap their minds around it. Same goes for works in many fields from music to literature. For some, everything seems to have stopped at the end of the 19th century. In truth, a little earlier — the roots of modernism were already apparent by the fin de siècle. For those, the only current works that seem to appeal continue with that old aesthetic — and continue they do. Although they don’t end up in art museums any more. As a photographer, I come across many in that field who have little knowledge or understanding of art but who, to use the old cliché, ‘know what they like’.
In fact, I came across a glaring example of this on the ‘Fstoppers’ website today, a dispiriting treatise claiming that most of us (as in the ‘us’ who are sympathetic to the author’s view) are ‘simple people’ for whom modern art is meaningless. Now, the author got plenty of blow-back in the comments but this highlights the gulf between those who chose to explore and those who chose to retrench into a safe and narrow view.
I have some sympathy for those who choose not the engage. Art can be unsettling, it challenges your assumptions and works on emotions that you might not wish disturbed. Yet there’s a good reason why authoritarian regimes from each end of the political spectrum have banned or censored modern art; such art works to cause the individual to think and question. Art is not necessarily designed to give you warm fuzzy feelings, yet I get the feeling that is exactly what a lot of people want from it. If you look at the work sanctioned by fascist or communist regimes, that’s pretty much all you’re going to get — apart from stirring exhortations in support of the state.
Art is not a palliative — or at least if some of it is, other works should be the complete opposite. Personally, I’ve found art to stimulate much of my mental growth and that’s why continue to be fascinated by it in all its forms. Naturally, I want others to feel the same way. But as the old proverb goes “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink”. I sometimes wonder if that’s the real reason why the St. Louis Art Museum moved its beautiful but very 19th century water fountain out of the entrance atrium when the museum renovated a few years ago and added a wing specifically for modern works. It does look better today, somehow.
At least to my eyes.
