Have you ever wondered if the success of today’s visual art mega-events depends less on their content than on the expectations surrounding them? The Venice Biennial and Art Basel’s 40th edition are a case in point.

Venice is a classic example of an event that art insiders love to hate. Every two years, a superstar curator is asked to prepare a vast exhibition in a difficult and historically charged venue, with limited resources, a ridiculous timeline, Italian ineptitude, and a spaghetti bowl of national pride, politics, and pavilion positioning thrown into the mix. Then the art crowd descends and, between bouts of champagne drinking and Vaporetto riding, it delivers a categorical judgment—usually negative. The pop psychologist in me believes that some folks have so much fun in Venice that they have to declare the Biennial a failure and a bore. This is partly intended to make their expense-account journey look more like a hard-working professional chore than the sybaritic fun ride it is. (You may discern a note of envy: I wasn’t there.) After this year’s opening, the commentariat appeared to be speaking from the same talking points. The line was that while the last Biennial was awful, this one—organized by art-world wunderkind Daniel Birnbaum, who is undoubtedly one of the smartest young figures on the scene—was banal and flat. Really?

Contrast with Basel. It’s a trite metaphor, but the world’s leading art fair, which occupies the same space as Baselworld, the epic watch fair, really does run like clockwork. Read More »

Lurking within recent commentaries on ‘the big group shows’ one finds no uncertain antipathy to the idea of ‘professionalization’ in the visual arts.  Most of the time, this gets written up as back-handed swat at art schools and the credentials they offer, the MFA and, now increasingly, the PhD.  Holland Cotter did it in that same piece on ‘generations’ I mentioned last week.  Here’s the offending passage:

A scan of the catalog’s biographies confirms that, almost without exception, the artists in the show are products of art schools, as often as not intensely professionalized, canon-driven environments. This may help explain why so much of the work on view comes with art historical references and borrowings, tweaks on tweaks on tweaks so intricate and numerous as to defy listing.

And Michael Kimmelman can’t resist a similar swipe in his recent and rather sonambulant review of the Venice Biennale:

If any show can be said to reflect a larger state of affairs in art now, this one suggests a somewhat dull, deflated contemporary art world, professionalized to a fault, in search of a fresh consensus. It has prompted the predictable cooing from wishful insiders, burbling vaguely about new found introspection and gravity.

What, I have to ask, is wrong with professionalization? What are we really criticizing when we deride the graduates of MFA and PhD programs for nothing more than simply having done what one would expect them to do, which is to go and learn about the enterprise in which they are interested? Read More »

Over the weekend, Holland Cotter, the (now) Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic for the New York Times decided to take that newly minted status out for a spin.  On Sunday, Mr. Cotter attempted what I guess one would call a “think piece” that took as its objects of interest two exhibitions in New York that deal with the idea of a “generation”: The Met’s Pictures Generation, 1974-1984 and The New Museum’s Younger Than Jesus.  These shows have been open for a while, so Cotter’s attending to them now announces that he has something more than a mere review in mind.  And in essence, his point seems to be that the notion of a “generation” is circumspect.  Here is Cotter’s conclusion:

Is same generation a useful basis for writing history? Obviously the answer is yes and no. For years now scholars have questioned the validity of viewing the cultural past and the present through the old apparatus of renaissances, dynasties and “periods.” They see these categories for what they are: packaging designed to sell an account of events that will go down smoothly and leave no spaces blank or questions unanswered. Generations could be added to the list.

So much for the “no.”  But what of the “yes”?  Why wouldn’t “same generation” be a “useful basis for writing history?”  Because, one imagines, without the contemporaneity that underpins much historical analysis, the writing of history would make little sense, or it would at least require significant methodological justification just to get itself going.  But this gets beyond my immediate point.  Cotter takes to task The Met and New Museum shows because their “history” is somehow incomplete.  Cotter thinks the Met’s case is myopia, the New Museum’s is inevitability.  Of course some of Cotter’s points—that the Pictures retrospective gives Philip Smith short (actually no) shrift; that the Generational is an exercise in curatorial self-gratification—have some merit.  But here’s the thing: they are shows.  They may even be historically important.  But they are not histories.  Or are they?

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