Art and Authority

The Metroplitan Museum of Art, New York

A while back, I flew from New York to an out-of-town art event. I remember neither where it took place nor my part in the proceedings. Maybe I was giving a talk. What I do remember is that afterward, as the event’s participants mixed with members of the audience, a young woman said to me, “I thought you’d be taller.”  I didn’t reply, though I could have said, “Yes, when I was in my teens I too thought I’d be taller, and it upset me that I wasn’t.”

In those days, the average American male was five feet ten inches tall. Or five-nine. My internet research did not produce definitive data on this point. I was five-eight, and it still troubles me that I am not taller. My father was about my height. Though my mother was short, her brother was over six feet tall, and it frustrated me that I had gotten her genes for height, not his. Height confers authority, as the young woman at that long-ago art event reminded me. For the import of her comment was clear: you are a well-known critic, you shape peoples’ ideas about art, and yet your height does not correspond to the authority you wield. I don’t know how deeply this disparity troubled her. If I had been four foot-eleven would she have decided that everything I said about art was simply wrong?

To equate tallness with authority makes obvious sense. When we are very young, we are very small. All power emanates from adults, who are much bigger and taller. So we have a residual feeling that the stature of a leader ought to be impressive. Presidents tend to be tall, as do combat officers. What about Napoleon, you ask. Well, height is not the only factor in play here. If it were, Andre the Giant could have been the supreme commander of something or other. Though tallness has no inevitable impact, it often reinforces other traits. I have yearned all my life for that reinforcement. But here’s the twist. As much as I wish I were taller, I have no wish to exercise authority over the meaning or value of art.

Another early memory: on a panel at Pratt Institute, I argued that the critic’s job is to point to the myriad possibilities for interpreting works of art. A student in the audience responded with the plaintive confession that “we look to you for guidance.”  In other words, please don’t leave everything up for grabs; tell us what is good, what it means, how to think about it. Exercise authority. The trouble, as I see it, is that the art world teems with people all too eager to do that.

In his introduction to Cubism and Abstract Art, an exhibition he organized for the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, Alfred H. Barr, Jr, wrote, “the pictorial conquest of the external visual world had been completed and refined many times and in different ways during the previous half millennium. The more adventurous and original artists had grown bored with painting facts. By a common and powerful impulse, they were driven to abandon the imitation of natural appearance.”   The founding director of MoMA and a brilliant curator, Barr was a leading art-world authority—even a father figure—from the 1930s until the late 1960s. Nonetheless, he was just throwing his weight around when he said that “the pictorial conquest of the external word had been completed” at some point between the Renaissance and the 1930s.

Representing the world’s appearances is not a project that can ever be completed. To transpose the look of things to canvas is a speculative process relaunched every time a figurative painter picks up a brush—or a new painter chooses figuration over abstraction. According to Barr, however, abstraction was the only legitimate choice on offer in the twentieth century, and the authority he had accrued in the New York art world gave this dictum impressive force. If painters want right-thinking people to take them seriously, they must travel the high road from Cubism to Mondrian and other exemplary abstractionists. This is what history dictates—as if history were an inherent, thoroughly analyzable feature of the universe, like gravity or the speed of light. In truth, history is mutable, for it is the invention of historians, and figurative painters of the past century have invented any number of lively, deeply engaging histories.

I have recruited Barr to serve as an emblem of all the individuals and institutions who use their authority to bring art under intellectual or bureaucratic control. These include formalist critics, who claim to reveal the essence of each visual medium; art theorists, so-called, who see works of art as the vehicles of various dogmas; and journalist-critics who reassure general audiences with glib interpretations and rankings that reflect the vagaries of the art market. The market, too, exercises a restrictive authority, as do museums and art history departments. To sum up: art-world authority works against the openness of art, and that is why I have never sought it. When I write about art, my purpose is to illuminate possibility. My hope is that our sense of art’s openness will reach beyond the borders of the aesthetic, that the freedom of the painter, the poet, the composer can infiltrate our lives.

To end on a practical note: as art institutions intersect, they provide art with a habitat where it can survive, if not always thrive. I am not demanding, like a Futurist from 1909, that we demolish the museums. Nor does it make sense to deplore the existence of the art markets or academic art history. I wish, though, that these institutions would exercise their authority in ways that liberate art rather than administer and thereby restrict it.