After my last post about The Splasher phenomenon, Michael Kimmelman, lead art critic for the Times, wrote this opinion piece about how to interpret The Splasher.
Kimmelman deserves credit for underlining the hazy nature of the targets of The Splasher’s acts of “vandalism”:
The current agitators, although they’ve got some of the revolutionary patter down, seem to lack clearly defined targets or priorities. Is the problem gentrification or the art market or artists or late capitalism? What’s troubling them — the street art they’re defacing or the fact that some of the street artists might also show in galleries?
(Kimmelman, Michael. “Splashing the Art World with Anger and Questions,” in the New York Times, June 30, 2007)
It’s true that this form of vandalism doesn’t seem as well directed as it would be if it had a truly noteworthy agenda. But Kimmelman quickly grows stale in his moralizing. First, he shakes a fatherly finger at The Splasher for lighting stink bombs and throwing them into gallery openings. The implication is that, where art is concerned, any attempt at revolution or protest must be purely abstract and intellectual. (”We are revolutionaries–hear us roar, but not do anything else, because that would break the rules of the Art World game!”) The art critic likes a wild performance, but only if he can sit in the No Splash Zone.
Kimmelman’s final moral–that this whole thing shows that art still “matters”–is dead wrong. Here he falls into the familiar cliché that something that happens on the street necessarily involves the populace. Most New Yorkers have no idea The Splasher exists. Kimmelman lives in such an art world bubble that he doesn’t recognize an inside job when he sees one (see my last post on the language of The Splasher Manifesto), and he doesn’t realize that the disturbance of a Chelsea opening has virtually no impact on the public at large. The Sensation exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 had a far greater impact; despite the best efforts of the media, The Splasher barely registers a blip.
Not that it matters. The desperation of many art-world insiders to grab the attention of The People seems like a pretty adolescent impulse to me. Contemporary artists want to grapple with serious issues of art history and criticism in their work; non-artists want art that looks pretty on a wall and that helps bolster a positive outlook on life. It’s all well and good if you can combine the two. If not, why fight to prove that you’re influencing an audience that has no interest in you?
Post a Comment