The culture warriors are back, and they’ve been Googling. “The word civilization is endangered,” writes Michael J. Lewis in the July/August issue of Commentary magazine, “as shown by Google’s Ngram, which tracks the frequency of word usage in print.” This unusual remark arrives near the end of his lengthy diatribe linking “postmodernism,” blockbuster museum exhibitions, censorship, and the putative retreat of art from its great civilizing function to cottage-industry irrelevance. Lewis, a professor of art and architecture at Williams College, meanders through the 20th century’s apparent ruins, conscripting along the way the example of his students’ response to Christopher Burden’s 1971 work “Shoot,” extravagant museum buildings and tawdry exhibitions, the art market, censorship, and, of course, “postmodernism.”
Lewis’s essay — titled “How Art Became Irrelevant” — practices the familiar tactic of hitching anecdotal events emblematic of the cravenness of the art market or museum sphere to the intellectual history of art at the end of the 20th century, with muddled and alarming results. In an interview on National Public Radio about the piece last weekend, Lewis claims that “the art museum used to offer objects — the finest that we have” and now instead offers “experiences.” Is that really all that a museum offers, according to an art historian — “objects”? And who constitutes this creepily homogenous “we” for whom Lewis speaks? If anything, it is more apparent than ever that the institutional “we” of the museum has never been some democratic curatorial abstraction.
Indeed, there have been troubling developments in the world of museums — admission costs are at historic highs in New York, elite museums seem content to operate as soft-power franchisees connected to authoritarian regimes, and substantial resources are being redirected to statement architecture and misbegotten digital nativism — but the two examples of museum drift Lewis cites, the international “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibition, which broke attendance records and toured US institutions including the National Gallery and Metropolitan Museum from 1976 to 1979, and the Guggenheim’s widely-disparaged “Art of the Motorcycle” exhibition in 1998, are thin gruel for those trying to digest his asynchronous argumentation.
That the most widely-attended museum exhibitions are trivial, non-art “blockbusters” is an old canard. A glance at The Art Newspaper’s annual exhibition attendance rankings would have disabused Lewis of his bad memories and worse assumptions. Major museums continue to draw major crowds with exhibitions that are utterly conventional — Ming Dynasty masters, Van Gogh/Artaud, Magritte, and so on. (Also, a reminder that the Guggenheim’s Thomas Krens, the architect of the “Motorcycle” show and the short-lived Guggenheim Las Vegas, was ousted.) But then, what of the whole question of “postmodernism,” and the collapse of judgment that Lewis diagnoses in his students when, as related in the piece’s opening paragraphs, he shows them Chris Burden’s “Shoot” and they responded by asking if Burden had his subject sign a waiver? “None of them expressed revulsion,” he tells Weekend Edition’s Scott Simon. “The art world cannot survive an indifferent public,” Lewis adds, as if history in his classroom and actuality in the public square are one and the same. Time and again, he marshals non sequitur evidence — whether it’s treating his students as stand-ins for a public focus group or citing two museum exhibitions with at-best weak parallels to his argument.
We’re not done yet. Enter the catchall culprit, “the age of postmodernism” — an exhausted straw man, paraded by the culture warriors of the 1980s and ’90s, from Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” to Hilton Kramer’s New Criterion — invoked again here. But Lewis goes further than indulging this intellectually meaningless trope: he marshals the decades-old provocations of Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the NEA Four to offer a rousing defense of censorship, squarely blaming the “irrelevance” of art to the American public on the decades-old alleged shock-tactics of seven artists. “The impulse to evade censure can inspire raptures of ingenuity,” he continues, not content to merely simmer the baby in the bathwater. In a following parenthetical, he tells his readers that the Hays Code, which he incorrectly dates to 1932, was in fact a great boon to Hollywood. That self-imposed motion picture industry censorship agreement, implemented in various guises from 1930 to 1968, barred depictions of interracial couples and, implicitly, homosexuality from films, among other moral and ideological strictures. For Lewis, this “prim” straightjacket “increased the sophistication and wit of American films by a magnitude.”
This kind of violent and deeply illiberal criticism may be par for the course for today’s neoconservative Commentary, but the fact that Lewis’s inchoate anger found currency with National Public Radio is exemplary of a wider exasperation. And that is, in some sense, a burden that must be borne by those within the art system: that the actual problems that plague it, its complicity in suspect commercial and political agendas, threaten to overtake the serious public discourse on art itself by providing alibis for warmed-over culture warriors and other bullies.
