Art Not Special II

I write this in response to Joyce Owen's insightful comments to my earlier post "Art Not So Special," in which she speaks from her special and delightful experiences as an art teacher. She talks of how students with no background in the arts learn that they too can not only make art but come to appreciate it and in the process become good consumers of the arts.

I was writing and thinking from the viewpoint of what I call the edifices of the arts. As an example, a few years ago I went to the Tate Britain and in my Midwestern callowness remarked to myself how nice it was that they had the big steps and the lions on either side, just like 'our Art Institute.' Only after I went inside, to my own internal chagrin, did I realize that ourArt Institute in Chicago was the imitator. Similarly, several years ago I visited one of the most remarkable museums in the U.S., the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York (which I highly recommend), that had the same big steps flanked by the lions. Not only is the exterior architecture imitative, once inside the visitor is confronted by the plaques of the donors, the bigger the size of the names the bigger the donations.

The art consumer is confronted, and I am convinced intimated, by edifices and temples that glorify the architecture. The floors are hard marble, there's an ethic of silence and quietude, which I suppose is to show awed respect. [Do the paintings care if people are making noise?] The museums have become immense secular cathedrals designed to impose on the visitor his/her smallness in the presence of greatness. This isn't confined to the Greco-Romanesque yearnings of 19th century architects and patrons, but continues, for instance, with Gehry's stainless steel constructs in Bilbao and elsewhere.

Then these spaces are filled with with art that is increasingly inaccessible to the so-called common viewer, defended by obscure jargon laden writings. The museums are under pressure to increase memberships, pay the building funds, increase traffic, to go blockbuster.

To quote from an article in The Australian by Diane Ragsdale, "Let's Aim for the Cultural Omnivore," 'We may have a generation of cultural omnivores out there, but arts organisations have made it difficult for them to feast because they've created silos between high art and low art, and between the disciplines of music, theatre, dance, opera and the visual arts." To which I add, how many of us could afford to buy seasons tickets to the opera, the symphony, the dance program and memberships at the big art museums, all in the same year?

Then she adds, "In the mind of the consumer, it's all culture. By maintaining their separate and better than others status, art organisations could be losing their spot at the banquet. Rather than competing against one another to sell subscriptions and single tickets, perhaps they could work together to increase cultural participation."

Diane Ragsdale says that in our modern computerized social networking age the tools exist to make us cultural omnivores with easy access to all the arts. She argues that community-wide computerized networks could link arts consumers with their preferences, favorite composers, artists, authors, books, movies, television and develop a system of recommendations, that would link also to Amazon, Netflix, the ticket office at the theater, the openings at the galleries.

In this way, we could lose our fear of the big boxes that push potential arts consumers away. For myself, I don't understand why when I go to these places, sometimes out of duty, because as an artist, I am supposed to like going to museums, I am exhausted by the process. It shouldn't be as hard as it is to be a good arts consumer.