In Bad Taste. - Review - book review

National Review, Dec 4, 2000 by James Gardner

Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance, by Lynne Munson (Ivan R. Dee, 237 pp., $27.50)

The great cultural debate of the past decade has been waged by liberals who very much want to watch Karen Finley smear government-funded chocolate over her nether regions and by conservatives who would love nothing more than to abolish altogether the National Endowment for the Arts.

Though Lynne Munson, who once worked at the National Endowment for the Humanities under Lynne Cheney and is now a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, appears to be conservative in her sympathies, her new book seeks a middle ground that would preserve the agency while purging it of its rabid excesses and its overt politicizing of art.

Munson is an unabashed champion of serious culture; not every conservative could say as much. But her conservatism takes the form of praising an older generation's culture, the sort that was fostered during the early years of the NEA. Since then, much has happened to dismay her, and the name of this sweeping change of taste is postmodernism. As Munson explains, she "does not attempt to document the breadth of postmodernism's impact but rather to offer a few important examples of how deeply its intolerance has been felt." To this end she has examined not only visual artifacts but museums that have caved in to the lowest common denominator, academies that promote ideology over connoisseurship, and the NEA, which has often rewarded subversiveness over traditional artistic competence.

Munson's main theme is that an illiberal and generally leftist art establishment has gained control of the art world. This assertion is not new, but Munson's contribution consists in tracing the institutional history by which we have come to this pass. One of her strategies is to defang the avant-garde by revealing its rootedness in the establishment. Thus she compares the ever-provocative Jeff Koons and his postmodern pornography to the works of Bouguereau, that arch- academician of 19th-century French painting. Both men, she insists, are products of the establishment. Likewise, she reveals how the "vanguardist" art featured in New York's Chelsea district and at the Whitney Biennial is, in the profoundest sense, establishmentarian, since it has behind it the full weight and prestige of the press, the museums, and the academies.

Unlike many other conservatives, Munson is not averse to public funding for the arts, so long as the art is deserving. She looks back with nostalgia to the early days of the NEA, during the mid '60s, when Henry Geldzahler oversaw the awarding of grants to artists of the caliber of Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, and Mark di Suvero. When Brian O'Doherty replaced him, everything started to change. The official preference shifted from painting and sculpture to performance and photography, and from formalism to highly politicized contextualism. The reductio ad absurdum of this trend, according to Munson, is ATM Piece, by William Pope.L (sic), in which the artist, wearing shoes, glasses, and black shorts festooned with a loincloth made of dollar bills, scored some vaguely anticapitalist point by attaching himself with a rope of sausage links to an ATM near Grand Central Station. Another grantee, Danny Tisdale, used the NEA funds he received in 1995 for a performance piece that consisted of running for a seat on the city council of New York, representing Harlem. (He lost.)

Further mischief is revealed in a chapter that charts the decline of Harvard's preeminence in the field of art history. After reaching its pinnacle under Sydney Freedberg, with his Old World connoisseurship, the school has fallen under the influence of T. J. Clark and Norman Bryson, who allowed their preferred orthodoxies (respectively Marxism and structuralism) to supplant such old-fashioned notions as beauty and truth. Munson's descriptions of the tawdry and cannibalistic infighting that took place in the department are especially interesting. And for those of us who have read Clark and Bryson's own writings with varying degrees of mystified irritation, her allegations of the former's racist misogyny and the latter's plagiarism are easily worth the price of the book.

Another chapter, entitled "The Persistence of Painting," discusses several interconnected groups of artists who have remained faithful to painting and representative art in general. These are the contemporary artists whom Munson seems most to admire. Although one cannot really say, on the strength of the reproductions that she includes, that these artists represent the best case that could be made for traditional art, Munson performs a valuable service by documenting the rise of this little-known movement, which seems to exist in a parallel universe to the art world as we know it.

One difficulty with Exhibitionism is that Munson approaches her subject in a somewhat piecemeal way. Nor does she seem interested in examining the ultimate causes of the sad state of contemporary art, or even in defining postmodernism clearly, since many of the artists she admires are more closely akin to postmodernism than to what it supplanted. Nevertheless, in a debate that has been characterized by willful misrepresentation on both sides, there is something inspiring in the balance and fairness of Lynne Munson's book.