Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 08:28:01 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: charlatans



New York Times
July 25, 1998

Class Lessons: Who's Calling Whom Tacky?

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN


ARTISTS: All charlatans. What artists do cannot be
called work." From Flaubert's "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas."

        One of the most talked-about new paintings of recent years
        shows George Washington taking a stroll along the banks of a
        lake. Nearby, three young people in modern dress approach the
        water. Two deer frolic. The blue sky is streaked with white
        clouds.

        That painting is, its creators declare, "America's Most
        Wanted." It was carefully constructed after a detailed poll
        questioned 1,001 randomly chosen Americans about their taste
        in art. Sixty-seven percent wanted a "dishwasher-size"
        painting; 88 percent wanted an outdoor scene; 66 percent
        wanted "soft curves." They got them all. And the painting,
        along with interviews and much commentary, was featured in a
        book published this season: "Painting by Numbers: Komar and
        Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

        The artists who created the poll and the painting, Vitaly
        Komar and Alexander Melamid, also surveyed taste in other
        countries and detected a worldwide love of kitschy blue
        landscapes. Former Soviet dissidents, they stick their tongues
        firmly in their cheeks as they refer to their project as a
        collaboration with a "new dictator": the "majority." That
        majority has another name with a long tradition: the
        bourgeoisie.

        This bourgeoisie -- the middle class that is neither upper nor
        lower, neither so aristocratic as to take art for granted nor
        so poor it has no money to spend in its pursuit -- is now the
        group that fills museums, buys books and goes to concerts. But
        the bourgeoisie, which began to come into its own in the 18th
        century, has also left a long trail of hostility behind it.
        And it doesn't take more than a glance at the Komar and
        Melamid painting to see what awful taste they think the
        bourgeoisie still has.

        Artistic disgust with the bourgeoisie has been a defining
        theme of modern Western culture. Since Moliere lambasted the
        ignorant, nouveau riche bourgeois gentleman, the bourgeoisie
        has been considered too clumsy to know true art and love
        (Goethe), a Philistine with aggressively unsubtle taste
        (Robert Schumann) and the creator of a machine-obsessed
        culture doomed to be overthrown by the proletariat (Marx and
        Engels).

        Flaubert was perhaps the most ruthless in his disgust, calling
        himself a "bourgeoisophobe." He wrote to George Sand: "Hatred
        of the bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue." His
        "Dictionary of Received Ideas" was a roster of bourgeois
        cliches and know-nothing attitudes. Seeing the small-town
        bourgeoisie, Flaubert wrote, "made me want to vomit and to cry
        at the same time."

        Since then, that urge has become an artistic convention. It
        has also given birth to generations of avant-gardes that have
        single-mindedly sought to shock the bourgeoisie and overturn
        its retrograde tastes. In doing so, they have drawn the battle
        lines for a century's esthetic battles.

        The history of 20th-century concert music, for example, is a
        history of avant-gardes reacting against an apparently
        established mainstream. Against that bourgeois mass, Arnold
        Schoenberg and Kurt Weill set their sights (with often barbed
        hostility); so did Pierre Boulez and John Cage. Even the now
        familiar early-music movement that began at the turn of this
        century and championed the revival of Renaissance and Baroque
        instruments and styles was, to a certain extent, an
        avant-gardist rebellion against bourgeois concert culture. The
        critic Martha Bayles has argued that the same rebellion has
        driven much pop music: heavy metal, punk, rap and grunge
        adopted hostile attitudes toward the bourgeoisie that were
        alien to pre-1960s pop and jazz.

        But what lies behind this widespread hostility? The historian
        John Brewer, in his recent book, "The Pleasures of the
        Imagination" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), shows how the
        bourgeoisie in 18th-century London ended up displacing both
        church and aristocracy as arbiters of taste. Coffee shops
        became counterparts of salons; public concerts provided income
        to composers and performers; art collectors and dealers became
        monarchs of commercial kingdoms. An artist no longer had to
        genuflect toward a particular patron. Instead, the arbiters
        were critics, purchasers, ticket buyers -- the bourgeoisie.

        The resentments that accompanied these new relationships were
        all the more pungent because the artist had often emerged from
        the class being courted. The artist may have even been the
        bourgeois par excellence, believing that with long schooling,
        husbanded talents, careful imitation and energetic innovation,
        advance might be possible, even advance out of the middle
        class with its commonplace tastes. Bourgeoisophobia among
        artists may have been a form of self-disgust.

        But the greatest paradox of 19th-century bourgeoisophobia is
        how little offense it inspired within the bourgeoisie itself.
        It even had a certain amount of appeal. The artist's desire to
        transcend origins seemed to resonate with the similar
        ambitions of the mercantile middle classes. After all, wasn't
        there always an element of self-disgust in the aspiring
        bourgeois? As Flaubert said of his most bourgeois character,
        "Madame Bovary: C'est moi." He saw himself in what he hated;
        so did his readers.

        How justified, though, is the disdain? Not very, argues the
        historian Peter Gay in a 25-year, five-book project discussing
        the vagaries of bourgeois life. In his recently published
        "Pleasure Wars" (W.W. Norton), Gay adopts Flaubert's term,
        "bourgeoisophobia," and shows just how unjustifiably sweeping
        it was. Bourgeois industrialists became great patrons;
        bourgeois dealers spurred public interest; bourgeois culture
        even helped give birth to bourgeoisphobic movements like
        modernism.

        Under the pressure of Gay's examples, the concepts of a
        "bourgeois" taste or of uniform "bourgeois" political
        interests begin to seem absurd, stale leftovers from
        Flaubertian hostility or Marxist theorizing.

        The U.S. case is particularly revealing. The United States was
        the first country largely predicated on such bourgeois ideas
        as the absence of inherited status and the importance of
        entrepreneurial innovation. This made U.S. bourgeoisophobia
        rare: who was to be scorned and on what grounds? Mark Twain,
        for example, took on all comers, bourgeois or not, mixing
        satire with affection.

        Even when bourgeoisophobia did develop, a very clear
        distinction was made between the bourgeois businessman
        attacked, say, by Sinclair Lewis, and the "common man," who
        was widely championed. That populist, democratic spirit
        flourished in the arts in the 1930s and '40s, in the music of
        Aaron Copland, for example, or the novels of John Steinbeck.

        After World War II, U.S. bourgeoisophobia became more sweeping
        as various avant-garde movements made the middle class its
        target. From the Beats of the 1950s to the performance artists
        of the '80s and '90s, the middle class has been accused of
        narrowness, bigotry, blindness; and it responded in kind. Even
        the uproar over grants made by the National Endowment for the
        Arts in recent years -- objections to the photographs of
        Robert Mapplethorpe or the performance art of Karen Finley --
        were over works that attacked conventional, mainstream tastes
        and values.

        But this bourgeoisophobia has also differed from its European
        parent. Unlike Flaubert, who disdained the bourgeoisie for its
        vulgar artistic tastes, his U.S. counterparts have criticized
        the middle class for its elite pretensions. In some cases, the
        very idea that gradations of esthetic achievement exist, and
        that "art" exists as opposed to entertainment, are themselves
        attacked as antidemocratic, self-indulgent and bourgeois. So
        in recent years the bourgeoisie has been attacked from below
        as well as from above. Once the bourgeoisie was blamed for
        enshrining kitsch; now the bourgeoisie is also blamed for
        enshrining art. Once the bourgeoisie was scorned for lacking
        elite taste; now the bourgeoisie is also scorned for claiming
        to possess it.

        This atmosphere helped inspire the "Most Wanted" project.
        Melamid and Vitaly embrace both types of bourgeoisophobia. On
        one hand, the artists' poll about taste was a trap: the
        questions almost guaranteed mockable results. When asked about
        the ideal size of a painting, two main choices are
        "dishwasher" or "full-size refrigerator." When asked to agree
        or disagree with statements, the participants are given
        examples like: "Art should be relaxing to look at, not all
        jumbled up and confusing." Care to disagree (and declare a
        preference for confusion and jumble)? And if you agree,
        haven't you already become a philistine seeking "relaxing"
        art? The poll's questions -- whether one's favorite painting
        would have a blue or green background, nude or clothed people,
        wild or tame animals, brush strokes or smooth textures --
        already presume a vulgar way of thinking about painting. It is
        no accident the results were so farcical.

        On the other hand, Melamid decries elitism. He talks about
        modern art as a "bourgeois business" and describes museums as
        the "castles" of "people in power."

        He also sees this project as an odd tribute to majority
        tastes, claiming support for "people's art." He and his
        colleague don't want to actually dismiss the middle class;
        instead, they want to poke fun at both it and its critics,
        mock both the idea of artistic standards and the idea that
        there aren't any. This results in a peculiar mixture of
        disgust, irony and emulation.

        Middle-class taste has always been a bit paradoxical, yearning
        for comfort while aspiring to wider knowledge and experience.
        That is also the kind of art it often inspired. Now a
        different kind of taste is celebrated. Its first canonical
        painting is "America's Most Wanted." It is meant to reflect
        the taste of the bourgeois; actually, it reflects the taste of
        the bourgeoisphobe.

------------------------------


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