Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/05/14/tdr_interview_michael_kimmelman.php
Monday, May 14, 2007
By Emily Ghods-Esfahani and Lauren A. Indvik
Chief New York Times art critic, Michael Kimmelman, visited Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art on Friday, April 27 to deliver the Robert L. McGrath Distinguished Lecture in American Art. With the help of PowerPoint, Kimmelman’s talk, “From Wonder Cabinet to Department Store: Thoughts on American Museums,” took the form of a virtual tour into some of the most prominent—and problematic—contemporary American museums of art.
Beginning with a series of slides featuring the recently opened Greek and Roman sculpture galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kimmelman noted that the ethereal courtyard, in which the new exhibit is located, was previously used as an over-priced cafeteria space for hungry museum goers. Now a light and airy space that complements the marble glow of the sculptures on display, Kimmelman wonders why the courtyard was ever used as a feeding ground—the answer? Cold hard cash.
The Met’s new renovation marks a positive departure, in Kimmelman’s opinion, from the commercializing grid into which the Met locked itself when J.P. Morgan took over at the beginning of the last century. Disdainful of the market drive that has defined the art world for the past one hundred years or so, Kimmelman emphasized the importance of museums in “enlightening, not entertaining” the public at large, for whom the museums are designed. The quality of the art work, not the quantity of generated revenue, should be the aim of any sensible curator who values art as much as his profession would seem to require.
Kimmelman’s least favorite of these ‘entertainment centers’ is the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art in Los Angeles, California. Condescendingly describing it as an “amusement park,” Kimmelman sets the enormous sums of money the museum spent on entertainment—from the two-story dining hall to the elaborate monorail that transports visitors from the parking lot to the museum site—against the comparatively trivial amounts it was unwilling to spend on priceless works of art.
One such piece was a prized Velasquez, which the Getty was unwilling to acquire for $50 million; the Prado Museum in Spain happily snatched up this invaluable work, despite the already numerous Velasquez paintings it has on display. At the time, the owners of the Getty simply did not see the value of fine art, as Kimmelman pointed out: “The Getty itself conceptually doesn’t know what it’s about.” Indeed, if, as an art museum, it is unwilling to devote itself to art, then to what is it willing to devote itself? Intellectual sloth in the face of this identity crisis in the museum world was what Kimmelman criticized.
And museums can certainly be worse than amusement parks. “I find MoMA [The Museum of Modern Art in New York City] to be almost as unpleasant as the Getty,” he said stiffly, describing it as “heartless” when likening it to a shopping mall. MoMA “confuses quantity with quality,” aiming for big shows with big crowds rather than focusing its funds on increasing the size and quality of its permanent collection.
Even worse for Kimmelman than MoMA, however, is the Guggenheim, which shamelessly rented space to Armani for $15 million in the fall of 2000. While these exhibits have attracted a great deal of public interest, they fail to create a permanent audience because “it’s false advertising... it’s not what a museum is actually about.”
Well, what is a museum actually about? Art, says Kimmelman, and he praised those museums who focus on bringing otherwise dusty and antiquated works of art back to life. These include the bright and airy Beacon Museum in New York and the Louvre’s beautifully illuminated non-Western art galleries. These museums maintain their original function as “wonder cabinets,” instilling “a kind of wonderment, to suggest something that was beyond our knowledge.”
When the museum facility complements its artwork, so as to draw the viewer out of the confines of his monochromatic world, then the awe that art induces is working to meaningful ends. This effect is lost in many museums today, like the Quai Branly museum in France, which has not only complicated its gallery space with complex architectural elements, but has also failed to clearly identify the objects on display: the result is confusion and disorder, not the order and harmony that one finds at the Louvre or the Met.
Following his discussion of Quai Branly, Kimmelman touched upon several controversial topics regarding culture and ownership. “Who owns art?” he asked. “Who gets to assign meaning to it?” Without hesitation, Kimmelman insisted that looted art should be re-patriated to the areas where the art was originally sourced. “Respect from other cultures comes from returning an object to where it belongs.” He also warned against controlling the interpretation of art. Museums should not assign a single meaning—aesthetic, historical, religious, or otherwise—to objects, he argued, because “objects can have many different lives” and thus a multitude of meanings. By limiting the meaning of the work of art, you limit its immortality, Kimmelman argues, because only through its many lives does the work partake of eternity.
Even the way an object is displayed in a museum affects the way it will be interpreted by the viewer, says Kimmelman. “To have physical contact with something that transcends that moment, that time can dissolve with brief points of contact with things that we cherish and deem longer lasting than ourselves—I think that is why we go to museums,” he concluded thoughtfully.
Kimmelman took questions from the audience after the lecture, answering inquiries about his favorite museums and his career. “Art critics are the lap dogs of the art world,” he admitted when asked about the influence of critics in the art world today. In the “Burg years” of the 1940s and 1950s, the art community was a small one, he explained, and the public did not know who the leading, most interesting artists were. Critics championed the work and views of emerging artists—like Pollack or Klimpt—to a resistant public. However, Kimmelman points out, the art world is no longer that way. Given the free-for-all that has defined the art world in the past few decades, new art—good or bad, though usually bad—is not only tolerated, but welcomed; young artists are recruited out of school, promoted, packaged, and bought by museums before the critic ever becomes involved. The critic, he claimed, now comes in “at the ass-end of the process.”
Kimmelman expanded on the role of the art critic in an interview with The Dartmouth Review following the lecture. “I didn’t become a critic because I felt I needed to impose my opinion on the world,” he explained.
He continued, “Of course I am not arrogant enough to think my opinion matters, but what I think a good critic does is explain how he or she arrives at an opinion and conveys a set of values, and those can be moral values too, but, in any case, aesthetic and intellectual values, and that the strength of your opinion is based on that, and not simply on assertion. The more compelling your voice is as a writer, the more people will believe your opinion. You’re in a marketplace of ideas and other opinions are competing with your opinion quite fairly, so you need to not assert but explain, and that is what I think the art of being a critic is.”
Kimmelman says he became a critic because he was “interested in being a writer and being involved in the exchange of ideas.” From a “very Left” family from New York that subscribed to a number of intellectual and political journals, Kimmelman grew up with the idea that a “public conversation” was taking place both among the academic community and the public at large. Art criticism, he thought, was a valid way to enter into this dialogue. “I think what interests me about art, both in making and writing about it—and what differentiates it from other activities—is that it is in a sense irreducible to something else. The experience is something that you need to fully understand, and then to translate it is almost impossible. So the interest for a writer is in finding some equivalent form of creativity that can evoke or suggest what you are experiencing, but isn’t the thing itself, because it isn’t quantifiable. And because good art, by its very nature, can’t be reduced to something undeniably simple.”
When asked whether he felt the need to respond to art market trends, Kimmelman said that although he did not feel compelled to cater to the market, “there is an inevitable kind of interest in areas that the market is also interested in... But I would very rarely write about something just because there is a large market for it. Unless, let’s say, it’s an artist in bloom, and I wanted to specifically make a point about the market.” He cited Damien Loeb as one such artist.
“There’s a guy who had his fifteen minutes, and I thought he was just not a very good artist who was being marketed as somebody, a kind of bad boy—and that was an irresistible target. But generally I find the market deep-down interesting—though money as a subject is just not; it has very little to do with art.”
He later elaborated on the unfortunate pattern of “young artists—adopted by the art market, seduced into selling things before they’ve really had a chance to mature, marketed in one way, trained to do one thing—[and then] left to fend for themselves in some way, and the art market just moves on, and I think that’s the dangerous aspect of this.”
Furthermore, as the chief art critic of the New York Times, Kimmelman says he has “the luxury in my particular job of choosing what I write about and also have the responsibility to write about many of the more larger things, obvious things,” unlike some of his colleagues “out there in the trenches... writing about all of the galleries.”
Kimmelman says he is less interested in being a spokesman for the galleries or in following “the careers that come and go.” He insists that art careers should be based on thirty years, not thirty months. “The cycle of the art world is such now that people really do have very short careers and attention spans are much shorter than they used to be. So people come and go constantly; there are literally hundreds of gallery shows every month. And to be following that as a full-time occupation... requires someone of enormous devotion and patience to the art world itself, which is not that interesting to me.”
Often criticized for his “eclectic” art tastes, Kimmelman evaded numerous inquiries about his standards for differentiating “good” from “bad” art. He did not, however, hesitate to define the relationship between beauty and art. “They’re not synonymous. Art can take many forms, and beauty is one thing that it can be about, although I would say that things that are very difficult and hard to love can be beautiful for that... I don’t think that... art should be beautiful or else it is not art... [and] I don’t think... that it should be easy and entertaining and diverting... Its beauty lies in our ability to come to terms with it, to be rewarded for the effort. Art requires effort and rewards that effort.”
Kimmelman says that art has been a tremendous guide and instructor in his life. “It’s a humbling and uplifting sort of thing. It tells us that we can never fully know something and that we need to keep our eyes opened all the time. Plus, it can move us in ways we don’t expect, and in ways that nothing else can.” With those last words, Kimmelman ends where he began: with wonder, and the force of art in inspiring wonder and awe in the hearts of the viewer, critic, and the public at large.