A walk through Mr. Nouvel’s domed museum complex, with its luminous shade and its breeze-channeling sea vistas, is an enchantment, almost enough to make you forget grim physical and social realities that went into creating it. And the manifold beauty of galleries filled with charismatic objects nearly persuades you not to remember that art is a record of crimes as well as of benign achievements. It takes an exercise in ethical balance to engage fully with our great museums, to walk the shaky bridge they construct between aesthetics and politics. A mindful visit to the Louvre Abu Dhabi requires this balance. That may be what is most universal about it.Besides those "grim social realities" – for example that Happiness Island was built by contract laborers from South Asia, the palaces of ancient Egypt by slaves – there is the reality of art world insiderism. This gives us works like the one shown above, “Food for Thought — Al Muallaqat,” by Saudi artist Maha Malluh. I kind of like this, but it is an assemblage of stew pots blackened by use:
they retain the marks of the past but also the imprint of the stories told during mealtimes in nomadic tradition. Maha Malluh has transformed the pots into a visual poem, in tribute to classical Arab poetry.Which is just the sort of thing that makes so many regular folks residents of flyover country grouchy about the snobbery of coastal elites. Elite art often appears as a celebration of division, that is, the division between people who get it and people who don't, to the greater glory of the former.
I find that I enjoy contemporary art best as a sort of lark. If I enter the museum in an exploratory frame of mind, ready to laugh at what amuses me and to be impressed by anything that seems amazing, I enjoy myself. But if I enter in the reverent mood I carry into cathedrals and the Met, I end up grouchy about the weirdness of a world that pays Jeff Koons millions for metal balloon animals. Do you suppose Maha Malluh was paid more for this assemblage of pots than the men who made these earned in their lifetimes, or he is perhaps not at that pinnacle of the profession yet?
2 comments:
I wonder if one should apply categories like flyover country to a piece like Maha Mullah's in its Arabian context. In a purely American context, to an American readership, a sentence like "Maha Malluh has transformed the pots into a visual poem, in tribute to classical Arab poetry" is pure pretension, and if that's all the explanation of the classical reference that the author gives, then they're just showing off and shame on them. But I suspect the Arabian Peninsula audience will recognize the pots and have no difficulty getting the references. The classical Arabic ode, which I take it Cotter is referring to, traditionally features a meditation on an abandoned campsite. My impression is those odes are still a beloved part of general Arabic culture, rather than a highbrow and/or purely academic topic. In context, I suspect the piece fills something of the same place as lonesome cowboy songs and paintings of hung-up saddles in our culture.
I wouldn't be surprised if the men who made those pots felt honored at this memorialization of their dying traditional art, rather than resentful of the financial inequity.
In terms of populist resentment, I think what might stir Arabs up more would be if Maha Mullah produced a realistic oil painting in the classical western fashion, or a nude.
Contemporary art is the result of traditional art objects being democratized by advancements in technology, and the wealthy elite needing something different to fixate on as markers of their social status and imagined superiority.
The response, then, was to decide you could make "art" of anything, and the "artistry" involved became a social game of snobbery and pretension.
Owning an attractive traditional painting that almost everyone could see the beauty in no longer sets you apart from the hoi polloi? Then the answer is simple.
Instead, own a disused urinal fixture which most people found ugly and repulsive, but work to convince your elite peers it has an "avant-garde" quality to it which only the "artistically enlightened" can appreciate.
Contemporary art boils down to the Emperors of the world showing off their New Clothes to each other. And every time a commoner points out that they're all running around nude, instead of breaking the spell of pretension, they end up reinforcing it, due to the plurality of Emperors.
A single person facing scrutiny for their pretensions is at least somewhat liable to succumb to doubt, if enough people question their pretense. The Emperor in the fable is embarassed not because the child sees through his pretense, but because his noble peers end up doing so as well.
But if instead of a single person facing scrutiny, you have a group of likeminded individuals, then the dynamic shifts. If the Emperor was not the only one nude, but had managed to convince his entire court to also don their own New Clothes, then he has better insulated himself from criticism, because now his courtiers are themselves at risk of embarassment if the pretense is not maintained.
When the same child makes the same claim of nudity, the entirety of the nobility can shrug off the accusation together. "Ah, you silly uncultured peasant! We're not nude! You just can't see and appreciate our majestic clothes! Proof, naturally, that we who CAN see them are your superiors."
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