It's Entertainment!

Various matters have kept me from posting lately, but I saw something this morning that seemed to require comment, especially since I have posted on this subject already, namely, the Alexander McQueen exhibition. In fact, I have posted on it twice.

I live on the West Side of Manhattan, directly across Central Park from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since I am there frequently, I saw the McQueen show early on, when it was still possible to view it without much of a wait. Something about the exhibition really caught on, however, and gradually the lines began to lengthen. If you go to this link, the exhibition space for McQueen is the orange area at the top on the second floor.

The lines for the show soon snaked out down that narrow hallway parallel to the 19th-century galleries (in light purple on the map). They then began to extend further, making a 45 degree turn and continuing through the Ancient Near Eastern galleries (the part that is indicated by blank space above the three green rooms, 175, 174, 173), all the way to the Great Balcony (which you can see labeled on the map). It wasn't long before the lines went down the Great Staircase itself and down into the rotunda of the museum. This morning, as can be seen in the above photo, the lines are now outside the museum and snaking around the back up to the east drive of Central Park. One of the guards told me people had started lining up at 6 a.m. The museum will be open until midnight tonight and tomorrow.

So, why did this exhibit catch on? Well, I am not going to spend much time analyzing it. As I wrote earlier, novelty has much to do with the crowds. Novelty produces a certain desperation; people don't want to think they missed something new. Of course, we are an age saturated with the continuous production of the new. In fact, the brightest minds of the generation under 50 years of age are engaged in producing entertainment. I'm not immune to good entertainment. Though I don't have a TV, I gladly watch Burn Notice on my iMac.

McQueen, whatever one thinks of his couture creations, was highly gifted, though the "vision" thing was a little offputting to me. I remember saying to myself as I looked at some of the clothes: "I can see why this guy committed suicide." Very morbid mind. (See example above. Amazingly the collection is called "ready to wear.") It is probably this morbidity that also drives people to the show. We want to see extreme things. Maybe because we are banned from extremities in our speech. Being honest nowadays, after all, is often called hate speech. Politeness has been expunged by McQueen.

All that is novel passes. According to the Drudge Report yesterday, the most recent episode of Jersey Shore was a "bust": only 9 million viewers! (Full disclosure: I have never seen it.) Will people talk about Alexander McQueen a year from now? Or will they only talk about the fact that they stood in line for two hours?

Photo credits: Wall Street Journal online; Oodora; NJ.com

But is it art?

In the last post I addressed the shortcomings of Bodmer's literary efforts, which were widely considered by his contemporaries to be little more than moral tracts. These works were written in the 1740s, after his large critical treatises, and indicate the transitional position Bodmer occupies. From Plato onward, there were many critics who were uncomfortable with the power of art to affect the imagination, and thus poets themselves were often quick to point out that instruction went down better when it was dressed up with pleasing language, imagery, characters, and so on: docere yes, but don't forget movere. Bodmer's contemporary Salomon Gessner also presented exemplary portraits of humanity in his idylls, but they were widely popular, even up into the 19th century, as indicated by translations.

But I continue to think about this question of what constitutes art, and I continue to incline toward the importance of playfulness (of which there is plenty in Gessner's idylls, by the way). Thus, I was struck by something I read in a recent (April 15, 2011) Times Literary Supplement "Commentary" on the 100th anniversary of the birth of the novelist Sibylle Bedford. I had heard Bedford's name, but have not read any of her novels. In the "Commentary" by Caroline Moorhead, Bedford is quoted as saying the following: "There does exist ... an absolute standard of artistic merit. And it is a standard which is in the last resort a moral one. Whether a work of art is good or bad depends entirely on the quality of the character which expresses itself in the work. ... That virtues is the virtue of integrity, of honesty towards oneself."

With this in mind, how is one supposed to react to new works on view at the Metropolitan Museum? The Met has gone out to produce a truly glamorous exhibition (Savage Beauty is the title) of some of the exotic creations of fashion designer Alexander McQueen. The lines are as long as might be imaged for such a blockbuster. One of the first works you encounter on entering is the dress at the top of this post, made of thousands of razor clam shells. It is really gorgeous and, yet, I can't see any moral purpose that it serves. Well, McQueen didn't call himself an artist, but the exhibition is supported by the Museum's textiles department.

The English sculptor Anthony Caro produces "public art." I like public art, especially when it is playful. I don't know what to make of the works on the roof garden at the Met. There is certainly a lot of craft here, which is, for me, an important criterion, but the works leave me cold. They leave little to the imagination. McQueen, in contrast, works better because of the employment of the flourishes. I can't say that his creations "move" me, but there is an element of delectation (delectare).

Neither McQueen nor Caro has made works that are useful or even instructional, and I suspect that is an aspect that underlies the work of many successful contemporary artists.

Picture credit: Walking Off the Big Apple