MOMA is putting on a garage sale. Artist Martha Rosler has made a career of putting on garage sales as if they were art events. Her very tired idea that material culture is art, if it's put on in the right venue -- and what beats MOMA? -- has a lot of space on today's NYT.
Here's where I willingly join with those philistines who lament the decay of discrimination when it comes to exercising aesthetic taste. Grandmas' old dress is hanging on the wall at MOMA and can be yours for maybe $5, after you pay the $25 museum admission. Yesterday, Grandmas' dress was picked from the local garage sale, a real garage sale, for $1, we might suppose. There it was a worthless piece of cloth. Together with other junk it provided some entertainment for bored neighbors who like to poke around in someone else's refuse. But with Ms. Rosler, in concert with some very delightful curator with a prestigious job and a big budget and still dizzy from her ivy grad school seminar where she learned -- aha! -- that everyday stuff is really art if you just have that special turn of mind, thanks to Duchamp and a bunch of delirious literature theorists, and an art temple to display it. Never mind that the idea is now so tired, so very tired, so dog-eared tired that it just flops down wherever it can like any poor, flea-bitten Fido. Meanwhile the 1 percenters are crowding each other a few blocks uptown to spend dozens of millions of dollars for other scraps of cloth stained by the likes of Rothko, Kline, and their cohorts one and many. (While children starve everywhere). Both the bottom and the top of the artworld -- rotting ideas at the bottom, rotting canvases at the top, are what real artists wake up to every day. Somehow, they go to their work and try to keep alive an ancient impulse to do something worthwhile that others might find encouraging, even beautiful. Whoever the artists are today, they ain't the ones junking up MOMA and they ain't the ones being propped up at the auction houses and serving as piggy banks for the creepy few who park their money in 'art' while awaiting the next big social exploitation opportunity. I can tell you it's damned depressing to have lived through the collapse of art and the concept of the beautiful. My whole career has been lived in the midst of this miserable situation. The people who make the calls, the pretty little curators from Williams or Harvard or Yale or Princeton, or the huckstering auctioneers in $10,000 suits and their clients with god-knows what evil-begotten fortunes, or the pinch-nosed ex-Marxist theorists who never touched a tool of any kind, and who lounge in bliss among the tenured few, are -- all of them -- the enemies of art and artists, even when, especially when, they pretend otherwise. I know what I'm saying. I was there; I am there. Does this mean I'm flipping over to Berg's side? No! It means artists live with a great paradox. They do what they do even though it makes no sense whatsoever in today's world. They keep a flame burning. I'll say this: If someone says that thing is art, can be art, can be experienced as if it was art, can become art in the right location, doubt it. Real artists doubt everything, including their own work. As far as I'm concerned MOMA has opened the gates of Hell and might as well sell off their whole collection at garage sale prices.
