Abstract
A radio podcast for Czech Radio, focusing on the role of visual arts in today's society.
In Michael Cunningham's novel At Twilight, two gallery owners, Peter and Beth, stop by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to see Damien Hirst's famous work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living. After New York stockbroker Steve Cohen bought the work in 2004 from London gallerist Charles Saatchi, he discovered that the shark was decomposing despite its preservation. He therefore replaced the rotting specimen with a fresher one and in 2007 he was already lending the "restored" artefact to the Metropolitan Museum. The characters in Cunningham's 2010 novel, Before the Shark, cynically observe that "it's getting a little hard to SEE... I mean, there's the object, and there's Hirst's career, and there's Cohen's eight million, and the fact that the Met thought it was brave to put something on display that was already nearly twenty years old." What creates the value of Hirst's object, Cunningham argues here, is not its intrinsic quality but the manipulation of art institutions: the art market, the cult of the successful artist, and, above all, the art museum. The Metropolitan Museum's space assures the works it presents the status of significant artifacts.
The attempt to make a dead shark a spectator hit is encountered in our domestic literature seventy years before Hirst: In 1921, Jaroslav Hašek published the short story Three Men with a Shark, in which enterprising friends tour South Bohemian villages and small towns with a carcass, beckoning "The terror of the northern seas! The tragedy of the deep sea!" However, being dumped in the waters of Cologne does not prevent the shark's decomposition and the spread of an unbearable stench that eventually causes the crowds of stinking onlookers to thin out, the three hochstaplers end up in the municipal closet and the shark buried at municipal expense. The Strakonice meeting hall and the national hall in Vodňany simply did not provide the carcass of Hašek's story with a respectable enough institutional framework to become a work of art, or at least to collect enough "voluntary contributions to stuff the unfortunate shark", as Hašek writes in the story.
But Cunningham's passage about Damien Hirst's shark is certainly not intended to please the old-timers who condemn the art of the last fifty years as a systemic fraud on easily manipulated snobs. It is clear from Beth and Peter's interview that even if their professional expertise allows them to unravel the background of the artificial enhancement of the work's prestige, they are still able to let its power and force work on them. At the moment when they are both staring into the mouth of the dead shark and Beth fails to finish the sentence with which she is trying to capture its artistic uniqueness, Peter realizes the real reason for their meeting. Beth initiated it to hand over her gallery business to him due to a move to Europe, but faced with the darkness of the shark's innards, Peter realises that this is not the whole truth: Recent cancer treatments have been unsuccessful and Beth is dying.
In a sophisticated way that my paraphrase fails to fully convey, Cunningham articulates the quality of a work of art as the ability to evoke the experience of human finitude. In spite of the traditionalists, Cunningham then argues that art can elevate and transcend the dimension of human life even when it does not use the masterful means of expression of painting, sculpture, and drawing. The shark's carcass will need to be replaced in the tank from time to time, yet Da Vinci's Mona Lisa has also been restored many times.
On the other hand, there is something deeply conservative about Cunningham's approach. He defines art as an anthropological constant, touching the deepest layers of human existence. We experience transcendence - transcendence especially in the face of works whose quality has enduring value. Old age most effectively distinguishes a significant artifact from the underdog, ephemeral kitsch, even from the poseur excesses of dubious creators. But the problem is that the experience of these great feelings associated with the value of a work's age and its ability to transcend the material limits of everyday life has, since the 19th century, taken place almost exclusively in the privileged space of the museum. Since their inception, museums have represented the interests of specific groups, defined either by nationality or social status. In America to this day, wealthy industrialists and businessmen influence the shape of art museum displays. For them, supporting art is often just one source of prestige. The aforementioned Steve Cohen, owner of the Hirst Shark since 2004, acquired the famous New York Mets baseball club in 2020, which the less cultured part of the public sometimes confuses with the Met - the New York Metropolitan Museum.
The mission of European and American art museums has thus been articulated from the very beginning of their existence by the interests of financial and social elites, self-proclaimed representatives of a nation, a people, a country. The voice they spoke was male, rich and white. For the different layers of society, it shaped the view not only of art, but of the whole world. Even those who were not from Europe or America, not white, rich or male, have long largely identified with the perspective of this privileged group in experiencing high art and consuming popular culture. Some non-European and non-American audiences even allowed the idea of the inferiority of their own culture to be imposed on them. But this has in fact been stolen from them twice over: first, when Europeans stole evidence of their ancient history and placed it in their ethnographic museums, and second, when they built up their own (not only) artistic wealth at the expense of non-European cultures and their natural resources since the modern period.
In the 1970s, (not only) Western European and American artists and intellectuals became aware of the privileged nature of art institutions, and they slowly began to change under their pressure. To this day, however, it is often hard to understand for the domestic audience of European and American museums that they suddenly present art that speaks with an unconscious voice. Because it has no centuries of proven values, and often does not even aspire to transcendence, they are reluctant to call it art at all.
But why should we expect those who have long been forced into silence to speak - when they finally get the chance - the same language that has dominated culture for centuries, that is, male, rich and white? The otherness of their art reflects the experience of growing up in a tradition that did not belong to them and often humiliated and abused them. They have to invent a language of their own, and they try it by experimenting, often by negating traditional "Western" formats, genres, media and values. This year's Documenta, for example, did not present a classical exhibition at the Cassel Museum of Art - Frederician. The show was spread across the city, and who could participate was not decided by individuals or hierarchically controlled institutions. A collective of artists, journalists and ecologists from the Indonesian group Ruangrupa took on the curatorial role, further dividing the decision-making responsibilities among invited collectives from South Asia, Latin America and Africa. The old-timers noted that the criterion of quality was inevitably lost in the cluttered mix of objects, installations, performances and actions. But this was defined by privileged Europeans and Americans for a very narrow segment of artistic production. New criteria have to be invented for new art, and it is worth being part of this great adventure. Not only Kassel and its Documenta, but also, on a smaller scale, Prague with the recent Biennale In the Matter of Art, provided an opportunity to discover new art forms, to think about them and to be challenged by them. In some works, then, the viewer may have discovered values whose experience is profound precisely because they are not dependent on centuries-old models, nor on the work of Euro-American contemporary stars. But this possibility does not end the admiration for the great works of European medieval, modern, and modernism, or the wonder at the depth of nothingness in the mouth of Hirst's shark, which Cunningham's Beth, for lack of better words, called a "grand gesture." This still valid canon of art, despite its exclusivity, managed to teach a sensibility that we now deepen by exploring new art and its nascent rules. It's time to give space to Hašek's three men, derisively called "voyungers, comedians, gypsies" by the commander of the Strakonice gendarmes, to show us their shark carcass and the overlap they find in it.