An opinion by Roger Kimball, co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion about an exhibition called “Wrestle” at the Bard Hessel Museum. This article was published in the June 2007 issue of The New Criterion.
Editor’s note: At the end of this article there is additional commentary from Roger Kimball about an upcoming exhibition by Chinese artist Wenda Gu at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College called the green house, on display from June 6 through October 28, 2007.
Last month, a friend telephoned and urged me to travel to Bard College to see “Wrestle,” the inaugural exhibition mounted to celebrate the opening of “CCS Bard Hessel Museum,” a 17,000-square-foot addition to the college art museum. It sounded, my friend said, spectacularly awful. She”d just had a call from her husband, a Bard alum, who had zipped through the exhibition while doing some work at the college. Huge images of body parts””yes, those body parts””floating on the walls of a darkened room, minatory videos of men doing things””yes, those things””to each other, or to themselves, all of it presented in the most pretentious fashion possible. It really was something “¦ special.
Well, these folks are not naà¯fs. They”ve both been around the avant-garde block and back a few times. If they said an exhibition was ostentatiously horrible, then it was likely to be something worth taking some trouble to avoid””unless, that is, your job description includes regular stints as a cultural pathologist, in which case it is something that duty requires you to inspect, docket, and file away for the instruction and admonition of future generations.
This is my unhappy position. So, one fine May morning I motored up to lovely Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, home of the elite, super-trendy Bard College. Bard is one of those small educational institutions whose ambient wealth has allowed them to substitute avant-garde pretense for scholarly or artistic accomplishment. Continue reading “Why the art world is a disaster”
