More on the Collectors' Gallery Idea

First, go read this, which offers some interesting ideas on the topic I posted a week ago. Lenny makes a good point about the astronomical cost of such an endeavor, and the possibility of getting various embassies to pony up. Good idea.

What really intrigues me is his mentioning that Arbus, Judd and Hirst are old hat, which, of course, they are in the world of chasing avant-gardes. Thinking about the mercurial notion of contemporary art makes me want to start a betting pool on when the whole thing implodes. Who will be the first major museum to admit that the whole notion of an avant-garde is now essentially meaningless? Whose about-face will be the most amusing? Which museum will stubbornly cling to its manic search for the next new thing? Which critics will say that they predicted this years ago?

Then, of course we will get the folks who have been lurking on the sidelines, waiting to reintroduce the cause of their pet mediocrity, someone who was "neglected" for years.

The sad thing will be that a lot of great art will be neglected, as people crawl over each other to out-Beaux Arts their rivals. There will be some great abstract expressionism lost in a sea of big, brown eyes.

Another thing that will be interesting is watching the hedgers, like one Joseph Pearce (you know the fellow, who has turned his skilled and trained eye (giggle, titter) to the task of arts criticism: "cor blimey, some of this modern art ain't so bad! Cripes! Pour me another Watney's"), who have sort of cautiously endorsed very limited ideas of modern art (none of which they have even the foggiest notion of anyway). When the silliness of Mr. Hirst and Kara Walker and what have you has become the cause du jour, and a lot of folks start taking shots at a lot of modern masterpieces, I will be most interested to see who sticks by their guns and who joins the new bandwagon.

Obviously my view is that there is a lot of kee-rap passing as art these days. Always has been, but it has been particularly brutal in the last 20-30 years. There are also plenty of lesser paintings made by otherwise brilliant painters (although I cannot think of three Diebenkorn stinkers). However, for the most part, modernism has been a very good thing for art. What hurt art was the decision to move the teaching of art from a trade school/apprenticeship approach to an academic approach. When a young artist who lacks Picasso's formidable drawing skills tries to capture the dynamism of cubism, he is heading into troubled waters. When he goes into abstract expressionism without the discipline and eye of a Diebenkorn or Kline, he is doomed.

Hopefully the fallout of the collapse of avant-gardism will include a revival of proper training. Otherwise we will have nothing more than sentimental kitsch, rendered by people with as ferocious an axe to grind as the aforementioned Miss Walker. We are seeing a bit of this in music, as neo-tonalists, feeling emboldened, seem dead set on wrapping the world in mounds of dreary fake Romanticism.