The quality question Essay Example For Students

The quality question Essay We live in a moment of extreme ideological confusion. The Soviet Empire and cold war seem to have have ended almost overnight. Like so many social and political spectacles in America now, the Clarence Thomas Anita Hill drama seems to have come and gone without an author, and no one with a radical or conservative label can provide it with an appropriate script. Magic Johnson, a globally revered heterosexual sports hero, has the HIV virus. Clearly many assumptions and categories on which people have been depending to make sense of their lives have crumbled. The degree of our confusion can be felt in our language. In the last couple of years the discussion of culture has been shot through with words like quality, multiculturalism, minorities, ethnicity, Eurocentric, community, margins and mainstream, each one emotionally loaded and intellectually vague. Like all buzzwords, they tend to encourage not curiosity and responsibility but complacency, defensiveness, finger-pointing and rage. When words get in the way of seeing, they must be scrupulously defined or else shelved. We seem to be unable to do either. Does anyone realize the degree to which our words and categories have broken down and how much communal intelligence and will it is going to take to rebuild and reinvent them? While our cultural language can now produce, at least in me, a kind of vertigo or nausea, our art is healthy. No dominant tendency exists and any attempt to fashion the kind of art star that was commonplace five years ago is immediately suspect. This is a good time for abstract painting, for video, for photography, for the kind of sculpture that defines itself within the context of the site for which it is made, and for theatrical thematic installations that combine different media, such as photography, found objects and painting. The art world grows ever more international. New Yorkers can regularly see contemporary art from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Several European countries have been exploring Americas reputation as a culture of cultures. Chicano artists have been shown in France. A broad survey of African-American artists is being planned for Japan. In the United States the achievements of African-American artists have still only begun to be recognized. A recession that is squeezing numerous galleries and museums must not be allowed to stop a process of aesthetic justice that was well underway last season and that is having an increasing impact around the world. This is a good time for the kinds of discussions within artists studios that had been largely absent from the hyped-up, money-laden 80s. In New York, many more artists are talking to one another about art and ideas and the world around them. Many artists are willing and eager to be installed alongside very different artists in group shows. Among artists of all kinds there is a longing for clarity and communication. The need to struggle with the confusion of the moment is apparent in the countless panels organized across America in 1991 to discuss issues like multiculturalism, quality and power. I think these panels have generally been more revealing for their inconclusiveness and stalemates than for their answers. The down side of choosing panelists because of race, gender and sexual preference is that it puts pressure on almost everyone on the panel to represent 21 particular position, which tends not to encourage conversation but to reinforce walls. In short, there is a lot of artistic energy and more honesty among artists than I have seen in a while. But we are also stuck. In the privacy of coffee houses, studios and galleries, there may be real openness and discussion, but in the public arena, we have become a culture of buzzwords and positions, and almost nothing is being engaged. The peer panel process of the Endowment offers one of the few forums where real debate between a variety of positions is not so much encouraged as expected to take place. Compromising this process in an America in which people are consistently being pitted against people would be one more sign of a national failure of vision and nerve. The crisis of the National Endowment for the Arts has caused real damage. In 1989 people throughout the United States were judging the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano without feeling any responsibility to look at them and think about them first. Columnists had a ball writing derisively about Karen Finley covering herself with chocolate, but which of them actually saw her perform? The feeling that it is acceptable to sit back and judge the creations and behavior of others from a few images or from a few inflammatory remarks in a newspaper is a sign of a provincial nation. Like it or not, the Endowment has become a symbol of our cultural will and ambition as a nation. Dancing with diablo: an international education in collaboration EssayWhen I am dealing with the art of a culture clearly different from my own, what I want to understand most is the experience of that art within its culture in other words what happens to someone in that culture when he or she encounters or lives with that scroll, or mask, or painting, or effigy or mound of sand or earth. Once I feel the depth of response to that art, I will always respect it and its tradition. Does that mean I will automatically see it as the equal of the art I value most? No. But it does mean that the object and its culture will become part of me, that I will begin to try to engage that culture in what I write, and that I will have a better way of measuring the object against others that culture produces. And it means that I will be able to consider the strengths and limits of my ever-changing, ever-elastic, unpossessable culture better. It also means that I might and indeed do either find a cultural comparison totally inappropriate, or consider the object every bit the equal of art I value most. One reason why I think we should stop using the word quality is that in the realm of contemporary art, far more often than not, the word now gets in the way of the recognition of quality. Consider the effect of the words good and bad. If you say a work of art is bad, you usually dismiss it without further thought. If you say to yourself, a work of art is good, you will probably remember it, but the word often functions as a license to turn the page or to go on to the next room. The word good tends to stop the process of feeling and thinking that all good art sets in motion. When you are so worried whether a work upholds the highest standards, you are less likely to recognize what that work has to offer, particularly when its inspiration or message or content is different or difficult. To insist on the word quality is now to insist upon control. Some of the most influential contemporary art challenges a sense of control. It is only through a relinquishment of control that a full experience of any art is possible. One problem with calling a moratorium on the word quality is that it gives the impression that those who do not use the word do not care about good art. The most serious question is this: If we do not use the word quality, is there any way of assuring that the very particular aristocracy of experience that the best art offers an experience that carries within it a recognition of all that human beings are capable of and share will be respected and preserved? I believe this experience can probably only be respected and preserved now if the word quality is put aside. I also believe that right now the weight of responsibility is not so much on the wielders and brandishers of the word as it is on those who resist it. The value of art that has been overlooked or that has not yet been appreciated cannot simply be claimed; it is not enough to write about art offering historical and political analysis and contextual information. All the art that convinces and endures has been written about with knowledge, passion and poetry, and with a built-in responsiveness to respected aesthetic positions either openly hostile to that art or disinclined to take it seriously. When language is equal to the experience of art and the writing has sufficient national outlets, the problem of doing justice to the art in question will resolve itself. Reviving our language, doing justice to good art wherever and whatever it is, and preserving the spiritual vitality and core of art, may amount to the same thing. Michael Brenson delivered these remarks in February to the National Council on the Arts in Washington, D.C. He was an art critic for the New York Times for nine years.