Denis Dutton wrote an interesting op-ed for the New York Times about a week ago. I am not familiar with Dutton's work but it was refreshing to see a serious, well-reasoned argument about the state of contemporary art in one of the major newspapers.
The article considers the historical place of a pricey brand of conceptual art made by people like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. As Dutton notes, both of these artists have made considerable fortunes on bodies of work that eschew traditional craftsmanship in favor of deft theoretical maneuvering. Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 13 foot tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde, is probably the paragon. Dutton counters Hirst's shark, and other works like it, with a fascinating and lengthy survey of ancient hand axes. From the hand axes, he shows that highly skilled craftsmanship and aesthetic beauty are both traits that human beings have valued as far back as we have a record of our existence. He then infers that work that does not use skilled craftsmanship and a beauty aesthetic risks its long term financial value and its place in the historical canon.
Dutton's argument dovetails with public concerns over what contemporary art is or if it even exists. There are plenty of museum goers who would gladly spend days looking at Renaissance paintings before spending even a moment with contemporary work. One of their most frequent criticisms is that contemporary work lacks the craftsmanship and beauty of the art they like.
Dutton and the public may well be right about Hirst and Koons. However, I don't think their critique can be extended to all contemporary conceptual art. An example of where the language of craftsmanship and beauty become unhelpful is the late French artist Michel Parmentier, who may have gained a little exposure to U.S. audiences during the Color Chart exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (a show that also included Hirst) that included him. I would like to use Parmentier as a test case here. A painter who did not paint for long periods of time, he eventually made work only when he was asked by to do so by others. His deliberate habit of not painting was a conceptually motivated attempt to approach painting's reserve, the space where painting is absent, invisible or impossible. He understood such a reserve to be a necessary condition of painting.
The paintings he did make are alternating bands of color and the underlying support (canvas or paper) generated through its folding and unfolding. Everything about these works deliberately and purposefully suppresses conventional understandings of craft and beauty. These works were not dependent, as Dutton might charge, on the intellectual zeitgeist, but rather animated by a set of philosophical concerns that are always relevant to historical and contemporary painting. In his 1999 essay, Did You Say Ethics?, Parmentier wrote the, "...inseparability of ethics and praxis...should even preserve us from the spectacular and, with more luck still, from the beautiful. The notion of beautiful being evidently subjective..." Such an extreme position might appear unduly rigid. Parmentier argued it was necessary in order to acknowledge doubt, a condition at least as central to human experience as beauty. All this is to say that his works, as well as the challenges they pose to us, are daunting and exciting in spite of, or more accurately, because of this severity.
Parmentier serves as just one example among many in the last one hundred years of art. Regardless of the current market value of his work (which frankly seems irrelevant to discerning its actual quality) or whether one likes it, the determination and thoroughness with which he pursued painting is undeniable and admirable. It offers us the opportunity to reconsider whether Dutton's question is the one we want to ask. Can we determine that something is art, or is good art because its hallmarks are craft and beauty? Maybe. But as the critic Leo Stienberg so succinctly put it, contemporary art needs Other Criteria.
