Don't Be Here Now

Journal entry for 29 Nov 2010 | Link

The Museum as a Museum, Part Two

Last month I noted Thom Collins of the Miami Art Museum as part of the new trend of museum directors who refuse to admit that they're running a museum. This month my friend Brett Sokol sat him down for an interview. Let's just say that they didn't go out for a beer afterward.

The interview has hit a wall. “You’re not a heroin addict, are you?” Thomas Collins asks me, only half joking. Why else, he implores, would anyone oppose turning downtown Miami’s ramshackle Bicentennial Park—or as Collins dubs it, “Needle Park”—into the home of the new Miami Art Museum? “It is no longer credible to try to undermine this project,” he continues sternly. “This museum is happening.”

When the bond issue that would provide the new MAM with partial funding came to a vote in 2004, I came out in support of it, with regrets. Six years later, the current MAM director is dropping postmodernist jargon on a reporter from Ocean Drive Magazine. Perhaps he plans to treat the press and a city full of unsympathetic collectors as if he were leading them in a graduate seminar, and can deflect their objections with condescending applications of stilted academic language.

I won't spoil the delicious zingers in Brett's piece, but I want to counter a couple of distressing assertions from Collins. First and foremost:

“I would deny that the principal value of works of art is a private, transcendental, liminal experience,” he scolds. Then, taking in my surprised reaction... he gently backtracks. “It’s an important part of it… I don’t discount it,” he offers. Still, “in addition to being a library or a repository for significant art objects, more and more it’s incumbent on a museum— particularly in modern or contemporary art—to think of itself as a social forum.”

Collins not only can't deal with the idea of the museum as a museum—he can't deal with the idea of art as art. This doesn't surprise me, as academia and officialdom weed out people who can, striving as they are towards an explainable art world, or at least one explainable in the language of academic aspirants. But on top of that, I observe a lapse of humanity. Collins uses the interview to beat his ideological drum: museum as a social forum, museum as a library, museum as a place to "invite interesting human interactions," and so on. At the end he describes the architectural design:

“It’s a place where people can be comfortable to just be. Whether you come to the exhibitions or not, it’s a public park with incredible views of the bay and beyond.”

But not if you're a heroin addict, in which case you're welcome to "just be" somewhere else. I have not visited the park in many years and don't know who is using it. It may not be folks I would elect to hang out with. But there's an undeniable element of bullshit behind the sentiment that the museum is going to create an egalitarian social space. On the contrary, it's going to require an autocracy—nothing short of use of force—to institute a space that welcomes "people" but not "heroin addicts." (Here's my question: On the spectrum of humanity that runs between the former and the latter in Collins's judgment, where do believers in art as a private, transcendental, liminal experience fall? I would guess that we're just on this side of "people." The history of political cartoons shows us that officialdom always resorts to dehumanizing the enemy as the first line of rhetorical attack.) Using force to drive out junkies and draw art aficionados may be worth doing. But it's important to remember that the ensuing invitation to come and "be" is conditional, mediated by a postmodernist agenda that is not pro-public in any real sense. And Collins is denigrating unsupportive members of the public as "not credible." Think about that as he solicits your goodwill for the envisioned museum.

I'll Start Procrastinating When I Get Around To It

I have long struggled with procrastination. I made a major behavioral shift four years ago when I started living with my wife-to-be, and my tendency to disorganization and bad work habits found someone else's nerves to grate upon. When I annoyed myself, I could live with it. When I annoyed her, there were two angry people in the house, both of whom were honked off at me. So I read Getting Things Done, designed my own little system around it (I also suffer from Not Invented Here Syndrome), and now accomplish tasks at the next to the last minute instead of the last minute. That sounds pathetic, and it is, but it makes a huge difference in our quality of life, mine and my spouse's.

I now share with you an exciting essay about procrastination on my new favorite blog, entitled You Are Not So Smart. Read it all. Pay particular attention to the conclusion:

The now you may see the costs and rewards at stake when it comes time to choose studying for the test instead of going to the club, eating the salad instead of the cupcake, writing the article instead of playing the video game.

The trick is to accept the now you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future you – a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.

To illustrate this point the author, journalist David McRaney, selects a painting of Ulysses and the Sirens by Herbert James Draper, which is poignant and apt. Procrastination is a failure to think about thinking. In the famous Marshmallow Experiment (he goes over it in detail), kids who succeeded in holding out for the second marshmallow found ways to distract themselves from the torture of waiting for it, and the ability to do so altered their destinies. It turns out that we procrastinators will always feel that torture, which is the product of the same desire for immediate payoff. The good news is that even children possess some resources for enduring that torture. As adults we can employ adult versions of the same strategies.

Readings

Jed Perl, scintillating here.

There is such a thing as an exhibition that is too smart for its own good, so thoroughly thought through that it leaves nothing for museumgoers to do. "Counter Space" leaves no room for discussion. Strangely enough, problems of a not entirely different variety emerge in the retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to Jan Gossart, the Netherlandish painter who died in 1532. Maryan Ainsworth, the scholar who organized "Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance," is one of the most brilliant curators at work today, and there is no question that the exhibition is a major event, bringing news to the United States of an artist not well-known here. Ainsworth is certainly capable of illuminating a subject. The section of the great 2004 "Byzantium: Faith and Power" exhibition that she organized, exploring the influence of icons on Flemish painting, was luminous. Her Gossart is luminous, too. Ainsworth does a beautiful job of locating Gossart in the complex ambience of the Northern Renaissance, where Netherlandish naturalism, old Gothic impulses, and the new scientific spirit were converging, often uneasily. The trouble is that the artist the exhibition seeks to illuminate is not very good. The show keeps pushing Gossart at us. And we keep moving away. The effect is a little like strong sunlight in a sordid interior.

David Brooks on Tolstoy.

[W]hen he sat down to write his great novels, his dreams of saving mankind were bleached out by the vividness of the reality he saw around him. Readers often comment that the worlds created in those books are more vivid than the real world around them. With Olympian detachment and piercing directness, Tolstoy could describe a particular tablecloth, a particular moment in a particular battle, and the particular feeling in a girl’s heart before a ball.

Ron Lieber, A Dying Banker's Last Instructions:

[W]hen Mr. Murray, a former bond salesman for Goldman Sachs who rose to the managing director level at both Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse First Boston, decided to cease all treatment five months ago for his glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer, his first impulse was not to mourn what he couldn’t do anymore or to buy an island or to move to Paris. Instead, he hunkered down in his tiny home office here and channeled whatever remaining energy he could muster into a slim paperback. It’s called “The Investment Answer,” and he wrote it with his friend and financial adviser Daniel Goldie to explain investing in a handful of simple steps.

Not a reading, but a viewing: Dennis Dutton on his Darwin Theory of Beauty.