"... a new conception of art museums as places peddling 'wellness,' promoting the appearance of wokeness and finding institutional purpose in the culture of therapy. 'Philip Guston Now' frames Guston’s profound and complicated oeuvre with patronizing wall labels. At the entrance to the exhibition and on the museum’s website, we are offered an 'Emotional Preparedness' statement by health and trauma specialist Ginger Klee, MS, LMFT, LPCC. Patrons are also offered an opportunity to exit the exhibition ahead of the gallery showing some of Guston’s cartoonlike images of crude, deliberately pathetic figures with Ku Klux Klan hoods.... Only on my second walk through the show, when I made a conscious decision not to read anything, did I remember how much I love Guston and his hectic, overbearing, goofy, maudlin, self-mocking, mute and reliably perverse view of the world. In a time of cant, where almost every cultural product is advertising something and defending preemptively against something else, Guston’s generous art is liberating."
From "In long-awaited Philip Guston show, great art comes with a warning The ‘Philip Guston Now’ exhibition, controversially postponed in 2020, has opened at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts" by Sebastian Smee (WaPo).
Here's my post from September 26, 2020: "4 major museums have postponed a retrospective for a highly respected painter — Philip Guston — because some of the paintings have images of the KKK." My reaction at the time:
There's no reason to think Guston liked the Klan. It's for the viewer to gaze on these painterly cartoons and wonder what the hell is this supposed to mean? or just to think hmmm, there's that or whatever you think in a museum... those bastions of white supremacy!
Maybe you think, yeah, this is all cute fun or mysterious ambiguity for elite white folks but it's all made possible by an unexamined sense that black people don't matter.
Okay, but maybe Guston meant to say that — to draw you in and then challenge you to confront your impulse to accept the KKK when it's painted and in a museum.
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Confession:
I've never been able to get over this fellow's name. If Sebastian is called out for a bad review, I guess he could say "I'm not really bad, I was just following orders..."
Interesting for one with the power to "put the hook in" to some poor devil's artistic career.
Okay, I'm done now. Not proud.
It [the museum] should have put up a warning that some viewers might find images in the show offensive or disturbing, provided helpful context, and more or less left it at that.
From the article.
How disappointing to artists, that if they are trying to shock, or even just to surprise, they can't - at minimum, they have to contend with the lame-o at the surprise party who giggles as the door opens, and apparently at maximum they have to deal with the helicopter parent who warns the birthday child before allowing her to turn the doorknob so she doesn't "get scared."
Of course, it's even worse for society as a whole than it is for the frustrated artists. What we have to deal with is the fact that apparently no one born after maybe 2000 can face the unexpected. Good luck in a world that consists of mundane, boring, usual, SURPRISE!
A quick internet search showed me several articles from when the exhibition was delayed. All of the articles that I looked at had images of the KKK paintings at the top, immediately above or under the title. They are also what showed in the thumbnails. No warning, no 'Emotional Preparedness'.
That's enough to tell me that whatever the museum is doing here was either to get more attention for the exhibit or that their opinion of their patrons (or the surrounding community) is so poor, they know there will be drama. And, the way things are now, the drama would not (rightly) reflect poorly on the people acting out, but would have the museum under attack from social media (worst thing ever).
How to show anti-totalitarian art in a totalitarian era? In an era when one can only say: "This is about that but it is said wrongly" or "This is not about that so it is excluding that which is wrong", how can one exhibit great art? Ok, put up great art with labels from today's culture right next to it. Count on the viewer to step back and put a frame around the whole - (which is what current art teaches us to do with everything we look at). The oppressors proudly regard the labels; the oppressed enjoy the irony and the art, like Ukrainians in the Donesk Republic reading about their liberation - the great word "Liberty" amid a graffiti of lies and coerced cheers. Surreal? Too European? Maybe. There've been better times but it is what it is. Is this a great country or what?
Who cares. JMW Turner is at Boston MFA until July.
In a time of cant, where almost every cultural product is advertising something and defending preemptively against something else, Guston’s generous art is liberating.
Surely Guston was promoting or advertising his own (vaguely defined) cause.
I'd want an explanation of why his paintings were particularly "generous," and I wouldn't call them liberating.
Weren't they something of a preview of our own PC world?
Love the Dickensian name. Sebastian Smee. Is he friends with Rupert Grint and Benedict Cumberbatch?
From the article linked to in your previous post about this: “postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.”. It seems to me that if his work has a powerful message, it wouldn't have to be "more clearly interpreted". So, it must not be that powerful. Or the museum just wants to keep a bunch of MFAs employed (I won't say productively). Those little explanatory wall cards don't write themselves, you know. Looking at images of his work, I'm not immediately impressed but unlike a lot of contemporary art (think Hunter Biden's stuff) I think there may be something there. I wonder if museums are going to start offering escape hatches for when the viewer enters an area where renaissance paintings of the crucifixion are displayed. Those bloody pictures seem to hold a lot more potential for trauma than Guston's cartoonish work.
From the article linked to in your previous post about this: “postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.”. It seems to me that if his work has a powerful message, it wouldn't have to be "more clearly interpreted". So, it must not be that powerful. Or the museum just wants to keep a bunch of MFAs employed (I won't say productively). Those little explanatory wall cards don't write themselves, you know. Looking at images of his work, I'm not immediately impressed but unlike a lot of contemporary art (think Hunter Biden's stuff) I think there may be something there. I wonder if museums are going to start offering escape hatches for when the viewer enters an area where renaissance paintings of the crucifixion are displayed. Those bloody pictures seem to hold a lot more potential for trauma than Guston's cartoonish work.
Is it time to take down all the statues of Senator Robert Byrd and tear down everything that is named for him???
"Okay, I'm done now. Not proud."
Smee is the minor character name most likely to appear in a crossword puzzle.
Reminds me of the marketing genius who handed out barf bags to hype horror flicks.
"Several other horror films throughout the 1970s received the barf bag treatment, including Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (aka Carnage), When the Screaming Stops, and Lucio Fulci’s Zombie. The campaign for Zombie extended to the film’s original theatrical trailer, which noted that barf bags would be provided to anyone who went to see the film and found themselves unable to stomach the graphic brutality – though it’s hard to say whether or not theaters carried through on the promise."
Instead, we must “lean into the discomfort of anti-racist work” (this is from Klee’s “Emotional Preparedness” statement) as we strive for “good change,” which is always “uncomfortable,” never forgetting to take care of ourselves and prioritize self-love and rest. (“Rest is productive. Rest is resistance,” Klee concludes.)
Laughter and then an unspoken stfu, would be my reaction; I hope 'health and trauma specialist' Klee has some other gig lined up for the day when the current fashion passes. Mr Smee is of course being paid to do criticism and so had to attend to the nonsense notices, warnings etc etc but after reading their first attempt at woke I would've ignored the lot of them going forward.
But if I had only a few hours in Boston, I would, like Howard, spend it with Turner, not Guston.
KKK: diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry)... occupying/invading businesses and neighborhoods to intimidate families and residents to take a knee, beg, good boy, girl. Deja vu. Some, select [Black] Lives Matter.
Two posts up - your post on teenage suicide increasing. May this post about a gallery assuming 'harm' will come from viewing images be somehow related to the issue of teenage suicide?
His abstract work is more interesting than his figurative.
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