IT’S RISKY BUSINESS to attempt to modernize a traditional language of architecture. It’s like threading a needle—too much in one direction or another and you miss the mark. (Elevation studies before above and after below, SMMUSD McKinley School classroom building, 2020-24)
In his introduction to a history of art that he called THE STORY OF ART, published more than seventy years ago E.H. Gombrich begins with this: “There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists. Once these men who took colored earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the wall of a cave; today some buy their paints and design posters… These people did and do many things. There is no harm in calling all these activities art …(if) we realize that Art with a capital A does not exist.”
THE EFFORTS OF THE INDIVIDUAL ARTIST and an understanding of their intended audience(s) matter in how we apprehend and appreciate the art.
EFFORTS TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN HIGH AND LOW ART inevitably invite snobbery on the part of the audience and subversion on the part of the artist
MODERN ART was birthed by among other things anxiety engendered by the emergence of photography and the mass production of imagery which was at the time perceived as a threat to artists’ prosperity and standing in society (Cezanne and Picasso, upper and lower left; Thomas Kinkade and 1940s pin-up poster, upper and lower right)
NO AIDS OR HOMELESS CRISES or even steep hills to navigate at the Grove in Los Angeles but you still get to ride a San Francisco cable car there
He suggests that a good way to think about what artists do—such as making paintings, statues, and buildings-- is not that much different from what we do when we arrange flowers in a vase, put together an outfit to wear, set a table, or prepare a meal. We feel our way, try this or that to discover what fits together, what feels right and complete and maybe even beautiful at least to the one making it-- the “artist” -- but hopefully also to those for whom it is being made. The differences among these activities have more to do with degree of difficulty and complexity then of kind, with perhaps the making of a building of greater difficulty and complexity, the arranging of flowers altogether less.
CURATORS AND CRITICS such as Robert Storr, Roberta Smith and Michael Kimmelman did not like this exhibit probably because it neutered their snobbery and rendered irrelevant their commentary and influence in the “art world.” (“High/Low” produced by Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, MOMA, NY 1990)
ARTISTS CAUGHT ON SOON ENOUGH to the artificiality of the avant-garde/kitsch distinction and soon mined the wealth of resources to be found in popular, mass-produced imagery that were according to Clement Greenberg the antithesis of avant-garde art. (“Chinese Girl”, Vladimir Tretchkoff, 1952 and “Liz Taylor”, Andy Warhol, 1964 above left and right; “Dance of the Nymphs”, detail, circa 1900; Self Portrait, Cindy Sherman, circa 1980)
TRANSGRESSION IS THE NAME OF THE GAME for these artists, a game which still requires a lingering sense of propriety and seriousness worthy of transgression (Clockwise from upper left: Koons, Hirst, Murakami, Currin)
DEVOLUTION INTO SENSATIONALISM may be the inevitable consequence of the confusion over whether serious art can or should also be entertaining —a confusion that is only a century in the making and of our own making. (“Shoot” and “Metropolis”, Chris Burden at LACMA, above and below left; American TV and amateur toy trains, above and below right)
Elsewhere in the same introduction Gombrich suggests: “I do not think that there are any wrong reasons for liking a statue or a picture. It is only when some irrelevant memory makes us prejudiced… that we should search our mind for the reasons for the aversion which spoils a pleasure we might otherwise have had. There are wrong reasons for disliking a work of art.” Gombrich, the art historian, was cautioning against the imposition of our personal tastes on our appreciation of art from other times and places. With a little understanding we still might not like a work of art and yet also acknowledge its value and right to exist.
HALF BAKED is the only way to describe the outcome of this herculean effort to place a giant rock on the LACMA campus-- the outcome of which is not so much “levitated” as it is “supported” by two steel corbels that pretty much dispel the sought-after illusion. (“Levitated Mass”, Michael Heizer, LACMA, Los Angeles, 2012)
THE REAL APPEAL of “Levitated Mass” seems to be the same as that of the “Leaning Tower of Pisa”
INSTAGRAMMABLE ART begs mindless replication-- and all the copy right accusations that come with it. (“Urban Light,” Chris Burden, LACMA, above, 2008; “Love Light”, Rabbit Town Park, Bandung, West Java, Henry Husada, owner, 2018).
But there may be good reasons aside from our prejudices and tastes to not like a work of art (or architecture) in our time of which a couple might be:
It does not tell the whole truth (half true)
It has not resolved into a whole (half-baked)
There are other ways to frame these same criteria such as “pretending to be something it’s not” or “the outcome has not delivered on the promise” or “it has not earned the standing it seeks” or “ it seeks for maximum effect with minimum effort and cost” or “ it aims for the easiest, most comfortable response without posing any kind of challenge--emotional, intellectual or otherwise” or “it’s facile, it’s superficially sentimental, it cloys.”
WHETHER IN ART, COMMERCE OR POLITICS, “half true” is how we might philosophically describe one aspect of kitsch--that which is the effort to conceal bad things that necessarily accompany good things.
TOTALITARIAN KITSCH obscures truth by denying the complexities of reality no matter the ideology that motivates it-- conservative or progressive, commercial, or political.
FACSIMILES OF REALITIES such as American main streets and mid-century freeways, free of all the problems of those realities took hold just as mid-century freeways destroyed American main streets. (Disneyland, Anaheim, CA 1955)
These are all classic definitions of kitsch although we would be wise to employ that term with caution. It was originally meant to capture a distinction between good and bad art and originated probably in Germany probably in the mid-19th century in response to the panic over “what is Art?” engendered by the industrial revolution and the ensuing ease with which it became possible to reproduce and fabricate artifacts. But since the mid-20th century despite the best efforts of curators, critics, and philosophers of art to continue to ask and answer that question, with the advent of pop (Andy Warhol), camp (John Waters), high-low (Cindy Sherman) ironic kitsch (Jeff Koons), and so on, it is a question that for most people has by now vanished.
NOSTALGIA CAN BE CHARMING OR CLOYING depending on the eye of the beholder, but whether that nostalgia’s about some imagined past or some imagined future does not matter-- it’s still nostalgia. (Clockwise from upper left: 1960s era Los Angeles dingbat apartment building, West Hollywood digital billboard, Calabasas Commons and 1920s era Los Angeles Storybook Style home).
And yet today when most people wield the term “kitsch” (unironically) the implication is still nearly always if not “bad art “then “in bad taste”, which by definition still requires an assumption that there is, somewhere, a shared standard of quality, if not truth and beauty, against which a work of art can be judged. But, instead, we live in a world without shared standards of truth and beauty, and we have become accustomed to not knowing or caring what is true and beautiful— most of what we now consider “high art” and most of our built environment aspires to one or the other or neither. We get instead, well, kitsch, if by that we mean bad art, and if by that we mean half true (The Grove) and half baked (The Getty Center).
MODERNIST KITSCH in American architecture took hold in the 1970s and 80s with half-hearted attempts to revive European pre-war modernism. One example is the outcome of a ten-year effort in the 1990s to plant a major cultural institution, the Getty Center, on the top of a hill in Los Angeles in emulation of a major cultural institution on top of a hill in Spain, the Alhambra, that took centuries to build.
AVANT GARDE KITSCH in architecture has now arrived -- a phenomenon in 2022 that perhaps Clement Greenberg could not have anticipated in 1939. ((W)Rapper Tower left; Samitaur Tower right, Erick Owen Moss, Hayden Tract Culver City, CA)
For a while in the in 1960s and 70s—when performance, pop, conceptual, written, video, street and land art came into their own -- we endured proclamations that painting was dead. This despite the prolific activity at the time of some of the greatest painters of all time such as Francis Bacon, David Hockney and Gerhard Richter. And for years we witnessed artists such as Richard Serra and architects such as Frank Gehry, like mid-century art world hegemons, engage in pointless public fights about whether architecture was Art (with a capital A) or not.
CONSTANT REVISION is the only way we know how to avoid half-baked and half true outcomes (Earlier and later iterations, SMMUSD Grant School Library, Santa Monica, CA)
But none of this really matters if we are convinced that whatever the work of art is (a building or a flower arrangement) the artist has put in the work and that the outcome has been worth the effort. And if we believe Gombrich the genre doesn’t much matter either. Artists of whatever kind (such as architects) may die but art of whatever kind (such as architecture) will never die if there are artists (and architects) still living.
FIRST ATTEMPTS are rarely successful attempts and act only as placeholders until further study can reveal fully formed and truthful solutions (SMMUSD Will Rogers School Early Education Building, Santa Monica, CA)