I Love The New Criterion

Just throwing that out there. This particular outburst of emotion/warm fuzzies is in response to Roger Kimball's demolition of a new and allegedly "edgy" art exhibit at Bard College, an exhibit, as Kimball so wonderfully puts it, comprised of

"huge images of body parts—yes, those body parts—floating on the walls of a darkened room, minatory videos of men doing things—yes, those things—to each other, or to themselves, all of it presented in the most pretentious fashion possible.

Duke's gorgeous new Nasher Museum hosted a mind-numbingly awful exhibit that might have been called "Tree Hugger's Delight" - but it couldn't hold a candle to this rubbish. Art? Excuse me? But as bad as it is, Kimball borders on the dismissive - the critically dismissive:

the thing to appreciate about “Wrestle,” about the Hessel Museum and the collection of Marieluise Hessel, and about the visual arts at Bard generally is not how innovative, challenging, or unusual they are, but how pedestrian and, sad to say, conventional they are. True, there is a lot of ickiness on view at the Hessel Museum. But it is entirely predictable ickiness. It’s outrage by-the-yard, avant-garde in bulk, smugness for the masses. And this brings me to what I believe is the real significance of institutions like the art museum at Bard, the Hessel collection that fills it, and the surrounding atmosphere of pseudo-avant-garde self-satisfaction. The “arts” at Bard are notable not because they are unusual but because they are so grindingly ordinary...Far from “challenging” or “subverting” the status quo, the 1,700 objects she [Hessel] has accumulated are the status quo. And far from “struggling” with questions about gender or feminism or anything else, she has simply issued a rubber stamp endorsing the dominant clichés of today’s academic art world. “Academic,” in fact, is the mot juste: not in the sense of “scholarly,” but rather in the sense that we speak of “academic art,” stale, conventional, aesthetically nugatory. A wall full of photographs of two girls does nothing to “interrogate” (a favorite term of art- and lit-crit-speak) identity any more than a mutilated doll forces us to reconsider our usual notions of whatever-it-is those odious objects are supposed to make us reconsider. Really, the only thing exhibitions like “Wrestle,” or institutions like the Hessel Museum, challenge is the viewer’s patience.

Ouch. Just to reiterate: I love TNC.

PS - read the whole article and savor his historical perspective as he destroys modern art.