IN RE: Controversial exhibits

   I'm not suggesting that provocative art go away at all.  I'm sorry if
   my post reads that way.  I do think that it is kind of silly to get
   angry at institutions for being provoked when the object of the work
   of art in dispute is to provoke those institutions.

   The art world that I am most familiar with is the "jazz" world, for
   lack of a better term.  This world includes all kind of provocative
   music, from Archie Shepp's angry political records of the late 60's to
   the post modern conglomerations of music that you might hear at the
   Knitting Factory.  These musics are produced by serious artists
   working to push the edge conceptually, but somehow, they are not
   forced to rely on these sanctified concepts of free speech and subsidy
   that confuse the visual art world and performance art world.

   Record companies put this stuff out, some people buy it, musicians
   perform in clubs, poets perform in poetry slams.  Why is there not
   this annoying sanctity and fustiness around these art forms?

   This is a genuine question, not rhetorical.  What is it about
   contemporary visual arts that seems to pose these vexed questions
   about the sanctity of freedom of expression and speech?  I have an
   intuition that it is something to do with the conceptual tradition in
   visual arts, and something that is promoted in art schools.
   Curators seem to be somehow glommed together with academics and
   professors who are supposed to be guaranteed freedom of speech and
   thought.  These two concepts, freedom of speech and thought, as I
   mentioned in my last post, seem optimized for historical research
   and exposition, as opposed to artistic expression.

   There is also something about the perverse and inexplicable art
   marketplace where independence and expertise seem to be rarer than
   pressure to find a commercial niche for contemporary art. This truly
   bizarre bazaar (sorry, couldn't resist) seems also to contribute to a
   somewhat fragile and panick-y sense of identity for individual visual
   artists.
   .
   But I must say that I really don't know why contemporary visual arts
   seem so tortured with issues of self-expression and censorship. But I
   will agree with one of the responses to my original post, that if
   these ideas are driven underground, maybe they will attract more
   psychic energy and shake off some of the baroque lassitude that seems
   to characterize contemporary visual arts.

   Eric Siegel
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