On Mar 30, 1996 07:29:05, '"Christine L. Roch" <[log in to unmask]>'
wrote:


>This is going back quite a few years, but how about the Armory Show of
1913,
>particularly its Chicago run?  Everyone denounced it, from
>schoolteachers, to the city's methodist ministers, to the Art Institute's
>director (who left town before the exhibit opened).  Students at the
>School of the Art Institute burned an effigy of Henri Matisse/"Henry
>Hairmattress" on the museum's front steps. _Nude Descending a Staircase_
seems
>old hat now, but modernist art really through the city for a loop.

Here is an example of what I call the investor's fallacy, well known to
everyone who reads advertisements for financial instruments:

"Past performance should not be taken as an indicator of future prospects."


Just because there was a popular outcry against the later-to-be-successful
"modern" art of the Armory Show, it does not follow that all populist
objections are necessarily myopic and closedminded.  Some may be so, but
you cannot argue that current mores must be just as wrongheaded as history
has shown past ones to be.  I'm afraid that we have to leave it to history
to judge the value of these shows (just as with the Armory Show), and we
may have to wait for history to rejudge and rejudge again the significance
of what is occurring here.

I noted recently in some magazine (forget which) a picture of Newt sporting
a hat decorated with American Flag motifs ala Abby Hoffman.  In the 1960s
would a social conservative have seen fit to wear the sacred stars and
stripes so flippantly?  The irony is that one never knows where our
language of symbols and metaphors will take us.

Art is made of art.  Dada toilet bowls, manifestos urging the destruction
of museums, and other acts of symbolic revolution may all lead inexorably
to the previously discussed unexpected fusion of the Flag and that epitome
of American domestic ceramic sculpture.  Inelegant? Surely. Anti-aesthetic?
Certainly. Confrontational? Of course. Unprecedented? Surely not.
Significant?  Who can say?
--

Robert A. Baron
Museum Computer Consultant
P.O. Box 93, Larchmont N.Y. 10538
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