The trouble with Western art today

Contemporary art isn't just shocking. Much of it fails to appeal to both heart and head.

from the December 19, 2007 edition

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Reason to hope

How can we reestablish a dialogue so the public can relate to and judge value in today's art? Fortunately, what Mr. McFadden calls a "new materiality" is infusing conceptual art. You see it in another exhibition at the Whitney by the artist Kara Walker, which merges show and tell, form and idea. Ms. Walker pastes cut out black silhouettes on white walls, depicting stereotypical scenes from the antebellum South that excoriate racism with what Safer calls "gallows humor."

Her work, "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," suggests the African-American artist's love/hate relationship with white society. The black voids of the silhouettes surrounded by enveloping white space enlist the format to convey her message. As Susan Davidson, senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum puts it, "The adage 'a picture speaks a thousand words' is embraced in her work." Walker's art appeals to my head and my heart.

A cure for the public's malaise with contemporary art is this combination of resonant form with emotional depth and accessible intellectual content. Not that interpreting art is supposed to be easy. "Back in the late '60s and '70s, the prevailing attitude was sort of 'screw the bourgeoisie,' " admits eminent conceptual art innovator John Baldessari, who adds, "I thought art was supposed to make people uncomfortable."

Art can throw us a lifeline after it pushes us over the edge of our comfort zone. "It's how you get material and form together to have an aesthetic effect and satisfy what Erich Fromm calls 'existential needs' that's desperately needed in our society," says Professor Kuspit. "There's a need for an art that becomes a model for integration and maturity, an art that speaks to adults with subtle reflectiveness."

Much recent art is pervaded by juvenile jokiness, cynicism, and commerce, like Koons's kitsch transformation of an inflated Mylar bunny into a gleaming, stainless-steel object of collectors' desire. Or Takashi Murakami's Pop figures that look like alien Disney 'toons. Mr. Murakami even plasters his infantilized imagery on Louis Vuitton handbags.

"How much more fashionable can you get?" asks cultural commentator Matthew Gurewitsch, a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, "and how much less can there be?" Even knowing the conceptual background about how Murakami (a hot artist in Japan and the US) is responding to Japan's postwar trauma, "it might be more persuasive if the art were less junky," he notes.

Art operates in a pendulum swing, as artists continually look forward and backward. For the moment, a return to metaphorically rich, hand-made objects – a reaction against digital dominance – beckons us to fuse mind and body in responding to art.

Our "us-versus-them" world seems fragmented – politically, socially, and economically. "These objects," says curator McFadden, "made with passion by someone's hands to be enjoyed by someone else, with a subliminal layer of meaning, remind us we all have this essential humanity that's often forgotten when you look at the international political scene."

English novelist E.M. Forster may have been giving advice to artists today when he wrote: "Only connect."

• Carol Strickland is an art correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and the author of "The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern." This is the first of a three-part series.

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