Journey to the New – why art sucks

Well, I did make it to the city and I did go to see the Elizabeth Peyton show at the new New Museum. First I have to say that the New Museum is one of the best places to view art anywhere and the fact that it is on the Bowery, an area practically synonymous with extreme poverty and disenfranchisement is even more amazing still. 30 years ago when I’d go down to the Bowery it was to buy some junk or supplies in one of the old restaurant supply stores or to see an artist friend who was living on the cheap in some run down loft building. I remember Charlie Yoder had a loft right next to the Bowery Mission and you had to trip over the bums and their puke just to get in the building. Today it’s so trendy I thought I was in another world.

This is the best designed new museum I’ve seen including galleries in Washington, DC, Seattle, New Orleans and Denver right down to the bathroom tile. Bizazzi did the tile and signed their work. They also did the tile in the building lobby of my friend Andy Silverman so that must make his place a real work of art.

Nevertheless, the New Museum building is an absolutely phenomenal space for viewing art. It’s just too bad that the art that is there for viewing is not as interesting or as well executed as the building itself. The museum has not progressed much in that regard from it’s old SOHO days when it was championing the obscure and the marginally talented. The fact is that the chairs were more interesting examples of contemporary art than the art on the walls, especially the small ‘patio’ chairs on rollers on the 3rd floor, though I am not sure who designed them. I also liked the colorful Franz West chairs in the cafeteria. Nothing like comfortably sitting on your bum and looking at bad art. And that brings me to Elizabeth Peyton.

This is a pretty big retrospective covering about 100 small paintings and drawings of  rock stars and friends. Ms P is confusing to me – at first her work looks thin and sketchy, as if these are not finished pieces at all. On closer observation her work requires more of your attention. Her subjects want you to look at them and so you must. They are thin, shallow and vain – just as the paintings are. After a while the sensation of looking at them (the subjects) wears thin too and the experience fades. I was left just looking at not so well painted portraits of rock stars, dead artists and skinny boys and I saw no depth, no intellect, no life force, no real reason to see any more. the real audacity here is not in the work but in the fact that they chose to show the photographs that the paintings were derived from. EP has talent no doubt – an eye for finding images – but her visionis covered over like gauze and the only thing I was left with was “who cares!” Who cares about Kurt Cobain? Who cares about Sid Vicious? Who cares about Tony Just? Who cares about paintings that are not so interesting illustrations from less interesting magazine photographs? Who cares? Obviously the answer is downtown gallery dealers, the New York Times and some very unknowledgable collectors.

painting by Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton

EP Reading by Peyton

 

I will say this for Peyton, she is consistent. The show covers a 15 year span and you can’t tell where she began from where she is today. In the catalog available at the show, the Curator Laura Hoptman calls Peyton “a painter of contemporary daily life, seen in sum, (giving) us an idea of the kind of people who have created our popular culture, and thus, an idea of our world over the past decade and a half.” Huh? Who’s life is she representing here? I don’t even think it is the lives of the subjects she paints. Probably it would be closer to say that what she is painting is an absence of life, a copy of a copy of some life she might have glimpsed while waiting in the dentists office. No soul, no mystery, no statement.

Well, maybe the collectors are just being smart and they are recognizing a trend toward the mediocre. Are we coming to a point where there just isn’t any emphasis on real skill? Have we lost the concept of the artist as gifted, as special? Has our mass consumer, computer generated society led us to a new kind of art for the masses? Was Andy Warhol right and everyone will be a star for 15 seconds regardless of talent or intellect?

Case in point is the other artist featured at the New Museum also with two floors of recent and not so recent work. Mary Heilmann, who is also featured in the recent Style Magazine in the Sunday New York Times, is very different from Elizabeth Peyton in terms of style, age and palette but very much like her in terms of how marginal and unremarkable her paintings really are.

painting by Mary Heilmann

painting by Heilmann

Heilmann has been on the scene for a very long time but has never received the kind of acclaim of many of her contemporaries - until recently. I can understand why. Over-hyped? Overrated? Heilmann is a survivor. She’s hung in but does that make her a worthy example of the great abstract art tradition? Hell no! Her work cannot measure up to a Rothko or a Newmann say or a Flavin or a Judd for that matter. Or a Paul Levitt, another survivor who struggled for recognition in the cruel New York gallery scene for years. Levitt eventually succumbed to the financial realities and left for Hawaii. Heilmann stayed on and now has hit some sort of payday. Her exhibit is called “Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone” but who is she? By the way, I think those rolling chairs I liked so much may have been designed by her in which case I think she should stick to furniture making and leave painting to others more skilled with a brush.

But how did we get here? How has our evaluation of art become so degraded? Is it the computer that did this? If you call a pig a duck is it really a duck? Or is it a pig? Is it all really just a matter of agreement? We agree that this is good so therefore it is good. If enough people agree than that is the law of the land. Are we victims of art dealers who know nothing of art and everything of marketing and critics who know what sells magazines and can spin but have never experienced creating art?

On one hand my journey to the New was enlightening and enjoyable and on the other it was disturbing and disappointing. My feeling about Peyton was confirmed and my experience of Heilmann was kind of shocking. I won’t be running back there on my next trip to the City. Instead I will be scowering the galleries in places like Savannah and Sarasota and Portland looking for new art that fertilizes and inspires   the imagination.