The Museum Is the Art

2007.12.30   prev     next

Many years ago, “60 Minutes” did a segment on aburd modern art, that I reconstruct here from memory. One of the pieces was a huge pile of individually wrapped hard candies filling the corner of one of the museum’s rooms. “So you don’t eat them, right?” asked the reporter.

“No, you can eat them,” replied the woman giving him a tour, “Here, have a piece.”

“But what happens when the candy runs out?” he asked with concern.

“Oh, you just keep adding more from time to time!”

Another art piece was a collection of urinals mounted side-by-side on a wall of another room in the museum. The artist, apparently, didn’t design the urinals, but simply acquired them, mounted them on the wall, and called them art.

At the time I saw this show, I thought it demonstrated that modern art is vacuous and pretentious. But now I think it also demonstrates something else. There was something strangely fascinating about seeing these things displayed in a museum, and I realize that I have been similary fascinated by equally obtuse displays in museums I visited in person.

And now I think I know why. It almost doesn’t matter what the “art” object is. You could walk into the next plain white-walled, stark room of a museum, and if there was an old, rusty, 1800s oilcan sitting in a corner of the room, it would be just as fascinating and intriguing as anything else. Stripped of its natural context, and placed in the bare, Bloch-esque maze of the museum, the oilcan looks like some alien discovery, and is the total focus of your attention since, like a rat in a cube, you have nothing else of any detail to look at.

This, I think, is the appeal of modern art. Just put any reasonably interesting object in a spooky, simple, empty series of random rooms, and the effect is achieved. The museum creates the effect of art. Or, perhaps, the museum is the art.