Description:
In this devastating critique of the art establishment, first-time author Lynne Munson demolishes the postmodern idea that art can't be separated from politics and defends the traditional belief that art ought to be judged primarily by timeless aesthetic standards. This may sound like common sense, but it's a controversial view in America's leading art institutions, where inflammatory works crowd out serious art in exhibits that deliberately bait the public, such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Sensation" show and its feces-stained depiction of the Virgin Mary. "Some art historians now advocate turning the traditional museum, dedicated to providing an unfettered forum for learning through looking, into a new revisionist institution recommitted to the pursuit of altering visitors' beliefs," writes Munson. Indeed, Munson shows that this view infects not just museums, but the whole art world, from art-history departments in universities to the National Endowment for the Arts. Munson takes readers on an eye-opening tour of all these places. She describes prominent museums in Baltimore and Cleveland that have blocked off glorious neoclassical entrances, with their tall columns and wide staircases, because these awe-inspiring gateways supposedly encourage elitism; visitors now shuffle through somewhat less magisterial side doors. She reveals how Harvard's art-history program, once the envy of every school in the land, has decayed into a place where students learn fancy theories but gain little practical knowledge of art objects. She shows how the NEA funded talented and promising artists at its inception, but now (with a bloated budget) considers its first mission the advocacy of social change. The problem isn't that great art isn't being made today--Munson argues that it is, and makes her case well in a chapter on painting. Instead, it's that the current art establishment, at war against the notion of quality, is too confused to recognize any of this. Exhibitionism is a profoundly sensible book that belongs on the reading list of every art fan. --John J. Miller
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