One of these sponsors is not like the others.
The Guggenheim Museum’s The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 was a great idea in search of a masterful curator. Inspired by the laudable ambition to present a sweeping overview of Asian influences on American art, this conglomeration of diverse works—some strongly influenced by Asian art, philosophy or spirituality; some only tenuously connected—doesn’t coalesce into a compelling exhibition and is saddled with an encyclopedia’s worth of long, tendentious labels, belaboring every possible connection that each artist may have had to an Asian text, practice or artistic technique (i.e., Jackson Pollock, calligrapher).
The superabundance of wall text may have had something to do with the predilections of the show’s chief funder, the National Endowment for the Humanities, which bestowed a $1 million Chairman’s Special Award because, as former NEH chairman Bruce Cole said at the press preview, “it had a very broad and very deep humanities content” and was aimed at “a broad public.” But its word-heavy presentation and the variable quality of works
assembled to hammer home the Big Idea may undermine “Third Mind’s” popular appeal.
The show often comes across as a dry academic exercise illustrated with artworks, instead of a visually satisfying, intellectually nourishing art exhibition.
The deficiencies (which also included too many you-had-to-be-there moments in front of artifacts from legendary but ephemeral performances) may have been largely due to the limitations of the organizer, Alexandra Munroe—an Asian art scholar lacking (by her own admission) significant expertise in American art but nevertheless grappling with an all-American art show (which perhaps could have been enhanced with some Asian-art touchstones).
Munroe was hired in 2006 by former Guggenheim Foundation director Tom Krens and former Guggenheim Museum director Lisa Dennison as the museum’s first Asian art curator. She has the museum’s Cai Guo-Qiang blockbuster to her credit. Vivien Greene, the Guggenheim’s curator of 19th- and early 20th-century art, whose specialization is Italian art. curated the show’s section devoted to 19th-century Asia-influenced American works.
We may never know whether a factor influencing the Guggenheim’s decision to do this show with this curator may have been Munroe’s ability to bring some of her own funding to the project. Curators are increasingly being asked to help find outside sponsors for their shows. In Munroe’s case, she needed to look no further than the Rosenkranz Foundation, directed by her own husband, Robert Rosenkranz, who (with Alexandra) “lives in Manhattan in an apartment that reflects his interests in Asian art and modern design,” according to the foundation’s website. Munroe is listed as “senior advisor” to the foundation. She is also a board member of another of “The Third Mind’s” funders, the United States-Japan Foundation.
The Guggenheim’s press release for the exhibition gives each of its other major funders a one-paragraph description, but prudently omits any background on the Rosenkranz Foundation. As it happens, the foundation sponsored a New York debate Tuesday night on artworld ethics—The art market is less ethical than the stock market—featuring Richard Feigen, Michael Hue–Williams and
Adam Lindemann (for the motion) and Amy Cappellazzo, Chuck Close and Jerry
Saltz (against the motion). [The “for the motion” debaters won by an audience vote of 55% to 33%, with 12% undecided. An NPR podcast will eventually be available here.]
But back to the Guggenheim: I found the best explanation of why “The Third Mind” felt unsatisfying and unpersuasive on one of its own labels—a quote from video artist Nam June Paik:
When asked if he was a Buddhist, Paik replied: “No, I’m an artist….I’m not a follower of Zen but I react to Zen the same way I react to Johann Sebastian Bach.”
By harping on just one of the multiple influences engaging the imaginations of these American artists, the show too often oversimplified them, rather than enriching our understanding of their complexity.