You know the visual art world is in trouble when even “sophisticated” New Yorkers think that art is boring…
At least that is what they (and people around the country who tuned in to closed-circuit showings of the program) said when Steve Martin and Deborah Solomon spent the better part of their program at the 92nd St. Y on Monday talking about art. As The New York Times reported the saga,
Midway through the conversation, a Y representative handed Ms. Solomon a note asking her to talk more about Mr. Martin’s career and, implicitly, less about the art world, the subject of his latest novel, “An Object of Beauty.”…
The audience cheered when Ms. Solomon read aloud the note.
Interestingly, this happened the same week as the Park Avenue Armory is mounting Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision By Peter Greenaway, the noted filmmaker’s attempt to make the 15th century masterpiece relevant in a multi-media world. (Though it opens tomorrow, I went to yesterday’s press preview.)
For his work — one of ten such masterpieces he is recreating — Greenaway has used sound, light and video to create the feeling that visitors are in the Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie church in Milan, where they view a virtual clone of the painting.
That’s not all they view, of course — and the sound makes the contrast with the real refectory quite stark. Is it beautiful and fascinating? Yes. In this 45-minute experience, Greenaway uses effects, like the sun passing overhead in the course of a day and the outlining of the figures in white, to bring the mural to life. Meanwhile, in the space surrounding the refectory, visitors see extremely close pans of the wall pigments, for example, as the paint flakes and flies away before their eyes. An all-white recreation of the table and its contents stands in the middle, itself undergoing various lighting effects. The music is dramatic.
Many viewers will never get to Milan to see the real thing, where the experience is completely different — and that’s ok. Will this get them to look harder and longer at this and maybe other paintings? Perhaps, in which case it would be a good thing. Spending 45 minutes before a painting is virtually unheard of nowadays.
I think much less of the 6- or 7-minute video prologue, which is more of a travelogue, and serves no purpose in my mind. The epilogue, Greenaway’s take on Veronese’s Wedding at Cana, is a much more serious lesson in art history, with Greenaway explaining the figures, composition, and theories about the painting’s content.
I join the Armory and the Y programs to ask what they mean for art and the public.
Is art boring unless it moves or is controversial? (I could, here, bring in the Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, but enough already. To me, once an exhibition is up, the NPG should not have bowed to pressure to remove it. But it’s an open question whether the art work under attack was worth showing to begin with — one with as many answers as there are viewers.)
Art isn’t boring, most likely, to anyone reading this post. Why, then, is it seemingly so uninteresting to much of the public?
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Park Avenue Armory