A while back, I asked you, “Does the artist bear a certain
social responsibility to challenge the status quo? Or is it enough for the
artist to entertain? What, exactly, is the role of the artist?”
Now, with Election Day in the U.S. less than 24
hours away, I’d like to not only revisit this conversation but also expand it from the individual artist to the art
museum. In “Voting Against Ruffled Feathers,”
the New York Times addresses American
museums’ tendency to tiptoe around politics, raising such questions as:
Should public museums be places where political argument happens? Why is this so rarely the case, especially when compared with politically engaged programming in museums in Europe, Mexico, South America and even parts of the Middle East?
Says New York artist Jonathan Horowitz, whose election-based
“Your Land/My Land” installation is currently on view at the Contemporary Art
Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina:
“I wouldn’t say that museums have a moral obligation to engage in political discourse any more than artists have a moral obligation to make work that does. I will say, though, that hermetic art about art is generally not of that much interest to me, and this seems to be the direction that art is trending.”
How do you
feel about art for art’s sake?
Shrinking the dialogue back to the
individual artist:
It may, however, also speak more fundamentally to the role of the artist in American society in the 21st century, a role whose political authority has eroded along with that of novelists, poets and philosophers. “The figure of the artist can still be heroic, still an outsider and still transgressive in Europe and many other parts of the world, whereas that’s seems less and less the case here,” said Negar Azimi, a writer and editor at Bidoun.
The article does consider certain factors that
may have contributed to this difference, reasoning that “structure
and history account for U.S. museum programs that, by and large, address a very
large public,” which is “why they find explicit political
pronouncements so difficult to make.” It’s also careful to end on a
less cynical note, with Horowitz’ belief that “it is possible for the institutional art world to help people
think more critically about the country’s political future.” That said…
What
are your thoughts on the subject? What do you think the
art museum’s role within society should be?
