Posts tagged populism
The Essence of Middlebrow: Volume of Experience
Paddy Johnson’s (Art Fag City) follow up to Paper Monument’s How to Behave in a Museum, illustrating an idea that I believed is formed first in Art School: “Although it may sound obvious, it’s worth mentioning that one of the few ways we afford expertise in a culture that rejects the canon is by demonstrating that we have more work experience than others. This is very similar to other fields, though fine art takes it to an extreme. We look down upon artists or any other professional who maintain hobbies, anything less than complete dedication to the field is unacceptable.”
How To Behave In An Art Museum
“This is very American. Our purported populism has always made us wary of those claiming, by virtue of their position or education, to know better than everyone else. One thing that’s changed, though, is that this populism, often disguised as the heady skepticism of continental theory, has managed to sneak into the very bastion of elitism, into the places where the aspiring intellectual first learns how to be a pompous snob: academic humanities departments. The institutionalization of deconstruction, identity politics, and Marxist criticism, in other words, has replaced the pious attitudes of previous eras with a different set of now-habitual postures: distrust of the canon and the institutions that preserve it. Whatever their merits, these frameworks have created enough ambivalence to make art appreciation a vexing enterprise for a generation of well-educated museumgoers. Because if you don’t believe in high culture, then what are you doing at a museum?”
