Arbiters of Art

Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge
To some extent, we are all arbiters of art. We choose what we like, what we don't like, what is meaningful to us, what is not meaningful. And reading and seeing Sturken and Cartwright's views and selections of art in chapters 3 and 4, I keep coming back to Foucault's themes of power and exclusion and Burke's themes of selection and deflection. For since the beginning of my life, the art that is available to me has been selected and included by others in power, historic arbiters of art. And hey, I've been an arbiter myself. As the executive director of a municipal arts council in Ontario, I "curated" a few shows, adjudicated a few works, and generally directed the townspeople to exhibitions somewhat arbitrated by me and a few close cohorts.

Living just outside Chicago, I have several times taken advantage of its acclaimed architecture boat tours, in which you float along the Chicago River to look at the historic, albeit modern, buildings. While the boat takes the same route, the tour and the buildings discussed are different each time, dependent on which docent from the Chicago Architectural Society is behind the microphone for your two-hour tour, selecting which of today's buildings will be given landmark status.

I'm considering the context of museum-based art and my own role as spectator/arbiter while reflecting on a couple of weeks spent in Europe during Spring 2007 when my daughter and I set off from London and traveled mostly through Spain, stopping on the way home in Paris and Amsterdam. Starting at the Tate in London, we knew that a search through the great museums would be part of our trip, although we really didn't have a set itinerary or schedule; we were landing in Barcelona, spending a few days and venturing out from there, wherever the train timetable would take us. Having studied art history in university, I had a list in my head of what I wanted to see and my daughter would just have to be along for the ride. I became the arbiter of her experience, too.





"Why call it tourist season if we can't we shoot them?"

The ghost of Antoni Gaudi haunts Barcelona. He is everywhere. Barcelona is gaudy. I have always enjoyed Art Nouveau, and the whimsical architecture and the mosaics and tilework in Gaudi's Guell Parc were a treat. But my favorite work was outside the park, the view from a sculptural peak where tourists flocked shortly after entering the gates. The graffiti was the high point of this excursion as its impression on my psyche was greater than that of Park Guell or La Sagrada Familia. The photo at right surely demonstrates the impetus for the graffiti above.

Also in Barcelona, we stood two hours in the rain awaiting entrance into the Picasso Museum. This venue has no "major" works. No major matter! The early sketches and drawings and cartoons by this master enthralled me. I did not want to leave. And it cemented our intention to head to Madrid to see Guernica.

However, we detoured to Bilbao enroute to Madrid, to visit, of course, the Guggenheim. I would agree with others that the museum's architecture is the star of this show. It is not that I didn't appreciate the contemporary installations throughout, which included a series of "tunnels" in which the walls seemed to shift, playing tricks in both physical dimension and space, another series of sticks and mud strewn along the floor as in a war, and a dark room with a frieze of digital poetry streaming over our heads, I think relating to the holocaust. I had been told by a friend that the Guggenheim in Bilbao (the exterior) changed with the light of day and to be sure to go back more than once. My mother asked what we thought of the topiary terrier (I hardly noticed it!). I don't see how the museum's exhibitions can compete with the building itself, although I loved "Maman," the huge spider outside (Louise Bourgeois), and found the iron silhouette of Frank Gehry walking away from the museum to be quite moving.

Realism and Perspective in Madrid
Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
What could be more real than the anguish portrayed in Picasso's Guernica? And having just come from the Basque coastline near the town where Germans dropped the bombs on Franco's "lesser" citizens to align with the General's cause and test new weapons, made this installation even more compelling. Artistically, one could say that realism is not a descriptive attribute for the art of Picasso, but the passion of the piece is realistic, is it not? Contrast this with the special exhibition we found in a neighboring gallery in this same venue: Chuck Close was next door! Well, at least his art was next door. Chuck Close is certainly associated with realism. I had studied the works of Close in university, and had seen one piece at the Art Institute of Chicago, but this exhibition was an eye opener. To have so many examples of Close's works on display together, and to see the evolution of his art made this a very worthwhile trip. But which is more realistic? I cannot say.

Museo del Prado
Okay, this is Madrid's most famous museum; some would say the Prado houses the world's most famous paintings. Here is where I really flaunted my role as arbiter of my daughter's artistic excursion. I had told her beforehand that this wasn't going to be a treat for me, because "I really don't enjoy looking at all those madonnas and childs." Nonetheless, I've got a soft spot in my heart for El Greco and a bit of Goya, so we scurried throughout the museum looking for their works. Of course, as illustrated in our textbook, the Prado is home to the famous "Las Meninas," and I pulled my daughter through the crowd so she could have a look at this "important" work which has always left me cold. And I was excited to learn that Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" was exhibited here; we spent a good deal of time in consternation over this work as compared to the contemporary paintings and sculptural works by Dali we had seen in London.

A Black Box in Madrid
My daughter was the arbiter of our next excursion, which was somewhat of a wild goose chase through Madrid searching for an exhibition that we'd heard about from some fellow Americans who were, like us, wrangling for some train tickets out of Bilbao on Easter Sunday. In addition to their tips on how to draw symbols of sleeper cars and arrows to destinations instead of inflicting our bad Spanish on the surly ticket takers (was our espanol really so bad?), these two students from Idaho shared that they had missed an MC Escher exhibit in Madrid and were excited that we were on our way there. My daughter was excited, too, having been introduced to this artist's drawings by a friend. The guys told us there were posters for it around town, but when we arrived in Madrid we didn't see any. We asked at our hotel, at the museums, at restaurants -- nobody knew anything about MC Escher, least of all an exhibition. Finally, at the information desk of the Prado, another museumgoer overheard our inquiry to the helpdesk staff and told us how to find MC Escher. This was a blackbox exhibition on the outskirts of the city, really edgy, pretty cool. And I think Escher's drawings of warped visual perspective are more compelling than any of the scientific explanations culled from history for insertion into our textbook.

It's all what ya like... An Impressionist Perspective in Paris; Reality in Amsterdam
I like Van Gogh -- not Monet. Impressionism is not my thing. I learned in school that Van Gogh was post-Impressionist, along with his buddy Paul Gauguin, which makes sense to me. Although, having seen Van Gogh and Gauguin's works side by side at the Art Institute of Chicago, I really don't think you can compare them. While both flaunt rich and vibrant colors, unlike their Impressionist predecessors, Gauguin's paintings, placed in juxtaposition with a Van Gogh, pale by comparison, rendered flat by the sheer volume of paint slapped onto Vincent's canvas.

Since I was a teenager, I have wanted to visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The last time I was in relative proximity to Amsterdam, the last time I was in Paris actually, the museum was being renovated, or I'd have made the trip earlier. So when I convinced my daughter that 10 days in Spain, in the rain and on the train, was quite enough, we bought two tickets for a 12-hour overnight trip to Paris (draw two rectangles, so they look like beds; Madrid ARROW Paris; DATE; EURO SIGN/Question Mark).

We did not visit museums in Paris. We ate strawberries and fois gras. We sampled cheeses and wine and GAZED at Tour Eiffel in all manner of lightness and darkness (my bow to the Impressionists). We walked the streets of Montmartre with the ghost of Henri de Toulouse Lautrec (yes, another fave). And then we took another train, to Amsterdam. My daughter took my photograph in front of the Van Gogh Museum. I walked through its doors. I cried in her arms. The dream of my lifetime was now my reality.