Andy Warhol, Empire, 1964. Silent film, 8 hours and 5 minutes.
The New York City mayoral race is a rather uninspiring event, offering a collection of weak platitudes by mostly unpersuasive candidates about equity and a better city for everyone. As a member of the art community, I am keenly aware of the fact that the arts are often seen as the least important of the priorities in the life of the city, or of any city for that matter (recently a Sunday Times survey ranked the artist’s profession as the least essential of all). Still, every now and then it is interesting to hear how politicians in the United States, and even in the progressive stronghold that is New York City, speak about the arts.
When asked about his ideas for supporting the arts in the city, entrepreneur and mayoral candidate Andrew Yang almost immediately pivots to discussing Broadway and his initiative to support the (primarily commercial) theater community. It is unsurprising for a politician to discuss the arts as inextricable from tourism and enjoyment so not to appear elitist and then, in the same breath, quickly emphasize that the arts are a revenue-generating sector. Setting aside what the arts community might feel about the implication that arts are only worth saving inasmuch as they make money, it is the equating of art with entertainment that I want to examine a bit further.
I often ask myself: why has it always bothered me to see the arts section’s headline in many newspapers called “Arts and Entertainment”? Most of us who work in the visual arts might feel that to describe the artistic practice as something that merely serves to entertain you constitutes a grave insult to art’s intellectual mission. I believe we can agree that art should not be reduced to a frivolous hedonistic pursuit, and while art in its many forms can captivate our aesthetic imagination in conventionally pleasurable ways, we tend to place greater importance in those artworks that make us think critically and at times even shake us out of our status quo of being, even to the point of making us uncomfortable. To equate art with entertainment, in this sense, means to adopt the conservative attitude that art should only serve a decorative role in society, and as the inessential thing that it is perceived to be, it is wonderful to have around, yet it should not ever be given any priority— let alone interfere with the more “essential” activities in our world.
John Baldessari, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, 1971
Meanwhile, from the perspective of the general public that equates art with pleasure, the kind of art making that does not follow this pattern is seen as elitist, disrespectful and pointless. When confronted with individuals who hate contemporary art, as a longtime arts educator I have learned that it is key to do two things: first, to acknowledge their views and show them that they are valid in some respects, and second, to gradually show them, through specific conversations and experiences, that in order to expand one’s view of art one also has to expand their view of pleasure.
From the standpoint of the art viewer’s experience, the very basic level of interaction you find identification and storytelling. This is why beginning art collectors are mostly motivated by two main activities: identifying art works with names of artists and telling stories about the works, their relationship with the artist (if they have any) or even the context of their acquisition. But as you become more knowledgeable about art, that relationship looks more like reflective and critical exchange with others in the form of comparisons and contrasts and in the ability to read an image in the context of broader historical, political or personal references. Those who have not had that level of involvement with art, and thus who are unable to access those early entry points (artist recognition and storytelling) quickly feel excluded, and this embarrassment caused by feeling excluded often translates in rejection (“this is not art”).
But all this is actually better understood in terms of the dictionary definition of entertainment: “the action of providing or being provided with amusement or enjoyment”. It is just matter of understanding how the enjoyment of art actually operates.
At a very superficial level, we might define pleasure as a plain feeling of numb satisfaction, like getting a massage, but in a deeper way it is an active state of intellectual engagement. According to Martin Seligman, a pioneer thinker of the psychology of happiness, our state of contentment and plenitude has to be linked to the degree by which we are mentally engaged in an activity. And Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term of Flow, presents this mindset as a form of deep concentration where all other concerns dissipate, generating a state of contentment. In this sense, and while it is common to argue that those of us who are arts professionals are jaded and can’t enjoy things anymore, the greater likelihood is that our ability to enjoy art is far greater and deeper than the average art viewer.
One may see this ability for enjoyment, or refined capacity of entertainment as “informed pleasure”, or in more conventional art education terms, “engagement”. And it is precisely that capacity rooted in mental stimulation, not just instinctive sensorial quest, that makes engagement with art something very close to entertainment.
When we as art professionals look at artworks, we don’t have the attitude of someone who is willing to satisfy a primal urge like hunger. Instead we gravitate to it in an act of curiosity and fascination to make sense out of a problem. Constructivist education theorists like Jerome Bruner argue that this is dynamic that follows a progression from enactive to iconic to symbolic representation.
The mind of the trained arts professional makes countless connections with a vast repertoire of references I mentioned earlier (historical, political, etc.), and has the ability to speak about them or articulate them to others in what can be a very enjoyable process.
But while the public needs to expand its own definition of entertainment in relationship to art, what is less discussed is the way in which the trained art professional needs to adjust a few prejudices against this idea as well.
In contemporary art, those works that overemphasize enjoyment or are crowd-pleasers are often deemed suspect. I recall the late MCA Chicago director Kevin Consey who, while speaking of the work of American photographer Richard Misrach of which we were doing a solo exhibition, at some point joked: “his photographs are so beautiful that one even wonders if they even are contemporary art.”
Other times, the extreme mass appeal of certain art works is just too repellent to the specialists. I often think of Improv Everywhere, a guerrilla theater group who organizes massive stunts in public spaces flash mob-style, such as having had dozens of actors dressed as rush-hour office commuters suddenly freeze in the middle of Grand Central, or having dozens of performers riding the NYC subway en masse with no pants on. Their viral videos often receive millions of views.
Improv Everywhere, New York’s Most Socially Distanced Office, 2020
Once, when I invited members of Improv Everywhere to speak at a conference titled Audience Experiments at MoMA many in the performance art academic intelligentsia were horrified. One told me: “I have nothing to say to them.” And the dislike was reciprocal: in a separate conversation with them, I learned that they knew full well that they were not welcome in the contemporary art world, and they didn’t care— they weren’t seeking nor needed that kind of validation.
And in another event I organized , a prominent scholar openly criticized Adam Lerner, a curator and creator of the Mixed Taste lecture series (events where he would invite two specialists to speak for 15 minutes each to talk about a totally unrelated subjects) of doing edutainment.
These reactions are not uncommon. To an extent, they stem from the sincere desire, which I also support in a way, to defend the vulgarization of art — the process by which the nuanced and delicate is grotesquely cheapened to the point of making the experience superficial and meaningless. To refer back to what is happening these days in New York City, massive events like Van Gogh Immersive Exhibition in New York are not even given the courtesy of acknowledgement by the art press while David Hammons’ End of Days installation, produced by the Whitney, while offering less appealing selfie opportunities for the average tourist instead provides great stimulation to art insiders.
Over the years I have encountered similar resistance by art insiders while exploring mass culture, such as Mexican telenovelas. Many curators and critics in the past rolled their eyes at hearing of my interest in soap operas, looking at me as if I were suddenly making paintings of dogs playing cards. But my interest — as well as the interest other artists who have worked on the topic, I believe—is to understand how the narrative strategies of serial television achieve the phenomenal results they produce, capturing the attention of tens of millions of viewers— something that seems nearly impossible for a contemporary artist to achieve.
So while I understand the skepticism against mass-appeal art (and more often than not I do find it justified), what I wished we spent more time reflecting up on questions such as this one: as we engage in the nuanced debate or reflection on art with our peers, what is the point by which it is justified to abandon the public nature of the art practice? In this deep engagement with ourselves, aren’t we exacerbating the outside perception of the contemporary art world as a cult and further inviting the opinion from mainstream politicians that the arts are fundamentally useless unless they generate jobs and attract tourism?
We might want to remember those artists who in the past embraced the mainstream perception of art as a form of entertainment, how could we use virality, mass appeal and that very expectation of art as a panacea to lead the public discourse to more nuanced places. Historically, being populist at different times was as radical as conceptual art: this was the case of the Mexican muralists, and the many American artists that they later influenced. Conventional narrativity was not seen as vulgar, but rather a critical approach to convey an urgent political message. What happens when we as artists really do not care what the larger public might have to say about it is not unrelated to why there is practically no government funding for the arts in the United States.
But to end back in New York City and the subject of art as entertainment, a work that comes to my mind is Andy Warhol’s 1964 silent film Empire— 8 hours and 5 minutes of a single shot of the Empire State Building. I don’t know anyone who has actually sat through the whole film, nor do I suspect there would be much of a point in doing so: Empire is a conceptual piece, likely more powerful as the anecdote of what it literally is than the possible cinematic experience derived by watching the whole thing as a regular film. Of course, Warhol knew exactly what he was doing. A few years later, when asked about why he made such monotonous films like this one, he replied: “I like boring things.”
Which makes me think about what could constitute one of the greatest achievements of the human mind: the art of entertaining ourselves with monotony. But how can that be achieved? We could give money to cities to train everyone to entertain themselves by sitting alone at home doing nothing. Or we can fund the arts and invest in connecting better with audiences in the traditional way. Or, to be even more radical: invest in training artists to reconcile ourselves with entertainment, and see what a more open mind toward greater appeal can accomplish, and manage one day, perhaps, to equally entertain us, the specialists, and the public.
Thanks for writing this. I struggle with wanting to defend and artist's right to "let the work speak for itself" and feeling very strongly that artists who can't - or refuse to - speak and write about their own work are being dismissive of an audience they ostensibly need. Then again, we make art to articulate the things we can't always speak about. And so it goes...