Thanks to the Louvre, but No Thanks to the Turkeys of Art

Thanksgiving Season Requires that We Pardon Even the Anti-Artists

Thanksgiving is a two-edged carving knife. First, let us be thankful for impressive art. The season also requires that we point out the turkeys that make jokes about art.

            In the thanks department, the Louvre museum in Paris has authorized a coffee table-sized book that, for the first time, shows all of the 3,022 paintings in its permanent collection. Of these, the book identifies 400 iconic ones. The Louvre: All the Paintings is the most convenient look yet at this historic repository.
            Large and heavy art books are still in vogue, and they still have the “large and heavy” drawbacks. The chore of flipping the 784 pages of this volume is assuaged somewhat by the quality of the images, though glare on the pages continues to be the the norm in color-reproduction art books. Since the book images must be smallish to fit the pages, it has been hoped that the computer CD that accompanies the book would offer large high-resolution images for closer study.
            Alas, the CD is somewhat low-tech and the images do not allow close up viewing in higher resolution. The reason for the limitiation probably is more a copyright matter than technology: if the Louvre handed out all its paintings in high-resolution digital form, it would lose control of its birthright. So we can be thankful to Black Dog & Leventhal, an imprint of New York’s Workman Publishers. The volume is perhaps the closest substitute to taking a trip to Paris, where 8.5 million people visit the Louvre every year (excluding millions more who now, arguably, can make the trip over their coffee table).
            Now for the turkeys.
            The seriousness of the art represented by the Louvre has given a class of contemporary artists a new shtick: making “art” that cracks jokes about art. They are comedians and non-artists, but they have come under contemporary art’s generous wing. Two of these artists have been profiled by New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, and their odd allure has fetched both of them New York museum retrospectives this year.
            The first is the French-speaking Belgian Francis Alÿs, who Schjeldahl reviewed in May for a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “A Story of Deception.” This week Schjeldahl has written on the Italian Maurizio Cattelan, whose retrospective is now at the Guggenheim. Of all art writers, Schjeldahl surely has the largest and most colorful vocabulary. Thanks to that gift, he has not repeated himself even though Alÿs and Cattelan are very much the same.
            They are jokesters on art, now in their fifties. “I am not an artist,” Cattelan says, intending to mystify. Alÿs says that nobody needs to see his performance pranks: they just need to hear about them. What Schjeldahl says about Alÿs applies to them both. They are the artist as “public jester.” As with bookings at comedy clubs, they are given art shows at galleries and even biennales to “attract and entertain large, fickle audiences.” They make art as art world self-flagellation, the humorous kind.
            When Alÿs pushed a block of ice around a Mexico City street until it melted, he said the action was “settling accounts with minimalist sculpture.” Cattelan also parodies art: he joked on the marble sculpture of Constantine’s hand (which now gives the finger) and another artist’s white-slashed paintings (which he turned into the sign of Zorro).
            When humor is not enough, both Cattelan and Alÿs have used shock-value to keep the attention of art curators. The tall and gangly Alÿs, who videotapes his art events, strode ominously around Mexico City with a large revolver. This lasted 11 minutes until police intervened. Cattelan, who often uses wax museum-type sculptures to joke on famous people, ordered up, in 2004, three lifelike children to lynch from a tree.
            Perhaps appropriately, Cattelan’s 128 works, produced since 1989, are hanging by long cords in the six-story rotunda of the circular Guggenheim museum. It is, of course, a joke on “hanging” art. But as Schjeldahl says, even the good (and funny) Cattelan works lose their appeal in a “bland pulp” of too many dangling things.
            Cattelan and Alÿs rank as artists of the conceptual variety, those who “do things” rather than fit the traditional category of art: “the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria.” Curators say their pranks are serious commentary on world problems. The curators also shoehorn them into sophisticated new art theory categories. Alÿs is involved in “reception theory,” for example, while Cattelan does “relational aesthetics.”
            Instead, Schjeldahl argues that the two men essentially specialize in the art of making inside jokes. The appeal is that when viewers “get” the joke, they feel both very hip and very smart; they feel like a real insider to the art world. “The goof is all,” Schjeldahl says of Cattelan. In the case of Alÿs’s work, there is an “imperative to displace your love of art into a vicarious relish of somebody else’s pranks and caprices.”
            So on this Thanksgiving, we can be thankful for a Louvre volume. The artist twosome, too, can be thankful that the Louvre exists, for its legacy has created the target for their comedic barbs against all art. There’s a great Thanksgiving tradition of “pardoning” the turkey. In that spirit, we pardon Cattelan and Alÿs. By no fault of their own, someone in charge of the art world has invited them to walk, “gobble-gobble,” through the great art museums.