A word from Roger Kimball
I asked Roger Kimball to comment on the Dartmouth exhibit discussed below in "A hairy exhibit." He has kindly responded:
What can I say? I have looked through the press materials about this...well, farce is the mildest word that comes to mind. “Major Public Art Project Explores Globalization through Human Hair”—Right. And I, as Dorothy Parker said, am Marie of Roumania. Why not “Major Public Art Project Explores Globalization through Human Sneakers”? or “Major Public Art Project Explores Globalization through Human Nail Clippings”? Or (the most accurate) “Major Public Art Project Explores Globalization through Human Fatuousness”?Thanks to Roger for his response. For more, see his "Why the art world is a disaster" in the current issue of the New Criterion.Let me begin with a minor quibble. What makes this silly exhibitionist prank a “major” anything? “Major” in this context means “important,” “unusually significant,” whereas this exercise in academic avant-gardisme is simply one more tired effort to come up with a whisper, a wrinkle, a soupcon of novelty in the barren field of “conceptual art.” The only thing “major” about Dartmouth’s hairy hangings has to do with the major fraud perpetrated upon the innocent public who might, in its innocence and good will, betake itself to this exhibition in hope of enlightenment, aesthetic refreshment, or at least some smattering of visual intelligence. One of the things that is so depressing about “the green house” (why the lower case letters? why?) is the concomitant collusion of Dartmouth in this latest instance of cynical cultural exploitation.
Four hundred and thirty pounds of human hair, 40,000 haircuts, and one “avant-garde Chinese artist”—what nonsense! And where is Dartmouth, which after all is supposed to be an institution of higher education—an institution, that is, where the exercise of critical discrimination is developed and refined, not abandoned in wholesale abdication of intellectual and moral responsibility—where I ask is Dartmouth while this drama is enacted on its campus, basking in the luster of its name and reputation? Why are there no Dartmouth professors saying No! to such pseudo-avant-garde garbage? It is true that, as a species, academics are distinguished by pusillanimity and herd behavior, but wouldn’t you hope that in exchange for lifetime tenure people who were paid to exercise critical judgment might, just occasionally, exercise critical judgment and utter something that challenged the mendacious cultural clichés that have so disfigured the art world? Dartmouth’s hairy hoax is one of those events that inspires a weary sort of depression, edged with nausea.
It’s so tired, so cynical, so adolescent in its “look-at-me, look-at-me” narcissism that one hardly knows how to respond. Such spectacles are, at bottom, self-satirizing episodes, but the point of the satire is at least partly delayed: it requires not only the event but also its reception to be fully appreciated—you need, that is to say, all of the owlish critical commentary, the “major public art” press release stuff, really to enjoy the event in its full preposterousness. The problem is, of course, that if you happen to care about art and culture, then exhibitions like “the green house” are more ghastly than humorous, for they exemplify the extent to which our culture, even in its most protected and most privileged precincts (Dartmouth, the Ivy League), has embraced the flaccid nihilism that uses and abuses the prestige of art to promote work and attitudes whose goal is the destruction of everything that makes art worth pursuing.
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