Gopnik on the Obama's art taste
This is perhaps the most elitist art opinion article that I have ever read, and the reason why populists distrust and dislike the arts intelligentsia's brutally off putting look at everything from a left side of the brain perspective.
Gopnik is way off base on some of his perspectives on the artwork the Obamas have been choosing. Or is he?
I still think that he is a decent art critic, but he would make one shitty collector, if he really wastes brain cells like he does in this piece
Working with curators at the White House and at the local museums that made loans, the First Couple selected some works whose politics are explicit, and mild. They seem to redress past imbalances in the nation's sense of its own art. There are works by African Americans (seven paintings from three artists, out of a total of 47) and by Native Americans (four artists contributed three modern ceramics and one abstract painting). There are also 12 paintings depicting Native Americans, by the 19th-century ethnographic artist George Catlin.Unless the brilliant Gopnikmeister is fucking with us and he's really writing this piece to get picked up by the AP and UPI and distributed all over the world.
But there are still only six works by women, vs. 41 by men. And there are no works at all by Latinos. (A work by the deceased Cuban American artist Félix González-Torres would have filled the gap perfectly, and added a nod to the country's gay culture. The Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum has one that could have been borrowed.)
Even the most positive of gestures made by the new White House loans can have complications wrapped around them. One of the African Americans with pictures in the Obamas' residence is William H. Johnson, a sophisticated artist who trained in Scandinavia in the 1930s. After returning to the United States to bide out World War II, however, he made pictures of Harlem that can seem falsely naive, as though buying into then-standard notions that "genuine" black culture was "simpler" than the culture of white Europeans. Why did one of the new White House Johnsons, showing impoverished parents and children in a modest room, get titled "Folk Family"? Did being poor and black make you more "folky" than other Americans?Mmmm... maybe Gopnik is shooting for a MSNBC or Fox or some other divisionist network guest appearance.
As for the Catlin Indians, should we think of them as a positive nod to the original peoples of this continent, or are they all about a white colonialist gawking at exotic conquered peoples? Paul Chaat Smith, who curates contemporary art at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, says that even he and other native peoples aren't sure of the answer. "They're not us, they're not for us," he says, but they're also "part of how we think about ourselves."
In today's art world, these kinds of debates and complexities are where you want to sink your teeth. In those terms, the Obamas could hardly have done a better job of choosing their loans.
Smart guy.
PS - On the Félix González-Torres idea... thank you but no thank you. We'd rather get picked on merit rather than by a need to fill ethnic niches. We Latinos don't like to be segregated or boxed in or labeled. We'd rather be chosen by an art collector or a President trying to get free loaners for the White House for our artistic merit rather than by our ethnicity. How many Italian-American artists are in the Obama collection? How many German-Americans? How many Arab-American? Stop putting labels on Americans. Stop trying to check all the boxes and choose artwork for art's sake.
Silly rabbit.
