ABSTRACT
I HAD AN INSTRUCTIVE ENCOUNTER ON A return visit to the latest Whitney Biennial, which I was trying to bring into critical focus. As a general rule, I am as interested in learning what I can of the public's responses to a difficult exhibition as I am in testing my own earlier responses to it, but it rarely happens that the public declares itself so directly as on the present occasion. The encounter took place on the museum's lower level, just outside the dining area, where I was looking in a desultory way at a kind of painting executed on the east wall by Jessica Diamond. It consisted of a large rectangle of an uningratiating green—the green of newts or of slime mold, of bile or of reformatory walls—on which the artist had dashed off a text in crude, uneven letters. “What is that?” a scornful and indignant voice exclaimed. I ventured to identify it as a piece of activist art. Under a headline that read “No Inside, No Outside/No Job Well Done” there was a listing of various foul-ups of the present age: oil spills, crashes, meltdowns, emissions. And beneath these Diamond had written, “Just the Top Forty.” It was like a latter-day Leporello cataloguing failures. “It is not activist and it is not art,” the stranger said flatly. “In fact, I am going to deface it. I'm just going to take my lipstick out and write all over it, the way they want us to.” She looked at me conspiratorially and added, “I really will if you dare me to.” I thought such a gesture might create some badly needed excitement for the show—more, certainly, than the fact that, as I had been told, someone had stolen the teddy bear from the installation on AIDS by Group Material in the lobby gallery, since the culprit there may only have been one of the second-graders I saw trailing through the display. But I was disinclined to be an accessory to an act of aesthetic vandalism, which is not my style of art criticism. “Nation Critic Incites Angry Aesthete to Graphic Riot” splashed across the front page of the Post would no doubt do my reputation a world of good, but I let fate pass me by. Every critic has some technique of evaporating in awkward social encounters, as when challenged to defend a recent column or perhaps to define art. So I slowly dematerialized, leaving my fierce companion to consult her conscience. She was a well-dressed and cultivated woman, and her response was an index of how thin the atmosphere of respect toward art is beginning to grow in our museums of advanced art.
