Western civilization may still have a lot of ruin left in it. But the tocsin rang twice for me in the last weeks, and it told me that we are much closer than I had thought. Of course, the Metropolitan Museum of Art did not mean to alarm me. But it surely did.
The first of its unintended alarums was the happenstance of three simultaneous exhibits at the Met. One was the Poussin show, reviewed by Jed Perl in the current print edition of TNR. (The truth is that Nicolas Poussin is a bit impenetrable to me. But, curated by my learned friend Pierre Rosenberg, past director of the Louvre and a member of the Académie française, and Keith Christiansen, the Met's curator of European paintings, the show was at once stunning and also didactic so that I came out, not only having looked at canvases at I'd never looked at before but now understanding some works that I'd already looked at many times.
The second was the Courbet exhibit, a showing organized by another friend, Gary Tinterow, the Met's curator for nineteenth century, modern and contemporary art. Gustave Courbet is certainly my favorite nineteenth century painter, reckless and disciplined both. I learned much about what I liked from looking at these works but earlier on from reading Michael Fried's Courbet's Realism. It has been observed by many that Courbet influenced Thomas Eakins who I am convinced was simply America's greatest painter. Like Courbet, he shocked with the salacious. And the Met exhibits Courbet's "The Origins of the World," which at the time of its painting was shocking and it still is. Now, if that is still the case, Courbet surely painted for eternity.
So what alarmed me? It is my receipt of the following invitation:
Philippe de Montebello
Director
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
requests the pleasure of your company
at a viewing and reception
to celebrate the opening of the exhibition
Jeff Koons on the Roof
Monday, April 21, 2008
Six to eight o'clock
The event will be on Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden (mentioned twice on the same page of the invite), "which has spectacular views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline." Maybe this real estate promotion suggests that the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden may be rented for weddings and bar mitzvahs.
We are also told that, "The exhibition is made possible by Bloomberg" Yes, in blackened letters.
"Additional support is provided by Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky." Why does this sentence end with a period and the previous sentence in the invitation not?
Another curiosity is that, "The opening reception has been generously underwritten by Gagosian Gallery and Sonnabend Gallery." Yes, this sentence does end with a period.
But the curiosity here is not about punctuation. It is about propriety and probity.
The fact is that the Sonnabend Gallery lumbers on. But the woman who ran it (the first wife of Leo Castelli, himself immortalized in Emile DiAntonio's iconic movie, "Painters Painting," as pricing art as yard goods) is now dead. Her children have sold much the history of the gallery to the notorious Larry Gagosian -- notorious in the sense of tax fraud -- for somewhere between $600,000,000 and $1,000,000,000. Count the zeroes. OK, the value of art has gone up and up, at least contemporary art.
But included in the Sonnabend cache now at Gagosian is a Jeff Koons bauble valued at $80,000,000. Perhaps the notably honorable de Montebello will introduce Gagosian to some eager buyer. Alright, those two have already met. But it is a mark of the deterioration of elementary museum standards of behavior that galleries are now permitted to fund exhibits of artists they handle.
But that is not the real scandal of "Jeff Koons on the Roof."
The true scandal is that the work of Jeff Koons is actually junk. Baubles, gift wrapping, ribbons, but enormous. Red, gold, blue, pink, orange, yellow. It is all an evocation of cheap commerce. The kind of decoration that you find in third-tier emporiums at Christmas.
The fact is that there was an entente among the four major museums in Manhattan divvying up the turf. The Modern was...well, modern. He Guggenheim had a mission when it was founded, to show the paintings of its founding family. Still, it's own collection is limited. The other Guggenheims around the world also are spare in what they themselves own, and so they all make news and mobilize visitors by having exhibits of motorcycles and Ralph Lauren's cars. The Whitney is a museum of American art, and its collections are deep, deepest I think in Edward Hopper. But the bi-annual is the latest goulash of politically stupid statements, usually "installations," and almost always ugly.
Then there is the Met, which has the world as its mandate and mankind's multi-millenial past as its scope. Perhaps its most vivid exhibition in recent decades -- visually stunning, intellectually demanding -- was its "Manet/Velazquez" show. It was of the type that the Met does best. For decades, it really didn't compete for American paintings. This is why, for example, it has only a small group of mostly minor Eakins, unlike Yale or the Pennsylvania Academy or even the somewhat helter-skelter Hirshhorn American museum in Washington, D.C. And why it has also left the modern classics for the Modern to curate .
So why suddenly is the Met running after the false and tinsel gods? Why, that is, does the Met have on long-term loan Damien Hirst's positively ugly shark in formaldehyde and ensconced it in a central location? When Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital bought this piece he paid, if I remember rightly, $13 million. He has had to have the initial shark replaced because it was disintegrating, which makes it even more vulnerable to the elements than the Egyptian mummies of five thousand years ago. I've been reliably told, by the way, that the insurance now carried on the man-eater is $50 million. Which is how values jump if an item is taken for a couple of years by the Met.
And the same thing will happen to the overvalued Koons objects. They will become even more overvalued. That is the genius of Jeff Koons, not his work but the valuing of his work. To this chintzy enterprise the Metropolitan has now given its honor, its reputation and its name. Shame.