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Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance
by Lynne Munson
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee (2001-07-24)
ISBN: 1566633990
EAN: 9781566633994
Binding/Media: Paperback - 256 pages
SKU: 47093
Condition: Collectable Like New
Comments: **THE LARGER SOFTBACK BOOK!** THE UNABRIDGED 1ST EDITION. 2000. DEE. EARLY PRINT. SOFTCOVER BOOK AND PAGES ARE IN GREAT CONDITION, CLEAN AND TIGHT. RAPID SHIPPING WITH FREE TRACKING. GREAT PACKAGING. ALSO PRIORITY AIR MAIL TO AN OUTSIDE THE USA ADDRESS. WV-GR.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
From "Piss Christ" to elephant dung, a decade of art wars has agitated public opinion and incited art world fury but has yielded little conventional wisdom about what ails our art institutions. In this sharp-eyed and authoritative investigation, Lynne Munson identifies an intolerance that overtook the art world in the postmodern era. By exploring the personalities and workings of such major institutions as the National Endowment for the Arts and Harvard University's Department of Fine Arts, she shows how a new dogmatism established itself in museums, academia, and even the artist's studio, where postmodernism favored experimental art at the expense of the traditional, and placed limits on what might be funded, exhibited, studied, and created. Drawing on original research, including more than a hundred interviews with artists, scholars, curators, museum directors, critics, and government officials, Exhibitionism gets behind the façade of the NEA's visual arts program to document its shift from excellence to fashionability; describes how one community of New York painters survived by taking refuge in co-op galleries; examines the "new museology" that has revised not only the content of art exhibitions but the very shape of museums; explains how Harvard's arts program, a one-time beacon for connoisseurial study, has devolved into a theory-driven curriculum nearly divorced from objects. With an eye for art and an ear for politics, Ms. Munson has produced the most important contribution yet to the art debate. With 8 pages of full-color illustrations.
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Amazon.com Review
In this devastating critique of the art establishment, first-time author Lynne Munson demolishes the postmodern idea that art can't be separated from politics and defends the traditional belief that art ought to be judged primarily by timeless aesthetic standards. This may sound like common sense, but it's a controversial view in America's leading art institutions, where inflammatory works crowd out serious art in exhibits that deliberately bait the public, such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Sensation" show and its feces-stained depiction of the Virgin Mary. "Some art historians now advocate turning the traditional museum, dedicated to providing an unfettered forum for learning through looking, into a new revisionist institution recommitted to the pursuit of altering visitors' beliefs," writes Munson. Indeed, Munson shows that this view infects not just museums, but the whole art world, from art-history departments in universities to the National Endowment for the Arts. Munson takes readers on an eye-opening tour of all these places. She describes prominent museums in Baltimore and Cleveland that have blocked off glorious neoclassical entrances, with their tall columns and wide staircases, because these awe-inspiring gateways supposedly encourage elitism; visitors now shuffle through somewhat less magisterial side doors. She reveals how Harvard's art-history program, once the envy of every school in the land, has decayed into a place where students learn fancy theories but gain little practical knowledge of art objects. She shows how the NEA funded talented and promising artists at its inception, but now (with a bloated budget) considers its first mission the advocacy of social change. The problem isn't that great art isn't being made today--Munson argues that it is, and makes her case well in a chapter on painting. Instead, it's that the current art establishment, at war against the notion of quality, is too confused to recognize any of this. Exhibitionism is a profoundly sensible book that belongs on the reading list of every art fan. --John J. Miller
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