On Art

...Against all Meyer Schapiro has ever taught, this new prophet denied that it is still possible to believe art can transcend alienation (although, in a weak moment, he did allow that "only the artist can hope to bring some understanding to the maze of mediations" that traps each of us...

...No kidding—at least no more than usual...

...My crowd sat in the back, the pedants scrambled for the front seats, and in the middle were the downtown art folk with airs who had to ask how to spell " Helmholtz...

...No wonder Halley and his ilk have found a ready market, contrived with mirrors by greedy collector-investors and art pimps...

...The worldly interests who set it up—and lapped it up— think of criticism as either marketing or party-pooping intellectualism...

...For one thing, his lecture was offered in displacement of both...

...His contribution was to insinuate an extra axiom: the dumber the better...

...Not that the several dealers present were about to object...

...Or that in his view the culprit is bad taste...

...Another work was called Freudian Painting, since it has one larger and one smaller square: Get it...

...it contains only an "empty or dead conduit...

...Halley is one of too many young artists whose sense of art, alas, reflects exactly two influences: Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol...

...Referring to his slides, Halley admitted in kindness to the audience that he himself would "probably find it hard to decipher what this is about" if he didn't, as the artist, happen to know...

...The same with architects: No problem quoting Louis Kahn's "A brick is a brick," yet one would have expected Halley to come up with a little dialectical rub in applying Kahn's doctrine of " using materials for their own sake" to his own purpose of "using simulated materials in a real way" (instead of just talking fast...

...One had to wince, there in Meyer Schapiro's old lecture hall...

...Moment...

...He even likened his "amphetamine" colors (as he gigglingly called them) to the "technological glow" he sees in Mark Rothko...

...others have already exploited the idea with wit and acumen...

...His words seemed strange coming from an art historian, especially nowadays with so much marketing effectively bypassing critical discussion...

...His Columbia colleagues celebrated the anniversary this spring with talks by four artists: Peter Halley, Philip Taaffe, Roni Horn, and Donald Judd...

...the point is that Halley not only takes what he wants, he smokescreens out the rest...

...Near the conclusion of his talk, he showed a solid black panel: This, ladies and gentlemen, is the first Halley in five years without a cell...

...When an atypical blank white panel appeared on the screen, Halley assured us it was a "windowless" cell—why not a swan eating marshmallows in the snow...

...To care about artistic significance and true value is, by his lights, to waste time that could be better used, before the earth blows up, becoming rich and famous...

...History...

...As to the iconography of his pictures in general, Halley commented, "It takes me a while to come up with all that after I have painted them...

...One must assume he has never heard of anyone who has been jailedfor political reasons...

...Halley, who has exhibited boxy, spackled, Day-Glo paintings for some time without much hint of maturation, presumably started things off because the powers that be decided he was the season's hottest item...

...I often wonder how such individuals find their way into art in the first place— unless, like irreligious nuns, they know a good thing when they see it...

...Perhaps worse, Halley'« freewheeling, "artist's" grasp of history is a little too convenient...

...When Halley looks beyond his art, all he sees is style, "attitude" (he probably thinks people sleep on sidewalk gratings because they are "into" airbaths...

...Addressing his own work, Halley betrayed a breathtakingly naïve grasp of representation...

...Jeff Koons, a former commodities broker famous for mercury-filled basketballs suspended in aquariums and other "sports" pieces...

...Those modern artists who passed muster with Halley did so precisely because he discovered some personal use for them at last...

...Halley said he tried painting on a surface of fake-brick siding, but the result was too "European," so he decided to go "suburban industrial...

...Making art that calls attention to its commodity status was not, of course, Halley's innovation...

...Susan Rothenberg got dragged in, for no discernible reason other than her implied "success...

...But there is more authentic culture in a roadhouse jukebox than in the lives of many of these art fans, and their latest pet diversions won't help them...

...Gee, what about selling the stuff for timeand-materials...

...According to Halley, a "world of idealism" has somehow resulted in the existence of "art commodities...

...For many in the artworld, including artists, social power has become the predominant obsession, overshadowing esthetic concerns...

...For him to praise Schapiro's "predictive and prescriptive powers," however, was wildly inappropriate: "The Nature of Abstract Art" is almost entirely retrospective and historical...

...Values mean nothing to Halley, despite some initially interesting published writings (they now appear contrived) in which he represented his theme as a statement against social oppression— prison cells, conduits that restrict communication and so on...

...On Art THE ARTIST AS CYNIC BY JOSEPH MASHECK FIFTY years ago Meyer Schapiro, professor emeritus of art history at Columbia University, published his classic essay on "The Nature of Abstract Art" in the Marxist Quarterly...

...Halley is the current mouthpiece, and his output is the flagship, of the cynical big-bucks art business...

...only toward the very end does Schapiro touch—and then with much care—on the art of the day...

...Halley began by paying respects of sorts to Schapiro's essay—that is, borrowing whatever he could use as a leadin to a slide show of his own work...

...Fixated as it is on a vocabulary of simplistic and unarticulated "signs," his work cannot describe our society, let alone criticize it...

...My theory is that all this is husband's art: It must have been a drag just writing checks for hoity-toity items...

...Ileana Sonnabend, who as a dealer used to maintain a standard of intellectual dignity, but who recently gave Halley & Co...

...He seems to think that embodying the synthesis of these two goals makes him Mr...

...For instance, it is fair to note that a standard pitch makes Halley out to be an emerging Frank Stella...

...Before introducing him, Professor Rainer Crone announced that the series also marked the launching of an "archive" of contemporary artists' observations...

...but how proud we were that Professor Schapiro was one of us...

...Halley said he liked the "anti-formalism" of the essay, which is fine, except that the complexity of the formalist debate (going back to the early 20th-century Russians) obviously escaped him...

...He simply said (several times) that his characteristic motif, a centered square subdivided into vertical bands, is a "cell" (the penal variety)— even though it could also read as, say, an egg slicer, a drain, the symbolic attribute of Saint Lawrence, a bit of floor planking, or an air mattress...

...their big breakthrough show, said in New York magazine that if these artists are manipulators, well, they're only children of their time...

...Halley, the smug Yalie, the complacent little art tycoon, would have had a much harder time in those days, either at the podium or in the back of the hall...

...What he neglects to mention is that his paintings owe more to a strain of queasily abstract, paint-smothered reliefs in the shape of little cottages done by Ralph Humphrey about a decade ago...

...As for himself, he announced, "The way I make space must remain diverse"—this from an artist whose output is about as diverse as so many factory-baked donuts...

...Actually, there was a time when even Halley felt he was getting nowhere...

...I tend to think it makes him part of the problem...

...His two-fisted literalism may be nothing more than Halley's way of coping with the absurdity of acting totally cool and ever so hot simultaneously...

...Perhaps this is why the archive is necessary...

...That it obviously matters little to Halley whether his works are perceived as representational or abstract made his enterprise seem something akin to Roger Price's "droodles" cartoon of the 1950s...

...If Halley's painting is as refreshingly untranscendental as he hopes it is, I wonder what compels him to misappropriate as many transcendental moderns as he can...

...His principal colleagues are: Ashley Bickerton, who in a recent press release opined that "watching two dogs f— must be the purest form of structuralism...

...In person, he offered his cell motif as cute rather than urgent...

...and Meyer Vaisman, whose once witty photographic pseudo-paintings now come stacked and nailed together, lumbering under the weight of their whoopee-room carpentry...

...In the clear vision of Halleyism, all the careful complexity of Meyer Schapiro's thought on art—which, by the way, has always advanced the spirit of social democracy—turns out to be more of that ?l' moonin' Utopian humanism...

...Mondrian he dismissed as "utopian," as though that were the one specific he could find in his sophomore art notes...

...Twenty-four years ago, I couldn't help remembering, I used to sit in this same lecture hall, in almost the same seat, listening to Meyer Schapiro himself unfold the "spectacle" (his word, not yet trademarked) of Impressionism...

...Why be so hard on Halley for playing loose with history and criticism...

...Then it suddenly came to him: His work needed "ideas put in...

...Overall, the artist took advantage of Schapiro's openmindedness as if finding doors left open by mistake...

...Barnett Newman figured more importantly: The backdrop of his work enabled Halley "to create the signs of a transcendental situation and then deny it" (thanks for being my straight man...

...I like to refer to Jasper Johns," Halley said, singling out that artist's creation of "literal space...

...No need to get into a dither over the relative importance of "influences...

...Being young, we no doubt had an "attitude problem...

...Merely a servant to enshrine whatever those with money eventually want to dump at a high price...

...What a luxury that was, then and in retrospect...

...Halley apparently believes that anything blatantly geometrical counts as abstractform, and that the claims made for transcendental abstraction—art purporting to depict a nonvisual reality— are nothing but delusion and/or intellectual hype...

...As I have said elsewhere, this is like taking Victor Borge to be the world's most important pianist...

...besides, placing a bet on an artist can't be too hard if wives have been doing it—you simply get on the phone and drum something up...

...These are to be transcribed for posterity, said Crone, so that scholars will not "fall victim again to dry, academic explanations"—henceforth they will get their wisdom straight from the horse's mouth, "not mediated through written articles and the like...