The RadWare: a Not-All-That-Modest Proposal
GELERNTER, DAVID
Art The RadWare: a Not-All-That-Modest Proposal By David Gelernter American culture is collapsing, and it is the Right's fault. The Left is out there fighting and we are not; the Left operates...
...Forget those prim little models today's architecture galleries love...
...And you would be able to see this master plan the moment you walked in...
...That world is slipping away...
...Think of the difference between the Times and the Wall Street Journal...
...It overwhelms the dim, officious Times editorials and op-ed pages, is taken more seriously, and wields far greater influence...
...have failed to create the new institutions we need if this country is to come around-as it will someday, and must...
...The chance to eat and talk where the passing scene is intriguing has been a boon for millennia, so why don't more museums make their visual riches-their crowds and collections-available for remote viewing from the restaurant...
...tells also, calmly and concretely, about a city with good public schools, no street crime to speak of, strong public morals and morale, families whole-a world that most young people don't remotely suspect is even possible...
...White wrote about this time, "are ballooned by the breeze, and their bare shoulders catch the lamplight...
...That is why it is attacked so angrily on the left: Studying recent history convinces us that, for all the progress we have made in hugely important areas, we have slid backwards also-dramatically...
...If it were serious about conducting the culture war, the Journal would field art, book, and cultural coverage to challenge the hegemony of the Times...
...Another is that they are fed up with the stonecold emptiness of minimalism and conceptualism, and the naive political cartooning of the dominant Whitney-Times school...
...We create large displays out of stacked screens...
...Most Americans have no concept of what McCarthyism was, other than an evil right-wing plot...
...Its first show, "Witch Hunts Then and Now," would be unlikely to excite much interest among the staff at the Smithsonian...
...Next, the Architecture Department...
...a museum is a way to reach schoolchildren, and their teachers also...
...Then again, you never know...
...Inside the perimeter just under the roof, offices and studios-visitors would notice the think tank whenever they looked up and the thinkers would see the public too, when they ventured onto the catwalks that connect their offices...
...but Joseph McCarthy, Janis Joplin, Jesse Jackson, and the usual bunch of feminists are too important to pass over...
...What's a person to do who cares about art but has no truck with politics or ideology...
...Artists would occupy studios on-site, and the RadWare would exhibit their work fresh from the easel...
...Are my plans flawed...
...The contemporary art program calls also for exhibiting eminent modernists whose recent work deserves more attention than it has gotten (Jasper Johns, for instance) and painters who have never gotten their due because they are always out of step-Gabor Peterdi, for example, whose late Wetlands oils are masterpieces of the "abstract landscape" genre invented by Monet but are arguably better...
...Children can sit on the platform's edge and dangle their feet in culture...
...Look at our response to the Pulitzer committee's failure to come up with an award for Dorothy Rabinowitz's work in the Journal exposing child-abuse witch hunts...
...Each RadWare show ought to be advertised in a first-rate artist's litho that you can buy at the shop...
...It would be a museum of history and art: They stand together because they define our nationhood for us and offer the best possibilities for cultural revival...
...David Gelernter, a writer and painter living in Connecticut, writes frequently about art for The Weekly Standard...
...Today's educated public loves museums, and museums rank among our central cultural institutions...
...Conservatives complained...
...We talk only to each other...
...The new institution would aim to be the most exciting, original museum in the country...
...Floating right at the center, midway up, the inevitable museum restaurant-wedding-cake-shaped, so that many layers of lunchers all have a clear view of the surrounding scene as they kibitz...
...they will be surprised to discover that, for all the damage done by the drunken senator from Wisconsin, our ongoing child-abuse witch hunts have been vastly more devastating to the victims...
...And, the ultimate provocation, Seek Beauty and Truth...
...You read the Times, visit the museums, and get your art delicately seasoned with leftist cant...
...The look of its interior would be crucial to the RadWare's mission...
...to be a place everyone wants to go, whatever his politics...
...So, imagine a new type of museum...
...Politics Out Of Art...
...It would serve no ideological purpose...
...But a flawed plan is at least a plan...
...cata-strophically...
...The Art Department would focus on today's art-on those contemporary artists, for example, whom you might call "aesthetic absolutists" as a group...
...One thing I can tell you about the "aesthetic absolutists" is that you have never heard of any of them...
...Fireworks can't turn night into day- but they can change its character, make it a lot brighter, and cheer people up considerably...
...So far as the Journal's proud warriors are concerned, however, the fight stops at the edge of the editorial page...
...What we ought to have done is declare the Pulitzer bankrupt and create a new award...
...it would be there because there is no good architecture museum anywhere, and we could use one...
...The antics of "installation artists" strike them as admissions of failure by people who can't think up anything to paint, and whether an artist is male or female, black or white, straight or gay, Aleut or puffer fish is of no interest to any of them...
...The Journal ought to play a role comparable to the role the Times now has a monopoly on-a role once played, with distinction, by the Sunday New York Herald Tribune before it folded in the mid-60s...
...It would present McCarthyism side-by-side with the child-abuse scandals of the 80s and 90s-the McMartin trial, Kelly Michaels, the Amiraults, the ongoing Wenatchee hysteria...
...Every now and then a Lee Bass arises with twenty-odd million to bolster the serious study of Western civilization...
...Conservatives have a duty to change that, or at least to try...
...Build High Culture...
...Yet there is more to the story...
...Their work is bold and aims high...
...The RadWare quixotic...
...Ideally, your apolitical lawyer, housewife, and high school student would have no idea what its politics are-just as they have no clear concept (to conservatives' impotent fury) of the Times's or Smithsonian's political slant...
...Certain history exhibits at the Radical Warehouse Museum of History and Art would have an explicitly political goal: to aim over the heads of the art establishment and beam truth at the public...
...The New York Times and the Smithsonian take their cases to the people...
...most 1990s intellectuals have never heard of the Amiraults and couldn't care less...
...The Times dictates terms to the entire art community like the schoolyard bully because it is unopposed...
...Not only the conventional museum-going public either...
...But too often they have acted as if politics is all that matters...
...The New York Times is the only U.S...
...they recognize his integrity and seriousness, but he is too narrow and too much of a sour-puss to suit them...
...Computers will be useful here also...
...newspaper that covers the art world's daily business...
...Conservatives have no intention of abandoning our great cultural institutions...
...Let me propose one way to start- an overreaching idea that is likely to be too expensive and lead nowhere...
...a different building lives inside each display, and you navigate your way around with a joystick...
...The America of half a century ago needed a utopian future...
...The Journal's editorial page is ground zero of modern conservatism...
...The RadWare could corner the market on a new kind of show also, the "historical moment" exhibit that conveys something of the past to an American public increasingly cut off from history...
...And speaking of the museum shop: The RadWare needs to help reestablish an art market for the middle class by selling cheap-but-good art and by commissioning it...
...They believe that the great unexplored territories of late-twentieth-century art are the human body and face...
...Philip Terzian captured the ethos of the New York Times perfectly in his comments on the Sunday magazine's centennial issue (The Weekly Standard, April 29...
...it must also be a think tank, where scholars are invited (or maybe dared is the word) to spend a year and plug their work into the public mood by designing a show or writing a catalog...
...Aesthetic Absolutism...
...Its goals would be to present architecture in new ways, advertise the civilizing effects of good urban landscapes, smash fashion, and scrape the deck clean of dried-up old ideas...
...A warning label will make it clear that if you venture into a college faculty lounge wearing this garment, the manufacturer absolutely doesn't know you...
...You listen to the radio, walk into a classroom, browse a lunch counter and a candy store...
...we ought to touch that stronger, wiser country once more before it is gone forever...
...Among today's prominent artists Lucian Freud comes closest to what they want, but that is none too close...
...The goal of this sort of show is to be haunting-as haunting as the thin radio sound of the "Star-Spangled Banner" through the open window at a small train station in September '45 as you watch, in the distance, a steam engine thoughtfully chuff closer...
...In the yellowing newspapers stacked round the stove in the stationmaster's office the war in Europe is still on...
...People will accept this society the Left has made only so long as they can't imagine anything better...
...you mingle with the crowd and look those Americans in the eye...
...The Architecture Department would show off neglected major talents (like James Gamble Rogers and Ely Jacques Kahn) and underappreciated geniuses (such as Luis Barag?n...
...We have a duty to change our culture, and we have the strength to do it...
...Conservatives today have no route into the schools...
...The computer displays might help visitors, also, to evaluate proposed new developments-a rebuilt waterfront, a westside stadium, the Glowing Glitzball that is supposed to replace the strong, sad Hayden Planetarium...
...The guiding principles of the RadWare's Art Department would fit (handily enough) onto T-shirts that you could buy at the museum shop...
...Round the edges of the big open interior would be a honeycomb of galleries on several levels, defined by partitions that were selectively broken down so that your gaze penetrates bunches of them at a time...
...Innocent people rot in jail as I write...
...We need a utopian past...
...If we had any guts and heart-and, come to think of it, we do-we would seize control of today's culture agenda instead of merely issuing lamentations from the sidelines...
...the RadWare's slide shows turn a screen into a "virtual display case" with the building itself slowly rotating inside...
...Our new museum would never stoop, however, to Smithsonian-style ten-dentiousness...
...Gazing from Olympian heights over the last hundred years, the magazine discerns nothing worth mentioning about classical music or serious painting, or Yeats or Kafka or Orwell...
...Imagine a narrow gallery with crisp large black-and-white photos, mounted drawings, and rear-projection screens showing long, coherent sequences of color slides that take you slowly round the outside of a building or through a room inside...
...Scholars have an obligation to bring history to bear on today's world, and it is instructive to set these two tragedies side-by-side...
...Not as quixotic as running for president...
...You start in a room papered round with a life-sized photo-mural of Times Square on VJ day...
...The idea for a museum to challenge the current one-party orthodoxy in the arts by presenting something new, and tantalizing, and highbrow, and accessible, might seem quixotic...
...If you care about art you have to read it...
...It cannot be merely a museum...
...You have no choice...
...It's early evening as you stand on the platform and "the skirts of the girls approaching," as E.B...
...overhead, a big oculus to let the sun in...
...It might use its big computer displays to reconstruct lost landmarks: New York's Pennsylvania Station, the Trylon and Perisphere at the 1939 World's Fair, Grand Central Station before the Pan Am building settled like a raptor on top...
...Intellectuals of the 1950s, for example, were outraged by McCarthyism...
...What's an apolitical art-loving lawyer in Passaic to do...
...the Left operates the institutions that deliver culture to the public...
...It would be housed in a large, plain, four-story shoebox in some corner of Manhattan or (better yet) in a Manhattan suburb, accessible on foot from a train station for visitors from the city, with a big parking lot to accommodate suburbanites...
...Or a housewife in Westchester or a precocious high school student on Long Island...
...It need not be...
...The RadWare will have to transcend politics to succeed...
...On the picayune chance a RadWare ever comes to be, a single new museum can hardly turn American civilization rightside-up all by itself...
...Every now and then a Steve Forbes pops up with twenty-odd million to spend and a desire to knock American culture on its ear...
...Nostalgia has become a political act...
...The show is frank about the era's entrenched bigotries...
...Imagine "New York, September '45...
...Things would be different here, not because liberals would be banned but because conservatives would be welcome and these shows would be 100 percent cant-free...
...Of course...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 35
