Collecting the Uncollectable

...Perhaps nothing so well conveys the religious and doctrinal dimensions of the Dia Foundation as the testimony of its chairman, Leonard Riggio (also chairman of Barnes & Noble), on the subject of Michael Heizer's City, an immense circle of slagheap surrounding an empty courtyard...

...My favorite candor came from Professor Gregory Amenoff in Columbia’s M.F.A...

...He belongs to that school of art known as Exhibitionism, and he observes its conventions with stern punctilio, appearing in his films in kilts and clown costumes with bizarre hats and hairdos...

...Run away...

...Kimmelman went on to effuse, "Hands down, he is, at just shy of thirty-six, the most compelling, richly imaginative artist to emerge in years...

...In fact, Dia:Beacon is as much an orphanage as a museum, since its purpose is to exhibit works that would otherwise be packed away unwitnessed, usually by virtue of their immense size...

...BY THOMAS M. DISCH On the cover of the April 6 New York Times's Sunday magazine, the paper's chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman, declared, "The most influential American artists weren't Pollock or de Kooning...

...Painting, like flipping burgers or shearing sheep, is physical labor...

...walked past, or around, the very magnum opuses of Donald Judd, Richard Serra, or Michael Heizer will realize that such works pose a special problem for museums...

...So often it is simply intangible...

...Theirs is a product increasingly hard to market...

...In that regard, one might note that last month’s issue of ARTnews (which also features a story on Abramovic as teacher and sibyl) has an article about the current art-school scene...

...For one of his "Cremaster Cycle" films he recruited an entire bevy of chorus girls with whom he tap-dances—with wearying, monotonous incompetence...

...The construction provoked Riggio to road-to-Damascus raptures: It "represents humanity's highest aspirations...

...are low impact...

...It is up to museum curators and to critics like the Times's Kimmelman to strike the right note of hectoring sanctimony...

...Indeed, the true idealists among the young feel that the manufacture of "commodities" is beneath their dignity, and in a spirit of raw humility offer their bare, naked need as worthy of federal funding...

...The work these artists made changed, or at least questioned, the nature of art...

...program, where students are selected not just for their technical abilities but also for their fit in an "intimate" class of twenty-four...

...But we should bear in mind that these are parlous times for museums, galleries, and artists at the cutting edge...

...We put a lot of value on the contact among the students," Amenoff explains— which ARTnews glosses thus: "In an art market where who you know can help win introductions to dealers, collectors, and museums, these friendships can prove critical to a career...

...They were the ones who came next—Minimalists, Conceptualists, Earth artists—who redefined what art was and who are now, finally, celebrated in a spectacular new museum...

...In the April 23 issue, the Times similarly ballyhooed the opening of the Dia Art Foundation's huge exhibition space in Beacon, New York, trying to make a decommissioned Nabisco cardboard-box factory from the 1920s sound like America's answer to Chartres cathedral: a daytrip for the thoroughly up-to-date...

...After a few hours of the Cremaster Cycle my response to anything resembling Matthew Barney's presence is like the Teletubbies' when facing any unpleasant novelty: "Run away...

...He can't compose images, or harmonize colors...

...That the Guggenheim Museum should have helped to fund and to promote the work of Matthew Barney is to be regretted but not wondered at...

...The curators say there will eventually be restaurants and even luxury hotels, but these are still in the development stage, along with the entire exurban housing boom that far-seeing developers and real-estate investors figure is certain to follow the opening of the Dia pleasure dome...

...The Times's April 23 story included a photograph of a great "grid of flowering trees" laid out by Robert Irwin, all gray and leafless and as little inviting as any municipal dump, which we can take as a token for the whole Dia experience...

...I've no idea how the whole thing is supposed to work, but it looks like the biggest Richard Serra sculpture ever produced...

...Barney pads out his film time by recycling his little repertory of sneers and parodies with a doggedness and paucity of imagination that take his art beyond Exhibitionism into the realm of Sadism...

...Barney—having now actually turned thirty-six—seems, to my eye, a tad old hat...

...The problem with Barney is not so much his mix of amour-propre with passé parlor tricks (we're all young once, after all), but the slow pace and incompetent execution...

...There she will eat, sleep, bathe, and drink her herbal teas for days on end, while gallery viewers may gawk and think what an exemplary artist she is, how victim-like, how like themselves— in need, not just of funding to build such cages for their own, but for their very tuition and fees at Braunschweig College or at similar institutions all over America...

...The young man in Jackass who sets down his boombox on a Tokyo street, strips to his jockstrap, and starts discoing in front of hordes of incurious pedestrians is making a social and philosophical statement that Barney, even with the Times's Kimmelman at his side, can't come close to...

...In an art market like that, who needs to know how to handle a paintbrush...

...The artists themselves are too often flippant and flipped out (Andy Warhol) or belligerent (Richard Serra, in addressing challenges to his Tilted Arc when it was removed from Manhattan's Federal Plaza...

...Meanwhile in Manhattan, for the price of admission to the Guggenheim, you can see five movies and a great heap of art by Matthew Barney, the man Michael Kimmelman has identified as "the most important artist of his generation...

...Indeed, if this is the way it works nowadays, then I'm going to make my own large conceptual Earth art—and I have decided to start with the recently decommissioned Bethlehem Steel plant...

...Thus I declare it mine, in the same spirit of appropriation that made a tomato soup can Andy Warhol's and a urinal the work of Marcel Duchamp: Bethlehem Steel by Thomas M. Disch...

...After all, what is art...

...It is enough nowadays to declare yourself an artist and then to declare some large artifact in the vast world of found objects to be your work of art...

...Anyone who had ever Thomas M. Disch is a poet, novelist, and art critic...

...For the same basic Exhibitionist thrill there is more fun and food for thought in Jackass: the Movie...

...Some Exhibitionists, like Dali and Cindy Sherman, do this part of the job themselves...

...There is also no central heating, so be sure to make your conceptual trip in the summertime...

...All it needs is Michael Kimmelman's seal of approval...

...One must admire the sheer chutzpah of such undertakings, even if one is not tempted to adventure so far afield in order to gawk or to shrug...

...Why is it that the whole Dia undertaking feels like the aesthetic equivalent of the tulip mania of seventeenth-century Holland...

...It is enough to think about it at a distance or, at the furthest stretch, to see the virtual shape of it at Dia's website or in the newspapers' art pages...

...It's incredibly beautiful...

...One man building his own equivalent of the pyramids...

...The artists even challenged whether art needed to be a tangible object...

...Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Earth art, video art, Conceptu-alism—suddenly art could be nothing more than an idea, a piece of paper that played in your head...

...He hasn't learned to edit film, or shoot it...

...As a reviver of camp styles, Barney is no Charles Ludlam, the resident genius of the Theater of the Ridiculous, but rather another Richard Foreman, the world's oldest bohemian bore...

...No doubt many citizens of the Seventh Dynasty reacted similarly to their pharaohs' wonders...

...Meanwhile, the young artists themselves are too impatient to be recognized as the new Keith Haring to be bothered to learn to paint in oils...

...A Magic Marker will serve as well...

...They hog all the space and do not invite the kind of energetic attention solicited by less titanic and merely human artists...

...others, like Warhol, delegate the duty to an entourage of starstruck gofers...

...With such schooling, her students can look forward to a fame equal to that of Abramovic, who can be seen on the cover of the April issue of Art in America, wearing a blue prison uniform and standing forlorn and mute in the cage she built for herself in the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, a cage to be entered only by climbing up step ladders whose rungs are butcher’s knives...

...I recently saw a picture of the foundry in the New York Times and it is awesome...

...It is essential to such undertakings that there be a corps of high priests and soothsayers to maintain the tone of reverence...

...The Guggenheim is at the cutting edge of dumbing down contemporary art and creating a global franchise of museums where works like Barney's can be showcased...

...This entails five-hour walks in the nude on the rainiest of days, drinking herbal tea, pulling at the scalp to "release electricity,” hugging a tree (in the nude) while complaining about their lives, and finding their way home blindfolded...

...And since Bethlehem Steel has now gone into bankruptcy, the thing is just standing there, waiting to be recognized as the great work of art that it is...

...This is welcome news, since it relieves art lovers of the onus of actually making the trek to witness art in situ...

...Barney himself shares the spotlight with a cast of dozens, including such has-been Exhibitionists as Norman Mailer and Richard Serra...

...The purchaser may not even get a white rectangle to hang over his sofa, just the title deed to an acre of slagheap...

...The owners and galleries have too obvious a vested interest to be credible...

...This question is expanded to encompass the works of all Dia's featured artists in Kimmelman's catch-all encomium in the Times: "They are men mostly, with big egos and big ideas...

...For such aspirants, the performance artist Marina Abramovic offers both precept and example, teaching her students at Braunschweig College of Fine Arts in Germany to follow her aesthetic example in a course called "Cleaning the House...

...That's the big question...

...But if more is wanted, check out the picture of Donald Judd's vast facility filled with big plywood boxes, bathed in the pure light of day—because the museum mostly eschews the artifice of electric lighting...

...His films' boings...

...There are, of course, conceptual and earth artists whose works even Dia: Beacon's quarter-million square feet can't accommodate—bulldozer-built works on the scale of mid-sized pyramids, such as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in Utah (which the Dia Foundation owns) or Walter De Maria's Lightning Field in New Mexico (financed by Dia...