Salon.com > Daniel Kunitz

Dreaming in television

Thu, 02 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

What happens when high-tech collides with high culture? In the retrospective exhibit "The Worlds of Nam June Paik" at the Guggenheim, what happens is an explosion of light and electrons, lasers and sound, transforming the usual museum experience of hushed reverence into something more akin to the disco distractions of "Saturday Night Fever." The man responsible for juicing up the venerable institution on Fifth Avenue is a 68-year-old Korean-born New Yorker, Nam June Paik, pioneer of video and electronic art, avant-garde collaborationist, mad musician, television wizard.

Many regard Paik as the creator of the video art genre. He earned this distinction when he acquired, in 1965, one of the first portable video cameras to be made available to the public (by Sony), recording his first video, "Button Happening," the same day and displaying it at the Cafi au Go Go that evening. Organized by John Hanhardt, senior curator of film and media arts (who also curated Paik's 1982 retrospective at the Whitney Museum), with Jon Ippolito, assistant curator, "The Worlds of Nam June Paik" follows the vector of Paik's experiments in performance art, television projects and sculptural video installations to his multichannel video environments and "post-video" laser projects.

The other beauty myth

Mon, 10 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Early last fall Harvard English professor Elaine Scarry published a thin book called "On Beauty and Being Just." The prospect excited me because, throughout the '90s, critics and artists had stirred up notions of beauty like the settled ingredients of a soup. In 1992, Arthur Danto wrote one of the first essays on the topic in "Beauty and Morality." The next year, Dave Hickey caused a minor but lasting fracas with his concept of transgressive beauty in his book "The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty." To reduce their arguments to one line, you could say that all three worry that, in the last 20-odd years, artists and academics alike have ignored beauty in favor of political question.

I hoped Scarry would bring to a boiling point the quarrels somewhat tepidly inaugurated by art critics Danto and Hickey. In her book, professor Scarry mounts a defense of the idea of beauty, which, she says, has "been banished or driven underground in the humanities for the last two decades." She tries to prove that, contrary to what the anti-aesthetes in the academy have written, promoting beauty in art is not an inherently elitist activity, nor is it harmful, as some feminist critics believe. (Scarry doesn't buy the feminist argument that the "male gaze" objectifies women.)

True “Sensation”

Sat, 02 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

For the last week New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has tried to convince us that he is deeply disturbed about the state of contemporary art and in particular the Brooklyn Museum of Art's mounting of "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection." His credentials as an art critic would be more solid, however, if he had actually taken the trouble to see the exhibit. What set the temperamental mayor off this time was not black Catholic artist Chris Ofili's painting "The Holy Virgin Mary," but rather a photo of the work in the show's catalog. There is, of course, a world of difference between a photo of a painting and the painting itself. But Giuliani is more interested in scoring political points than in carefully considering what he has dismissed as "sick stuff."

Thank God this farce is now in the hands of the courts. As Floyd Abrams, chief legal counsel for the museum, has argued, once the city funds an art institution, any attempt by the mayor to dictate the contents of that institution amounts to censorship. By the way, the "Sensation" catalog clearly states that "the exhibition has received no city, state or federal funding." The museum itself "is supported in part by the City of New York" -- the taxpayers, not the mayor -- "for the maintenance, security and staffing of this City-owned building."