"Money Creates 'Taste': An Unfortunate Truism" (Venice Biennale), New York City Tribune, Aug. 17, 1990, pp. 16, 14.

Matter Over Mind: Jenny Holzer at the Venice Biennale

by Jason Edward Kaufman

In today's artworld, aesthetic and intellectual considerations invariably bow to financial ones. The rampant wheeler-dealer, art-for-profit mentality is not so much the cause, as the symptom of a wider problem, one that snowballs as more and more aspects of life -- from professional sports to Wall Street -- succumb to the cheapening, leveling criterion of material value. As marketing strategies lure with promises of the good life, people want nothing more than to get for themselves. Driven by greed, they shunt aside enduring values, blind to social responsibility, morality, even common sense.

Michael M. Thomas, columnist for The New York Observer and a contributing editor for The Nation, cites a disturbing development in the past few years in the world of finance: "The philosophical or moral basis of the transaction, its aesthetic if you will, ceased to be its productivity or its social or commercial utility." And so it goes with the artworld; there is a direct parallel. It's all show with no substance, and at the bottom is money. As one museum trustee recently told a soliciting gallery owner, "Sorry, I'm fully invested."

The decline in values which the commercialization of art reflects leads inevitably to a corresponding decline in artistic integrity. The market is omnivorous and oblivious to mediocrity. Waiting lists to own an abysmal Julian Schnabel, Sherrie Levine, or Richard Prince confirm that people are buying without great concern for the nature of their purchases --other than their projected resales in five years.

Speculation rather than delectation, calculation rather than connoisseurship -- these are the forces that impel modern collectors who buy in order to gain entree into elite social circles, or to connect their names with "high culture," or to give their dubiously acquired riches the appearance of legitimacy. And they buy with the assurance that art today is money tomorrow. After all, any artwork is worth its underbid at auction.

The galleries feel no urgency to seek out new talent. Critics largely back mediocrity, and of course, collectors are convinced of the validity of critical interpretations which, in essence, serve as beaming advertisements for lackluster product lines. Curators seem willing to label almost anything "art," as if the single criterion for such a designation were that an item has been sold in a gallery or written about in a glossy magazine with a three-letter word on the cover.

Critics and curators abdicate their responsibility every time they accept the untested opinion of the marketplace. Yet, no museum is brave enough to mount an exhibition that explains why certain works are poor, while others are not. No wonder creativity is stagnant -- there is almost no stimulation to greatness.

As Robert Hughes wrote in Time magazine in 1985, "It is as though the conditions that produce great art ... have been bleached out of current painting by the glare of its own success. And this success depends as much on the eager passivity of consumers as on the opportunism to which America ... consigns its talents."

Hughes, the critic who has most vigorously analysed the phenomenon over the past ten years, points out that "with careers held up before them such as those of Jean-Michael Basquiat or (parody of parodies) Jeff Koons, young artists are less disposed to accept an ideal of slow maturation. This makes them vulnerable to fashion, prone to seize whatever eye-catching stylistic device they can, no matter how sterile it may be in the long run." What results is frivolous often fraudulent work, some of which calls attention to itself by blurring its status as art, or by scornfully attacking the values of its patrons.

Consider the legion of artists preoccupied with mass media. As the media increasingly shape our culture and consciousness, many of these artists seek to analyze and "deconstruct." But, most of their ostensibly critical work is vapid idolatry, coopting the familiar and numbing media and thrusting them onto the pedestal of high art.

Whereas Renaissance artists appropriated from the ancients, whom they revered as Nature herself, today's artists profess that the media imagery has replaced natural reality. We can look forward to the pseudo-scholarly account of their fatuous font of inspiration in book that might be titled: Late-20th-century Art and the Mass Media: A Handbook of Sources. Meanwhile, the art-media craze threatens to replace aesthetic experience with an arsenal of shallow, television-age gimmicks that vie with one another on the fashion runways of art's "cutting edge."

A more objective explanation for the prevalence of media imagery in contemporary art -- more credible than the dubious "concerned" posture claimed by many artists and critics -- has to do with the artists' relationships to their clients. Before the nineteenth century, art served church and state, and its subject matter corresponded with those patrons' needs for self-affirmation. The modern era has witnessed the phenomenon of secular art for it's own sake, and art's subject matter no longer caters to the clients' designs.

Or does it? Today's patrons are those who have prospered within the corporate milieu. In making an art that utilizes sleek consumer products, industrial materials, high-tech equipment, or mass media imagery, are not today's artists implicitly celebrating the corporate world, and thereby flattering their patrons?

Take Jenny Holzer, the 40-year-old Ohio-born "word artist" who composes verses, then has programmers plug the lyrics into computerized electronic sign boards, or has stone carvers etch them into polished marble benches or sarcophagi. Ms. Holzer is the sole United States representative at the Venice Biennale (through September), the world's most prestigious international exhibition of contemporary art. She is the first American woman so honored.

Her installation comprises four dimly-lit rooms; two have polished-marble floors of diamond-shaped panels alternating red and black in one room, and in the other, red and white. The polychrome pavement was inscribed with Holzer's verse, translated (somewhat imperfectly) into various languages for the cosmopolitan Biennale crowd. Along the walls in both rooms were marble benches whose seats were similarly inscribed.

The flanking chambers contained light-emitting-diode (LED) boards that carried Holzer's words around three walls, again in different languages, and now in yellow, green, and red. In one room, a dozen vertically mounted boards broadcast a text about Holzer's hysterical emotions concerning her child; in the other, twenty-one horizontally mounted boards carry earlier texts around the walls.

Holzer says her purpose is "to make the big ideas in culture intelligible as public art." Since 1982, when the Public Art Fund enabled her to place one of her verbal blurbs on the Times Square spectracolor board, she has had her texts proliferated by various means. Concurrent with the Biennale, her work was supposedly presented on posters and billboards around Venice, on the water buses, on Venetian t.v., and on Holzer t-shirts, caps, and assorted "memorabilia" sold by vendors along the Grand Canal. Though it sounds as though it was unavoidable, I didn't see any of this flotsam and I was in town for a week.

But the glaring truth about her sayings -- "alternative public service messages" as she calls them -- is that they have very little to recommend them. The Truisms (1977-79) on the United States pavilion floor, for example, are pseudo-aphoristic, philosophical caveats such as, "People who don't work with their hands are parasites", "Private property created crime", "Murder has its sexual side", and "Words tend to be inadequate."

Believe it or not, these epigrams represent the apogee of Holzer's literary career, for she next penned the Inflammatory Essays (1979-82) and Living (1980-82) series, both of which appear on the LED's in the side rooms. In these undistinguished, page-long documents, paranoid ravings about sleeping, cooking, and social mobility mix with practical suggestions on how to survive torture. "It's hard to rant in one sentence," Holzer explained to Guggenheim Museum curator Diane Waldman last year. "I needed to have at least a paragraph."

With the Survival series (1983-85), Holzer returned to disparate, mean-spirited, homicidal nonsense: "What country should you adopt if you hate poor people?," "You can't reach the people you can kill all the time, so you have to go home and think about what to do," and another one-line gem from the series, "The breakdown comes when you stop controlling yourself and want the release of a bloodbath."

With her Under a Rock (1986) text, Holzer reached a new low, featuring a sadistic rapist's stream of consciousness, ladled out with all the gusto of a raunchy "2 Live Crew" rap song: "Crack the pelvis so she lies right. This is a mistake. When she dies you cannot repeat the act...," and so forth.

A choice metaphorical excerpt from Laments (1987-89) reads: "I love my mind when it is f...ing the cracks of events." Surely it is not for their serious literary or artistic value that collectors snatch up such creations. Rather, Holzer achieves widespread success in the contemporary artworld by cloaking her unpublishable writings in the glittering trappings of corporate culture and affluence.

It is telling that Holzer's manipulation of her electronic medium is utterly inartistic -- technically less imaginative than the most banal uses to which the mass media are put. Rather than modulate the text flow and colors in a potentially expressive manner, she allows the occasional shifts to occur in no apparent relation to the content of the phrases. Key words (if there are any) are not emphasized; significant passages are not set off from the rest of the text. Like listening to an atonal symphony of quarter notes, played without dynamics or phrasing, the experience is a vacant one. Some might call Holzer's programs "skilled technological choreography," but a more apt comparison is to the marching in a parade.

Michael Auping, chief curator of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, which proposed the Venice show, ascribes to the standard interpretation of Holzer's work. Auping claims that by projecting her psychotic thoughts onto the cold and indifferent public media, Holzer is "undermining the very authority of the commercial message carriers she employs." Thus, he asserts, she subverts the system that manufactures and utilizes the technological commodity (LED boards) that is the mainspring of her art.

Mary Jane Jacob, curator of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, detects a double-standard in this species of high-ticket, media-conscious art. Writing in the exhibition catalogue of her Museum's recent "Forest of Signs" exhibition, she remarks: "Appropriating techniques of commerce and advertising for the content, mode of fabrication, and presentation of the work, artists are playing with strategies of both the business and art worlds that have combined forces in so many ways over the past decade. As a result, their work stands somewhere between criticality and complacency." To wit, how plausible is an indictment of capitalist society when that critique, itself, thrives within the system?

Holzer must have been pleased to see her most often-repeated Truism, "Money creates taste," come true before her eyes. Predictably, the international jury awarded her exorbitantly installation (costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, at least) the prize for the best pavilion in the Biennale. But, should she not have declined the prize as a gesture of her independence from the wrong-headed establishment? After all, isn't that what her art is all about? It seems Holzer is an "anti" only when personal gain is not forfeited. As the art news editor for The New York Times, Grace Glueck puts it, Holzer, like many an avowed artist cum culture critic, has been "living high on a diet of moral fiber."

The other top Venice prizes went to artists whose pavilions were the second and third most expensive: Great Britain's Anish Kapoor and West Germany's Bernd and Hilla Becher (Reinhard Mucha received an honorable mention). A third prize was politely awarded to the host country's Giovanni Anselmo. Yet, the devastating anti-war installation by set-designer Józef Szajna of Poland, a major work certainly deserving recognition, went unacclaimed. Even at the Biennale, an allegedly dispassionate non-commercial roundtable for art from around the globe, money is the linchpin.

One cannot help but conjecture as to how such prizes and reputations are negotiated. But, rest assured, the revolving door at the NEA is only the froth on a sea of corruption that engulfs the artworld, tapping the strength of our cultural alloy in much the same manner that self-serving and criminal Defense Department contractors and inept savings-and-loan managers eat away at the nation's domestic economy and cripple our competitiveness abroad.

Auping blithely declares, "It is a vigorous moment for American art." He is wrong. American art, like the economy in general, is languishing, and the center of the artworld is drifting out of New York harbor. The selection of Holzer (which, by the way, was made by the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions) was a last-ditch effort to symbolically leap back as a leader in world technology, and to return to the forefront of innovation in art. But the overwrought, ostentatious installation with its conspicuous materialism and its vapid verbiage tells a far different tale about the state of our country.

As the Director of the Albright-Knox, Douglas G. Schultz, declares, "In the great historic and architectural ambience of Venice, Jenny Holzer's words reflect a uniquely twentieth-century American sensibility." Unfortunately, Schultz is right, though not in the sense he intends. As sad (and embarrassing) as it may be, Holzer's inane ditties do indeed accurately betoken the malaise in which American culture is foundering. What folly for the United States, in its blindness, to proudly send them off in their meretricious wrappers as our nation's ambassadors to the world! It is intolerable. Only by purging the mentality that equates art and money can we hope to reverse the slump of our culture's vitality.

Jason Edward Kaufman ©