There are museum exhibitions that divide critical opinion along party lines, so to speak, and there are museum exhibitions that win something close to universal acclaim. But it is rare—in my experience, anyway—for a major museum exhibition that is devoted to a large and familiar subject to meet with a chorus of scorn, condescension, and derision from critics of almost every persuasion. Yet this has been the unhappy fate of the exhibition called “The American Century: Art & Culture 1900–2000” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.[1] Critics who rarely agree about anything, in either art or life, have found much to dislike about “The American Century” and little to admire. Their reasons vary, of course, but not their overall verdict. It is this adverse critical response to “The American Century” that has made this exhibition something of a milestone in the annals of late twentieth-century museology. Which, in a way, is what the organizers of the show set out to achieve with “The American Century,” though what they ended up with was clearly not the kind of milestone the Whitney had in mind for this ambitious undertaking.

What went wrong? In exploring this question, which has immense implications for the future of our art museums, it has to be understood that the fiasco we speak of has been an aesthetic and intellectual fiasco. The experience of art, which it is the function of an art museum to protect and enhance, has been traduced, and the intellectual integrity of art history has been irresponsibly sacrificed to the imperatives of sound-bite history and theme-park sociology. An entire century of American art has been retrofitted to conform to the standards and appeals of our 1990s pop-culture media mentality.

In terms of its box-office appeal, it is hardly a surprise, then, that “The American Century” seems to be enjoying a considerable success. A box-office success is, after all, what “The American Century” has been expressly designed to achieve. Thanks in large part to the Intel Corporation of Santa Clara, California, the corporate sponsor of “The American Century,” the exhibition has been promoted with one of the most aggressive marketing campaigns ever launched on behalf of a contemporary art museum, and this in itself guaranteed that the show would be a marketing success. But it is this marketing strategy, which “The American Century” apparently was conceived to serve, that has made the exhibition an intellectual fiasco.

For what Intel’s promotional campaign has been marketing for the Whitney, both on and off the Internet, isn’t exactly an art exhibition. It is something else, and it is precisely owing to the nature of what could be promoted by Intel—a pseudo-documentary montage of images and phrases drawn from American social and political history —that works of art, some very fine and many very inferior, are condemned to serve an illustrational and instrumentalist function, both on the Internet and in the exhibition itself. What gets illustrated isn’t the experience of art but what Intel’s own press materials candidly identify as

major historical events and key themes addressed by artists over the last 100 years. [These] themes include Industry and Technology; Immigration and Diversity; Politics and Social Change; Inspired by Nature; and the Story of American Art.

It’s nice, of course, that “artists” and “art” get mentioned in that statement, but they get mentioned only in reference to what are considered the principal subjects of interest in “The American Century.” The art itself is clearly of secondary interest; and at times —given the constant distraction of piped-in music, film clips, computer screens, wall texts, myriad collections of books, magazines, newspaper articles, and sundry other period souvenirs of twentieth-century life in America, including bathroom fixtures—the art is not even of secondary interest in the busy installations that have filled the Whitney’s galleries.

The crucial role played by Intel in shaping the very conception of “The American Century” is openly acknowledged by Maxwell L. Anderson, who took over as director of the Whitney Museum with the organization of the exhibition already far advanced and its basic character firmly established. In a statement drafted for an Intel press release that was distributed by the Whitney at the opening of “The American Century,” Mr. Anderson underscored the fact that “Intel’s contribution enabled us to assemble the most ambitious exhibition of twentieth-century American art and culture ever presented. Their unprecedented collaboration has enabled us to make the exhibition’s issues, ideas and images available worldwide on the Internet.” Alas, “issues, ideas and images” turn out to be what “The American Century” is mainly about. This did indeed afford a shallow, cliché-ridden conception of American “culture” in this century to dominate the exhibition—a culture of headlines, hemlines, and hype—but it left the history of what American art had actually achieved in this century pretty much a shambles. This no doubt made “The American Century” eminently suitable for transmission on the Internet, but it proved to be an intellectual and artistic disaster on the premises of the Whitney Museum itself.

For what does it mean for an art museum to focus on “issues, ideas and images” rather than on the problems and accomplishments of art itself? That this destructive priority in favor of “issues, ideas and images” alerts us to the many ways in which “the Internet and PCs will change the role of the museum in the twenty-first century,” as the Intel statement also claimed, is unfortunately likely to be true. Yet that is a shift in priorities that a responsible art museum ought to be actively resisting, if only because a concentration on “issues, ideas and images” at the expense of the experience of art is guaranteed to render the museum itself complicit in encouraging an aesthetically illiterate attitude towards works of art.

Do we really need to be reminded that it is not the function of an art museum to make the world safe for aesthetic illiteracy? After all, we already suffer from a surfeit of that kind of illiteracy in the art world without our museums adding to it. For anyone attempting to acquire even a rudimentary command of painting, say, as a medium of non-verbal expression, an excess of words or the intervention of other media can be more of an obstacle than an aid to aesthetic comprehension. A work of art can only be comprehended in its own medium, and connoisseurship can only be acquired through a close acquaintance with and a painstaking comparison of works in the same medium. There is no fast lane in this endeavor. It requires time, patience, and the cultivation of skills that cannot be acquired at second hand. Years ago, when existentialist philosophy was very much in vogue, the American poet Delmore Schwartz quipped that existentialism meant that nobody could take a bath for you. Well, learning to look at art is a lot like that. Nobody can do it for you. Certainly no technology can do it for you. Which is why all this blather about putting art exhibitions on the Internet is so foolish and dishonest. What you can put on the Internet are those “issues, ideas and images” that the discussion of art often generates in a culture like ours, but that experience has little or nothing to do with the experience of art. A work of art can only be comprehended in its own medium, and for museum professionals to believe otherwise renders them unfit to discharge their principal duties.

It certainly rendered the organizers of “The American Century” unfit to give us a proper account of American art in this century. Once the decision was made to tether every work of art in “The American Century” to some sociological “issue” or “idea,” this mammoth, two-part exhibition was turned into a show of documentary images, and all hope of tracing the course of American artistic thought and accomplishment in this century was lost. To qualify for admission to such an exhibition, a work of art had to be seen to exemplify a social trend, a political movement, or some culturally chic mindset. Standards of quality had therefore to be forfeited to the imperatives of a social narrative, and objects that more properly belong to what has come to be called material culture—as distinguished from works of art—had to be accorded parity, if not, as is often the case in “The American Century,” preferment.

This disastrous agenda of skewed priorities, in which art is subordinated to the drumbeat of a dubious social narrative, was openly acknowledged by Barbara Haskell, the principal curator of the first part of “The American Century,” when the show dealing with the first fifty years of the century met with that chorus of critical derision last spring. Interviewed by Joanne Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal, Ms. Haskell defended her debased conception of the show by declaring that “Early on, I rejected doing an exhibition about art history, a perfectly reasonable justifiable show but not one that I felt would be able to reach out to people who weren’t already converted. To describe the sequence of styles and which artists influenced whom seemed a dry way of approaching the material and not one that would really have the expansiveness I thought the occasion warranted.” She praised what she called the “cinematic flow” of the exhibition, which was itself a tacit acknowledgment that this was meant to be a show of images to be glimpsed rather than an exhibition of distinctive works of art meriting close examination.

Ms. Haskell then went on to bring a very bizarre charge against the show’s critics, one of them myself. “A lot of criticism,” she said, “betrays a fundamental lack of interest in American art and a lack of understanding. It’s as if we’re still in 1910 and European art is still the symbol of quality. It’s a very strange realization that this is a battle that hasn’t yet been won.” But it was, of course, Ms. Haskell and her colleagues who had so little confidence in the quality of the art they had available for their exhibition that they felt it necessary to package it as an extra- artistic social narrative with a “cinematic flow” guaranteed to preclude close study. There was no question of being back in 1910. What many of the exhibition’s fiercest critics—myself among them—were complaining about was the 1990s-style media mindset that looks upon “doing an exhibition about art history” as “a dry way of approaching the material,” and thus insufficiently glamorous to score the kind of box-office success the Whitney needed to justify Intel’s investment, which is said to be the single largest corporate contribution to an exhibition in museum history. What the critics understood and responded to was the fact that the Whitney not only failed to make the strongest possible case for twentieth-century American art, but also sold out to showmanship and a crass commercial interest as well.

It is not only public taste and understanding that are corrupted by a sellout of this magnitude. As Ms. Haskell’s stunned but revealing response to her critics vividly indicates, the intellectual integrity of the curatorial vocation is similarly corrupted. For many years now, as public confidence in the Whitney has plummeted, Ms. Haskell has been the only curator on the museum’s staff who retained a significant measure of professional respect. There may have been things to criticize in the ambitious monographic exhibitions she devoted to the work of Marsden Hartley, Milton Avery, Charles Demuth, Ralston Crawford, and Joseph Stella, but they were solid shows all the same. They were important contributions to our understanding of what American painting had achieved in this century, and they were mercifully devoid of any twaddle about art being “more than just abstract form and color relationships”—an obvious and contemptible cheapshot at the late Clement Greenberg—and some of the other guff she descended to in her interview in The Wall Street Journal. It is because of that track record of significant exhibitions that Ms. Haskell’s contribution to “The American Century” has come as such a shock and disappointment, for one cannot help but regard it as a dismal augury for the future —both Ms. Haskell’s and the Whitney’s.

About the second part of “The American Century,” which purports to cover the period from 1950 to the present, no disappointment of this kind would be in order, for its principle curator, Lisa Phillips, has always accorded priority to social narratives of one kind or another in her prior contributions to the Whitney’s exhibition program, and it was not to be expected that she would suddenly suffer a born-again conversion to aesthetic discrimination on the present occasion. If you happen to have seen the exhibition called “Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965,” which Ms. Phillips organized at the Whitney in 1995, you will already know what you are in for with “The American Century: Art & Culture 1950– 2000.” The only significant difference is one of scale. Here it is the entire history of Abstract Expressionist painting since 1950 that is woefully distorted, while Pop Art in general and Andy Warhol in particular are celebrated on a grand scale. Ditto some of the outsize manufactures of Minimalist art, while Color-field painting is confined to a three-person ghetto in an obscure corner— still another attempt to score against Clement Greenberg, I suppose. And so far I have mentioned only some of the better things in the exhibition Ms. Phillips has given us in lieu of a serious account of American art during the last half century.

What is more in Ms. Phillips’s line than serious painting—in this or any other period—is a work like Kiki Smith’s Tale (1992). Tale is a sculpture that depicts a naked female figure crouching on all fours while defecating a long, snakelike turd onto the floor of the museum. It is on this excremental note that the social narrative of “The American Century” is concluded. I don’t know if this is meant to be a symbol of what American art has come to in this last decade of the twentieth century, but it is undoubtedly a fitting symbol of the fate that has overtaken the Whitney Museum of American Art.

As for the larger significance of “The American Century” fiasco and what it portends for the future of our art museums, there is an alarming parallel to be noted between the blatant misuse of works of art in this exhibition in the name of “culture”— not to mention the patent neglect of works of art that, regardless of their quality, could not be fitted into its ideological schemata —and the intellectual horrors that have overtaken the study of literature in the universities in the name of “theory.” For both of these developments represent the intellectual debasement of their respective disciplines. In both, moreover, we can discern the same abandonment of artistic standards, the same attempt to supplant the values and conventions of high culture with those of pop culture and the entertainment media, and the same contempt for the traditions which these particular institutions—the art museum and the university —were created to safeguard and advance. And just as the proponents of radical literary theory in the universities have reduced the very concept of “theory” to that of a nihilistic assault on literature itself, so the governing conception of culture in “The American Century” reduces that once useful idea to a mindless catchall in which the highest artistic achievements and the trashiest debris of our civilization are afforded equal attention and respect.

For it is not only because of its misuse of art that “The American Century” has proven to be such an intellectual fiasco. It is also owing to the ways in which it has abused the idea of culture itself that this exhibition and its accompanying publications have inspired so much ridicule and derision. There may be something to criticize or amend in Matthew Arnold’s idea of culture as the “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, in all matters that most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world,” but documentary extravaganzas culled from the “issues, ideas and images” to be found in media responses to art are not a persuasive alternative, especially when riddled with so much of the worst that has been thought and said about the subject under discussion. The sad fact is, there was no one involved in either the conception or the execution of “The American Century” who was capable of taking hold of the subject at an intellectual level even close to what the subject itself called for. Yet its box-office success with a public even more ignorant about its subject than its organizers may very well establish “The American Century” as a model for other museums to emulate. This is all the more likely if culturally illiterate corporations like Intel continue to exploit such ill-conceived cultural entertainments for the purpose of promoting their own products and services. In this respect, too, “The American Century” may prove to be an ominous augury.

Notes
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1. Part I of “The American Century: Art & Culture 1900–2000,” organized by Barbara Haskell, was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art from April 23–August 22, 1999. Part II of “The American Century: Art & Culture 1900–2000,” organized by Lisa Phillips, opened September 26 and remains on view through January 23, 2000. The accompanying publications, The American Century: Art & Culture 1900–1950 by Barbara Haskell (408 pages, $60, $40 paper) and The American Century: Art & Culture 1950–2000 by Lisa Phillips (400 pages, $60), are published jointly by W. W. Norton & Company and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Go back to the text.
2. See “The Curator Strikes Back” by Joanne Kaufman, in The Wall Street Journal (May 24, 1999). Go back to the text.