Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator at
the Serpentine, a London gallery "now firmly established as a center for
contemporary art" (New Yorker, 12-15-14). He has spent fifty of the last
fifty-two weekends away from his base checking on emerging art and new shows. He has been named by ArtReview "the most powerful figure
in the field."
According to D. T. Max, the author
of the profile of him, "The art he is most passionate about doesn't hang
on walls and often doesn't have a permanent emanation. It can take the form of a game or a
science experiment, and often leaves nothing behind but memories and an
exhibition catalogue."
I immediately see this 46-year-old
Swiss man winding up where all thoughtful people in the West must, in my view,
wind up: at the feet of Socrates.
He is close to recognizing that the pursuit of the good life takes
precedence over all other pursuits.
All that remains for him to do is
walk out of a ballpark or chemistry lab and say, "Wow, that ranks right up
there with the game or experiment I saw artists doing yesterday." He'll be taking experiences as they
come to him, and measuring them on the same scale.
What a moment that will be! The fence between art and life has been
taken down. There are suddenly not
two arenas, but one, and there, there are artists, painters and sculptors and
dancers, competing for attention before a single audience. I can't believe that
it's happened in my lifetime. An
art expert and I are sitting in adjacent seats!
And that, I think, is where
Socrates wants us, looking at art and life as equal competitors for our
attention, with contribution to the good life deciding the winner.
How does that, contribution to the
good life, become the measure?
Through the kind of thinking Socrates tried to teach us: go through the
possibilities, test each one against the other, choose the one that stands up,
and formulate the principle of your choice for use when you have to make
another one. In a classroom you do
it slowly, in a ballpark or art gallery you do it quickly. But the process is the same. And once you've taken the big step,
admitting everything into judgment equally, it should be easy. It's the step I expect Mr. Obrist to take shortly, the step that will make it impossible to tell us apart.
"And if he doesn't take it,
what will he be living, the bad life?
In a useless occupation?"
Not at all. He'll be living the good curator
life. And he certainly won't be
useless. He's already been useful
to me, at second hand, by calling my attention to a show where the artist,
Alison Knowles, invited visitors to fill in squares with whatever they thought
was interesting — as long as it was red.
I'd be drawn to that show.
I think it would be neat to discover what your friends and neighbors,
bound by the need for red, thought was interesting.
I'm grateful to anybody going
around narrowing down the world's abundance of neatness for me. Just the day before yesterday one of my
nieces posted on YouTube a video of balls released at the top of a rising
escalator, their bounces fighting the rise randomly and, I saw, hopelessly. Her note said, "Uncle Rol will go
for this." She was my curator. Whether anybody called it
"art" or not I don't know. And, Socrates reminds me, it doesn't matter.
Socrates lets me be guided by both
Sue and Hans Obrist as long as I don't go fencing off the neatness they recommend
from any other neatness I find, or am directed to, in the world. I have to be free to put Koo Jeong-A's
installation of the bedroom she had used while making another installation, an
installation (of blankets and clothes) on an installation, alongside any other bedroom I have looked into.
"He's a poor seeker of the
good life who walls off parts of experience," says Socrates. You don't protect and you don't
privilege. And that's what a lot
of people, especially less talented ones, would love to do. Need to do.
Sort them out, curators. And you know what would make it easier
for all of us? Try doing it
without using the word "art."
Without even thinking of that category, or in that mode. It's the biggest fence there is, and in
our time it keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Here's my hope in Obrist. I think he's on the verge of discarding
the word "art." In the
name of The Good Life, the fence-buster.
Do it, Hans, and we can sit indistinguishably and happily together,
watching any ballgame, real or pretend.
Not that either of us will know
what the good life is. We learn as
we go, we learn differently, and we take different advice, adjusting according
to the payoff. The important thing
is not what the good life is (it's not out there, waiting for us to find) but
that our conception of it comes first.
Put it second and Socrates will throw us out.
"My conception?
Me? Me? Man, that takes confidence."
Yes, too much for a lot of people. But for Americans (you can look to them
for inspiration, Hans), ah, they've got an author who can charge them up for
it. Emerson. He's the one who tells each of them,
over their high-school library door, that "nothing is at last sacred but the
integrity of your own mind."
And then in class, outrageously: "To believe your own thought, to believe that
what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius." You want confidence in your inner
Socratic process? Stay in
touch with Emerson.
Emerson taught young Americans, at a time
when they were awed and then over-awed, by the cultural maturity of Europeans,
to be confident in their youth. An
American was a boy, and "a boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the
playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such
people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in
the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent,
troublesome.... He gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him:
he does not court you."
A European was, perforce, a man. And "the man is, as it were,
clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken
with éclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of
hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe
for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality!"
All right Hans (we use first names very
freely over here), how does this work for us? We're at the same circus, life, but it's got several rings. In one ring the performers are
ballplayers and scientists, in another artists. How do we decide which one to watch?
Not, says Socrates, by what the rings are
named, or by anybody's description of them, or by their history or reputation,
or by the number of people watching them, or by the passion in their gaze, or by
their elite status. Not by anything other than what's going on in
the ring. Fix on that, my students,
and then measure its contribution to the good life, as you conceive it, against
what's going on in the other ring.
If it takes Emersonian confidence and
courage for an American youth to do that, to reject history and reputation and
prestigious categories and elite status, and we have given him credit for it, what
is it going to take for a European dealer in those things, whose occupation
depends on them, to reject them? Even
more. Especially after he sees
that being drawn to a soup can as art comes not from an American impulse but
from an essentially European one, founded in a deeper respect for
"art."
I would be asking the impossible of you,
Hans, if you weren't so close. The
passion of your gaze extends to "games and science experiments." Which ring are they in? The sign in front of one says Life, the
other Art. You're within an inch
of the Socratic answer: "It doesn't
matter." Your assistant
is standing by, ready to carry away the signs. Give her the word, give her the word.
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