Exactly 80 days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. That was February 9, 1964. By that time, Beatlemania had already engulfed the UK, and it would soon spread like wildfire in the USA. The popular obsession previously bestowed on Elvis Pressley was suddenly trained on the Fab Four, and the rest is history. That moment is memorialized in an exhibition titled “Eyes of the Storm: photographs by Sir Paul McCartney,” at the M.H. de Young Museum. Originally organized by the National Portrait Gallery in London, it features around 120 prints from recently rediscovered contact sheets taken by McCartney in the days leading up to and just after the first Sullivan Show appearance, anticipating the mop-topped lads’ roles in Richard Lester’s 1964 film, “A Hard Day’s Night.” Judging from the images, it seems that McCartney used his picture-taking as a visual diary reflecting on his bandmates’ whirlwind journey into the international world of high celebrity.
These are ordinary snapshots by a hard-working and ambitious kid, so their value is historical not aesthetic. The majority are indifferently printed at a larger than normal scale by persons other than McCartney. Their graphic conventions are easily attributable to the etiquettes of popular mid-century picture magazines such as Look and Life, and of course, to commercial glam shots of the type common to music industry promotional practices.
In other words, McCartney’s photographs are much more celebrity relics than they are serious works of art. Yet, in the United States, celebrity is our common religion, never mind that celebrity status is manufactured by unseen forces like so many packages of chewing gum. This is also true in the art world, where taking an idea and turning it into branded merchandise before promoting it to the high heavens has become business-as-usual. But we need to remember the lessons of scale, by which I mean that we need to recognize that there are no more than two dozen legitimate art world celebrities in the world. All others are jockeying for position in a parade marching under a banner emblazoned with the words “celebrity envy.”
Needless to say, the McCartney exhibition is a popular success, attracting tourists from near and far — a goal shared by many San Francisco Museums. Their aspirations run highest during the spring and summer months, assuming that recession conscious tourists show up. This impulse is understandable, because government funds for museum programs have been drying up for decades, and now the DOGE cuts to the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the recent effort to terminate the National Endowment of the Arts portend additional impacts on the bottom line. Museum trustees do not want to be caught holding the financial bag for museum operations. The result of this is that programing decisions are becoming ever more mindful of potential impacts on ticket sales, hence the emphasis on “marketable” exhibitions.
Yes, all of this is understandable, but it also is problematic. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) has undertaken similar forays into “new audience development,” by organizing exhibitions such as “The Art of Noise” and “Get in the Game,” all but dispensing with works of art in favor of massed-produced objects that should best be called “historical memorabilia.” Both presentations were popular successes, meaning that revenue goals were met and perhaps exceeded, as well as being lighting rods for what I call “celebrity porn journalism.” These are light, frothy human interest stories, always telling the pedestrian crowd what it already knows about itself. In other words, advertising copy with lipstick. Roland Barthes nailed it when he wrote that “the bastard form of mass culture is humiliated by repetition … always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.”
Museums’ recent attempts to “meet the audience where they are” might seem like an overdue counterbalance to the widely disparaged elitism of the art world, save for the fact that this new-found “relatability” reeks of mercenary cynicism that gives up on bringing audiences “up” to the challenges of art. This will not change anytime soon. However the obvious follow-up question asks how should art critics respond to the situation?
One response is to acquiesce to being instrumentalized by the marketing mechanisms of those institutions, obediently adding literary flair to press release bloviation. If you wanted to start a career as a free-lance journalist, and you were unconcerned about anything other than getting paid for your writing, I would recommend that you act and write accordingly. Better still, start a career as a publicist, where getting paid is business as usual. But this advice only pertains to writers who are bereft of the one thing absolutely necessary to any real writing practice: having something to say.
Another response is to push back. There are problems with this approach. In times of crisis, there is always the call to “be helpful” by reminding oneself that a community of interest requires members of said community to protect those interests. Indeed, there is a case to be made for operating this way, especially when the federal government shows open hostility to all cultural programs that do not have the Duck Dynasty seal of approval. Push back is my own position.
This is based on two notions. One is a recognition that the main problem in art is now an increasingly widespread banality, quite a contrast to the pretentiousness that drew so many complaints 25 years ago. The extraordinary and the provocative get lost in this particular shuffle, meaning that the banal is everywhere. It must be remembered that controversy sells more tickets than sychopantic blandishment, but the Bay Area art world has long been sadly allergic to disputation, and that needs to change.
An additional problem with banality is that it offers nothing solid enough for younger artists to rebel against, undermining any basis for staging some kind of countervailing contention. This robs them of learning what it means to take something that resembles a position, and when you stand for nothing, you will fall for anything. When everything matters, nothing does, even in the garden of a thousand blooming flowers overrun with undernourished weeds.
