I'm a big fan of art. That's a really broad statement. Let me classify it: I like most art. Recently, however, I attended an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London entitled "Pop Life, Art in a Material World." The exhibition centered on some of the biggest pop artists of the last fifty years or so, beginning with Andy Warhol and ending with Takeshi (not to be confused with Haruki) Murakami, touching on many artists in between, ranging from Keith Haring to Jeff Koons to Damien Hirst.
I'm not one of those people who doesn't consider modern art "art," or someone who can't appreciate a work of art just because it's a little different, but I had a hard time with some of the things that were hanging on the walls of the Tate Modern.
Rather than refer to what I'm discussing as art, I'm going to call it "pretentious art" because that's pretty much all I can call it. Don't get me wrong — I love pretention, but some "artists" take it a little too far.
One such piece, a piece that I simply shook my head at instead of stroking my imaginary beard contemplating, was "Untitled," a 2003 video installation by Andrea Fraser. The video played on a small TV in the corner of an unlit room behind large doors marked "Warning: Explicit content unsuitable for those under 18."
I, not too worried after seeing the rest of the oddly explicit exhibit, marched through the doors and quickly saw that I didn't want to see it. The video is of Fraser having sex. The bit that I saw was the precursor to the intercourse, but I still didn't really want to watch some random woman making out with some random guy in a generic hotel room.
The idea behind the piece is that Fraser got a gallery owner to find a collector to fund a piece for $20,000. The piece, then, would be a video of the collector having sex with the artist.
In most cases, this is called pornography. In the Tate Modern, it's art. The video is stripped down (no pun intended): minimal lighting from a lamp in the hotel room, the camera placed high in one corner of the room, no set dressing. The whole thing is very Dogme 95.
Consequently, Dogme 95 is another great example of pretentious art: It's a fairly recent movement in filmmaking, started by a pair of pretentious Danes (Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg) in 1995.
The long and the short of the Dogme 95 manifesto is that the film has to be made au natural, with nothing more than a camera and some actors (no sets, no special lighting, no special effects, etc.). It's good to try and make art as pure as possible, but once filmmakers have to sign a vow of chastity with regards to adhering to the manifesto, it gets ridiculous. There's art and then there's this — this, which, in the end, makes amateur pornography into high cinema.
Which brings us back to Fraser, and the circle of self−congratulatory artistic masturbation (or, in her case, penetration) continues.
When Marcel Duchamp wrote "R. Mutt" on a urinal and called it "Fountain" (1917), he was having a laugh, and the art world laughed with him. When Damien Hirst suspended a shark in formaldehyde and called it "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" (1992), he was being a pretentious wanker, and someone bought it for $12 million.
Like I said, I'm a big fan of art, but art for the sake of being "cool"? Just say no.
Pretentious art: one out of five stars.
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Mitchell Geller is a junior majoring in psychology and English. He can be reached at Mitchell.Geller@tufts.edu.
