ConsecutiveMatters (a.k.a. jonathantdneil.com)

Might we make a distinction between critical and curatorial sensibilities? To my mind, we can–and perhaps more urgently, we must. Of course I don’t think this is necessarily a new distinction. But perhaps with a little work we can see the rise of the curator over the last decade, and the accompanying demise of the critic, as symptomatic of some more general shifts in cultural perspectives rather than as the engine driving the change. So what is this distinction? Briefly, I think it boils down to the relative values that we place on “presentation” on the one hand and “discovery” on the other.

The curatorial sensibility is focused, almost singularly, upon presentation: whether of people or things, the role of the curator is determined by gathering, packaging and exposing. And, more saliently, it takes the value of these moves to be self-evident. Often what is gathered, packaged and exposed is of secondary importance. Sure the items of interest must be seen to conform, however slightly, to the curatorial conceit, but ultimately these relationships–of items to one another and to the presentation as a whole–are simply vehicles for the presentation itself. For those possessed of a curatorial sensibility, it is valuable in and of itself that some thing, no matter what it is, has been “presented” (in the existential sense of the term, to be made “present”). If it’s here and now “for me,” then it is, by definition, good.

The critical sensibility, in contrast, is focused I believe upon “discovery.” It is the role of the critic to discover those relationships within and between any given items of interest, regardless of whether they have been gathered, packaged and exposed to the world. The conditions of presentation may enter into one’s critical perspective, but they are hardly a necessary consideration. For those possessed of a critical sensibility, then, value is to be found within or between items of interest; it is, in other words, to be “discovered,” which requires articulation in some form or another. That articulation is surely a kind of “presentation,” but the form that presentation takes is driven by the discovery itself (and yes, “presentation” may be a sufficient condition for “discovery” to occur, but it is hardly necessary, which should put to rest the argument that the fruits of the critical sensibility require those of the curatorial).

If the terms of this distinction have remained purposely abstract, it is because the division I am thinking about in no way entails the labels of “curator” or “critic” as they are applied to personalities within the world of contemporary art. Within that world alone there are curators who are uniquely possessed of a critical sensibility–e.g. Jens Hoffmann, Sara Reisman–and there are critics out there who operate under a distinctively curatorial sensibility–think of Roberta Smith’s common refrain: “artists x, y, and z are brought to mind.” No, the curatorial and critical sensibilities are just that, “sensibilities”–ways of looking at, engaging in, and thinking about the world. It is the critical sensibility that possesses Tyler Green to draw out–i.e. “discover” for his reader–the missed curatorial opportunity at the Met’s recent show of Dutch masters where Vermeer’s Allegory of the Catholic Faith (1670) could have been connected to ter Brugghen’s The Crucifixion (ca. 1625); whereas it is surely the curatorial sensibility that drove the Met to gather, package and expose–i.e. to “present”–its Dutch masters in the order that the works were gifted to the museum by its benefactors (whose names, it should be mentioned, are accorded pride of place in the “presentation”).

But the critical and curatorial sensibilities are at work outside of the art world as well; in fact, I would argue that it is only once we begin to take note of these sensibilities within the larger context of what Richard Florida has attempted to carve out as the “The Creative Class” (a book shot through with the curatorial sensibility) and what MBA and media types have taken to calling “Creatives” (a term I find highly problematic at best and meaningless at worst) that we might begin to get a better idea both of how the two sensibilities differ and why they have come to do so to such a dramatic extent as of late.

[Next installment: the critical and curatorial sensibilities outside of the confines of the art world]

The estimable E. O. Wilson, in a recent piece for the New Scientist, offers what is to my mind an essential tripartite distinction between religion and science:

In the more than slightly schizophrenic circumstances of the present era, global culture is divided into three opposing images of the human condition. The dominant one, exemplified by the creation myths of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - sees humanity as a creation of God. He brought us into being and He guides us still as father, judge and friend. We interpret His will from sacred scriptures and the wisdom of ecclesiastical authorities.

The second world view is that of political behaviourism. Still beloved by the now rapidly fading Marxist-Leninist states, it says that the brain is largely a blank state devoid of any inborn inscription beyond reflexes and primitive bodily urges. As a consequence, the mind originates almost wholly as a product of learning, and it is the product of a culture that itself evolves by historical contingency. Because there is no biologically based “human nature”, people can be moulded to the best possible political and economic system, namely communism. In practical politics, this belief has been repeatedly tested and, after economic collapses and tens of millions of deaths in a dozen dysfunctional states, is generally deemed a failure.

Both of these world views, God-centred religion and atheistic communism, are opposed by a third and in some ways more radical world view, scientific humanism. Still held by only a tiny minority of the world’s population, it considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning. Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled. Having arisen by evolution during the far simpler conditions in which humanity lived during more than 99 per cent of its existence, it forms the behavioural part of what, in The Descent of Man, Darwin called “the indelible stamp of [our] lowly origin”.

Too often are the failures and atrocities of communist history laid at the feet of those who hold to an atheistic worldview, even if that atheism is simply a byproduct of a more firm commitment to what Wilson calls “scientific humanism.” But I believe that it is this division between scientific humanism and monotheism which is the dominant ideological struggle of our time, and it is one which requires a significant rethinking of the multiculturalist positions (or ‘postmodernism’ more generally) which, to be sure, forged great gains over the past thirty-five years, but which, as Wilson points out, may be seen as a variant of “political behaviorism.”

To push this further, the ideological lines that supposedly disappeared sometime around 1989 or 1991, those dates which mark the end of History for Fukuyama (or the end of Art for Danto), have been redrawn, not between civilizations, between East and West, between Islam and Judeo-Christianity, between Islamo-fascism and Liberal democracy, but between religion and science, with humanism–that means the Arts; for what better testament to humanist values can there be?–firmly on the side of the latter. By which it follows that a commitment to humanism, to human achievement and creativity, without recourse to a belief in supernatural agency, is the banner under which our art–our contemporary art–must march.

Christopher Ho, an artist friend of mine, and I were discussing recently how to map out the state of contemporary art (this is something that takes us back to grad-school days and the semiotic-square, which now seems so outre that we must indulge in it behind closed doors), and we got onto the topic of methodological models which have been useful, even definitive, to historians and critics in the past. These should be widely familiar by now: Marxism, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, anthropology, to name a few of the more influential disciplines. Art history, we thought, could do with an infusion of new blood, so to speak. (This idea may be highly unpopular, that art history needs models from other disciplines to fuel new insights; but one must admit that many of the most significant historians and texts within the field have derived that significance from cross-disciplinary borrowings. And why not look around a bit?)

Given, it seems, everyone’s obsession with the market, Christopher suggested that we should be looking much more closely at the one discipline whose raison d’etre is developing conceptual models: economics. This, we agreed, would require a lot of work: though certainly highly intelligent, art historians aren’t given to the kind of thinking that goes with economic expertise. We both thought that there would necessarily be some text which could establish the framework through which art historical insights might be derived. What that text is, we don’t know. I suggested Jeffry Frieden’s Global Capitalism (Norton, 2006) as a place to begin, especially given Frieden’s positioning of the gold standard as fundamental to the growth of global capital in the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course Walter Benn Michaels’ The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987) has tread some of this ground already. But Frieden’s book is more historical than theoretical, and it doesn’t offer the kind of structure that is easily imported from one intellectual terrain to another (a prime example here being Frederic Jameson’s borrowing of Ernest Mandel’s phases of capitalism from the latter’s Late Capitalism [1972]).

Perhaps whole texts are not what we’re after, though. James Surowiecki’s column in a recent New Yorker discusses the economics of strikes and mentions work by Linda Babcock and George Loewenstein on “self-serving bias.” This bias alters, quite literally, how and what people see, and it works as a kind of cognitive override of direct perception. Now it seemed to me that we’re familiar with this kind of concept from Arnheim’s (gestalt) psychology of perception, which had its day in the 1960s and, as we know, was important in the early discourse of minimalism. (I also think it’s a subset of Wittgenstein’s discussion of “seeing as” from the Philosophical Investigations, which formed the basis of Richard Wollheim’s Painting as an Art.) But perhaps the Babcock and Loewenstein study may round out, update or, more importantly, trouble these ideas of perception, especially as they move the locus of inquiry from the individual subject to a site of intersubjective conflict (the economists’ study entailed the judgments by two different groups of fans of whether a football game was called fairly). Needless to say, this may be a productive line of inquiry.