Of Patronage and Place
In this issue of Quodlibetica, we investigate the material paths that art has taken on its way to our eyes. Our magazine – in its local and international focus, in its selection of themes, and in its use of digital reproductions – participates in one of fine art’s greatest illusions: the illusion that erases the material circumstances by which art reaches us. As means of production and reproduction have changed many of the rules of the game, one cardinal rule often remains: the process by which art is authorized on its way to our eyes must be obscured.
In general, viewers want their experience of art to be simultaneously subjective and universally approved. Foundations, galleries, and museums assure the public of the significance of this or that work. The path that most contemporary artists take – education by institution, creation by generous grant, and showing by selection of docent or curator – increasingly replicates the claims of a marketplace. Art’s own survival becomes proof of its significance. The marketplace will invisibly eliminate art that does not merit our attention.
Yet even as the grant process increasingly concentrates power in the hands of a few foundations, there are exceptions to the rules. There are renegades and alliances.
In this issue, we’ve invited museum director Kristin Makholm to write about her own museum. A trustee of that museum, Bill Wittenbreer, comments at length on the significance of one of its paintings, while another, George Slade, offers pictures from the MMAA vault, photos that reflect a search for “shelf life,” for the vitality of a collection in suspended animation.
Christopher Atkins, who directs the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program at the Minneapolis Institute of Art pleads for your trust as he recapitulates recent adventures in conflict of interest.
In our own pieces, co-editors Christina Schmid and I have inserted ourselves into the frame. Schmid explores a personal experience with a painting in Austria. I have written about work by Marjorie Schlossman, an abstract expressionist painter who is a friend of my mother’s.
Fine art can snub these personal connections and responses, an attitude meant to shun the provincial, the local and the community in favor of greatness. But this attitude is disingenuous and inaccurate to the way most of us experience art.
I would argue that these unauthorized paths become even more important as digital reproduction again encroaches the personal experience of art. Tom Haakenson updates Walter Benjamin’s seminal “Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility”, and Patricia Briggs checks out “Benches and Binoculars” at the Walker Art Museum.
Ultimately, we want to celebrate the many ways that art reaches us, to undermine the assumption of any centralized art authority in favor of a plurality of modes of making meaning and of seeing, and to remember that no matter who has lately slain them, the great ideas in art never die; they just go in and out of fashion. Let us not only skim the surface of contemporary art’s waves, but dive deep into the simultaneity that is available in a world of art.
-Collier White
January 2010
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