The objects now classified as “art” have become so varied as
to befuddle the most dedicated observer of the contemporary scene. The
jumble that is today’s art world
has reduced even the most
established of mediums to just another
means of attracting attention.
Such is the case with painting. Notwithstanding the
crowds lining up for the latest blockbuster, rarely has the
application of paint
on canvas seemed such a marginal endeavor.
There have been few more dispiriting examples of the
current lack of regard for painting than
what was to be seen this summer at the Guggenheim Museum.
In the museum’s main event, “The Art of the
Motorcycle,” the chrome-plated cacophony that Frank Gehry made
of Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda could not have been further from
the subdued character
of “Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864–1916): Danish Painter of Solitude
and Light,” which ran concurrently in the back galleries.
Indeed, the paintings scarcely
inhabited the same cosmos as Gehry’s popular sensationalism.
This isn’t to deny
the complexity of contemporary culture in all its permutations or the
satisfactions to be found in good design. But shunted as it was to
the tower of the Guggenheim,
“Vilhelm Hammershoi pointed
to the second-rate status museums give to painting,
now seen as the purview of
specialists alone.
One might argue, of course, that Hammershoi’s work is inherently of
interest only to the specialist. He was, after all, a nineteenth-century
Danish artist working at a time when painting—specifically, French
painting—was going through revolutionary transformations. Given