Lively debate at 'Good Art/Bad Art' conference

The good, the bad, and occasionally even the ugly in poetry and visual art were vigorously debated in the conference titled Good Art/Bad Art: What Are Aesthetic Values? hosted at the the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College April 11?12 by Salmagundi, the journal of ideas published at Skidmore. The conference brought together more than a dozen notable critics, scholars, and writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, criticism, and dance, among them Salmagundi editor Robert Boyers, Tang Museum director John Weber, and members of the Skidmore English department faculty.
   

	John Currin, Three Friends, 1998

The conference's Friday afternoon session ("Trying to Talk About Paintings") opened with projected images ranging from a vintage crazy quilt to Picasso and Warhol, and included contemporary works like Felix Gonzalez-Torres's carpet of licorice candies spread out on a gallery floor and John Currin's supremely fleshly painting Three Friends. Saturday morning's foray into poetry began with the reading aloud of poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Pinsky, Etheridge Knight, and Emily Dickinson. Additional sessions focused on the makers and audiences of art, and debated the idea of abandoning efforts to differentiate among good, better, and best. A full account of the proceedings will appear in an upcoming issue of Salmagundi; meanwhile, here are some notable quotes and insights gleaned from the visual art and poetry sessions.

For conference starters, Salmagundi editor Boyers said that though we are quick to label a movie "stupid" or an art installation "sophomoric," the act of judgment crucial to establishing aesthetic values has "fallen into disrepute lately. We judge all the time?human beings want and need to discriminate between things?but are embarrassed by our judgment." And Jihad vs. McWorld author Benjamin Barber pointed to a crisis in "our confidence in our ability to say anything," an "abdication of debate over good and bad that has made the commodification of the art world easier. Without a strong sense of good and bad, we're left with artworks that are measured not by high motives but by what they will fetch."

New Republic art critic Jed Perl suggested that the nature of good art lies in its "free-standingness," a quality that stretches to encompass such different works as Rome's Bernini sculptures and Marcel Duchamp's "ready-mades," put together from mundane objects like a bicycle wheel and a stool. But in comparing the brushwork in John Currin's painting to that of Rococo era painter Jean-Honor Fragonard, Perl said that "the way Fragonard does a thigh, the light that glances across it?Currin can't do that. His work doesn't make my eyes happy or engage my heart. This is not ideological for me. It's because of what my eyes tell my heart and my mind."

A Saturday morning poetry discussion, untrammeled by art-world concerns of power and commodification, dove deep into language, form, and meaning. "Poems are treated as vessels of information, as if they were e-mails," said poet and critic James Longenbach. "The quality of a poem does not depend on its extractable content but on the way it forces you to engage in discovery: It's thrilling every time you read it. It's not the what, but the how of language." Salmagundi art critic Charles Molesworth liked the way Bishop's poem reaches out and grabs you: "How can it do that? It's more than grammar or syntax; it's the hunger of language to get at the world." Which may be why, as poet Carolyn Forch of the Skidmore English faculty pointed out, "If you're a good poet, it doesn't matter if a thousand poems have already been written about that subject."

Repeal of Reticence author Rochelle Gurstein proposed that "besides good and bad art, maybe we should throw in 'great,' 'good,' and 'not so good,' and 'not so bad' before we get to 'bad.' " What to do in the face of so much aesthetic choice? Molesworth asked. "Go and look at what you want to look at. If you have an aesthetic experience, it is incumbent on you to find a vocabulary to explain it."