A Child of Six
The collection I have of cartoons about modern art is called A Child of Six Could Do It! It has all the classics: a group of museum visitors stand enthralled before a ventilator while guards watch them, snickering; an art student who depicts his nude model realistically is admonished, "You have a long road ahead of you young man!"; a confused woman entering an empty gallery is told, "This is the show, Madam." I could go on, but you get the idea. Every cartoon I've cited is at least thirty years old, but the sentiments they express spring eternal. I hear them all the time--sometimes from visitors to the museum I work at, sometimes from other artists, sometimes from people who don't really think that way, but are trying, (not as successfully) to be funny.
An important difference between the cartoonists and the would-be art pundits I've been noticing lately is that the cartoonists, artists themselves, maintain an informed relationship with their subject and are able to distill the sensibilities surrounding it in ways that prompt mutual chords of response in their audience. That's why their jokes still work decades later. In the needlessly huffy afterward to A Child of Six Could Do It!, a British art historian maintains that great modern art has prevailed in spite of the reductionist jibes of irresponsible cartoonists. Modern art has prevailed but so have--on a simpler level--the best of the cartoons that lampooned it (hence the popularity of the book, which has had several reprintings since it was published in 1973). I think that, in many ways, such cartoons are among the most effective art criticism. They reflect the confused hostility many of us still have when confronted with the shock of the new; through reflecting it, we're both comforted--that our confusion is shared--and challenged to go beyond simplistic responses. The best of the artist-cartoonists invariably demonstrate their ambivalent relationship with controversial art through the skill with which they reproduce it. The reductive caricatures our Brit art historian deplores are paradoxically the means that help make the image of modern art so enduring.
But all this can only hold true for those who know what they're doing. A few examples in the book were of historical interest only. A 1913 cartoon about Rodin is merely crude and mean-spirited, citing wartime atrocities (in the Balkans, no less) as excellent "models for Rodin." It doesn't work on two levels: it's too ill-tempered and--more important--severed limbs are not the best visual metaphor for Rodin's style. Other vintage examples work, in spite of being incredibly dated. British artist Jacob Epstein's rough-hewn figurative sculpture is hardly shocking nowadays, but a cartoon of a classical cupid impaling Epstein's Rima (1925) with an arrow and a cool put-down can still evoke a smile. Epstein is surely one of the most maligned artists of the 20th century--far surpassing Mapplethorpe or Serrano. His art was often attacked as equally to blame (with Winston Churchill) for everything Tory cartoonists and letter writers considered amiss in British politics. Like any perusal of history, a chronological survey of cartoons provides more discouraging evidence that it's all been said and done before, even if we didn't learn anything from it.
But the 1925 Tory cartoonists did bother to inform themselves about their subject matter. And they made interesting connections between art and its sociopolitical context which are at least worthy of provoking discussion. I rarely see that kind of challenge in "humorous" or "satirical" attacks on art today. There are a few disturbing reasons for this. Led by an scary coalition of respected "anti-P.C." critics like Arlene Croce and down-right ignorant columnists like Evans and Novak, many attackers of contemporary art no longer feel it's necessary to see something before telling others why it sucks. Connected with this, there also seems to be a complete lack of respect for literacy, visual or otherwise. In other words, not only do they neglect to look at the art, they can't even interpret the press release that describes it with any accuracy. It is an easy target, so why not at least attack it with aplomb and accuracy? Mean-spirited silliness is not the same as real wit. To paraphrase a caption from my cartoon book, sometimes less is less. The less background knowledge you have, the less effectual your criticism.
Artvoice, 1995