Malaise and Missteps Marked '02

Less a failure of vision or nerve on my part, my particular problem in pinpointing art's current sense of verve appears to be something of an endemic problem today, if not an outright popular malaise. Everywhere one turns folks appear tired, frustrated, out of sorts with the response of contemporary visual art to the demands of the times. The economic downturn and the public's anxiety about a deepening recession have clearly contributed to the general climate of pessimism, but I don't ever remember hearing so many people complain about bad exhibitions, poor museum management, cookie-cutter galleries and boring art as I did last year.

A rebuilding 12 months to say the least, 2002 will likely be remembered in every aspect, including its cultural production, as a doubting, anxious addendum to 2001. The pall Sept. 11 threw over the collective imagination is likely to last at least as long as the event's profound economic and political repercussions. One can only guess at the effects a war either in Iraq or Korea might have on the creative zeitgeist, but at least in the short term, such a catastrophe is likely to provoke more confusion and less clarity among the folks on whom we rely to symbolically reinterpret our world.

"There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice," Henry David Thoreau wrote about the lingering effects of the Civil War on American civilization. Today few words appear more apt in describing the shock waves of 9/11 and its attendant financial, moral and cultural slump. Watersheds in search of an historical course, they pose their own urgent questions: These are watersheds for what, exactly? What insight, if any, do they point up as new, dangerous, atomizing factors approach headlong around the bend? Historians, politicians, commentators, musicians, writers and, of course, visual artists grapple with these new and fragmentary notions while the rest of us languish in what can only be called something of an ethical, cultural and ideological limbo.

In 2002, art and its often maddeningly recondite, navel-gazing strategies came up hard against its own limitations in dealing with humankind's most important themes: death, hope, faith, tragedy. Used to endlessly parsing out its component parts in ever more baroque syntactical exercises intended to negate universal meaning, a great deal of orthodox postminimalist art found itself made irrelevant by the very multicultural chickens its champions had predicted would come home to roost. Who could care about Matthew Barney's lazy cremaster muscle (located, for those who don't yet know, inside his scrotum) as the weird source for his Baz Luhrmann-like productions when the Bush administration's "production" of real live wars turns out to be so much more spectacular (not to mention important)? What does it matter that rafts of formulaic, antiformalist political art appeared time and again at scores of resolutely anti-original festivals from Documenta to the recent Corcoran Biennial when its prepackaged gospel provides precious few esthetic experiences and no new ideas to speak of? The answer was and remains simple: It mattered, of course, not a whit.

In the harsh light of a new day in America, the window-dressing many mistake for the art world went from fabulous to looking cheap and tattered, and several emperors were revealed to not be wearing a stitch. Virtually overnight the context of no context featured a rooted conflict so immediate, vivid and unavoidable that, seemingly out of nowhere, it cast the theoretical world of simulacra and its all-too-contents into its mirror opposite: the hard-bitten reality of practical contingency with actual consequences. Such were its results that it reached even the black-suited powerbrokers of the upper castes of the art world.

Witness Thomas Krens' decline as überdirector of the first and hopefully last of the world's museum franchises. Last week's announcement of the definitive cancellation of the Guggenheim's planned 400-foot-tall, 572,000-square-foot, $950-million Frank Gehry building in downtown Manhattan, and news that the Guggenheim's other 90s U.S. juggernaut, the Guggenheim Las Vegas, has turned out its lights indefinitely, appear to close the lid on the notion of the art museum as a theme park for tourists. Krens' Ponzi scheme for floating designer buildings filled with J.C. Penney art on the liquidity garnered from box office receipts fell apart shortly after 9/11 as the flood of out-of-towners coming into New York for exhibitions of motorcycles and brand-name apparel slowed to a trickle. Joining the Fashion Cafe, the Hard Rock Cafe and even McDonald's in hard times, the fall of Krens' McGuggenheim is as the Enron and WorldCom fiascoes are to the new, albeit reluctant reformist tenor of the times: gross, corrupt abuses of power that need exorcising for the sake of the larger social organism. Already the best news of 2003, few cases of schadenfreude have given so many, including this critic, so much unabashed, shameless, totally unapologetic pleasure.

Of course, this being New York, even a low year filled with largely uninspiring shows held out gems to remind us of what might have been and could be again soon. First among these was "Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting," a retrospective of the work of the most important artist alive today. Easily one of the most significant U.S. exhibitions of the decade, it showed how painting's preeminent contemporary master reconciles seriousness with high effect, hard-earned meaning with postmodernist critique, even incisive politics with an incredibly refined esthetic sense. Another genuinely significant event, the opening of the Neue Galerie on Manhattan's museum mile, introduced a wonderfully appointed ambitious institution to the heart of New York. Devoted to Austrian and German art of the first half of the 20th century, the Neue Galerie is the realization of cosmetics magnate and art patron Ronald Lauder and proves to be, in a word, terrific.

The city's galleries, meanwhile, mostly floundered throughout this difficult year, though a few notable exhibitions and one particular phenomenon bear mentioning. There was, for example, the Ed Ruscha exhibition at Gagosian and the Thomas Hirschhorn show at Barbara Gladstone gallery, both of which, though wonderful, epitomize the larger phenomenon of first-tier commercial galleries putting on the kinds of exhibitions that were previously reserved only for museums and their bigger budgets. Other, more modest gallery exhibitions, like the show of the late Peter Cain's car paintings at Matthew Marks and Alexi Worth's deft miniatures of a balding, sad-sack art world character at Bill Maynes, infused life into a year full mostly of artistic adjustments, reduxes and missteps. In their different ways, the memory of these small triumphs makes waking up and smelling the coffee at the start of 2003 just a bit less bitter. Still it's a long way from auld lang syne.