Gallery Talk by Dr. Annette Blaugrund

Juror for American Art Today, Juried Works, 2009 

Copyright  2009 Dr. Annette Blaugrund. Permission required before using below text.

I am grateful to Linda Steigleder for inviting me here and for giving me the opportunity to select the Bascom's current exhibition, American Art Today. I am very impressed with your terrific new state of the art facility and likewise with the art that has been submitted to this competition. With over 400 works to choose from, let me tell you it was difficult to select the 49 pieces that are on view. In fact, I was asked to choose only 40 but I just could not eliminate any more than I did. So, I congratulate all of the artists whose works are on view here tonight.

My credentials for being asked to jury the work, in addition to what Kaye told you, come from years of looking at and studying art. At the National Academy Museum where I was director, I participated in numerous juries with the National Academicians, who, as you may know, are distinguished artists from across the country. They have held annual exhibitions of contemporary art since 1826 but only in the past ten years have they begun to jury shows of non-members. In addition, I have juried shows at the National Gallery in Bermuda and in Russia, as well as at art institutions across the United States. It is interesting to me, that even when there are several jurors, for the most part, agreement about the best work is easily arrived at. The few pieces that are disputed are settled with one passion vote for each juror. Working as a committee of one this time, I had only myself to argue with.

The qualities I was seeking were: Skill; Execution; Originality; Talent and, Variety for the overall disposition of the exhibition. Thus the show encompasses a range of tastes and interests, as in a Chinese restaurant, some from column A and some from column B. I tried not to be limited by my own preferences therefore you will find a mix of representational and abstract subjects that include figurative, landscape, still life, and genre paintings, sculpture, ceramics, baskets, textiles, and decorative arts. Over a period of days, I tested my selections again and again to make sure I had chosen the best. I examined form, color, and content. Each time I scrutinized the images I came up with almost the same conclusions until at last I had an A and a B list. I want you to know that even my B list would have made quite a good show.

As the art critic Clement Greenberg has said "The objectivity of taste is demonstrated in and through the presence of consensus over time." To which the artist Marcel Duchamp added "But consensus over time is an historical process that cannot be easily compressed into a brief encounter with a work of art." And so I invite you to return to this exhibition several times in order to hone your own taste. Sometimes, after looking long and hard, the very piece you hated or ignored at first becomes the one you favor. Continue to go to museums and train your eye for quality, taking for granted that the work in museums is of the highest quality. As you become increasingly sophisticated your taste will inevitably change. I am sure you know collectors who periodically upgrade their collections or change their focus as they gain knowledge.

There is no singularly pervasive or dominant style in the art of today. In fact, for many artists, their stylistic development encompasses a variety of conservative and advanced modes and mediums. Academic art depends on the tried and proven, the recognizable and accepted, but each generation questions its artistic past and tries to invent something new. Consider the French Impressionists, who are so universally popular today, and remember that when their work was first exhibited in the 1860s and 70s it was only displayed in the Salon des Refuses - the gallery of the rejected ones that were not allowed into the official Paris Salon. And after a while, the rigid academic standards of artists like Ingres and Bouguereau, with their historic and mythological subjects, were replaced by the looser and brighter work of Renoir, Monet and Degas, whose subjects were of every day life. This quest for the new, the unconventional, the different, and the original goes on. And we must pay homage to those who are adventurous by looking until we either accept or with reason, reject the work.

Duchamp's Readymades, for example, his Bicycle Wheel of 1913 and especially the urinal he called the Fountain of 1917, were scorned when first exhibited; yet they are in museums today. His Nude Descending the Staircase, that cubist/futurist deconstruction of a figure shown in the ground breaking Armory show of 1913, was mocked as 'Rude Descending the Staircase'. That exhibition of approximately 1300 European and American paintings, sculpture, and prints encapsulated the development of major 19th and early 20th century movements, from neoclassicism and romanticism through cubism, Fauvism, and the various expressionist styles. While the general public and conservative artists met it with enmity, younger painters were excited by it and embraced it.  That legacy has been passed down to the artists whose work is on view in this gallery.
While figurative art resurges in new ways periodically, witness the work of John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, and various forms of abstraction persist, currently it is the candy piled on the floor in the corner of a gallery, electronic creations, sharks ib formaldehyde, and the detritus or commonplace objects grouped into a distinct space, either unaltered or glued, painted or nailed, that are today's urinals. Will they evolve into museum pieces or will they be forgotten? Some of them by design will disintegrate in time. Such are the new creations of our era that force us periodically to re-examine the definition of art.

The Bascom exhibition reveals the diversity of subjects and media in which artists in the US are now working. Feast your eyes, open your mind, and I hope you enjoy the show.

Thank you and now the awards.