In the UK, the art scene’s ability to reconcile high culture and pop sensibilities is in stark contrast to the US, where a crisis in art galleries is growing
Het up at the Met … New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest in the US. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
In the UK, the art scene’s ability to reconcile high culture and pop sensibilities is in stark contrast to the US, where a crisis in art galleries is growing
A crisis at America’s greatest museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, has elicited mournful handwringing over the malaise of high culture in a pop-cultural age. What led to the financial woes that have forced the resignation of the Met’s director, Thomas P Campbell? An op ed in the New York Times laments that “much of the museum’s encyclopedic collection now means little to younger viewers. It feels foreign and remote and unsociable in a way that contemporary art, with its familiar references, does not.”
I keep seeing similar opinions, ad nauseam, on the arts pages of US papers. “Can the old masters be relevant again?” asked the New York Times last year – and the answer given was far from reassuring. I don’t know if young Americans are really as ignorant as these media moaners claim, but there is certainly a scary mood of philistinism emanating from cultural commentary itself stateside. “The musty paintings of old masters feel entirely out of touch to a youth eager for sexuality, irony and diversity,” according a recent article on Salon. What could The Starry Night possibly contribute to the the life of a 21-year-old woman of colour who is working as a hostess while finishing a computer science degree?”
To which the obvious answer is that Van Gogh’s Starry Night can mean as much to her as it can to anyone, for it is a cosmic vision with universal human significance painted by a man whose own life was not exactly easy or cosy.
Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist Is this kind of cultural pessimism for real? Is Trump’s America a place where great art no longer means anything to anyone – not even MoMA’s Starry Night or all those Rembrandts and Vermeers in the Met?
If so, then for the first time since the EU referendum I can honestly say that I am proud to be British. I don’t want to be too Boris Johnson about this, but it might just be that we currently have the healthiest and most intelligent art scene in the world.
In Britain, the idea that great art from earlier times has nothing to say to the 21st century seems nonsensical. Our museums have become incredibly good at mixing new and old, history and immediacy. The National Portrait Gallery is about to open a show that juxtaposes the contemporary art of Gillian Wearing with the 1930s surrealist photography of Claude Cahun. Meanwhile, Tracey Emin’s My Bed remains on view in Tate Liverpool alongside the Romantic visions of William Blake, the British Museum is soon to explore LGBTQ experience among its ancient artefacts, and theVictoria and Album museum is gearing up for a Pink Floyd retrospective, a stone’s throw from its Renaissance sculptures.
Even in the light of recent figures that show a decline in attendances, the museum sector in Britain is strong enough to attract a leading Labour MP to give up his political career and run the V&A instead.
One reason Tristram Hunt would do that is, surely, because museums have a public role, even a political influence, in Britain. Neil MacGregor’s liberal championing of world art and history during his directorship of the British Museum showed how museums can help us understand who we are. Through MacGregor’s eyes, art did not have to be new to be urgent. Exhibitions about ancient China and even the ice age took on a powerful modernity. This spirit continues – its recent show about South Africa spanned everything from rock art to the struggle against apartheid.
Perhaps it helps that Britain is a comparatively small country. Artists discovered this in the 1990s when the Turner prize became a national talking point and art invaded the mass media. The US is the home of pop art, but nowadays there is something much more public and communicative about the British art scene. Grayson Perry is part of the national furniture, David Hockney designed a new masthead for the Sun – art is so absolutely public here. That same spirit has infected museums themselves, wonderfully.
David Hockney’s redesign of the Sun newspaper’s masthead. Photograph: Arthur Edwards/The Sun/PA The other night I was teaching a Guardian Masterclass at Tate Modern, among hordes of people who were enjoying an evening event with workshops, performances and other fun. It was like trying to give a seminar in a vast pulsing nightclub. And it was glorious. As for high culture? A ticket to the Rauschenberg exhibition took you out of the noise and chaos to gaze at his profound illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Rauschenberg is an archetypally American genius, of course, and it is disquieting to feel these vibes of cultural pessimism coming across the Atlantic, when it is the US that taught me how today’s art and the great tradition can feed each other in a true modern civilisation. That civilisation is thriving here, at any rate.
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