Oops; I Meant To...

Word from the art world is that stuff's getting broken in Miami.  The former Miami Art Museum -- now the Pérez Art Museum Miami -- reopened in 2013 on some beautiful premises with some interesting hanging garden architecture.  As part of a row of heavy hitters they got to reinaugurate the museum exhibition-wise, PAMM scored Ai Weiwei, one of the more recognizable names in the contemporary arts.  Broader publics might know Ai a bit less for the relatively broad portfolio he has than his consultancy on the Olympic stadium in Beijing for the 2008 summer games and the tense relationship he maintains with the Chinese authorities (he's been in and out of trouble of various stripes for the past few years).  I'm not sure I heard right on an interview with him on the BBC this morning.  However, if I did, since he became a critic of the Chinese system, he's been subtly denied the right to show in his home country.

In an ongoing show at the Perez, some nudnik (yup, let's just get straight to the point) picked up one of parts (a vase) in a work entitled (strangely enough) "Colored Vases" (thank you, Mr. Ai, for not calling it "Sunday Interlopers on Heightened Moonbeams 7") and dropped it.  The nudnik has a name -- you can read it in The New York Times, if you're curious enough.  He said he didn't think the Pérez, making a play for the big time, shows enough local artists.  He's probably right.  Community outreach isn't exactly the raison d'être of the crème de la crème world of the haute arts (I hope I used enough French there).

Word has it the "Vases" installation could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, U.S.  Such is what often happens when one gets into that level of the art world:  aesthetic value and economic value become one.  The cultural capital of taste, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it.

The piece is ruined.  It's a shame.  There can be a lot of chatter about the ridiculousness of the contemporary arts and well, some things are ridiculous.  And self-important.  But get in there and actually try to make something; it's a long, long, long, hard and very intellectual endeavor.  It either takes a good training or a massively unique intuitive sense of how space, color and to some extent time work -- and such things do have properties; properties which can be used to say things.  Artists have the right to be iconoclastic -- as Ai himself might have been in a work (pictured in the background) called "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn" (1995).  Ai dropped a Han Dynasty urn.  They took pictures.  That stuff can get bad reactions.  In such cases, artists are taking it upon themselves to represent ironies in a global life full of them and to which they themselves contribute.

What's a shame is that money value at all enters the picture here.  In the end, the nudnik and his dropping broke a statement.  It's happened before -- also likely to artists noticeably less famous than Ai.  However, what matters is in no way, shape or form the price.  What matters is the status of a work -- yes, in part because it has run through the mill of "taste" and its "cultural capital" -- that participates somehow in public discussions and the representation of us.  That's back to ourselves (the subject to whom the object of "us" gets represented).  I think I'm the green one on the right.