Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

The language of art is embodied in paint and line on canvas or paper, in stone or clay or plastic or metal — it is neither a sob-story nor a confidential whisper.  LINDA NOCHLIN  What makes an artist great? For the duration of the cultural drought that engulfed the plague year, as the rates of illness and death rose, there was hardly an opportunity to consider so decadent a question. Museumgoers were starved, subsisting largely on virtual exhibition tours and Instagram profiles dedicated to Old Master paintings. The ersatz screen-gallery is uniquely numbing. Zooming into and then scrolling through post after post of factureless paintings is like kissing through a sheet of glass. There is a semi-spiritual sensation which can grip a viewer who comes face to face with the actual product of a master’s hands. Standing in front of a genuine work of art, it is possible to enter the charged liminal space between one’s own mind and the artist’s. If one knows how to look, to silence all distractions and concentrate attention entirely on the work alone, the space between the two minds becomes asymptotic, and the capacity to see the world through the eyes of another human being, a brilliant human being, is within reach. This experience is possible only in proximity to the original.  When word of the vaccines’ efficacy was reported like the olive branch in the dove’s beak, the art-craving population was in no position to be picky. Museums were opening again and we would eat whatever was put on our plates. This is generally true of the public, pandemic or no pandemic: it will admire what it is told to admire by the appointed experts, but it is especially true regarding visual art. Most people have no idea what makes it good or bad. It is rattling to be confronted by images for which one is unprepared by prior certifying opinions, for which one has no received framework. Many people assume that if a painting hangs on the wall of a museum and they don’t like it, they simply don’t get it. It’s just not their thing, which is not to say that it is in some way objectively deficient. On the contrary, many readily assume that their lack of interest or understanding is a measure of their own shortcomings. It is hard to trust your own judgement when you feel that you are being tested for your cultural literacy. The line of least resistance — to join the consensus and celebrate what is being celebrated — has its rewards.  And so, last spring, ravenous and trusting hordes flocked to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Alice Neel: People Come First. It was Neel’s first retrospective in New York in over two decades. The show had been conceived in 2018, but the delayed opening was serendipitous: in 2021, after a year of perpetual political agitation, in which it seemed as if the same inequities that Neel spent her lifetime protesting were laid bare, “a champion of social justice” (so characterized by the museum website introducing the exhibition) who created “images of activists demonstrating against fascism and racism” as well as “impoverished victims of the Great Depression… portraits of [her] neighbors in Spanish Harlem, leaders of a wide range of political organizations, [and] queer artists and performers” was positioned to model the progressive mood. Neel’s work, said the Met site, is a testament to New York’s “diversity, resilience, and [the] passion of its residents.” A harmonic convergence of politics and culture was occurring. How felicitous it was that Neel’s social consciousness was so aligned with that of her curators, and so pertinent to the political and social upheavals that overran our quarantines. Is it odd that the museum’s webpage mentioned nothing about Neel’s paintings qua paintings, or her skills as an artist qua artist? Maybe not anymore.  Who was Alice Neel? What could one expect to learn about her relationship with color and form from a visit to this show? Poring over books and catalogs of her work, the particular energy with which her portraits vibrate is obvious even in reproduction. (She was primarily a portraitist, though she did produce cityscapes and still lifes).