Relay: What Are You Looking At?
If you wander through New York’s Museum of Modern Art, you’ll eventually come across “Painting Number 2” by Franz Kline, a set of thick, unruly black lines on a white canvas. Elsewhere, you will find one of Mark Rothko’s many untitled works, consisting of various colored rectangles. And in front of both paintings, you will inevitably find visitors wearing an expression that is best interpreted as “I could have done that.”
This commentary on “what is modern art?” surfaced last month at the Springs Mystery Art Sale at Ashawagh Hall — a three-day shopping spree of guesswork at which over 1,000 pieces of art by professionals, students, and dabblers, who had agreed to pit their talents against one another on 5-by-7-inch postcards, are all displayed anonymously, so you’re not sure who made what. It is one of the most clever and enjoyable fund-raisers on the East End. The game — the “mystery” part — is that buyers don’t find out who created their prize until the event closes.
I was amid the acquisitive swarm on the first day of the sale. Despite arriving an hour before the doors were set to open, the red dots I purchased for $20 each had number 53 on them. Some of the 52 ahead of me sat around on beach chairs, chatting. Others sprawled out on the grass with laptops open, working as they waited. Or perhaps they were doing some homework on artists like Charles Waller, April Gornik, and Peter Dayton, who were known to have submitted items this year.
Surely, the idea was to walk in and relish the democratizing power of an anonymous art sale. Buy what you like, as the old adage goes.
Well, I do like April Gornik. I whipped out my phone for a quick refresher. Landscapes. Skies. Stormy clouds. I like Peter Dayton, too. Google said flowers. Colorful stripes. Surfboards.
I wondered if artists ever try to fox the audience, joke with them. Would Peter Dayton submit a macramé dream-catcher instead, that would only catch the eye of a 10-year-old?
By the time the doors opened there must have been a hundred people behind me. Inside, the gallery was a cacophony of miniature art, mostly contemporary, all smudges and blurred lines. Modern art isn’t easy. It is not obvious. You need to be told. This stuff has to be — simply has to be! — better than it looks. I even wondered if the fire extinguisher on the wall was part of the exhibition. I spotted a landscape with big, stormy Gornik-esque clouds. Person number four had already claimed it. I continued to swirl through the room, unable to really focus.
Then something caught my eye. A pair of line drawings on Priority Mail postage labels. One had an old-school cellphone, like those from the late 1990s when they resembled walkie-talkies. Instead of the number pad, there was a face. The other had a surfboard (Peter Dayton: surfboards!). Yes, they were simple enough to be drawn by a child, but then every Gerhard Richter I’ve seen could have been done by a toddler with a squeegee.
And isn’t modern art supposed to be about communicating ideas? Aren’t artists inveterate cultural borrowers who harvest ideas from the realm of our times? Wasn’t this artist using a visual pun with the telephone to make a statement about device-addiction — literally, our faces in our phones? I convinced myself this had to be the work of a clever artist living in the information age, making art that anyone can decode and respond to.
A docent who could see what I was eyeing whispered over my shoulder, “An artist from London who was just here pointed to those and said they were his favorites.”
An insider tip! I stuck my red dots on the two prints and left as smug as Charles Saatchi the day he discovered a shark swimming in formaldehyde.
David Hickey, long regarded as the enfant terrible of art criticism, once said: “The art world is divided into those people who look at Raphael as if it’s graffiti, and those who look at graffiti as if it’s Raphael, and I prefer the latter.”
Apparently, so do I.
On revelation day, the Sunday after the event ended, I went to collect my acquisitions. The signatures revealed that two sixth graders from the Springs School were the artists. I tip my hat to Juan Moscoso and Carolina Condon. Their drawings are not simply works of art but works of geniuses. Theirs are pieces of bona fide art that made me question whether art validates the artist or the artist the art. They had got me thinking. And that’s the whole point of art, right?
Judy D’Mello covers education, art, and more for The Star.