These were my thoughts on seeing the Andrew Wyeth exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They have not been coordinated with one another and definitely don’t constitute a “review.” I typed them in short note form right when I got back from the exhibition, a couple weeks ago, and have been putting off fleshing them out enough for a general audience. Now I’m done.

The audio tour introduction contained a quote from Wyeth along the lines of “People who don’t look at my work think of me as a painter of old oaken buckets. I’m anything but that.” This was preceded by something straight from the curator to the same effect – “we hope you’ll discover that Andrew Wyeth isn’t about what you thought he was; there’s more to this work than there might seem.” To which I wanted to ask: why do exhibitions always need to claim that they are going to change your mind about something or reveal secrets? It reminds me of the sort of formulaic thing kids (I) do (did) in writing high school essays to create the effect of being thought-provoking, by contriving to make compatible things seem incompatible so as then to reveal them as compatible. “Paradoxically, many of Shakespeare’s plays are about the rich, yet he wrote them for an audience of the poor.” This is like a magician telling you he has some linked rings in his bag, then pulling out — ta-da! — two separate rings! So anyway, why do museums have to stoop to this sort of thing? Why does an exhibit have to “accomplish” anything other than putting worthy works on display? It seems to fit in with an aspect of 20th century art-world thought that I hate, the idea that art theory and art itself are close relatives.

There’s also something dishonest and (it seems to me) motivated by a sense of inadequacy more than anything else, about this desire to claim that art isn’t just what it seems to be. I could imagine that Wyeth’s comment about the old oaken buckets is also a form of defensiveness. Because whatever else he may be, he most certainly is a painter of old oaken buckets. And what’s so wrong with that? Somewhere, the unvoiced opinion that it is “naive” or “trite” is ringing in the air, and the artist, the curator, and the reviewer are all scrambling to distance themselves from it.

It is a lamentable state of mind, to believe that the claim that art has value needs substantiation but the claim that art lacks value does not. When someone accuses something of being naive or embarrassing, it takes guts to stand up for it and say that it isn’t naive – because you might look naive in the process – but when someone “accuses” something of being great art, there’s no risk involved in saying that they’re wrong. Except the risk of looking cranky, but crankiness and sophistication are perceived as compatible, whereas naivete and sophistication are opposites.

I should have said, it’s a lamentable state of mind to believe that the claim that art has value needs more rigorous substantiation than the claim that art lacks value. The looming unspoken criticism, that Wyeth’s work is insubstantial sentimentalism, is not, in fact, self-evident. The exhibition seemed to believe that it was, which could only stem from the fact that the works were being defended in somewhat bad faith by an institution that actually fundamentally agreed with the criticisms. Any era’s art culture is made up of various biases – but either they’re saying that we should forget our biases – which they weren’t; these were not paintings of old oaken buckets, they told us; those would indeed be trashy – or they’re saying that our biases don’t concern these works, which is either an easy case to make or else simply isn’t true. Instead, what they chose to say was: those biases do concern these works, but not enough to convict. You probably thought these works were guilty, because they do look guilty, but we’re going to spring them on a technicality, and won’t that be exciting. This was, to me, distasteful.

The review in the New York Times of this exhibit more or less dismissed the body of it as being just so much magic romanticism and singled out a recent painting of the interior of Wyeth’s private jet as the most interesting in the show, because it reveals that Wyeth’s actual life is one of wealth and privilege. This strikes me as cynical to the point of offensiveness. The curation made convincingly clear that Wyeth’s paintings attempt to be about memory and death and the nature of experience, and the like – this in the end is the gist of the “not just buckets” comment. The idea that the painting that reveals him to be rich is more interesting than the paintings that don’t is, it feels to me, contemptuously far from trying to take his work seriously. “Yeah yeah, the mystery of life, sure – what would you know, gramps? Why don’t you just buy yourself another fucking yacht and shut up already.” This infuriates me just like all the reviews of mainstream Hollywood movies on IMDB that say “what a bunch of whiny white people!”

Despite all sorts of macho/curmudgeonly insinuation to the contrary, I still cannot see any situation in which empathy is a mistake or will lead to weakness. Lack of empathy may not be anything to be ashamed of, but it is most definitely nothing to be proud of. Sticking sociological Cheetos on it (“bourgeois,” “white,” “entitled”) and trying to pass it off as incisive criticism really offends me. Yes, some artists might well be white and rich, and if from your point of view that’s depressing or distracting, that’s probably something worth talking about – but it’s not the same thing as the art itself.

Yeah yeah, contemporary theory would say they’re inseparable. Well, not gonna talk about it right now but I already touched on this at the end of this entry. Inseparable doesn’t mean indistinct.

The curatorial texts on the walls and the audio-tour talked all about how Wyeth used symbols, parallels, conceptual abstraction, design, and other visual elements to indicate psychology, drama, the flavor of experience, personal significances etc. etc. as though these were the choices and ideas that made his work deep, valuable, and distinctive. But… that’s what painting is! I wasn’t sure whether the fact that baby-talking curators were spoon-feeding us these many-century-old basic premises of the painter’s art – the premises underlying most of the other art in the museum – was a reflection of the educational/outreach spirit of this intentionally crowd-drawing special exhibit, or of the fact that the art that contained all those elements, which I would call “painting,” is as an institution long dead. I think it’s both. It just struck me as odd that the same people who had walked through the museum and looked at all sorts of paintings without help were now being acknowledged probably to have had no clue or reason to care about them.

The exhibit narrated its way through A. Wyeth’s apprenticeship to his father N.C. Wyeth, giving some idea of the rigorous, traditional craftsman’s training he received. I liked that part, and I liked that aspect of the work as a whole. Respect for craft always pleases me. Isn’t craft such a huge part of the effect and value of a painting? I’m still impressed to the point of being moved by the fact that skilled painters can make paint look exactly like real things. Am I supposed to be embarrassed about that? You can say it’s a superficial thing to care about, if you must, but isn’t the irritating thing about craft-less contemporary art exactly the “my dog could do that” syndrome? I for one take great pleasure in seeing things that I couldn’t do. They’re more impressive, which is to say more likely to make an impression on me.

Wyeth’s work is more or less all about the specific quality of the craft, to me, but that’s hard to talk about so the curation simply didn’t. How does he make a lot of dead grass seem like memorable, romantic dead grass? It’s all to do with brush strokes and color mixing; that’s why he’s in the museum. The actual notions behind the paintings (“this rock symbolizes his father”) are just the framework, and notions are a dime a dozen. I know it’s hard to talk about technique, at least in a valuable way… so instead here’s the audio guide leading us down some other, pointless path, because it can.

A drawback of craft-oriented art is that, like out-and-out craft, it can start to seem monotonous; it’s more about the work as a whole than about any particular piece. It’s no wonder that only a few of them stand out as superior, but why should they have to? 60 works at once is too many for anyone. If there was a single Andrew Wyeth hanging in the diner down the street, you can bet I would have noticed it and thought it was pretty great. Of course, maybe that’s not the best way to think about it. Or maybe it’s exactly the best way to think about it.

I was standing there looking at some painting of a window, and next to me are a couple of average-looking late-middle-aged touristy guys looking at some painting of a window. They’re reading this paragraph on the wall about it (“Wyeth draws us through the window into the space beyond…” or something), pressing #141 on their audio guide and listening, and then looking again at this painting of a window, trying hard to get it. Why am I looking at this? we ask, and the museum tries to tell us and we try to agree. I don’t know, it seemed so absurd. Somehow these guys had entered into a contract wherein they would pay money to look at a picture of a window, and having paid the money, they were going to look at it and look at it good. Did they care? Did I care? Isn’t this what everyone ends up thinking about at a museum?

Working one’s whole life toward a single aesthetic goal is more of a thing to live than to a thing to see all at once. I think sometimes I try to be a completist because it seems like this is what’s wanted of me by the creators of things that fit into complete sets, or by the sets themselves. But those sets are just the result of the constant creative functioning of the artist, and don’t form an artistic whole to be enjoyed in the form of its completeness any more than the artist’s life itself. So maybe we never need 60 paintings all at once.

The exhibit included long sequences of preliminary studies for two paintings. They were interesting because they revealed some aspects of the technique and the process – but shouldn’t that be like bonus material rather than part of the main attraction? Again, the museum was opting to be about art study rather than art itself.

I’m not sure but I think maybe N.C. was the better artist.