About the Author

Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts and the director of the Comparative Arts and Culture Graduate Program at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment. She will blog about university life, the arts. and culture.

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Recent Posts

A Secretary's Taste | Comment [4]

The Way Taste Grows | Comment [5]

You Need Judgment to See Art | Comment [8]

Why a College Professor Teaches Taste | Comment [22]

The Problem of Aesthetic Taste | Comment [37]

Featured Articles By the Author

A Brush with Leo Strauss

A Pedagogical Straitjacket

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mess

Blowing Art-Theory Smoke

Creative Class, Dismissed

The Lie of the Portrait

May 11, 2008

A Secretary's Taste

Professor Fendrich is very busy with all the things that professors are busy with at the end of a semester. Plus it’s Mother’s Day, and she’s a mother (I’m not). So when I told her to take a breather and I’d fill in for her, she was pretty quick to say yes.

Lately, a lot of readers seem especially up in arms about the idea that some people’s taste might be better than others’ and that both studio and art history professors might actually help students improve their taste.

I’ve got some general reactions to all of the angry comments, but first I’d like to say something to someone named Marc Country, about the art critic Clement Greenberg.

Professor Fendrich would be too modest to put this in her blog herself, but I happen to know that she knew Mr. Greenberg and he even came to her studio once. She said he was charming and fascinating (and that he drank two beers while he was there), but that he was absolutely sure that his own taste in painting was the best, that he had a special eye, and that hers wasn’t quite at his level and probably wouldn’t ever quite get there. He was willing, she told me, to guide her by doing something he called “taking the painting around the clock,” which meant rotating it 90 degrees and analyzing it in each of the four positions on the wall. (I’ve tried doing that with some of the pictures I have at home, but all it does is confuse me.)

Before I met Professor Fendrich, I never thought about my taste at all. But I’ve learned a lot from hanging around her, listening in sometimes while she talks to students about art, and now from reading her posts and all the comments people are posting about her ideas.

Professor Fendrich reads a lot of this old French philosopher Tocqueville, and has even directed me to read some pages, from his book about America, that are about what happens to art in America compared to art in France, where there were high-class people we don’t have here in America.

She told me that she thinks that people getting so worked up about taste is something that could only happen in a democracy. She says that Tocqueville’s book is about how people in a democracy love equality more than anything else. Even though they say they love freedom, when push comes to shove, they’ll take equality over freedom any day.

I think this is still true today. The mere thought that some people might have better taste than other people seems to make a lot of people go bonkers. (It’s funny, though, how they accept the fact that some people are just plain better at sports than other people, or that some people have better singing voices than others do. Even if you’re born with sports talent or musical ability, you have to work hard to improve them, and people accept that. But they don’t like the idea that the same things might apply to taste.)

Some of the commentators seem to think that she must beat her students over the head with her opinions. Nope. Never. I’ve seen her in action, and she just talks about what’s beautiful or moving in a painting and asks students to follow along while she talks. Then they go off and pick their own favorite art.

I’ve learned a lot from going on some of Professor Fendrich’s field trips to museums. Sometimes I agree with Professor Fendrich’s opinion, and sometimes I stick to my own opinion. But the discussions, which start with her talking about which works of art she thinks are really great and which she thinks aren’t, are what really help me improve my taste. If I had to rely on just museum labels or wall texts, which tell us a lot about the history of the art but very little or nothing about how the art actually works, visually, I never would have gotten anywhere.

The funny thing is that while I’m trying to improve my taste (not by just following along with Professor Fendrich’s, mind you, but by thinking about what she’s said and arguing with myself about it), I’ve also been reading all these comments from other professors (at least I assume most of them are from professors) about how anybody’s taste is as good as anybody else’s.

A lot of people seem to think that to say anything against the idea that tastes are equal is “elitist” (a new word for me), and that art professors shouldn’t go around “shoving their taste down students’ throats,” as I think one commentator more or less said.

What’s funny is that there’s no one more “elitist” (I think I’m using the word right) than college professors. They think they’re smarter than most other people (and they often are, although professor smartness doesn’t go hand-in-hand with regular smartness, which I think counts for a lot more). They’re also more conscious of rank than anybody I know, even people in the military. An assistant professor is lowly, an instructor lowlier still, an associate professor is pretty good, but only a full professor is a real bull (or bullette, I guess you might say).

It seems that a lot of commentators think that students are too impressionable to handle any professing of taste by the professor. All I can say is that if I were a student and a professor who was supposedly teaching me about art wouldn’t open up about his or her taste, or “aesthetic judgment,” as Professor Fendrich and others call it, I’d ask to get my tuition back.

I have to admit that I’m not necessarily any happier in my life since Professor Fendrich has started me thinking about taste. “Ignorance is bliss,” they say, and that applies as much to taste as it does to anything. But my life is a little … deeper, I think. I don’t know. I think my life has changed because I now notice some things that are beautiful that I absolutely never noticed before. I’ve even started to think about how my home looks, and I’ve made some changes in the things I put on display.

You know, I keep hearing professors say that college is a time when students are confronted with ideas that are very different from the ones they knew about before they came to college, and that this is a good thing. Well, in my book, that should go for taste, too. And the professors who aren’t making students just a little uncomfortable about their tastes aren’t really doing their jobs.

May 8, 2008

The Way Taste Grows

Children neither see nor think about the taste in their homes, which are simply backdrops to their lives, not aesthetic zones. Whatever taste is expressed in the home is simply the way things are — like the forces of nature — and it’s almost impossible for children to step back and think about their parents’ taste. During high school, in particular, kids begin to modify the taste they learned from their parents by what they encounter on their own — at school, in the mall, on television and, these days, on the Web.

I, for instance, grew up in a home where my parents’ taste in interior design tended toward excess, checked only by their frugality and limited resources. Just about every available surface was covered with knickknacks. My mother invested a lot of those possessions with much more sentimental than aesthetic value; the knickknack came from a wonderful vacation, a friend gave it to her for Christmas, it was made by one of her children, etc. When she cleaned house, she dusted them lovingly. My parents were very decent people, with good values accompanied by charitable actions. But, as an artist with a gimlet eye, I know that their taste was pretty bad.

A painter like me can see that the objects in my parents’ home, considered as a whole, made no aesthetic sense whatsoever, even if a few of their possessions, considered individually, were fairly nice-looking. So why wasn’t their taste any better?

Good taste requires, for starters, that the whole prevail over the parts. Few of us have either the money or the aesthetic focus to construct our interiors following this principle (one followed, within their paintings, by almost all great painters). Instead, most of us acquire our aesthetic objects — i.e., those things in plain view in our homes that we like to look at — rather serendipitously, over time, the same way my parents did. Good taste necessitates a certain mercilessness — a cool determination to cull sentimentally valued individual objects out of the herd of one’s visible possessions for the sake of the aesthetic whole.

A world-class contemporary art dealer, now retired, once told my husband how to decorate a room. Take everything out of it, he said, and bring the objects back in, in order of size, one at a time. With each object, ask yourself if it’s absolutely necessary. If it’s not, he said, leave it out. How many of us are willing do to that? (He also said to move furniture away from the walls, so as to make room for large paintings. He sold large paintings, of course.)

Yet my parents genuinely aspired to good taste. They actively wanted their home to look nice, to exude better taste and, more important, they wanted to better themselves through art. They went so far as to hang a framed (but otherwise utterly worthless) reproduction of a Cézanne landscape painting over their mantle, even though my mother knew nothing about the artist and didn’t particularly like her reproduced picture. They read Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, they belonged to local reading groups, and they made sure their children got to see Shakespeare plays and experience the occasional museum visit.

Their taste was the despised “middlebrow” taste ridiculed by Dwight Macdonald in his 1960 essay, “Masscult and Midcult.” Macdonald and other intellectuals (including the great American art critic, Clement Greenberg) saw “middlebrow” culture as the pathetically pretentious and ultimately comic efforts of the despised bourgeoisie to put on airs.

Macdonald and Greenberg were parlor Marxists who apparently and somewhat paradoxically believed that you were either born to “get” higher culture, or you weren’t. Their attacks, together with larger forces such as the coming of television, blew a hole in the ship of middlebrow culture and taste and — as Joan Shelley Rubin lucidly documents in her excellent book, The Making of Middlebrow Culture — it’s been slowly sinking ever since. Sure, there’s a bunch of reading groups in various cities, and Oprah’s Book Club, but these things are a far cry from the Book of the Month Club or Dr. Frank Baxter on TV on Shakespeare.

For all its faults — awkward abridgements of the classics, bowdlerization, the heavy editorial hand of anthologizers and packagers — the bourgeois, middlebrow culture of my parents that has now almost disappeared managed to spread art far and wide in its day. It permitted thousands of people outside the plutocracy and the ivory tower to understand and appreciate higher culture at some palpable level. Even amid forests of knickknacks, it permitted children like me to grow up with a sense that there was something beyond department-store shopping and television sitcoms that mattered.

We lost something when we permitted the intellectual elite to knock bourgeois culture down so that masscult could then trample it to death.

NOTES

1. Once again, “good taste” and “bad taste” aren’t hard and fast, scientifically provable, immutable exacts. But they do exist.

2. There’s also such a thing as “no taste,” where certain people just don’t care much what things look like. They subscribe to the visual equivalent of people totally not into food who say, “I eat to live, not live to eat.”

3. My parents’ taste wasn’t on account of economic deprivation. They were marginally “comfortable.”

4. My own taste isn’t perfect, not even connoisseur-level, but it is better than most. I am, however, somebody who has spent an awful lot of time looking at art, at interior design, and thinking about them, so it stands to reason I have a little heightened visual acuity at my service. In the area of wardrobe, I’ve got serious work to do.

5. Many masscult things rise to the level of, well, something better than low masscult — e.g., such sitcoms as “The Honeymooners,” “I Love Lucy,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Cheers,” and “The Office.”

Next time: Teaching taste in the classroom.

May 5, 2008

You Need Judgment to See Art

When I talk about teaching taste, I’m not talking about teaching multiplication tables. Obviously, there’s no right or wrong “answer” to questions of taste. Nor is taste something that any teacher should try to impose on students. It would be an injustice to reward or punish students according to whether or not they agree with someone else’s taste.

But students are deeply shortchanged by their art teachers’ refusing to make judgments and explain them, since they’re given no help in entering what the great art historian E.H. Gombrich called, “The Story of Art.” They also are misled, since they don’t explicitly learn that artists always think and behave in terms of judging what they do and see as bad, good, better, and best. (Eavesdrop on almost any conversation in a bar frequented by artists to confirm this.)

The current situation—where people seem downright afraid to pass judgment, to argue their opinions, to wrestle with where things rank according to their quality—leads to teaching art as if it’s no more than just another unremarkable byproduct of larger historical, political, economic or sociological forces. In the process, of course, the unique voice of the art is almost totally discounted.

If we ban judgment from matters of taste, we reduce art to art-historical data. Fear of judgment spurred the rise of “visual studies” and “visual culture” departments to replace “art” and “art history” departments. These like their art dished up as social science, which flattens art into something that’s more or less the same as making up a train schedule.

Aesthetic taste, in reflecting the sensitivities peculiar to the organ of sight—the eye (working in conjunction with the brain, obviously, since the eye is passive)—derives from a number of things, beginning (although by no means ending) with the biology of the viewer possessing the taste. Some people, for example, can distinguish a significantly larger range of colors than others, or make out a greater range of tonal variations. On the other hand, some people have red/green color blindness (about 8 percent of the population) and a few have the condition of achromatopsia (where no colors can be distinguished at all).

We can all agree (I hope) that someone with achromatopsia should not be in the business of teaching painting (unless it’s monochrome painting), and that we wouldn’t give much credence to the aesthetic taste for color of such a teacher. Music has its Beethoven, composing music even when deaf, but the nature of painting makes such a marvel impossible.

It should be obvious (although somehow it isn’t) that having good or bad taste—in anything—has utterly no connection to whether one is morally good or bad, and startlingly less correspondence with intelligence or level of education than one might think. Life mixes morals, intelligence, education and taste in individuals into various stews. When talking about art, it’s always worth noting that, as often as not, brilliant art collections have been built by people who were despotic, wicked or downright evil—Leo X, the Medici, Hermann Goering come immediately to mind.

Aesthetic taste changes drastically from culture to culture (some cultures, for instance, like lots of clutter, while other cultures like things visually sparse), which makes cross-cultural comparisons risky. And within individuals, it changes as they mature. In their twenties, thirties and forties, people’s tastes often change rapidly and frequently. By fifty, however, most people’s tastes are usually pretty much set in stone. Or perhaps I’d better say, “people’s ranges of taste.” The same person who loves John Prine in the morning can easily turn around and love Beethoven in the afternoon.

In his absolutely essential essay, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757), David Hume acknowledges that the several qualities someone with good taste must have—“a strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison and cleared of all prejudice” —are impossible to identify in any given person. He goes on to argue that this doesn’t mean such a person couldn’t possibly exist—Hume’s standards were human, not Olympian. Hume meant that although it will always be subject to dispute whether any particular person has good taste, taken as a whole, the activity of judging remains valid.

Gombrich was asked at a lecture I attended if he had an opinion as to who was the greatest artist in the history of art. He didn’t say, “That question can’t be answered,” or “That depends.” Instead, he said, “One is tempted to mention the name of Michelangelo.” The judgment was delicate and tentative, and I daresay not one person in the audience felt that Gombrich was imposing his taste on the audience.

Yes, Gombrich’s taste, in judging Michelangelo to be the best artist, is subject to dispute. A man of his brilliance clearly knew that, but in integrating his judgment, taste and understanding of art into a whole, he was capable of seeing greatness—and, of course, seeing non-greatness. If you can’t even acknowledge that artistic greatness exists and stands out against a field of non-greatness, you’ll never, ever see it.

Next time: How some thinkers, in putatively trying to rescue regular folks from the taste hierarchy of hidebound elitists, actually stifled natural and commendable desires on the part of those regular folks to make their taste a little better.

May 2, 2008

Why a College Professor Teaches Taste

Reader responses to my previous post compel me to digress from my planned post—on how I go about teaching taste—in order to address the question of why I presume to teach taste to my students.

My initial post on taste reveals the extreme, even raw sensitivity many people—even university professors—have when it comes to the mere suggestion that taste might be a hierarchical matter. That a college professor like me dares to teach good taste—instead of simply “explaining” it, as if it’s a neutral matter, like a fact—elicits the charge of elitism (not so bad), snobbism (pretty bad) and even worse, words that don’t belong in print on a blog site dedicated to issues of higher education (very bad).

Ah, that nasty word elitism. But like Jon Stewart said, in mocking the flurry of commentators who charged Barack Obama with “elitism” after his comments about small-town Pennsylvanians, don’t we want leaders in democracies who are “better than us”? When it comes to art, the questions really are, Why are college art professors so afraid to convey to their students that they have superior taste?, and, Why are they afraid to teach that taste to their students?

Teaching good taste is a thoroughly democratic invitation to young art students to join the club of art-lovers by teaching them to become passionate about—rather than merely “knowledgeable” about—art.

The subjectivity of taste that always applies when things being compared are very close (e.g., judging vanilla ice cream to be superior to chocolate ice cream) does not negate the underlying truth that when things being compared are very far apart (e.g., judging Velázquez’s Las Meninas to be superior to a toddler’s scribble), no one with the least bit of visual acuity would say judgment is merely a matter of subjectivity. From this we derive the principle that matters of taste imply a hierarchy of taste, even if we can never be certain about its internal ordering.

Matters of taste and matters of morals are, in a deeply complicated way (richly explored by both Rousseau and Hume) analogous. Both have a ranking from good to bad that’s never going to be provable. A curious fact of human experience, however, is that even thinking people can’t shake the sense that these rankings are, roughly speaking, true and incontrovertible hierarchies—and not mere matters of subjectivity.

At the heart of the culture wars is a fight between many decent people with deep moral values fighting relativists, many of them in universities (most of whom are as equally decent as the first group), insisting that moral values are mere social constructs.

This same relativism clearly shows up in people who insist that matters of aesthetics boil down to preferences. It shows up in university professors when they say they are there simply to “make it clear to…students that the job of an art historian is not to judge whether art is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (i.e., notions of our own taste are not what matters), but to try to understand art within the context in which it was produced.”

To those professors, I ask this: “Why teach Velázquez at all, if you don’t love him and don’t think he’s truly great? Just because he made the history books?”

No wonder so many students fall asleep in art history classes! If a professor doesn’t love the art, if a professor doesn’t reveal to the students that he or she thinks the art is great, or conversely, think it’s grotesque, the presentation is no more than dessicated information that places art “within the context in which it was produced.” Professors like this live in the land of Nietzsche’s living dead, and their students will surely sense it. Yes, yes, I’m sure these students will do well on the outcomes assessment examinations that will eventually come their way, testing their true “knowledge” of art.

But guess what? They’ll never learn what it is to love a great work of art.

May 1, 2008

The Problem of Aesthetic Taste

In the next few posts, I’m going to tackle the topic of aesthetic taste — what’s happened to it in the past couple of decades, whether or not we can, or ought, to teach it, and if so, how we can teach it.

Freshmen arrive on campus with their own taste in everything from music to clothes, food, and electronic equipment. Consciously or not, they also have developed certain tastes in art. Taste being what it is, and young people being what they are, freshmen usually arrive with either no taste or very bad taste — not just in art, but in everything — but in either case, they’re very comfortable with their tastes. They don’t expect or want to change them. The paradox is that it just so happens that their taste, which they consider to be something that’s very particular and individual, is, in most important respects, exactly the same as that of most other college freshmen.

If college students have any opinion about art, it’s usually that M.C. Escher and Salvador Dalí are two great artists. Those who have “advanced taste”—i.e., have taken AP art history—love Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Only the rare bird likes Cézanne or De Kooning.

The aesthetic taste of college students derives from what their homes look like and their high school experience. High-school taste fuses together the sights of the mall, TV, the movies, and the Internet. The occasional forced march through an art museum, led by a well-intentioned high school art teacher, makes nary a dent. No matter their socio-economic background, gender, ethnicity, or race, without active intervention on the part of college teachers or enlightened peers, it’s unlikely that students will change their taste during college.

But it’s not just college students who often have narrow or bad taste (these differ, I admit, but they frequently overlap). I’ve known many powerhouse intellectuals, academics, bankers, doctors, and lawyers whose taste was execrable, or just plain ordinary, or who were completely oblivious to taste. How can smart, successful people hang tired, perfunctorily chosen landscapes on their own living room walls, or permit porcelain ducks with little bonnets on their heads to waddle across their coffee tables? Are they lacking some aesthetic gene that we artists have? Or are they just too busy to notice how things look in their own homes?

It’s said that there’s no accounting for taste, although I believe it’s often the case that it’s rather easy to account for it. Yes, taste may be subjective at its core, but that core is surrounded by a lot of reasons that very adequately explain why something is good or bad. There are many who would argue that because of the subjectivity of taste, it follows that no one, including a college teacher, has the right to challenge the taste of another person, including students.

But taking my cue from the wise David Hume (whom I’ll explore further in a future post), I see another side to taste. For all the impossibility of defining good taste, good taste tends to precipitate out over time and then solidify. “Say, that Manet painting sure is beautiful,” is almost as much a fact in its universal application as, “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.” In fact, good taste easily ossifies, which explains Martha Stewart. The idea that taste is radically subjective is an utterly inadequate explanation of aesthetic matters.

The higher tastes—hearing and sight—are clearly molded by particular cultures. Just as bonsai trees owe their grownup state to the multiple causes of how they were planted, their particular container, the light, the wiring of their roots, the water and fertilizer and the clipping of their limbs, visual taste varies from culture to culture. Even so, all tastes, everywhere, are contingent on the quality of the “gardener.”

Next time: How a college professor teaches taste.

April 24, 2008

Psst! Art Students!

I want to save everybody some time and effort here. You don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel, do you? For all you Aliza Shvarts wannabes, scan the following list before you start your next art piece. Most of the good ideas have already been taken.

Tying two guns to his temples in a performance piece: André Breton, back in the good old Dada days.

Killing catfish in a museum gallery: Newton Harrison (1960s)

Shooting a dog as a performance piece: Tom Otterness (1980s)

Living in a locker for 5 days: Chris Burden (1960s)

Having yourself shot: Chris Burden (1970s)

Having yourself crucified on a Volkswagen beetle: Chris Burden (1970s)

Crawling in his underwear across broken glass: Chris Burden (1970s)

Making prints with semen: Ed Ruscha (1970s)

Reading a scroll pulled from her vagina: Carolee Schneeman (1970s)

Having sex with a collector recorded on video tape: Andrea Fraser (recently)

Letting viewers view her cervix: Annie Sprinkle (1980s)

Canning his own excrement: Piero Manzoni (1960s)

Squirting paint out of his anus: Keith Boadwee (fairly recently)

Killing a chicken by wringing its neck on stage: Ralph Ortiz (1960s)

Sailing off in a boat to disappear forever: Arthur Craven (1920s)

Smearing herself with menstrual blood: (Can’t remember a name now, but there must have been lots)

Filling an entire room filled with tampons: Womanhouse, Los Angeles (1970s)

Cutting her own lips with a razor blade: Gina Pane (1970s)

Pretending to be raped on a gallery floor during an opening: Joy Poe (1970s)

Having endless plastic surgery on herself as a work of art: Orlan (ongoing)

Photographing himself with a bullwhip up his anus: Robert Mapplethorpe (1970s)

Diving out a second story window (maybe, could have been a fake): Yves Klein (1960s)

Masturbating under a gallery floor: Vito Acconci (1970s)

Suspending himself in a gallery by attaching hooks into his skin: Stelarc (1970s)

Having his back cut with a razor blade: Ron Athey (1990s)

Living tied to another artist for a year: Linda Montano (1980s)

Copying an entire novel onto canvas by hand: Al Ruppersberg (1970s)

Amputating his own penis, an inch at a time: Rudolpf Schwartzkogler (possibly faked) (1960s)

Living like a growling dog, in a cage, in a gallery: Can’t remember his name…Lassie something-or-other?…fairly recently.

P.S. I’m leaving out things like Tracy Emin’s tent, with the names of everybody she ever slept with, and Vanessa Beecroft’s nude women standing around a gallery, because they’re, so, you know, polite.

April 22, 2008

Art for Shvarts' Sake

Aliza Shvarts (Yale ’08) made a senior project consisting of an installation/video/performance piece that supposedly documents her repeatedly inseminating herself, over the course of nine months, and then inducing multiple miscarriages.

The volatile mix of contemporary art, abortion, and campus free speech lit up the blogosphere and caused an uproar on campus. Surprise. Ms. Shvarts’ show was supposed to go up today, April 22nd, right next to all the other senior art projects. As of this post, Yale is saying it won’t happen unless Ms. Shvarts agrees to publicly admit that her piece is fiction and to promise that there won’t be any real blood in the installation. (And just a few decades ago, mere abstract painting caused college deans to have palpitations!)

Last week, Helaine Klasky (Yale’s version of Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino) insisted Ms. Shvarts was merely pretending to do all the things her piece claims she really did. “The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding the form and function of a woman’s body,” said Ms. Kalsky, who ought to consider working a second job as a label-writer for the Whitney Biennial.

As far as Ms. Shvarts is concerned, the fact that her advisers knew what she was up to means they “supported” her, which in turn translates for Shvarts into her project being “university-sanctioned.” She adamantly denies her piece is a fiction: “No one can say with 100 percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen.” She adds that she didn’t know if she was ever pregnant and that the “nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.” Whatever its other faults, Yale, it seems, is quite effective in teaching its undergraduates that we live in very uncertain times.

Ms. Kalsky — not to be trumped by a young art student on the career make — responds that Ms. Shvarts’ denial is part of her performance. (Hey, somebody is either lying, or this “uncertainties” business is spreading like Kurt Vonnegut’s Ice-9.)

Kalsky then adds that Yale was “disappointed that she [Shvarts] would deliberately lie to the press in the name of art.” (Didn’t some guy named Picasso say that art is a lie that reveals the truth?)

For those of us in the contemporary-art business, the Yale squabble isn’t all that interesting. Ms Shvarts’ undergraduate project sounds so, well, so undergraduate. Contrary to what a lot of people may think, her project wouldn’t make it into a serious contemporary gallery and, if it did, it wouldn’t get much traction with the press or the public. Ms. Shvarts’ project is getting attention mostly because it’s at an elite university, where it has students, professors, administrators, and college flacks running to the free-speech and culture-wars barricades. Almost everyone in the art world has been there and done that, a long time ago.

The real stuff — e.g., performance works by such artists as Carolee Schneeman, Ana Mendieta, Karen Finley, Chris Burden or Annie Sprinkle in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s — was bitter, shocking, risky, and always on the line. It took place in funky, rented venues, and not the cushioned halls of ivy. Sometimes it was stupid, but sometimes it was powerful and moving.

The dispiriting part about Shvarts’ tempestuous teapot isn’t really the art — whether it’s morally offensive, or not, or good, or bad — but the fact that putatively edgy art projects are really guided to completion by faculty advisers who inexorably turn what was once upon a time a fierce counter-voice to culture into soft, risk-free, pseudo-avant-garde exercises in calculated offensiveness.

April 21, 2008

The Secretary to the Rescue

After writing three posts on tenure, Professor Fendrich told me that she couldn’t bear to think about it any more. She’s gone off to see her aromatherapy expert, followed by a visit to a local tavern specializing in extra-large martinis. I was a little surprised, I admit, when she told me to just “go ahead and post whatever you write.” I’m wondering if what I’m doing makes a plagiarist out of Professor Fendrich. Anyway, I don’t care. She’s a nice boss and I want to help her out.

I looked over her three posts on tenure and saw that there were a total of 98 comments. That’s too many for me to tackle. But I can say this: Based on my experience with tenured faculty (as opposed to untenured ones and adjuncts), I agree with Professor Fendrich about fixed-term contracts.

Instead of all her crazy fussing with three-, five- and 10-year contracts, however, I’d simplify things and have nothing but one-year contracts. I’ll never understand why professors think they’re better than the rest of us and get to have jobs where they can’t ever be fired.

Other than that general observation, I have three specific responses to recent readers’ comments.

Living Well (in Manhattan) Is the Best Revenge

Joseph F Foster (hmmm, no period after the middle initial — just like Harry S Truman, I bet): I’ll take Mountain View, Arkansas, over Manhattan, New York, any day.

Holy cow. All Professor Fendrich did was write about how one of the perks of living in New York is being able to experience first-class cabaret. Granted, it’s real expensive, and isn’t what everybody would do with the money they get by taking out a second mortgage. But the Oak Room — like MoMA, the Met, the Morgan, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the New Museum, the Frick, the Hispanic Society, the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and the Studio Museum in Harlem — does help make New York an interesting place to call home.

That’s all she said. She didn’t say, “I’ll take New York over Mountain View, Arkansas, any day.”

But after Mr. Foster’s comment, Professor Fendrich was curious about Mountain View, and asked me to find out whether it’d be a nice spot for her to take a short vacation. And sure enough, it is. It seems to be, actually, a kind of Cancun of the Ozarks.

In Googling a little further, I found this odd comment from a resident: “Here in Northwest Arkansas, we’ve got a lot of foreigners milling around and settling. Indeed, it seems that many folks pack up their carpetbags and leave their homes in Iowa, Kansas, New York, California and other foreign spots and wind up living here.”

Being a Yankee, Professor Fendrich could tell she wouldn’t be real welcome in Mountain View. She said if she ever goes there she’ll make it a very short vacation.

Time’s Up For Tenure

AW: Now that Prof Lauri has her professorship, tenure and being a Director of something she can also apparently afford to live in and have a studio in NY and commute to Hofstra. Then she speaks forth about tenure?

Now looky here. I’ve known Professor Fendrich for a long time and I can tell you that when she and her husband arrived in New York, baby in tow, they hardly had two quarters to rub together. It was right at the end of the time when artists could still manage to find affordable live/work space in Manhattan.

When she first moved to New York, Professor Fendrich helped patch a living together for her family by typing listings for an art magazine, installing art for an art consultant (many times in the evenings, from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m.), and teaching as an adjunct — all the while living in a dark, walk-up artist’s loft on the third floor of a crumbling building that was cold in the winter and ferociously hot in the summer. And it was located on an unglamorous street that her friends affectionately called “Rue du Rat.”

OK, so it isn’t Horatio Alger’s story. But you can bet AW wouldn’t have wanted to pay that kind of artist dues.

As to getting tenure: Well, that’s the system her university and its faculty collective-bargaining organization have agreed to. If you’re full-time, at a certain juncture, it’s tenure or out. There’s no “Thank you very much, but I’d prefer staying without tenure.”

But just because she has tenure doesn’t mean she’s got to support it. If that were the case, nobody who came up through any system in any occupation would be allowed to try to change the system, and everything would stay the same no matter how bad it got.

To top it off, AW threw in a very mean remark: And of course the “meaning of abstract painting.” Most of the people who create this stuff have no clue what they are doing until a tenured professor explains it to them.

Even I, a secretary who’s never taken an art-appreciation class in her life, can spot the attitude communicated by calling abstract painting “this stuff.” By the way, I know how to spell philistine, too. Just so you know, AW, I happen to like Professor Fendrich’s paintings very much and I don’t need any tenured professor to explain them to me.

The last thing I’d like to mention concerns this back-and-forth business between “Anti-hypocrisy advocate” and “LuckyJim.” Since “LuckyJim” seems to agree with Professor Fendrich on most things, I naturally have a slight preference for him. But he does seem like one of those smarty-pants types who’s always got to score points.

But “Anti-hypocrisy advocate” needs to get a life, period. And also a new … what did my ex-husband call it? Oh, yes. A new moniker. You know, butter melts in all of our mouths.

April 16, 2008

What Is to Be Done (About Tenure)?

In a previous post, I advocated either the abolition or the radical modification of tenure. I argued that tenure in its current form terrorizes junior faculty and renders them (to greatly varying degrees, of course) timid and impotent. It permits — even encourages — tenured faculty to act like bullies.

Moreover, I argued, tenure is responsible for many tenured faculty slowly evolving into deadwood who, although way past their prime, adore their medical insurance and office perks too much to give them up. I also raised the tenure-generated problem of “softies” — tenured faculty who are unwilling to take a stand on anything.

Readers’ comments make it clear that tenure is intertwined with a lot of issues in higher education — the “corporatizing” of the university, the “adjunctification” of the university, the “amenities arms race” in attracting students, grade inflation, the underestimating of community colleges, capricious administrators, old-boy networks, and more.

Abolishing or greatly modifying tenure won’t get rid of these problems, of course. It may even exacerbate some of them. But I still think either abolishing tenure or dramatically modifying it would, on balance, do more good than harm.

A lot of the problems associated with tenure stem from human nature, one reader noted. But as with all things having to do with human nature, it is our responsibility as mortals to structure human life so as to bring out the best in us, and at least tamp down the worst.

The first proposal: Replace tenure with fixed-year contracts. I’ve heard and read several different versions of this, but the one I tend to favor is this—an initial three-year appointment followed by a five-year appointment, followed by a 10-year appointment which would be one-time renewable. The second 10-year contract would be followed, until retirement, by as many three-year contracts as the professor can earn.

This plan is not all that different from traditional tenure. After eight years, a faculty member would be eligible for a guaranteed full decade of employment, which should be enough time do to enough advanced research and publication to earn — given talent and industry on the part of the faculty member — a second full decade on the job. After that, the professor — who’d typically be around 60 years old by then — would, in effect, have to renew his or her driver’s license by taking a road test every three years to make sure he or she hadn’t turned into deadwood.

Objections to this proposal will, I’m sure, abound. One will say that it doesn’t eliminate the potential for abuse on the part of those deciding whether or not a professor gets a new contract. No, but it will mitigate it, since every faculty member will always be looking down the road at his or her own contract renewal.

Another will say that it doesn’t eliminate the pressure on de facto “junior” faculty, i.e., those anticipating a five-year or the first ten-year appointment. That’s right. Life is not an anxiety-free experience. But failing to have a contract renewed would never be the humiliating and traumatizing experience of life-or-death tenure that we now suffer.

Yet another will say that replacing tenure with reappointment contracts would increase the emphasis on quantity over quality, but I can’t see how this situation could be any worse than it is now.

An alternative proposal (fasten your seatbelts, this is a bumpy idea): Have the second instance of the tenure decision (the five-year reappointment) reside in the hands of a department of another college or university of roughly the same size and rank, using such criteria as admissions competitiveness, faculty/student ratios, percent of faculty doing research, and research grants to decide what are equivalent institutions.

Peer assessments from the home department and institution regarding teaching, service, and research would be in the form of written letters addressed to the departmental committee at the other college or university. A yearly rotating lottery system would determine what institution served as judge for all faculty hiring and firing decisions that arise during any particular academic year.

This idea will never go anywhere, I admit. But consider the benefits. Personality would be almost entirely removed from the equation, while academic peer evaluation would still remain the crux of hiring decisions.

Candidates up for reappointment, rather than having to spend their first three years at an institution tiptoeing around tenured faculty, would be able to know their teaching, research, and service would be evaluated by a neutral third party, and people ahead of them in their own departments would themselves be busy working on earning their own reappointment. Bullies would be defanged and forced to behave themselves in order to have their own contracts renewed.

How then will colleagues in the candidate’s own department and home institution — those most familiar with his or her teaching, research/publication, and service — make their evaluations known? They could write letters to the reappointment committee, or have meetings and author a joint letter (or letters, if there’s a dissenting opinion.)

Another far more moderate proposal is to move the first reappointment vote (three years into the hire) outside of the home department. Instead, send the dossier straight to a school-wide committee on which no member of the candidate’s department is a member. Faculty members in the home department instead write individual letters or have meetings and author joint letters.

The point of both these proposals is to change the venue of the first reappointment committee vote away from the place where most (if not all) of the bullying, servility, hallway politics, doctrinal prejudice, favor-currying, and rumor-mongering occur, and remove it to a place where perspective can be had and cooler heads might prevail.

The dangers in my proposals are obvious: Things on paper often fail to express the quality of the work of a candidate; moreover, there’s the problem of either a mismatch in expertise, or, in the case of a university-wide committee, a lack of expertise. And sending a decision to a university committee won’t get rid of hallway politics. They’d clearly continue to play a part (albeit somewhat attenuated). And then there’s the problem of doctrinal prejudice: The further from the home department, the more apt the candidate is to encounter opposition from people who dismiss out of hand whatever it is they do.

I haven’t addressed the question of the role of deans and provosts in deciding contract renewals or tenure. Even if their role remains the same as it is now, however, a system of faculty contract renewals, instead of tenure as we know it, would improve higher education.

April 13, 2008

The Soft Side of Tenure

I promised in my last post that I’d propose a couple of suggestions of what to do about the problem of tenure — and I will, but not just yet.

First, I want to bring up a problem connected to tenure that’s the opposite of the bully — the “softie.” As surely as tenure breeds bullies, it breeds softies — tenured faculty who wallow in the sweet, warm feeling of never taking a public stand on anything (even though they’ll talk endlessly, and with great sincerity, about everything). Softies can’t bring themselves to swat a fly, let alone make the difficult, painful judgment that a faculty member in their department does not merit tenure. Softies are people who were softies before they got tenure and grow even softer afterwards.

On their way up, they never offended anyone by their speech, scholarly work, or teaching. Even when confronted with ideas they know deep down to be idiotic, they always pronounce those ideas to be “very interesting and deserving of real consideration.”

Once tenured, softies become a little like people who live in cradle-to-grave welfare states. In enjoying lives without economic anxiety or risk, they develop a sense of gratitude and happiness toward the world in general (even though they may feel they owe no one, in particular, a thing).

For softies, the vote on a tenure case is such a harrowing ethical crisis that they almost completely lose their bearings. They can’t figure out any way to separate their emotions from their reason. In their empathy for the tenure candidate’s situation (one of obvious and intense stress, as all of us who have tenure know), whatever sense of duty they have to the principles that underlie tenure decisions disappears into the ugly personnel committee room air. Under the guise of “carefully weighing everything” about a candidate, “being fair,” and “assessing the work along with the university service and teaching,” their reasoning collapses into sentiment.

“Oh, what the heck,” they quietly conclude. “I can’t take this torture any longer. This candidate isn’t all that bad. My conscience is what counts and I’m going to follow my conscience.” Since they long ago forgot how to distinguish between conscience and feelings, in “following their conscience” they’re really following their feelings. No matter, in voting for tenure they get to add to their already plentiful warm and fuzzy feeling about themselves even more warm and fuzzy feelings.

As to the future students who will, over the course of the next couple of decades, be subjected to what the softie knows somewhere, deep inside, is a terribly inferior teacher and scholar, well, softies are dimly aware that they won’t be around to see it. “Besides,” the softie thinks, “This candidate isn’t all that bad, come to think of it. The work is typical of what’s out there — certainly, not any worse.” When a true pang of conscience rings, softies console themselves with the thought (not backed up by any particular evidence) that tenure spurs people to become both better teachers and better and more productive scholars.

In the face of the living, breathing tenure candidate, whose doleful gaze continually fixes on the softie’s face during the year before the tenure decision, the softie abandons all principles. The tenure candidate’s shared pictures of trips to Ecuador, stories about the partner’s illness, the two kids, and the recently purchased townhouse, haunt the softie right up to the moment the vote is cast. Relief comes only with a “yes” vote.

Abolishing or modifying tenure won’t get rid of the softie, any more than it will get rid of the bully. But it will greatly ameliorate the problems of both. When it comes to the softie, the all-or-nothing vote of tenure and its possibility for humiliating defeat for the candidate is much too much to bear. But if there were no institution of tenure, the softie might well find it’s not the end of the world, in facing a mediocre university professor, to use reason to publicly conclude, “I don’t think this work is any good.”

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