I don't know where they get the money

Renaissance Hotel, Aruba

I remember a time when you seldom heard people speaking a foreign language on the streets of Manhattan. Maybe in the Bronx people spoke Spanish -- Puerto Ricans -- but not on Park Avenue or even in Greenwich Village. Nowadays, not only does one hear German and French but also languages one cannot so easily place: is it a Slavic tongue, or perhaps Hebrew? One hears the chattering in Central Park, one of New York's major tourist attractions, but also in Zabar's and at Whole Foods.

And those are only the folks who are identifiably "European," for there are also lots of families who seem to hail from the Indian subcontinent and who speak other unfamiliar languages.

When I studied in Germany back in the 1960s, very few Germans traveled across the sea. The same for the French, Italians, Dutch, and so on. Back then, the tourists in Europe were Americans, most of whom traveled on group tours and stayed in hotels where they did not have to suffer European plumbing or unheated bedrooms. We who were students at foreign universities took pride in our hardiness back then.

European cities in the late 1960s were not yet the efficient, polished, tourist-accommodating places they have become. It is true that the Paris Metro ran well, as did all trains north of the Italian border, but my experience of the austerity of Paris and of Germany allowed me to appreciate the privileged material conditions of the U.S. and, in the long run, may have protected me from an overestimation of the merits of foreign countries, all of which were still resolutely different from one another. Not only was Europe not yet connected to the world, electronically or otherwise, but it was also unheated for the most part.

Despite Fodor’s European guidebooks, it was also intensely wearying to find one’s way around a foreign country. There were none of the hang-outs that now exist all over the world, from Hong Kong to Katmandu, buffering the experience of gap-year travelers. In that respect there is now very little to challenge a traveler in Europe or even in Asia in the early 21st century. Students traveling abroad today, whatever their nationality, find the same conditions in practically every town or city, including American-style coffee shops with internet access and clean toilets. Moreover, even in Italy everyone now speaks English. The world has really become Americanized, as Europeans used to complain in the 1960s, but they in the meantime have gone along with it.

I also remember when French and Germans didn't look the same. Nowadays when I hear a foreign language with which I am not familiar I will study the face to see if its features give the speaker away as, say, Polish or Russian. Eastern Europeans are not yet quite as "polished" as Western Europeans: they don't have a century of economic progress behind them. But the funny thing about economic progress is that it homogenizes us. We are all alike in our tastes. We read the same kinds of magazines for guidance on how to dress or how to outfit our homes. So, the advance of wealth over a wider swath of the earth leads more and more to the erasure of national or ethnic identity.

So, clearly people have money nowadays. They travel to places where the inhabitants do the same things and live the same way as they do back home.

Against "knowningness"

My friend Gesine and I went to the Guggenheim to view the exhibition How to Work Better, which surveys the oeuvre of Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. As the Guggenheim brochure indicates, it is "the first comprehensive overview of their 33-year-collaboration in a New York museum." If you are looking for "art" in a traditional sense, for instance, an object that you can feast your eyes on, that you can "dwell" with, that makes you consider how its craft has been achieved, then this show is not for you. This is art that can only be viewed in an institutional setting: at large museums or at international biennales. It represent a kind of "Gesamtkunstwerk." You can't pick up a replica for your book shelf, although postcards are available.

The walls of the winding, ascending galleries of the Guggenheim are filled with "replicas" of ordinary objects, with videos of "chain reactions" utilizing everyday objects, large monitors showing still photographs, slide installations with ponderous questions ("Why Does the World Turn Around Once a Day"). There are also innumerable small constructions composed of two figures, of unfired clay, to which are affixed a "concept": e.g., "High and Low." The goal is "to confuse traditional hierarchies and value systems."

Small and Big

A five-year-old could produce the figures, although, of course, a five-year-old would not be so "knowing" as to dream up the concepts. Come to think of it, maybe Fischli and Weiss had kids prepare the objects: it is hard to believe that they actually immersed their own hands in clay, like in a preschool. But what do I know? The show is for people who are "knowing," for whom the contraries represented by the objects represent some kind of wisdom.

Gesine and I had different reactions to the show. She liked the whimsicality of the small objects, contended that they make you think. I always feel like a disapproving chaperon on such occasions, for my response to such shows is always of "the emperor has no clothes" variety. And just as with emperors, an astonishing amount of institutional resources have gone into maintaining the deception. The description of the artists' methodology in the the brochure produced in me the proverbial gag reaction. Take this one: "Tischi and Weiss shunned the authoritative voice of the artist and acted instead as whimsical philosophers who pondered all questions, great and small."

But the subject of my post here is "knowingness." The appeal of such "art" is to people who are in the know about the latest cool things, people who are ahead of the curve and who express their knowingness in being able to get what the artist is doing, unlike the rubes who wonder what the fuss is about. Of course, I recognize what the artists are doing. I have a Ph.D., and I am au current about the contemporary art scene, but my rube background also makes me aware of the gimmicky aspect. Indeed, I suspect that the artists themselves know that they are not philosophers and that what they are doing is a gimmick. It is a gimmick, however, that has led to a career, to prizes, awards, exhibitions, magazine covers, and the like. That is the artistic world we live in now. Art requires craft, and while there is much craft in what has been installed at the Guggenheim -- people with various skills, especially technicians, are required to pull it all together -- in the end its purpose is to satisfy a small crowd of connoisseurs. In the process, it confirms a conformity of taste,  the taste of people in the know.