Teens/adults - Lesson 3: But Is It Art?

On September 19, 1993, the popular CBS news hour 60 Minutes aired what became a notorious segment by Morley Safer, “Yes…But Is It Art?” Without a doubt, it was slap-in-the-face, controversial broadcast designed to question Contemporary Art’s validity. He began by quoting P.T. Barnum’s legendary missive that there’s a sucker born every minute. Safer, whose Vietnam-era reporting provided the foundation for his long career as a respected journalist, repeatedly used incendiary and dismissive language in his segment and provided examples of art auctions and conceptual art works to illustrate what he considered a multi-billion dollar conspiracy akin to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” He called most new art “worthless junk” including numerous examples of high-priced works and artists, despite their established reputations within the art community.

After the broadcast, the reactions from artists and people working with Contemporary Art were swift and angry. Safer was called a philistine, anti-intellectual, and uninformed by some critics, artists, and dealers. The New York Times art reporter Carol Vogel wrote a follow-up piece, “Art World Is Not Amused by Critique” that attempted to balance out both sides of an emerging argument, but it was clear that Safer spoke for many people with similar disdain for Contemporary Art. Numerous others agreed with Safer that the Contemporary Art business is a house of cards, a crooked marketing engine, a scam.

This kerfuffle—and the follow-up 60 Minutes piece, “Art|Market” that aired in 2012, four years before Safer’s death—presents us today with a fine example of Aesthetics questioning in action. Let’s dig into it and determine what the various reactions to this television segment have to teach us now.

First, watch the entire 12-minute story, “Yes, But Is It Art"?” Notice Safer’s language and tone, examples of art he selects, his choices of experts, and how the segment is structured.

What do you think the goals of the story are? What was Safer attempting to accomplish?

It’s an inflammatory piece, without question, aimed at an audience that ate up every word. In its heyday, 60 Minutes loved nothing more than to call out corruption, to unmask charlatans, and to provoke viewers against hypocrisy. The show was a weekly exposé machine. Each episode in the era ended with the curmudgeonly Andy Rooney, who trained his satirical eye on the perceived loss of a way of American life to modernity. This was not a show about progressivism, inclusion, or intellectual discovery. The 60 Minutes audience was primed for the kind of piece that Safer delivered on art.

Art strikes back

Immediately following the controversy of “Yes…But Is It Art?”, PBS’s program Charlie Rose invited Safer into a 44-minute panel discussion with prominent voices in art to delve into the issue further. It consisted of an artist of international stature Jenny Holzer, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art David A. Ross, and art critic for The Nation and Columbia University professor of philosophy Arthur Danto. Charlie Rose led the discussion. Safer was unapologetic—he said he had been planning the segment for years—but the arguments by the others provide valuable context for Aesthetics, today.

Predictably, the discussion got heated. Safer was called out for his “cheap shots” and lack of balance in his reporting. Danto said that Safer was not asking questions about art but condemning it outright. Safer had quoted New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, but a fuller statement by Kimmelman was read, noting that even he has had “crises of faith in the midst of the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale. But I had no doubt about which side to stand on when the lines were drawn by Mr. Safer. No one who genuinely cares about art and aesthetics can feel anything but alarm while watching lampoons like the one broadcast into 17 million households the other night.”

After a part of the debate in which the panelists themselves disagreed with each other, Holzer noted, “We just demonstrated that the art world is too diverse and too feisty to agree on a conspiracy that you seem to think you’ve identified.”

Watch the debate (Charlie Rose 10/25/1993) and capture your reactions. Do your opinions shift as you hear from the panelists? Was this discussion more balanced and nuanced than Safer’s 60 Minutes segments?

Latter-day Saint culture and its visual art conservatism

This aesthetic debate is a pivital one for Latter-day Saint culture, too. The value of Contemporary Art is not assured for many members of the Church. To view new art with suspicion—if not outright condemnation—is common, despite the fact that numerous artists in the Church are making such work and exhibiting it in some of the most prestigious galleries and museums in the world. Where does this visual art conservatism come from?

The official publications of the Church rely heavily on illustration. Perhaps as a consequence, many members come to look skeptically at art made by members of the Church who distance themselves from realistic illustration. Advanced art education is another issue. Certainly there are other explanations, as well, that fold into similar conservative positions in social issues, politics, etc.

Where do you sit on the spectrum of this range of art appreciation? Again, it returns to this question: What is art for?

85% of art

After the original Safer dust up, the CBS journalist quoted art critic Jerry Saltz, at the time the critic for New York magazine, quipping, “Even Jerry Saltz says that 85 percent of the art we see is bad.”

Jerry Saltz, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018, wrote an essay, “Morley Safer: Playing It Safe,” for the magazine in which he reflected on the aftermath of Safer’s television news pieces. Published immediately after the 2012 piece, Saltz wrote, “In last night's segment, Safer delivered cliché after cliché, starting with ‘the emperor's new clothes.’ Earlier in the week, he was moaning that contemporary art ‘lacks any irony.’ (What has he been looking at these past 40 years?) He worried that the ‘gatekeepers of art’ permit such bad work. He doesn't know that there are no ‘gatekeepers’ in the art world anymore, that it's mainly a wonderful chaos. It's like the scene in Apocalypse Now when Martin Sheen crosses into Cambodia and asks a soldier, ‘Who's in charge here?’ The soldier, unaware he's in a place where old rules no longer apply, panics and replies, ‘I thought you were!’ That's Safer.” [1]

Regarding his quotation that 85% of art is bad, Saltz said this, which might be helpful to you as you consider your reaction to Contemporary Art or to the value of art, generally, “I wanted to tell [Safer] that the percent I suggested doesn't only apply to the present. Eighty-five percent of the art made in the Renaissance wasn't that good either. It's just that we never see it: what is on view in museums has already been filtered for us. Safer doesn't get that the thrill of contemporary art is that we're all doing this filtering together, all the time, in public, everywhere. Moreover, his 85 percent is different from my 85 percent, which is different from yours, and so on down the line….” [2]

[1] Jerry Saltz, “Morley Safer: Playing It Safe,” Artnet, http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/morley-safers-art-world-screed-4-2-12.asp

[2] ibid, accessed, March 24, 2020