title: art babel (elevations)
medium: marker and pencil on vellum
size: 3 1/2” x 2"
date: 2009
Immediate Thoughts
If asked to conceptualize the world’s largest art museum, one might conjure an immense structure including the Hermitage Museum and the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian all interconnected by miles of hallways and underground tunnels. Here, however, we ask you to consider that scope is not relevant to size. If an image can become a memory, any person—artist, art critic, art lover, art bystander—could house the world’s largest art museum. That museum becomes portable, accessible, susceptible to the changing whims of nostalgia and time. It becomes—and remains—immediate. Defining art in this way makes it universal and equitable. It lends art what some might deem a dangerous level of interpretive freedom. And yet, for others, it’s that very openness that makes art worth pondering. Immediately and repeatedly.
If objects created by man continue to be conserved inside a museum, then there is ultimately a point in the future when not only the museum will become full, but the planet itself as well. At this saturation point, the vessel, which once contained meaning, dissolves. Ad Reinhardt stated, “Art is art. Everything else is everything else.” But, in a fully saturated state, there is not an “everything else.” There becomes only the individual and art. This is not an endgame. This is not a nihilistic perspective. It is a new beginning.
MOPA is an exhibition strategy that predicts the saturation point. When every square inch of planet is covered in art, when it is the responsibility of every individual to sustain the qualitative components of the art, we will all carry art in our wallets.
The largest art museum, then, becomes a samizdat, a furtive passing of small pamphlets and cards between parties. One jots a sketch on a napkin, passes it to a friend over coffee, and leaves it for the waiter or next customer to muse over. Scope isn’t relevant to size. The world’s largest art museum could, essentially, be contained on a piece of paper if enough people see it and discuss it. Art becomes a true once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because it may not return or exist again.
This show posits the pre- and post-saturated reality in both the form and ideal of the show. It demonstrates the need for society to maintain the qualitative content of the work of art. It is an undeniable assertion that everybody needs to list and maintain art. By extension, the importance of art objects contained within any museum is in the dialogue that occurs around them. The less accessible these objects are then, the less valuable they become.
art babel