Quote of the Day: Christopher Knight
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| Doug Chiang, Podrace Crash, 1995-1999. Lucas Museum of Narrative Art |
"…the Lucas idea confuses art culture with popular culture, bizarrely touting illustrated storytelling as 'the people's art.' As one of those people, I object."
—Christopher Knight
Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight is retiring after 36 years. His final column traces L.A.'s ascendancy as an art center and lands parting zingers on Michael Govan's Geffen Galleries and George Lucas' narrative art-thing.
Comments
How disappointing, then, that they haven't enriched their collection nearly as intensively as I would expect.
With that bankroll, don't wait for scheduled evening sales in New York or London. Knock on every schloss, palazzo, chateau and country estate in Europe, with checkbook in hand. Right now, you're more like an Olympian swimmer with a withered arm.
> thematic installations of its
> permanent collections, although
> it doesn’t have the depth to
> present more than Art History
> Lite.
Museum on tight budgets don't have much room to maneuver. However, the Resnick (along with BCAM, natch) since 2020 has had way too many shows of contemporary art. Or cheap-o-type programming. But now that more of the "Lite" permanent collection will be on display in the Geffen (and no longer squirreled away in storage), the Resnick for the past 5 years being as flimsy as the Bakersfield Art Gallery & Wellness Center is even less excusable.
What was no longer a credible endeavor was criticism that assumed there was some preservable difference between pop (low) and art (high) culture. In late capitalism, the contraction no longer existed at that level.
A better critic would have addressed the intellectual/cultural dilemma of late capitalism and how the Lucas Museum takes advantage of the situation to make a paradoxical case for the refined consumption of the "people's art" (cartoons and other popular ephemera).
... But Mr. Knight is a hack. Not only does he not understand the "cultural industry," but he also took advantage of the same situation himself by previously making an argument that was as "populist" in nature as the one the Lucas Museum is making now. Knight wanted to make LACMA great again. He appealed to the readers of the LA Times as a "people" whose greatness (common identity) was based on having an encyclopedic museum, no matter how exclusionary and arbitrary that concept was.
Ethically and intellectually, it's shameful what has passed for art criticism at the LA Times. Good riddance to Mr. Knight. ... AI software trained on the writings of recent cultural theorists would be a major improvement.
--- J. Garcin
> no matter how exclusionary and arbitrary
> that concept was.
So the Louvre, Metropolitan, National Gallery (both DC and London), etc, etc, etc, are way too exclusionary and arbitrary? If so, I'd rather have that than what LACMA is increasingly becoming---like a branch of the Dubai Museum of Starving Artists. Or the Shanghai Gallery of Also-Rans. Or the Kansas City Institute of Low-Budget.
After seeing what the Met's special exhibition schedule for just the past few years has been like (forgetting even its permanent collections and just focusing on its temporary shows), I realize that Christopher Knight has been too easygoing towards LACMA.