Sundays in New York have always been rather special for me. Somehow, the sun valiantly emerges, shooing away – however momentarily – the sulking clouds that intermittently hood this magnificent metropolis in winter. The wondrous Metropolitan Museum – a continent in itself really – has long been a Mecca of the fine arts for me.

The ‘Met’ is the biggie amongst the many museums that form part of Museum Mile, that lovely stretch along the upper reaches of Fifth Avenue, edged by Central Park on one side. On it imposingly sit, amongst others, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Frick Collection, the Neue Galerie and the Jewish Museum.

This is indeed the Promised Land for pilgrims in the art world. Once, as the Americans put it, you have ‘done’ this – as well as the excursions to the Whitney Museum of American Art (not too far down, on Madison Avenue that’s chock full of glitzy art galleries) and the other temple of 20th century and 21st century art: Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) – you are quite blessed.

Shock of the new
In New York some months ago, having ‘done’ the usual suspects and feeling sufficiently anointed, I decided to venture to the Lower East Side, to the renovated New Museum of Contemporary Art. It emerges like an off-kilter stack of rectangular boxes (pristine with their fine metallic exterior) from the middle of a street in Bowery. An almost-gentrified neighbourhood, it was not too long ago known for its ‘Bowery Bums’ – drunks and the homeless. Today, a few of them still add a bit of local colour to what was once New York City’s Skid Row.

Perfect you might say for cutting- edge art, more cutting than what’s on show further uptown. Well, some of it was so, well, cutting–edge, that I just didn’t get it. The exhibition at the time was curiously titled, The Generational: Younger Than Jesus. This was just a cooler way to say that the international artists who took part in this survey of sorts were younger than 33 – the age at which Christ was supposed to have died.

No, it wasn’t the shock of the new, the outré, that stopped me in my tracks. It was a banana peel lying smack in the middle of the floor in one of the rooms. The guard, as expressionless as those unfortunate guards in front of Buckingham Palace, blissfully ignored its presence. Convinced that he had seen it and wasn’t about to exert himself, I angrily asked him why he didn’t just pick the peel up since a visitor could easily fall and break a leg or something even more crucial to his wellbeing. A hint of a smile flickered across his face. Suddenly it dawned on me that the joke was on us, the visitors. The latently dangerous banana peel – fodder for so much slapstick comedy – was part of the show. Apparently, each morning a member of the museum staff placed a fresh banana peel on the floor in a different room of the museum. We, the visitors, were supposed to react. Our baffled conversations, amongst each other, or with the guard and complete strangers became part of the exhibit. We became the show.

I have a sneaky feeling that some of the avant-garde artists are just getting lazy: why should they paint, sculpt or film anything when they can get the viewers to do the work for them.

The death of art
Memories of that rotting banana peel surfaced in my mind (I could almost smell it) as I flipped through renowned art critic Donald Kuspit’s provocatively titled book, The End of Art. In his elegantly acerbic book, the Emeritus Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, mourns the death of art.

What killed art is, according to him, its divorce from the aesthetic. In the era of ‘postart’, the banal gets precedence over the enigmatic, the profane over the sacred and the clever over the creative. Kuspit describes the ‘postartist’ as a ‘clever social mirror’, one who has put the ‘commonplace’ (both the object and the attitude) on a pedestal, aesthetics be damned.

Well, even a cursory survey of the desi artscape reveals that much of the art is derivative, at times merely tinkering with what some much-haloed European or American artist had already done, and moved on. Many Indian artists continue to buy into ‘anti-aesthetic’ postmodern art. As do many of the with-it patrons and patronesses of contemporary art frantically determined to keep up with the latest trends in international art.

I am not for a moment making a case of a return to pretty pictures. And heavens no, not a revisionist return to the past. But that banana peel made me think a bit about the big question: what is art? I am not qualified to answer that question. However, I do feel that it is time that somebody got up to say that many of our little emperors in the art world are not, metaphorically speaking, wearing any clothes.

In his book Kuspit relates a telling anecdote about an exhibition in a Mayfair gallery of the ‘pricey’ and once enfant terrible of art, Damien Hirst. The centrepiece of this particular show included half-full coffee cups, empty beer bottles, candy wrappers and ashtrays brimful with cigarette butts. The night, after a preopening party for VIPs, the cleaning man dismantled the exhibits, put them in bin bags and threw them away. The man thought the ‘original Damien Hirst’ was literally garbage – too much of an ordeal to tidy up in fact.
I rest my case.

Subscribe to Verve Magazine or buy the Verve issue on stands now!