Garbo was venting one day in class. Someone had brought in a reproduction of what the author of the accompanying article called “the next Basquiat”. This character had just landed a solo shot in the Whitney. The hounds were on the scent.
Garbo banged his fist on the desk
“Look” he said, “During the protest period around the middle of the Viet Nam War. The students mobilized to protest the draft, the war and the establishment. Swept up in the iconoclastic energy was “Don’t trust anyone over thirty and by extension “don’t trust the old icons”. I was a grad student at the time and leaflets were being passed around the art classes. I spoke with a friend of mine at Harvard who said the leaflets were there too. So this was no local movement these guys were of Bolshevik proportions and Nazi zeal. The pamphlet said we had all been brainwashed by a corrupt system of aesthetics that came to claim that a value system of appreciation that conformed to certain ideals of beauty had bankrupt the single artist who might choose another mode of self expression a priori. We all thought Rembrandt was good because we had been told so. The Louvre and the Met were simply protecting their interests.
At the forefront to this attack was a guy (charismatic: aren’t they all?) named Allen Kaprov who began on a soapbox and ended up charging large fees for his blaspheme. He had two mutually exclusive axioms that no one seemed to notice. ‘Non Art is more Art than Art Art’ and Art is best served spontaneously … he called this ‘a Happening’. “
Garbo paused to light up a Clove Cigarette and finished his tirade. “The point is this: the generation of students that burned their draft cards and toilet papered the dean’s office. That generation has become the curators and art dealers of our time. They fought for the right to exhibit their feces and that right has become contemporary taste that eschews quality and skill as priorities in order to call for innovation and self- expression. “’
“After all it takes a degree of ‘culture and connoisseurship to discern quality and skill from the marks of one’s buttocks pressed vigorously on a wet canvas. Especially if that smear fetches a handsome price a next years auction. For now the Philistines are winning.”
