Where is Art?

Today there is far more access to art than ever before. Through the internet, we have the ability to transcend hundreds of miles with a click to experience more art that we could ever possibly see otherwise. However, though we can see the art through the screen it is very different from experience it ourselves. Therefore the existence of museums and public art galleries are still incredibly important within our societies. This makes it very worrisome that much art is still relatively inaccessible to a large part of society.

Though I was fortunate enough to go to a school who has paid for it's students to have free access to the art institute, a regular guest would have to pay 25 dollars just for the basic admission. While the Art Institute is one of the more expensive art museums in chicago, it also offers the largest and most expensive collections. The other museums in chicago may have a lot of modern art that is easily accessible to the general public but the Art Institute is one of the only places in Chicago that you can see olders art from the Renaissance and older periods of history. While society has come a long way, this period of art is still a privilege to be able to experience and people who are not as fortunate as I am should still have the rights to see it.

Philosopher John Dewey as experience of art as being crucial to the education of youth. Museums have the power to teach the youth lessons about history and viewing art critically can teach critical thinking skills that would be hard pressed to teach within the confines of a traditional classroom.  As a society we must question the values that we want to uphold. We could deny the progressive beliefs of Dewey. As a capitalist society, we have collectively agreed that things that have value should have a monetary value. Since the experience of art is so important why shouldn’t there be a monetary cost for admission to this experience. Or as a society we could recognize the value of the art experience and agree that their shouldn’t be a monetary barrier to an experience that could be influential on a young person's life.

When presented with this decision it can be easy to say that all art should be free to view, however in the real world things are not so simple. There are still many barriers in our world that could stop a free art utopia from existing. First and foremost, if all art was free to view then there would be very little money driving the economy of the art world. If museums did not take in admission fees, there would be less money for them to buy new artwork and thus fewer new artist could be economically supported by their work. In this world, the only people who could become artists would be those who already has a stead means of supporting themselves. Afterall a starving artist can’t be starving forever, otherwise their art will never be made.

This very reliance on the very institution that they are critiquing brings into question Andrea Frasers work “From Critiquing the Institutions to an Institution of Critique”. In his own writing Fraser critiques how many of the artist who have made their name by critiquing the institution of art are now apart of the very institutions they were being critical of. In shorter terms, Frasers calls out the artists for selling out. While I think it is admirable of Fraser to point out this hypocrisy, I think he is idealist to how quickly radical change can come.

To explain this better I will use a different context. Within feminism there are several different schools of thought about how gender equality can be attained. Radical feminism is the belief that the institution of politics is inherently sexist and that will never change, being thus feminism must work outside of politics and create its own mode of enacting change. Liberal feminist thought argues that the only way to make real change in this society is to be a part of society and to work your way up to a place of power where you can enact real change. These same principles can apply to art and institutional critique.

Fraser’s thought process would be very radical, believing that artists who were previously extremely critiquing are buying into the system that they themselves once raved against. But I would argue that those artists have put themselves in a place of power within the art society and therefore are at a greater vantage point to enact change. Fountain by Marcel Duchamp could’ve never been in the position to change the art world entirely if Duchamp had been an unknown voice but Duchamp used his authority in the art world to protest what his peers were doing. Because of this, I don’t think that it is fair for Fraser to argue that real institutional critique is dead but that we should open our minds to being both active participants within a society  that we don’t one hundred percent agree with and see the ways in which can improve it from the inside.

Though art can never be entirely public nor should we resign to art being entirely private, institutional critique allows us the ability to critique the art world from inside it's walls so that we can make it better. Arts like Keith Haring who painted the chicago mural could devote time to creating free public art because he also had already sold millions of dollars in paintings that were for the private. In this way, we can see that while we should always critique mighty institutions we can also use those very institutions systems to improve them.