I am not an insider. Neither am I an uninformed passerby. Rather I am a committed witness whose encounters with the art (historical) gambit are constantly underwritten by deep ambivalence, skepticism, and reflexive critique. Its corruption and corruptibility, follies and excesses, elitism and player-hating fuel these misgivings. And yet, I have never doubted art’s transcendent experiences, its ability to lock horns with its present, and its latent criticality, relevance, and value that emerge over time. I am for the most part a hopeless optimist. So it was rather distressful to follow the bitter exchange that has unfolded in recent issues of Artforum over the Venice Biennale. The interest here is not to toss another two cents into an already overfull well, but rather to derive from the critical jousting match an understanding of the current state of art discourse.

An art exhibition is a treasure hunt. Sometimes the booty is better or more plentiful than at others, but it is always there. The curatorial vision sets forth a map embedded with initial treasures, the works themselves. Then the works offer additional discoveries in their forms, materials, process, and imaginary, or the varying lack thereof. Further there are the inflections of and allusions to conditions and circumstances external to the discrete work, and the alchemical transformations that occur in the juxtaposition with other works, with surrounding architecture, and the exposure to the particular cultural geopolitical climate of any given moment. Finally all of these factors coalesce and crystallize in the eye and mind of the beholder who walks away with some kind of interpretation. (Thinking that something sucks is still an interpretation. The follow-up question is always, why does it suck?) Art looks and means different depending on where, when, in what context, and to whom it is presented. The best criticism offers a guide through the terrain, reveals some of the harder-to-find treasures, sets off disputes over questionable ones, and calls out mistakes.

With these expectations of criticism in mind, reading the Artforum Biennale battle raised an acute perception of foul play. There is no denying the morbid delight in watching the mighty fall. Blockbuster exhibitions, the Whitney Biennial, and ambitious group shows join the category of things-critics-love-to-hate. The once-a-decade convergence of three enormous art showcases, the Venice Biennale, Documenta in Kassel, and Skulptur in Münster, packaged and cross-marketed as the Grand Tour, veritably made 2007 a year of hate. I am not advocating the evacuation of hate. In fact hate plays a vital role in the overall conversation when it disagrees in a meaningful way, activates rather than alienates, and short-circuits the wholesale acceptance of and blinding enthrallment by any marquee event. Hate exercises critical faculties that form the grassroots resistance to any aggregation of power, which, despite best intentions, is evident in the kinds of presentations mentioned. Then there is the hate driven by onanistic satisfaction, denying growth, closing the conversation, menacing readers and viewers. The tenor of the Biennale bout exceeded the boundaries of good hate, drifting from the art and ideas to seemingly inappropriate personal attacks, on all sides, volleys that were irrelevant for the non-insider. In sum, this bout consisted of an overview of the Grand Tour and three Biennale-specific reviews by an art historian, a curator, and a former Biennale director appearing in a single issue, a subsequent issue presenting the 2007 Biennale director’s lengthy response, and the next issue containing rebuttals from overview author, the curator, and the former director. Notice the art historian is not implicated in the latter exchange, but this should not be misconstrued as a pardon for her lack of negative criticism. She just did not cross that line. The inclusion of the overview author was a surprise in that his treatment, though harsh, still appeared fair. Incidentally his participation in the response was also the most fruitful, though toxic, and it became obvious there were other bones to pick (follow the trail of the African pavilion).

Every profession and subculture develops its own economy of stardom milked by the cottage industry of celebrity gossip. But as in encountering tabloids from foreign lands such as ¡Hola! and the OG (British) OK! where the constellations are unrecognizable, a sense of indifference, albeit amused, sets in. Celebrity-rag-rubbernecking outranks artforum.com any day. But the terms are the same: money, sex, power, with a decided preference for when it all goes horribly wrong. (Just look at what they’re doing to Britney Spears: the AP’s anticipatory obituary, common practice yes, but that this became a story itself, the creepy black-and-white elegiac magazine covers, and various countdown websites, to think they once ticked off the days until she turned legal.) Back to the boring sensation, which confirmed that in the artworld personalities loom large, people who buy art also have yachts and planes, professional competition is fierce, intellectual territory is jealously guarded, bureaucratic obstacles compromise vision, and liberal white men do not have all the answers. (As if we needed Enron and Jack Abramoff to expose corporate and political corruption.) My concerns lie elsewhere.

Whenever I hear the word “public,” my suspicions are piqued. The invocation of this unruly body begs questions of which and what public? Is it specific or general? Anarchic or organized? Sympathetic or adversarial? Is it an audience (captive, passive)? A constituency (engaged, enfranchised)? How is it conjured and imagined? The concept is manipulated and qualified to fit virtually any mold, an instrument in the hands of those who speak its name. The public lies at the heart of criticism and the art exhibition. It is appealed to, fought for, lobbied, and served. It is also sold out and betrayed, recalling experimental author Ben Marcus’s apt ventriloquization of the tyrannically populist writer toward his public, “I love you, I hate you, I need you, you’re stupid.” This is too often the attitude artworld professionals bear toward their publics, who in turn face condemnations of dumbing down and snobby academicism, being spectacular and being boring, too commercial and too esoteric, smothering and alienating the viewer. At its best the writing on the Biennale recreated the experience, evoked textures and correspondences, and raised critical issues. The public appears in multiple guises throughout the Artforum conversation from sophisticated to dilettante. A tense relationship to populism, its friend or enemy status pending, effected a palpable anxiety that had everything to do with the relevance of contemporary art. Stunned by the superstars duking it out on Olympus, who at their worst failed to communicate the art, is the public left vulnerable to the “values” phenomenon? That nebulous concept on which the 2004 presidential election belatedly banked, which seemed to mean this and that, everything and nothing all at once, revealed itself to be merely the default issue, made available by its malleability, since everything else was on the fritz. Currently we have another expansive bandwagon (if I hear the word change one more time…).

Evident in the Biennial battle is the looming legacy of the 1960s over art history, as well as the culture at large. Developments in criticism, theory, science, and technology, widespread demands for institutional and educational reform, the prevalence of incendiary, if not revolutionary, rhetoric all gouged out of that decade another great divide. Under the newly minted signs of the military-industrial complex and the generation gap, the Civil Rights movement, its fellow-traveling causes, and the Vietnam War fundamentally reconfigured the nation’s cultural coordinates. These conditions also changed the way art looked, the terms used to discuss it, and the ways in which it was presented (in exhibition and in print). Historical art was re-examined, re-written, and rehabilitated through a 60s lens. This is the bedrock of current contemporary art discourse. The Biennial battlers are still mourning the fact that the 60s are over. They lament a general doom and gloom that is as symptomatic of this mourning, as it is of the sorry state of current events. In the irresistible tendency to periodize, the 90s are imagined as a kind of 60s redux where discursive progress and important exhibitions were made, and now the early twenty-first century has lapsed into another period of decadence. Attempts to revive the 60s now are futile at best, at worst pastiche. Nonetheless it is a popular move, what with Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate Martin Luther King Jr.-Lyndon Johnson statement and the frequent comparisons of Barack Obama to the president who proposed that we ask not what the country can do for us but what we can do for the country.

For the generations born since the 60s, having inherited, rather than fought for, that decade’s crucial, transformative criticality, there are possibilities for escaping its shadow. Taking the practice of demythification from that period and applying it to the period itself, any understanding of the 60s today acknowledges the Port Huron Statement, the March on Washington, and emancipatory countercultures alongside the Weathermen, the failure of the 1964 DNC to recognize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” The history lessons drawn from that mythical golden age: with revolution comes terror, utopia and dystopia share a border zone, and don’t drink the Kool-Aid. The persistent cross to bear is that ever-evolving trap of radical chic. As children of deconstruction and post-structural ruthlessness, the generations coming of age after the 60s multiplied the cultural warriors quick to reveal and then mercilessly eviscerate the injustices of the past. We take the emphatic forms of agency developed during that heroic, but fallible, time for granted and run with them.

Absolutely shocking then in the Grand Tour overview was the acknowledgment of “[Jean-Hubert] Martin’s seminal 1989 exhibition ‘Magiciens de la terre,’ which intermixed works by well-known Western artists and lesser-knowns from the supposedly geographic periphery.” If anything sounds the death knell for the author’s romanticized 90s, where discursive advances brought artists from far and wide into a revitalized and problematized art field, it would be this appreciative nod to the exhibition that launched a thousand pen-wielding fists. As a student in the early twenty-first century, the only virtue of Magiciens seemed to be that it provided fodder for an almost ritual disembowelment. An exhibition that sought to redress the hegemonic ills of Western curatorial practice and its quasi-ethnological/anthropological framing of non-Western art was bound to fail. Charged with paternalism, demeaning essentialisms, primitivism and exoticism 2.0, all of those difficult, if not impossible, readings in critical theory were ecstatically put to work in the close analysis of Magiciens. Taking collegial breaths to acknowledge that the curator had no malicious intentions, and in fact the intensity of the critical firestorm reflected the exhibition’s real significance, we continued with death-of-the-author on our side and hungrily sank our teeth back into the mutilated corpse, picking at its discursive unconscious. Even the curator’s good intentions took on a perverse pall. The mathematical exactitude of maintaining representation of Western and non-Western artists at a 1:1 ratio (50 from each side), with little formal or aesthetic criteria for their selection, reinscribed rather than contested the center-periphery orientation and smacked of tokenism. But a utopian motivation underlay the delight of tearing down an establishment manifestation, enacting a destruction-creation dynamic. Blissfully hurling trainer lightning-bolts from hubristic high horses, these Oedipal exercises carved a precious independence and maturity. The impetus to continue, to improve, and to not repeat past mistakes, was constitutive of the refusal.

Leaving the names unnamed—you may already know them and you certainly know where to find them—may be a futile way to mitigate the hate, but it does help focus on other issues. To not defect from the field altogether is to believe in a public that is sophisticated but not necessarily expert, willing to ride with a reasonable premise, capable of absorbing unfamiliar ideas and consulting outside references to gain understanding, and most important of all, a public that brings their diverse knowledge to the table and multiplies the possibilities of what is presented to them through unexpected interpretations. What’s the point if we all just agreed? And what would truly be boring is an entirely self-evident presentation that neither offers nor invites challenges. Sometimes the most significant art is the difficult-to-describe curiosity or understatement that slips into the subconscious, quietly harbored there until the moment something directly or tangentially related triggers the memory, which can also happen spontaneously, sending you into your files or scouring the internet to remember the artist, the work, to cobble together a new idea. To actively, conscientiously experience art exhibitions, or any activity, is to collect for mental storage all those seeds of knowledge whose germination cannot be anticipated, but never fail to bloom when they are needed. Is this an audacious hope?