Exhibit Labels

Issue 221

New York, 2023

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Museum exhibit labels have the peculiar quality of giving you both too much and not enough information. You learn the artist’s name, perhaps a birthday, the exhibit’s title; you almost always learn the artist’s nationality, along with the year of creation and a list of materials; and, if the curator feels particularly ambitious, you might find a separate label or, more likely, seventeen lengthy paragraphs on a museum wall that describe the entire exhibit, saving you from the trouble of needing to interpret any of the artwork.

For these paragraphs, the language is ornate, academic, and—you can be assured—impenetrable. There’s typically a touch of mainstream geopolitics, perhaps a few sentences of pop psychology, some gibberish about society that looks fine as long as you read fast. And to ensure that the bills are paid, you might find a line or two about provenance at the bottom, with a sentence that’s full of reverence and genuflection for exhibit benefactors. Museum visitors read from top to bottom; museum board members read from bottom to top.

Every year, it seems, this descriptive writing on museum walls expands, with more scribbles and longer sentences and grander adjectives, while the artwork, somehow, seems to shrink. I’ve seen Pollock-sized spaces given to curator dissertations, and I’ve also seen museum visitors spend more time reading about the art than looking at the art. The intention, it is alleged, is to illuminate the exhibits, or to provide context—which is normally written as contextualize, for reasons that I can’t fathom. Yet the balance is tricky, as these descriptions keep growing in our age, in grandiosity, in scope, in Talmudic-impenetrably, and it isn’t exactly clear whether the writing on museum walls is meant to illuminate the artwork or whether the artwork is meant to illuminate the writing.

Having what’s in front of your eyes defined with the authority of a museum wall does come with a slight badgering quality, too, and that’s especially unfortunate when an artist creates a daring, expansive work, as the typical museum visitor ends up perceiving what they’ve been told to perceive. The internal reaction is superseded by the external description. It takes a certain amount of disgruntledness—which, incidentally, I support—to dissent from the stone tablet quality of museum walls: No, that’s not what this exhibit is about, isn’t an opinion that’s usually considered.

In most cases visitors are shown a curator statement before they even enter an exhibit—almost certainly limiting the potential for epiphany and discovery and significance or any personal reaction. Curiously, most people seem to believe that a prison sentence is justified if someone reveals the ending to a novel, yet looking at artwork without first knowing the artist’s intention makes those same people uneasy. But if you do like being told how to think about art, then you happen to live in the right time.

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On the second floor of an old museum recently, I just happened to find myself hunting for one of those smaller exhibit cards—a clay sculpture of a distorted figure had caught my attention and I wanted the artist’s name. Perhaps there wasn’t much purpose to my hunt, as I could still observe the sculpture without knowing the artist behind the work. My emotional and intellectual reaction didn’t need, really, to be primed with facts. I’m not collecting, so knowing a work’s provenance isn’t necessary. There’s even a good argument that studying the work without any extraneous information—no title, no nationality, no year—would focus my attention on the art. Besides, exhibit labels are always outside of the artwork and frame what you see from a distance, almost like somebody who tells you about a film before you watch, prompting and influencing your eventual reaction. A label attempts to tidy your senses, instructing your mind on the proper way to catalogue the art—which, for me at least, feels a bit presumptuous.

When I first spotted the large clay figure, the sight triggered a sensation, it was visceral, a cocktail or curiosity and uncertainty, with lingering questions about form and texture and what appeared to be purposeful shadows from the museum lights. For this experience I had to walk into the room without any prompts, neither about the artist nor about the exhibit, leaving my thoughts undisturbed and able to concentrate on, well, nothing but the art. The significance, if present, would come from what I absorbed, not what I knew in advance. Picture the journey of a medieval peasant who has never even seen an image before their first step into a grand cathedral, filled with sculptures and frescos and iconography that depict scenes from a book that they are unable to read—the word awe, as in awestruck, only emerges when there are no expectations.

I do admit that there’s a logic and even necessity to the amount of exhibit descriptions in the contemporary art world, although that logic betrays a shortcoming in the actual art: the more abstract or theoretical or experimental or political or contextual or meta or intellectual the art, the greater the need for an external description. When the typical person imagines some loose concept like art, there’s no need to explain, or to add context, whether the work is a painting or sculpture or photograph, as the significance of the art must be contained within the art. Of course they might misinterpret the artist’s intentions, or not really understand why a painter arranged a particular still life, but they know a table of apples when they see a table of apples, and the reaction, however amateur, is genuine. But if the significance of the art comes from a place that’s external to the art—in culture, in history, in politics, in events—then they’re obviously going to need a guide that’s external, an authority that wears institutional robes who describes and defines the art.

Here’s a reasonable inverse relationship: when the art itself provides the significance, the shorter the exhibit description; when the significance comes from something external, the longer the exhibit description. And the typical person, looking at some tangled wires or blank canvases or mounds of dirt, is going to ask those maddening questions: What does it mean? What’s the point? Is this art? In steps a modern curator, primed with a multisyllabic retort, knowledgable about art history and, believe it or not, politics, who bequeaths to viewers the proper way of seeing: contemporary curators are like 14th Century priests, able to interpret the complexity that the common parishioner isn’t permitted to understand. We, the museum visitors, don’t speak the language, we don’t have the background, we haven’t been anointed, so we can’t commune directly with the sacred.

And once you start seeing it this way, you start to realize that the true innovation in contemporary art isn’t contained inside the exhibits. It is the performance around the art, the way in which the art is packaged and marketed for consumption. The art market supposedly has a world of exhibits at its core, but that seems backwards. Just like how contemporary fashion shows highlight the models, the designer, the music, the location, the guests, the spectacle, before eventually, begrudgingly, highlighting the fashion, the art world is most fascinated by the art world. It is the openings, the biennials, the auctions, the collectors, the gallerists, the curators, it is the entire edifice of gossip and intrigue and production that surrounds the art. Look away from the exhibit, look closer at the exhibit descriptions, and see them as art, too, as performance art, as worthy of award and discussion and obsession, because that’s where you’ll find our most contemporary form of artistry.

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Damien Hirst is a British artist who came to prominence in the 1990s, most especially for his signature works of animals in formaldehyde. There’s a shark inside a glass box, a calf inside a different glass box, and a black sheep that is, of course, inside a glass box, among many other exhibits where animals are frozen inside hilariously expensive containers. Depending on your perspective, this is pioneering and important, or peculiar and tedious, although it is worth remembering that those categories often overlap. His work has sold for hundreds of millions in total, he has won the Tuner Prize, and he’s not to be ignored if you want to consider yourself informed about contemporary art. To understand Renaissance art, you must understand the frescos and sculptures of Michelangelo, the sfumato technique of Da Vinci; to understand late 19th Century French art, you must understand the brushstrokes of Monet, the dabs of paint the are actually dabs of light; and to understand our age, you must understand, alas, the decision to put a shark in a box. Supposedly, death is a core theme in Hirst’s art, an obsession that connects his paintings with his installations, and that’s probably appropriate because that’s what the typical museum visitor feels when looking at his formaldehyde art.

A decent portion of his work, and especially his paintings, I should add, does have charm, or a sense of intrigue that you wouldn’t have expected from an artist so focused on gelatinous taxidermy. And that’s because there is always an unmistakable voice in Hirst’s work, a perspective behind the art that reveals a striking, idiosyncratic person—which is all that I ever ask of my art, whether that’s in a novel, a painting, a film, or, I guess, a shark in a box.

Yet the necessity of priestly guidance becomes clearer when you examine Hirst’s career. You can, of course, absorb the exhibits without any preconceptions, without any background in art or culture or history, though not all museum visitors are comfortable with that uncertainty. Some people, and especially adults, want their hand held in art museums, to show them where and how to look. A shark in a box prompts reactions, instinctive, emotional reactions—but there’s still a desire to comprehend how the work fits into the social atmosphere, to comprehend its purpose. Thus the necessity of the writing on exhibit walls, of categorizing the exhibits, in a way that provides a frame for the art that doesn’t appear to have a frame.

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Although Hirst has continued to sell, and has held record auctions this century, his most renowned work still comes from the early 90s. So it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to learn that he was charged with backdating his pieces. The accusation is that Hirst took recent work and dated it to the 90s. These pieces, it is important to remember, were offered in galleries around the world, and have already been sold to numerous collectors with the earlier dates.

Taking this step, as an artist, is obviously a cynical and unethical choice, and it does seem to betray a certain attitude toward your own creations. You probably can’t take this step if the impulse to create comes from an internal drive, as your connection to the art will be too personal, too intimate, for manipulation, as you’d be falsifying something that’s intrinsic to your perceptions. But it might be easier if the impulse to create is external—a desire for fame, money, relevance. There’s nothing wrong with those goals, really, though the smallest step in that direction in your art moves you further from creating and closer to selling, which very quickly starts to redound onto the work itself, as every seller does eventually conform to the desires of the buyer. And this is a problem if your artwork is supposed to express a sensibility that’s distinctly yours, as it is tricky to keep your compass aligned once that journey begins. I can see how, over time, the need to create what’s popular influences the creations. You become comfortable with adjusting the art to create what’s prestigious, little by little, until, one day, the desire to create for prestige is all that’s left.

This is both a humorous and sad story, one that exposes the perversity of incentives and the corruption of the contemporary art market. But it takes on its full beauty, its fantastical quality, even a smidge of artfulness, in the way that Hirst responds to the accusations. The response should be considered an artistic statement, akin to an exhibit description, a response fitting for our politics, our culture, and our contemporary art. He faced a dilemma in the accusations, one that has the potential for millions of dollars of liability: what do you do when you’re credibly accused of tricking galleries and collectors with the dates of your artwork? Because it is the year 2024, and liability is troublesome, the response comes from Hirst’s public relations firm, the modern equivalent of the artists in Warhol’s factory:

“Formaldehyde works are conceptual artworks and the date Damien Hirst assigns to them is the date of the conception of the work. He has been clear over the years when asked what is important in conceptual art; it is not the physical making of the object or the renewal of its parts, but rather the intention and the idea behind the artwork.”

For anyone with just a passing familiarity of curation, museum requirements, and art market standards, this is a stupendous and brilliant amount of drivel, to the extent that some people might even call it art. The con is exposed, the evidence is visible, yet the conman, as always, reveals a dexterity with the truth that must be admired. Fiddling with the provenance of your work does reveal a comfort with using your creations for a con—and if you already believe that you’re conning museum visitors, then I imagine that conning a few collectors must be an easy next step.

If you look closely at the statement, however, there’s a detail worth noticing, or even isolating. Forget about listing artwork with a false provenance, as that’s easy to dismiss. The jury will giggle rather than deliberate. What’s more interesting to me is how plainly the significance of the art is described as external to the art. Obviously this isn’t new in contemporary art, although it might be one of the few times where the admission is required because of the fear of liability. An exhibit is a manifestation, as goes this thinking, a manifestation of intentions, theories, of elements that are more nebulous, of what’s inside the artist’s mind, or drawn from society, but the resulting art itself doesn’t necessarily contain that inspiration. What you see in the exhibit isn’t as important as the intention behind the exhibit, which is pretty much the same excuse given for incomplete homework in school, for incomplete projects at work, for forgotten birthdays and missed deadlines and unmet goals, for the treatise behind so much smarmy, careless art. This is art that’s idea-driven, that comes from what’s intellectual rather than what’s emotional, that places the desire to do something above the accomplishment of doing something, so that what you, as artist, think about your creation is the only real standard. How people react to this way of creating is actually the entire point because, like so much contemporary art, the act of looking at the art eventually becomes the art, a bit like how celebrities are famous for being famous.

Yet this manner of perceiving doesn’t really seem restricted to our contemporary art. Hirst claims that what’s inside his mind is what counts, that he alone can arbitrate what’s factual, that any notion of provenance is subservient to his own beliefs, and that seems just about right for our world. It isn’t exactly novel to notice that there’s not much of a shared reality in our age, that facts are mere pixels on a screen, able to be adjusted and deleted and forgotten with a swipe. So of course an artist would maneuver himself into the space between conception and actuality when so much of life is based, today, on creating your own reality. Nearly every single news story eventually descends into a debate about the precise meaning of words, with so many people in academia and politics and business believing that if they change the description of a situation they’ll also change the situation—so why wouldn’t an artist pretend that thinking about art is equal to creating art?

Thus every art exhibit comes with instructions, in an authoritative voice, that invites you to see the chosen reality. To disagree, you’re told, is to misunderstand, it shows your ignorance. We all have our filters, our bubbles, the political and social biases that constrain us—well, here’s the chosen reality in the art world, the chosen way to see.