Glenstone has reopened. The 300-acre space is in Maryland and, as one reviewer observed, “blends art, architecture, and landscape design in a way that encourages visitors to turn off the noise of the digital world and connect with what’s in front of you.” Glenstone’s an incredible space of sculptures, paintings, unclassifiable art, and landscaped paths. It was closed for a few months for renovations, particularly to the Pavilion, one of the main exhibition spaces. The reopening features works by On Kawara, Jenny Holzer, Mark Rothko, Henri Matisse, Bill Traylor and Ruth Asawa. Also returning is my favorite collection Iconoclasts. It’s a trip through 20th-century art from Duchamp to Basquiat.
The spring season and reopening coincides with a book that’ soon to be published. Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice by J.F. Martel is one of the most exciting and perceptive works I have read in years.
Martel argues that real art connects us to a collective consciousness as it enriches our souls and makes us more empathetic towards our fellow humans. It does this most effectively in an analog way. In many ways the digital revolution has been bad for art. “Art breaks down the barriers that normally stand between the physical and the psychic, between your soul and the souls of others,” Martel writes. He quotes Proust: “Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to as those that may exist on the moon.”
According to Martel, the digital world can’t do this:
Art is a meeting place in which human beings commune at a level that ordinary language and sign systems do not allow. Without art, connection at this deeper level is impossible. This is a troubling idea to consider in a time when aesthetic forces ranging from sensationalistic news spectacles to manipulative viral marketing seem bent on achieving a very different end. The all-consuming razzle-dazzle of sound and light with which we are bombarded does not draw us into the secret universe of another consciousness. On the contrary, it fools us into taking as self-evident a picture of life that in reality belongs to nobody, effectively producing an artificial space wherein the market and the state can thrive as though they were inextricable parts of the cosmos rather than the mutable accidents of history that they are. We are in danger today of losing the capacity to distinguish between artistic creation as Proust defined it and the aesthetic creativity that goes into a commercial jingle, a new car design, or a hollow summer blockbuster. If our confusion suits the reigning political and economic regime just fine, it is because it stands as proof that the operation to supplant the dream-space of soul and psyche with a fully controllable interface is going according to plan.
Martel concludes that “great works of art have a unique capacity to arrest the discursive mind, raising it to a level of reality that is more expensive than the egoic dimension we normally inhabit. In this sense, art is the transfiguration of the world.”
Glenstone’s just a short distance from my childhood home in Potomac, Maryland. My father, who was born in 1928 and died in 1996, was primarily a journalist but also an amateur painter. He depicted social events around our neighborhood—a block party, Halloween, horse races, the Good Humor truck surrounded by kids. My favorite work from 1962. It’s a summer view out the back of our house in Potomac, with my mother sunbathing in the lower right hand corner. It’s folk art in a similar style as Grandma Moses. Still, for decades the painting has made me feel more to my parents than a modern iPhone snap could. Martel is right. The analog art world connects us through the soul and subconsciousness to others in a way the digital world cannot. It’s why I can recall books I read on paper years ago or movies I saw on film when I worked in a movie theater in the 1980s better than the tweets I read an hour ago.
In his book The Triumph of Modernism, Hilton Kramer argues that when modernism emerged in the 20th century, the middle class embraced it. People liked Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Odd Nerdrum and Alex Katz. Kramer, one critic observed, “insisted upon Modernism as an essential component of bourgeois culture. He admires Modernist art and has less patience for the artworks made after Modernism, which he tends to interpret in terms of decline or degeneration.”
When I was last at Glenstone I struck up a conversation with a docent. I told her I’d grown up just down the road and that my father was a painter. She asked if I had any on my phone, and I pulled up the one of my mom sunbathing. The docent loved it and began talking about perspective, light, and the colors and optimism from the Kennedy era that made the painting seem so alive. Almost subconsciously, I found myself touching my heart.