A cut and paste from this link:
http://blog.mlive.com/mediumfidelity/2007/09/in_defense_of_minimalism.html"I always enjoy Tom Rademacher's columns, including the one that's been generating interest recently in our Public Pulse section.
Late last month, he published a piece headlined "I have seen art and this isn't him," which dusted off the "What's art?" debate in reference to an acquisition by the new Grand Rapids Art Museum.
The piece in question is minimalist artist Ellsworth Kelly's "Blue White," a painted sculpture recently installed in the yet-to-be-opened museum. It's a large, parallelogram-shaped flat surface that is painted half-white and half-blue. Its no-frills appearance led Rademacher and a few onlookers to speculate that this work was perhaps not worth the roughly $1 million that a few deep-pocketed locals had paid for it.
Reading the column, I was reminded of "Breakfast of Champions," my favorite novel by the recently deceased Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The book's self-described "spiritual climax" offers the most robust defense of minimalism I've ever read, in the form of a monologue by a fictional artist, Rabo Karabekian. In the novel, the people of Midland City (a made-up town that may or may not be based on Midland, Mich.) are up in arms that the organizers of an arts festival have paid a large sum for a Karabekian painting titled "The Temptation of Saint Anthony."
Karabekian's work consists of nothing more than a bright orange vertical stripe down the left side of a giant white canvas. At first, the story's narrator, Philboyd Studge, agrees with the townspeople that the painting is nothing more than the work of a pretentious elitist: "I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid."
Karabekian comes to town for the festival and is confronted in a cocktail bar by a woman who doesn't like his piece. "I've seen better pictures done by a five-year-old," she tells him.
The artist calmly defends himself:
"The painting did not exist until I made it. Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.
"I now give you my word of honor that the picture your city now owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal -- the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. It is all that is alive in any of us--in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.
"What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light. Citizens of Midland City, I salute you. You have given a home to a masterpiece."
Has Grand Rapids given a home to a masterpiece? Don't know, haven't seen it. (The museum opens in October.) But "Blue White" appears thus far to have inspired deep contemplation, gut reactions, strong feelings and contentious debate. How can an eraser-shaped, blue-and-white parallelogram do all that?
Simple. It's art."
I'm pondering....
Joe