EXHIBITIONISM: Art in an Era of Intolerance.

• Author: McKee, Bradford
• Position: Review

EXHIBITIONISM: Art in an Era of Intolerance by Lynne Munson Ivan R. Dee. $22.50

GOD HELP THE CONNOISSEUR. The discipline that used to be fine art has fallen into wicked, even vulgar, hands. Pop culture and critical culture alike confuse artists with anarchists, stuntmen, and shallow self-promoters. The mantle once worn by Rubens, Fragonard, and Cezanne now somehow is cast over a ham named Annie Sprinkle, who allows us to peer at her cervix with a speculum. Academics have abandoned the canon of men like Klee and women like Kollwitz in favor of a keening, chocolate-covered performer named Karen Finley. That's entertainment maybe, but it ain't art. Who will stand up for the old school?

It looks as if Lynne Munson will, for better or for worse--mostly worse. Munson, who is currently a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, used to work as special assistant to Lynne Cheney when Cheney chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities. And Munson wrote Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance "in [Cheney's] image?' The book chronicles various battles in the "art wars," campaigns of aesthetic cleansing that have exiled representational painting and sculpture over the past 30 years and handed over popularity to politicized artists and countercultural curators.

The most notorious public fights over art in this country arose in the late '80s and early '90s around an exhibition of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's erotic imagery at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, and a painting by Andres Serrano called "Piss Christ?' Both works relied in part on funding by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which enraged conservatives (though not conservatives only) as affronts to the public trust.

But bad faith had begun to pervade the art world decades before those conflicts. The biggest bully in Munson's book is the "postmodern" movement that seized academia in the wake of the late-'60s cultural rebellion. To the postmodern mind, there is no objective standard or truth in art or its history. A giant such as Leonardo da Vinci was simply an old boy written into the white male "master narrative" of European culture. Trendy art is better than traditional work, and a fresh mouth trumps a skilled hand every time.

Munson gathers more than enough evidence of art-war crimes carried out by the NEA, Harvard University's art history department, and certain major museums. But as galling as those institutions' actions seem, Munson's...