Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 6, 1993 TAG: 9310050211
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CAROL VOGEL NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Entitled "Yes . . . but Is It Art?" the segment, which featured Morley Safer, questioned the very premises of abstract art.
It began with Safer quoting P.T. Barnum's legendary statement about a sucker being born every minute. Safer went on to say that most contemporary art was "worthless junk" given value only by the "hype" of critics, auction houses and dealers committed to misleading the public.
As talk of the segment spread through the art world, the furor only grew. Museum curators, dealers, auction-house experts and collectors are scrambling to get their hands on a tape of the show.
On Sunday, "60 Minutes" broadcast a letter from Marc Glimcher of the Pace Gallery stating that the segment "stank of anti-intellectualism."
The owner of another well-known Manhattan gallery, Andre Emmerich, said the broadcast's "smug, smiling, philistine approach was appalling."
And the painter Ellsworth Kelly said last week that he was "disappointed that a group of people like `60 Minutes' who are generally respected have slipped up so completely that none of them are more sophisticated about the arts."
"I thought the tone was amusing," said Safer, who is involved peripherally in art: he calls himself a "Sunday painter" and has had two shows of his paintings, in 1980 and 1985, at Central Falls, which was a restaurant in Manhattan's SoHo.
"When you approach a piece like this, you are going right where people live, not their taste, but where their pride and persona are," he said in a telephone interview. "These are people with disposable income who dispose of it in a curious way. They buy art as appendages to show how wealthy they are. We weren't talking about connoisseurship."
Connoisseurship aside, Safer remained scathingly dismissive throughout the segment.
When describing a painting from the 1950s by the American painter Cy Twombly that was being sold at Sotheby's last November, he said, "This one, a canvas of scrawls done with the wrong end of a paint brush, bears the imaginative title of `Untitled.' It is by Cy Twombly and was sold for $2,145,000. And that's dollars, not Twomblys."
Shown with a group of black schoolchildren at the Whitney Museum of American Art's retrospective of Jean-Michel Basquiat's work, Safer asks, "Do you think you could do as well?"
"Yeah," responds one of the children. "I could do better than that." Of Basquiat as an artist, Safer explained to viewers that "in 1988 when his popularity was declining, his career was saved.
"He died of a drug overdose, and now that there would be no more Basquiats, the market fell in love with him all over again."
Antonio Homem, the director of the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo, said the "60 Minutes" report could have been filmed decades ago.
"I remember when everyone was saying their child could paint like Picasso," he said. "The fact that `60 minutes' found that now every kid can draw like Basquiat reflects a sad decline in our society. The argument is so old, it could have taken place in the 1950s or earlier."
by CNB