WHY A PAINTING IS LIKE A PIZZA: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Modern Art

WHY A PAINTING IS LIKE A PIZZA: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Modern Art. By Nancy Heller. Princeton Univ. Press. 192 pp. $29.95 hardcover, $19.95 paper

When Morley Safer made fun of contemporary art in a notorious (at least in the art world) 1993 broadcast of 60 Minutes, his scorn liberated thousands of people to say out loud what they had long thought. To wit: A child of five could do that; art ought to be beautiful; and, as Al Capp put it, "abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered."

A professor of art history at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Heller wants to persuade the bewildered that the emperor of contemporary art does in fact have clothes— confusing and abstract clothes, but clothes nonetheless. She realizes that people dislike contemporary art because it makes them feel stupid, so she shies away from the conceptual in favor of formal aspects that everyone can appreciate: color, material, composition, and the like.

Pointing out that Monet’s technique, beloved today, once was reviled by critics and viewers, she demystifies the aesthetic choices and technical skills behind such works as Gene Davis’s stripe paintings and Robert Ryman’s all-white ones. She does a terrific job dissecting the brouhaha over the Sensation exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999, when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani fomented outrage over Chris Ofili’s elephantdung-dotted portrait of the Virgin Mary. She also shows how installation art can recast our perspective on the objects and spaces of ordinary life. She admits to having been duped into thinking that a bronze plaque by Jenny Holzer was "real," and not a piece of art. "After this discovery, I felt somewhat foolish," she writes, "but ever since then I find myself looking far more carefully at every bronze plaque I pass."

Yet for all her jargon-free charm, Heller is unlikely to convince the Morley Safers. In choosing to focus on formal elements, she skirts the intellectual underpinnings crucial to an understanding of much contemporary art. The truth is that a great deal of it isn’t selfexplanatory, nor is it the kind of thing the average person would want hanging over the mantel. It often engages less with the world around it than with the art that preceded it or the museum that exhibits it. And in most cases, the viewer is helped immeasurably by learning the artist’s biography and intellectual framework. Art has taken a journey away from the representational, and, however hard that makes life for tour guides, it isn’t coming back.

Indeed, one wonders whether Heller’s task is necessary. Why should art be equally accessible to all? What does it matter if most galleries attract only a cadre of well-informed insiders, while the rest of the world buys Thomas Kinkade prints at the mall? It evidently matters to Heller, who wants people to stop worrying and enjoy the art. And it matters to museum curators, who hope to bring in the masses. Someday, a blockbuster Chris Ofili retrospective may attract the same adoring crowds that Monet’s water lilies do today. Maybe we’ll even see a line of dung-encrusted holiday greeting cards.

—Alix Ohlin