In decrying Wenda Gu’s hirsute the green house and united colors projects, we on campus seem to have run out of breath for now. But with the return of Dartmouth exiles and the inauguration of a new class in the fall, the dialogue surrounding the wisdom behind this art commission will doubtless be renewed, if only because the project has become emblematic of everything many of us perceive to be wrongheaded about our administration. It's an effigy of the demons that we knew we had heard bad things about before, but we didn’t really understand all that well: “sustainability,” “plurality,” and other similar forms of new-schoolery. Most of us, of course, aren’t really so opposed to all that, but much of it often comes off as a jumble of fecklessness and money-wasting, and the Gu commission both affirms and aggravates such feelings. We know it cost a lot of money, we know it makes our dignified Baker hall corridor look like the scum-caked shower drain of gorilla, and we vaguely suspect that the mats of hair would frown upon the Greek system and perhaps even deprive a sports team of money, if they could. But among these more obvious tragedies of the commission hides another: the pieces, reviled as clueless and dismissed as artless, are the most immediate, if not the only, point of contact most Dartmouth students have with the world of contemporary art.

Only once that I have seen has Gu’s project been evaluated in terms of its success as a piece of art, and even here the writer withholds a final critical judgment of the work, instead basically adopting a “like it or not, it sure does make you think” platform. I personally think the project is contrived and platitudinous—Look, the hair comes in all the colors of the rainbow, just like the human race! Look, the medallions entwined in the strands have the names of countries…and they’re spelled backwards, for twice the profundity!—and therefore, aesthetically, a very unfortunate introduction for most Dartmouth kids to the world of contemporary art, which is already perilously easy to malign. Even casual art admirers often puzzle at the stuff that has come out of the postwar period and beyond, but it need not be so.

On the placard posted next to the Mark Rothko painting in the Hood Museum (that’s our art museum, if you forgot since last time you were there during Dimensions), there is a scoffingly pretentious Rothko pronouncement that goes something like, “If you think my work is simply about the interplay between two colors, you’re missing the point.” He goes on to bloviate about the depths and vastnesses of the dark soul that are mirrored in his work. But it is Rothko who misses the point: the real reason most casual detractors fail to appreciate creations like Rothko’s is much simpler. Bemused gallery-goers are less likely to be thinking, “What’s the deal with the interplay of these colors?” than, “I could literally have made this myself.”

This attitude is part and parcel of the widely-held notion that most modern and contemporary art is devoid of technical skill and aesthetic acumen. Dali is probably the last internationally renowned artist of fine, visual, non-functional (e.g. painting and sculpture) art whom all lay museum-goers like because his is far-out subject matter realistically rendered—it’s what you think an acid trip looks like, a good kind of weird. His skill with a paintbrush is evident; he is, in the most obvious sense, a “good artist.” Even Picasso is more nettlesome, since his work is the opposite, realistic subject matter refracted through a far-out lens that makes figures look like gawky, angular puppets. Would he be a "good" painter if he were constrained to doing normal-looking trees and prostitutes? And artists like Pollock and Rothko strain our credulity in what constitutes canonical art further: do they really parse their reality in such an obscure and outré way? Do people really look at this stuff and think it visionary or sublime? Or are the artists and the museums and the auction houses just colluding to play a big joke on the rest of us? To the uninitiated, it can be hard to tell.

It isn’t a joke, and here's why. Most people understand artistic talent to be the ability to create something that makes reality look more divine, more fluid, more agonizing—somehow more intense. What links Giotto with van Gogh, however, is a basic verisimilitude; on their canvases, a river looks something like a river, a human face like a human face. It was foregone, however, that visual art would depart from that realism. The shackles of such realism on art were loosened very slowly, but once the Renaissance masters had gotten pretty darn close to painting and sculpting the world how it was, it would have been boring and derivative to keep depicting the world in the same style. Ralph Ellison said that every text of a given historical moment is inherently a criticism of every other text contemporary to it—the anxiety of influence becomes the anxiety of coexistence—and nothing could be truer of art. Progress in the art world demands that each artist be somehow original from, or even rebellious against, others, and so it follows that 21st century art looks much different than 16th century art. (And this isn’t the first time in Western history that this sort of progress has yielded art that is less strictly realistic: in Byzantine Christian art, the accurate portrayal of the human form is not very important, while that ideal was the point of Classical Greek art a thousand years prior.) Today it is the singularity of the artist’s vision, rather than straight-up paintbrush or chisel skills (and who needs them now anyway, since we have cameras?), that constitutes his or her talent. Perhaps you, the viewer, are enlightened by the way, say, Robert Rauschenberg conveys his sense of the world and perhaps you just think that pasting old socks and newspapers to a canvas is pretty stupid, but either way, contemporary art is important because there have been about 100 billion different perspectives of the universe over the course of human history and today’s art articulates ones that depart vastly from those of the past, just as those of the future will depart vastly from ours. If contemporary art strikes you as more complicated, confusing, unsettling, and exasperating than David or Starry Night or something else facilely laudable our ancestors made, it is because our times deserve and demand that. Art should not just be beautiful—the world isn’t.

But “complicated, confusing, unsettling, and exasperating” also describe hangovers, nu metal, and puberty, and few people have any desire to become (re)acquainted with these phenomena. This is where Dartmouth made a misstep in its Wenda Gu commission. An art connoisseur who has been wading in the cold pool of contemporary art galleries long enough to become acclimatized to it might appreciate the unmitigated weirdness of Gu’s design, but most of us in Hanover have neither the time nor the inclination to get ourselves to that point. I could not agree more with Hood Assistant Director Juliette Bianco ‘94’s statement that “art outside of museums has a real role to play in the intellectual education of the campus,” but I would suggest that next time Dartmouth makes an artistic commission (and there should indeed be a next time), those in charge consider the intangibles that make most art attractive to us in the first place: it should also be intriguing, compelling, thought-provoking, and resonant. (That last factor is subjective, of course, but whoever coordinates art for public spaces at Dartmouth can safely assume, I think, a young, intelligent, and practical audience.) I think that the Gu commission is written off by most students as an eyesore and a black hole of tuition money before it can be considered as any of these things. What we need here is contemporary art that is just a little bit easier. Essentially, something that should be complicated and confusing and all the rest if need be, but also kind of cool.

I recently had occasion to visit the Tate Britain and Tate Modern galleries in London, where I was very impressed by how some of the exhibits fused just the right amount of bizarreness with just the right amount of whimsicality, emotion, or commentary. I was initially skeptical of this: the largest gallery space in the Tate Modern was occupied by Test Site, a piece composed of three slides—yes, like the kind in the McDonald’s playpen than terminate in ball pits—and including, somewhere, the sentence that sliding was a “voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.” (Artists, it seems, lack that radar of detached self-criticism that prompts most of us to ask ourselves, “Are you serious?” before doing or saying something that would make others wonder the same.) But elsewhere, the Tate succeeded. The State Britain exhibit, a series of war protest banners that had badgered Parliament from across the street until that body outlawed such dissatisfied impudence, is moving and charged. The inclusion of recent political banners in an art gallery (and the more bien-pensant Tate Britain rather than the Tate Modern, at that) forces that the definition of “art” be reconsidered in a manner as jarring as a full-cavity search at the airport. Of course, what we on campus need is the opposite: intentional art in a non-museum setting. What we need is something like When Humans Walked the Earth. The sculptures in the installation are nothing more than bricolages of common junk—power tools, wheels, trash—but there is self-evident creativity, grim commentary, and even humor here in the depiction of human functions as distilled to their most mechanistic forms. The exhibit is fun and smart and, if not the product of a virtuoso sculptor’s hand, it certainly doesn't look like a pep rally banner made out of the stuff that grows on my ass.

To bring such a commission to Dartmouth would not be a pipe dream. Ideally our next public exhibit will not be offensive at the most visceral level, will showcase some kind of obvious if unconventional talent, will confront us with ineluctable and perhaps uncomfortable wisps of Joe and Jane Dartmouth’s reality, and will somehow feature discarded auto parts, or maybe sex toys. As the lead-ins for so many recent D articles have pointed out, last year’s is the first art commission Dartmouth has made since the Orozco murals were finished in 1934. The choice of commission, then, is pardonable and the push to make it happen in the first place highly commendable. Let’s hope that our art directors take to heart our criticisms of the Gu projects, but not to a kneejerk extent. It would be a shame if the redress of this blunder resulted in future commissions of complacent and derivative art hearkening to “acceptable” past artistic traditions or, worse, resulted in no future commissions at all. Hopefully, Dartmouth continues in its well-intentioned attempt to introduce its students to today’s art—just with different strokes next time.