ABOUT:

The educational mission at the heart of this museum is to openly acknowledge the contribution the spectator makes to the creative process. This makes it unusual among contemporary museums, for it underscores an important failing.

Until the postmodern movement began, only some sixty years ago, the public was actively engaged in the contemporary art that museums and galleries showed. Visitors liked it or didn’t, based on what they saw and how it made them feel.

If they were knowledgeable about art, they could support their opinion on it, to themselves or others, using a common history. If they were laymen, they could base their opinion on other work they liked and felt they understood. Either way, they were tempted to participate in the process the artist initiated.

When art was defined by anything a museum or gallery decided to display – a dead shark in chemical soup, for instance, or an unmade bed – it quit communicating in an accessible visual language. Without a coherent relationship to the human condition, art quit being art as it had long defined itself. It became an idea with labels attached. Without an explanatory text it didn’t exist. It was not visual art, but the written word authored by the artist.

One can read the label, look at the object. But who is able to participate in the profound experience of visual discovery? Despite all the writing, it remained an unmade bed.    
Historically, the artist well understood his part in the art equation. He crafted his work with care, ever mindful of an audience he had to attract and hold if it were to be successful. He knows that before it is art, it is an invitation see. If it’s good, it can beckon a spectator from across a room. If it remains good, it holds the viewer long enough to take him step by step through the magic of color, form, line, weight, warmth, atmosphere, values, and relationships into another world altogether, one he simultaneously recognizes as his own and someplace compellingly different.
Such a work not only initiates the conversation with the viewer, it delivers on an implied promise to reward him for the experience.

For thousands of years artists accepted this responsibility by making art worth seeing. Art has always been a means of communication, in the most elevated sense of that word. Aristotle called the phenomenon “mimetic” in his famous Poetics. He meant that art was art if it provided its audience –or individual members of it—a means to transcend one world for another, if temporarily.

Transcendence can be experienced through all the arts, a painting, a movie, a play, the dance, literary fiction, or one of Dvorak’s cello concertos. If you’ve lived the life of a character in a novel, been swept away by a piece of music, you’ve experienced the exaltation a piece of art can bring, you’ve seen – really seen -- Rembrandt’s self portrait as he lays bare his soul in thickly grooved paint that carves out the contours of a cheek or shadows of an eye. Each time you look at that image you rejoice in the fact that you and the artist share membership in the human race.
This ultimate discovery derives partly from craftsmanship. It isn’t art in itself, but it’s a well-worn path toward it. As surely as a violinist, ballerina, poet or playwright labor to master his or her craft, the visual artist is no exception. Though Gertrude Stein foolishly attempted it, no author created literature by abandoning the craft of writing in order to throw words at a page.

The contemporary art museum is a recent phenomenon. A second cousin to the grander museums, it serves as a testing ground for art that has not yet been vetted by much, if any, history. A painting’s inclusion in a contemporary museum implies that its place in history is likely assured. When historical standards for art are absent, as they are in most postmodern work, the curator, speaking for the museum, is given the awesome power of deciding what art is and what it is not. He is called to make a value judgment when there are no values at stake. When an object is a standard household vacuum cleaner, for example, or an animal carcass, a human skull, or a can of excrement, what gives it the status of art which is valued, in some cases, for millions of dollars?

If the talent of the artist is not evident in the work he does, as most would agree is the case with most postmodernists, it’s placement in a contemporary art museum is certainly a compelling association. That this has a profound impact on the sale of art has not escaped the attention of major museums and their business associates

This museum, WMIA, seeks to encourage other like-minded institutions to restore the art-spectator nexus, the basis on which art is fostered, founded and collected. As an art educational institute, it will mostly teach by example, through the work it chooses to hang on its walls in an ever-widening permanent collection, it’s periodic exhibitions and exchanges. 

The opportunities to expand on the conversation raised here are many: debates, forums, outreach programs. Art has much to say to a public open to listening.

The aesthetic principles that have governed visual arts for millennia, those relying on the human eye to engage human experience, are at the root of understanding and appreciating it. It’s an international discussion; one well suited to this island’s central geography. WMIA’s mission should also shed some light on the limits of the contemporary artist’s education in a world dominated by the tiny fraction of artists who earn a living from  their trade.