Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (review)

Art controversies continually swirl around us. As I write this, Fisk University in Nashville is embroiled in controversy over its desire to sell a Georgia O'Keeffe painting from its campus art collection. The work, O'Keeffe's 1927 Radiator Building, has become a flash point in debates about art and economics. Is it reasonable, some ask, for the financially troubled institution to sell artworks it owns in order to better fund its core mission of education? Or should art be kept separate from economics, honoring O'Keeffe's wishes that the collection to which the painting belongs be kept whole? Last fall, my morning newspapers reported the story of a Texas art teacher who was placed on disciplinary leave, ostensibly after parents complained that their child had been exposed to "nude art" while on a class field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art. The art in question included a nude marble torso from a Greek funerary relief dating to 300 B.C. Think "art controversy" and countless contemporary examples like these come to mind, many of them tied to the so-called "culture wars" of the 1990s: Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs, the National Endowment of the Arts versus Jesse Helms, Richard Serra's public sculptures. But how many of us would also think of Henry Greenough's 1841 George Washington, a piece of art perceived as so aesthetically problematic in its representation of Washington as a toga-clad, bare-chested Roman god that it got the nickname "George Jupiter Washington"? Or, how many of us are aware that when it opened in 1922 the Lincoln Memorial was proclaimed by some to be architecturally bankrupt, "too Greek" to honor a modern and famously rustic man of the people? With Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Michael Kammen seeks to fill in this other, largely lost history of controversy. While the book does treat many of the "usual suspects" (including those mentioned above), it also turns its attention to other, less prominent but equally fascinating times and places where art clashed with other public goods.

Like much of Kammen's previous work, Visual Shock is a bold project that produced a big book, and for good reason: the history of art controversies in the United States extends as far back as the founding itself and cuts across all domains of public life. Guided by questions such as "What role should art play in democratic public life?" "What do our responses to art say about American morality?" and "What is the relationship of art to free speech?" Kammen explores the myriad of ways that art has been politicized in the United States. As he writes in the introduction, "The purpose of this project is to provide what might be called 'full historical disclosure' by indicating the nature, diversity, and persistence of major disputes generated by art since the 1830s, but also to reveal what has changed and why" (xvi). What has changed, as Kammen chronicles throughout the book, includes an art and museum culture more open to the public than ever before, media that play an increasingly important role in reporting, shaping, and reflecting public tastes, and governments that increasingly fund the arts. Ultimately, for Kammen, "art controversies matter because they are so symptomatic of social change as a highly visible but contested process" (xi).

The book's structure successfully accommodates Kammen's purposes. Each chapter takes up a specific issue or theme around which art controversies persistently have clustered: monuments and memorials; nudity, decency, and morality; modernist art; murals; public sculpture; art and political ideology; art and the 1960s; difference and diversity; and the role of the museum. The thematic approach enables Kammen to address a wide variety of art practices (such as painting, photography, performance art, public sculpture, and museum exhibits) as well as attend to issues that recur over time. In addition to working...