Marck here. You remember me, right? We've had a number of contacts over the years, though since you moved to the morning drive (belated congrats on that, by the way). I did a project for you that you seemed to appreciate: I devised a method of "scoring" a major league baseball game that centered on counting how many baseballs were used over the course of a game. I haven't been able to listen to you live since you moved to mornings, but I still catch all the podcasts and enjoy them.
That is, until I came across your discussion about the modern wing of the Art Institute and you're self-effacing monologue on not understanding the art you saw. The way you talked about your experience in the modern wing seemed so completely contradictory to everything I've come to understand about your nature that I felt the need to draw attention to it ... and perhaps defend modern art as an everyman (to an everyman) in the process.
The reason you grew to become my favorite WGN radio personality was your natural curiosity about things, about seemingly everything, whether scientific, cultural, or political. The questions you ask, the research you do, the books you read -- all of this speaks strongly to your wanting to understand the world and the characters that inhabit it. A lot of the books on your bedside table reflect this, and I have taken many cues from your reading list to explore similar ground. (A belated thank-you, btw, for putting me on to Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which might have been my favorite non-fiction read in the last couple of years.)
But then you walk into the Art Institute and you completely throw your hands up in the air at the modern wing's contents -- and even went so far as to belittle the art with one caller (I'm talking about when you delivered the line "You're not educated" in a fairly sarcastic tone). You used the example of the video installation called "Clown Torture" by Bruce Nauman. (I didn't know the name or the piece or the artist, but less than 10 seconds on Google got me this information.) It's a piece I have visited myself, and was similarly confused by it at first.
Now, the John Williams I remember would look at this and would have asked one of two questions (or both):
- "Okay -- it's in the Art Institute, so I guess it's great art -- there's limited room for stuff, and someone decided that this was brilliant enough to take up valuable real estate. Now *why* is this considered great?" The John Williams I remember, the curious one, would have actually looked for some answers to that question.
- "How is the experience standing in this dark room watching disturbing videos affecting me? How is it affecting others viewing this?" The John Williams I remember would have explored that. And I'm talking beyond the easy go-to of "How does the security guard stand listening to the video for four hours?" (In fact, when I was there, I asked the guard stationed next to the exhibit what annoys him more -- the video or everyone asking him how much it annoys him. Guess which answer he chose?)
You claimed on the air that if you were compelling people with this description of the installation to go to the Art Institute, all the better — you were selling tickets. But I'm not so certain that you're being the least bit respectful to an artist by encouraging people to go laugh at the weird thing they don't understand. Is that even good motivation to pay admission to the modern wing?
At the risk of belaboring this, let me tell you what I, Uneducated Marck™ (at least as far as art goes), got out of "Clown Torture:"
I was there with my two daughters, ages 7 and 4. They waltzed into the middle of that dark room, sat on the ground, and started watching. In mere seconds, my kids were as transfixed by this "show" as by any of the cute, educational children's programming we let them watch at home. It didn't seem to matter at all to them that the content was disturbing, emotionally violent. All that mattered to them was that it was television.
I walked out of that thinking a lot harder about the visual images that we subject our (and our children's) minds to, and how quickly and easily we come to accept it and distance ourselves from it for the simple reason that it is on a television screen.
Now, do I think that this is what the artist intended? I doubt it. And reading his description of what he was intending (see above link), it sounds almost as if my daughters' experience was the OPPOSITE of what he was hoping for. But in the end, I don't think he'd mind. Because in the end, he moved me by his art, stirring me up and getting me thinking about things from a different perspective.
You don't have to be educated to have an a-ha moment. And the last thing an art museum needs in this day and age is more excuses for the everyman to want to avoid using his brain. Maybe the issue is that the nine-to-noon shift you're on now doesn't allow for much time to expound, though as you can see from this, it doesn't take a lot of time to have extracted a useful message from "Clown Torture." Hopefully in the future, you won't take the easy way out and just talk about all those crazy artists out there acting goofy. So much of your show is about helping people understand what's happening in this world -- mass shootings, no-interest-no-asset mortgages, the healthcare mess. You think maybe you could throw culture (other than television) a bone too?
Don't forget to play to your strengths, John -- your curiosity is one of your best. I'll continue to be a fan of yours. Even if I miss the more laid-back days of the 4-7 shift, when you could stretch segments out and let them organically grow.
Still listening,
Marck
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