This way to the egress. (Notes & comments: March 2002).(exhibiting ethnic art)(Brief Article)(Column)

Take one part liberal guilt about race, two parts political correctness, and add a large measure of contemporary lit-crit speak about art. Mix well in a macedoine of whatever leftist political cliches are current this week and, presto! out comes Okwui Enwezor, the Nigerian-born political science major turned curator turned art world star du jour. As The New York Times recently reported on the cover of its Arts page on February 12 (and then in long follow-up articles in subsequent issues), the thirty-eight-year-old Enwezor was recently tapped to be the artistic director of Documenta, the huge German-based exhibition of international contemporary art that takes place every several years and that opens in June.

The Times was ecstatic. Documenta, its reporter wrote, "is to contemporary art what the Olympics are to sports." If the Times reporter had been thinking about rigged juries, ruthless politicking, and the triumph of publicity over achievement, she might have been on to something. But we fear that she intended to praise the Documenta exhibitions by invoking a realm of endeavor where native excellence was everything.

In fact, for as long as anyone can remember the Documenta exhibitions have represented the triumph of celebrity and politics over art. Under Okwui Enwezor's stewardship, the subjugation of art to politics is not simply a taken-for-granted background fact, it is the declared raison d'etre of the exhibition. "I can't understand how you can sequester art from politics and social upheaval," Enwezor said. He is very concerned that Documenta not be just "an optical manifestation"--i.e., art that one looks at--but rather "a public sphere where ideas that do not lend themselves easily to optical representation can be articulated": in plain English, a manifesto. In a series of exhibitions--at the Guggenheim Museum, at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, at the Art Institute of Chicago (where he is an adjunct curator), Enwezor has used art to illustrate what are essentially political sermons. He has no training in art history. But he talks a good line. And these days actually knowing something about art is practically a liability. As one of Enwezor's colleagues at the Art Institute explains: "Over the last half-century, conventional classifications of art-making, and the attendant practice of an absolutist connoisseurship--having an `eye' in the old-fashioned sense of the world--have become largely irrelevant to the field of contemporary art."

In other words, "the field of contemporary art" is art in name only. It poaches on the prestige of art--"art" is the glamorous sugar-coating--but really it is a form of sloganeering. In the run-up to the opening of Documenta, Enwezor is jetting around the world--Vienna, Delhi, St. Lucia, Lagos--to gather "historians, ...