Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” is often raised by the harshest critics of contemporary academic visual arts to illustrate the primary weakness with the contemporary artwork featured in major museum shows worldwide.

In the story, a scheming tailor convinces the vain Emperor that he can create a new wardrobe for him sewn from a magic cloth that appears invisible to people beneath his lofty position. Naturally, everyone “sees” the magic cloth, until an innocent child points out that the Emperor is naked.

Some institutions revel in seeing how far they can push the visual arts Emperor and how many more suits they can design. In fact, places such as London’s Tate Gallery have achieved worldwide fame not only for their controversial art shows, but also for the public outcries about the “art” itself. Earlier this year, a British housewife attacked Tracey Emin's Turner Prize-nominated exhibition because she didn't consider it to be art.

Emin’s artwork, titled My Bed, is an unmade bed surrounded by underwear, cigarette packs, and empty bottles. After reading about the supposed artwork in the newspapers, the woman was so outraged that she jumped in her car on Sunday and drove to London -- where she proceeded to attack the composition with a bottle of Vanish pre-wash cleaning spray. But her shouts about the Emperor’s lack of clothes had the opposite effect, Emin and the Tate basked in expansive publicity.

The 47th Corcoran Biennial at the Corcoran Gallery of Art delivers a timely opportunity for critics and admirers of contemporary visual art to form their own opinion as to the translucency of the Emperor’s new clothes. Since its first show more than 90 years ago, the Corcoran Biennial (one of the oldest continuous art exhibitions in the US) has attempted to act as the barometer of major trends and innovations in American painting. This focus ended with the 45th Biennial in 1998, when former curator Terrie Sultan decided to expand the Biennial’s boundaries to include diverse media and multicultural artists. Curated by Dr. Jonathan Binstock, Curator for Contemporary Art, and subtitled “Fantasy Underfoot,” the 47th manifestation is his first Biennial and features established and emerging artists.

Well…It’s Not MTV

The Biennial, which has been accused of ignoring its own backyard when looking for artists, includes DC’s own Susan Smith-Pinelo, whose video was exhibited earlier this year at Fusebox and also in New York. Although Smith-Pinelo is the only DC artist in the group, Binstock must be lauded nonetheless for his constant efforts to visit many Washington galleries and studios, a refreshing change from his predecessor. This is a curator who tends his own garden.

"At the same time, today’s artists understand the ability of multimedia formats like film and video to provide familiar environments that allow viewers to connect with works of art," he adds.

Smith-Pinelo’s video is an example of the deep impact that technology now brings to visual arts. While it (and the vast majority of what passes for artistic video) pales in technical comparison to the tricks and manipulations of MTV’s lowest budget music video, its spatial relationship to deep cultural assumptions, sexual concepts, and meaningful statements make it “art.” Smith-Pinelo’s jiggling breasts and enormous crotch shots become “art” because of where they are exhibited, while the same thematic focus in the latest music video is just entertainment because it’s on cable rather than in a white-walled art gallery.

Smith-Pinelo and the thousands of artists like her, armed with video cameras to tape something exciting or something incredibly boring (like any of Abramovic or Dean’s sleepers) are at the forefront of the new and ever-present trend to bring the trappings of the entertainment world to our modern salons. After all, technology has the ability to make any unknown artist a brief superstar, provided that they get in the right place with the right people.
 

Ticket to Paradise

This Biennial brings several well-publicized art pieces and artists to the Washington public, such as “The Paradise Institute” by Canadians Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. This work made its debut at the 2001 Venice Biennale and won the emerging artist prize (and it steals this Biennial as well).

The work, sorry “installation,” consists of a small movie theatre, cleverly designed so that once you are in one of the 16 seats, you feel as though you are in the balcony of a real theatre.
 

Once the lights go off, a short movie begins to play on the screen (designed so you look at rows of miniature seats in front of the viewer), you don headphones and an audio melodrama begins to play, along with the soundtrack of the movie. Popcorn eating, whispering, and other typical cinema human sounds all play out to an interesting ending that I won’t ruin for you.

It is a clever work that marries the dollhouse builder’s skill with the illusion created by smart stereo sound manipulation. It takes well-honed technical skills to deliver this kind of work, the sort of skill that is often eschewed in other forms of visual art by many modern curators. However, it is a cleverness that perhaps appeals to us precisely because we are accustomed to being fooled and entertained by Hollywood.
 

Hollywoodism

This trend to bring Hollywood’s special effects to the world of high art (hereby baptized as ‘Hollywoodism’) is also evident in the work of Ken Feingold. His work consists of animated, robotic, bald talking heads and have delivered the kind of artistic success that many covet. Two of the heads on exhibit at the Corcoran were also included in the last Whitney Biennial in New York earlier this year.

However, I found the two other, lesser-known pieces more interesting, if somewhat not as technically solvent as the conversing heads (titled “If/Then”)

and the potted head (“Sinking Feeling”). In one piece, a disembodied head tries(not very well) to keep a conversation with the audience, while a self-portrait of Feingold maintains a conversation with a projection in front of it.

It is also worth mentioning that the non-technology artwork on display, although somewhat overshadowed by Hollywoodism, does provide an interesting side bar to the exhibition. Binstock has selected artists whose work seems to fit more in that “no-no” category of illustration than fine art. In the works of Atlanta artist Kojo Griffin and Canadian Marcel Dzama, we find whimsical, fun artwork, which at first seems more apt for illustrating Hans Christian Andersen than hanging on the walls of a trendy, modern art gallery -- much less an exhibition aimed at becoming the barometer of current trends. I find it interesting that Binstock included their work in the Biennial, almost as if poking fun at the technological formula art that critics often laud with embarrassing effervescence.
 

This special effects success in the art world, while not surprising, is intriguing in the sense that we can easily predict now that as soon as Hollywood figures out the next technical trick -- say a true holographic projection à la Star-Wars -- some unknown artist will leap onto the art world’s pristine walls with the “new” media, which will be as ethereal and long-lasting as the next technical trick.

I look forward to seeing it.