• October 24, 2012, 12:00 PM ET

A Modest Proposal: Exhibit ‘Bad’ Modern Art

• By Will Gompertz

Everett

A detail of Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.’

I have a proposal. Why doesn’t one of the world’s major modern art museums – say MoMA, Tate or the Pompidou – mount an exhibition of bad contemporary art drawn from the institution’s own collection?
I accept the idea has a tainted provenance — the most famous large-scale show of “bad” modern art was the brainchild of the bloodthirsty dictator Adolf Hitler with his Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937.
But my proposal is different. Its purpose would not be to discredit contemporary art, as was the Nazis’ intention, but to generate some much needed debate around the art that has been produced in our time.
Of which there is a great deal. Never has so much expensive art been made, bought and sold. But conversely there is so little discourse as to its merits. A major national modern art institution could change that and challenge the prevailing passivity with an exhibition of bad art, which might work like this:
The institution invites one of its brightest curatorial talents to rummage around in its collection of contemporary art and select works that he or she subjectively deems to be “bad” or not very good. The result of this trawl might be one work or hundreds; it doesn’t really matter, although in my experience (seven years as a director at the Tate Gallery) curators are very opinionated in private about the amount of substandard art that finds its way into their institutional collection.
The selection would be personal, not corporate, and therefore not embarrass those responsible for acquiring the art works in the first place. Nor would it be a declaration that the works are in fact “bad” – merely that in the opinion of the individual curator they are, whose aesthetic and intellectual arguments against them would be available as essays.
And lo, we would have some grounds for proper debate: for an informed, contextualized, heated, passionate discussion about the art selected and contemporary art in general. It would highlight how tastes change and how some art works can lose their power remarkably quickly.
We know it works the other way around, when once unloved works subsequently become canonized. Take Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon” for example. Derided by just about everybody in 1907 when the artist produced the picture: a response that so upset him that he subsequently abandoned the work unfinished and left it gathering dust in his studio for years. It was only when MoMA acquired and promoted the painting in the late 1930s that it became widely popular and developed its now legendary status (by which time Picasso was world famous and regarded as one of the greatest talents to have ever picked up a paintbrush). The reverse also occurs.
But our museums tend to ignore this inconvenient truth, preferring instead to extol the virtues of everything they present as “extraordinary,” “remarkable” or “seminal.” Which is a shame, because judging by the audiences to whom I have spoken while touring around the U.K.’s many literary festivals promoting “What Are You Looking At?,” my book on the history of modern art, there is an appetite among the public for an open conversation about the merits of contemporary art: a debate led by a national museum that goes beyond the usual propaganda that everything in its contemporary collection is marvellous, which is  a ridiculous standpoint.
Will it ever happen? I hope so, but suspect not. One reason is that these great, revered institutions that we trust to be independent and scrupulous in matters of art have allowed themselves to become compromised. A commercial conflict of interest has turned them from incorruptible centres of intellectual inquiry, into evangelical promoters of market-endorsed artists. Money –as ever – is at the root of the problem.
Much of the finance these institutions require for acquisitions and exhibitions comes from the private sector; not least art dealers and wealthy collectors who, too often, have a personal interest in – and stand to gain from – an aggrandizing museum display of the artist or art work in question.
This system succeeds in providing the institution with the money it needs to put on shows and buy art but there is a cost. It inevitably leads to an erosion of critical distance and independent objectivity, the very principles upon which the public bases its trust in a museum. Curators  – some of whom accept lavish hospitality from suppliers (art dealers) – become susceptible to being turned from analytical art historians into part of the PR machine –  the public face of a multi-billion dollar business.
To an extent it has been forever thus in the art world, but the rapid expansion, commodification and commercialization of contemporary art over the last couple of decades has given Mammon undue influence. The art world has become an increasingly self-sustaining economic eco-system in which the interests of all parties – museums, curators, auctioneers, collectors, dealers and artists – are best served by jointly establishing and maintaining the reputation of “brand name” artists and art works. No questions are asked, no criticism allowed – and certainly not an exhibition of bad art drawn from a museum collection that might undermine an artist’s market value.

Added to which the curator making the selection would probably worry about upsetting artists with whom he or she has become friendly, as well as the collectors and art dealers on whom his or her institution enjoys a mutually beneficial relationship. Not to mention the colleagues at work who were responsible for bringing the selected works into the institution’s collection in the first place.
The reality, I suspect, is that there are simply too many conflicts of interests to make my proposal a reality. Even if a major museum wanted to take the idea on, the chances are it would be too compromised to do so: a situation that perhaps inhibits some of the many talented and knowledgeable curators that populate our museums to fully express their opinions about contemporary art. And that is a great shame for all concerned, including us.
Will Gompertz was a director at the Tate in London for seven years and is now the BBC arts editor. He is the author of “What Are You Looking At?: the Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art.”