Getting Up-close and Personal with Aunt May and Uncle Jim. Some thoughts on how to deal with your audience in the 1960s

Abstract

On Friday the 28th of May 1965 the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced that museum attendance had reached a record high of 1,058,700. The upward trend started in the fifties but really took off in the sixties. The rise in museum attendance was the result of an economic boom, better education and an increase in leisure time. It was also stimulated by a growing mediatisation of both the arts and the different activities of museums and art institutions. On the whole, journalists, curators, museum educators and critics enthusiastically welcomed the increased interest in the arts. But the growing mediatisation of the museum, art and exhibitions as well as the continued growth of the public’s interest in art was met by some with scepticism, not least from the artists themselves. They realised that they were no longer working for a privileged and specialist audience but for a large, demanding anonymous crowd. And it worried some of them. The way artists reacted to this institutional change – their reaction, both in art and writing – has received little scholarly attention. This essay looks at how two artists, Bruce Nauman and Allan Kaprow, responded to it and how it possibly affected their work as well as their artistic identity. We will see that their concerns about the presence of the audience led them to eradicate the distance between both the work of art and the audience as well as – in some sorts - between the artist himself and the audience. What is interesting here is that the eradication of distance is, so it seems, a direct consequence of a distrust, a rather pessimistic feeling. Controlling the aesthetic process and response seemed to be their guiding principle.