Crown Jewels for a Philosopher King

Blake Gopnik

Imagine a world where the Metropolitan Museum of

Art collected the kitsch of Thomas Kinkade (Painter
of Light) and gave him major shows. Or a world
where the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) featured
the goofy-realist bronzes of J. Seward Johnson. That is
what the world of jewelry risks looking like to a critic
trained to consider fine art. Ive been in love with the
work of our most serious jewelers for many decades
now; Ive been surprised for just as long at how little
cultural leverage it has outside its own circles,
compared to the other disciplines a mass-media critic
is asked to cover.
When it comes to painting and sculpture and all the
new media that have joined them, the notion of a
serious cutting edge has dominated museums and
the public square for something like the last hundred
years. Curators have, at least in principle, aimed to
buy and show only the most exciting and daring of
contemporary art; if you attack one of their choices,
the defense will always be that you have not
recognized the works innovations and significance
not that you have somehow set the bar for creativity
too high.
And then theres jewelry. The publics notion of
serious jewelry tends to be built around karat and
cut, glitter and weight. Bigger is better is pretty
much the average persons guiding aesthetic when it
comes to this art form. The view from the museum
may not be much better. In 2013 the Met itself put on
a show of splashy gewgaws by the Parisian bijoutier

Joel A. Rosenthal (a.k.a. JAR), which included such

things as lifelike(-ish) butterflies smothered in rubies
and a diamond-bridled zebra brooch. The justification
for the exhibition was not could not have been
phrased in terms of the works conceptual advances
or formal radicalism or bold content. It was all about
technical skill, rarefied materials, and the imprimatur
JARs pieces gained from the social elites that buy
and wear them (and that funded the show and sit on
the Mets board).
This commitment to bling can be found even in
museums dedicated to design. In 2011 pieces by the
venerable jewelers Van Cleef & Arpels, in thrall to
centuries-old traditions, were shown at Cooper
Hewitt, the Smithsonians design museum in New
York. The exhibition was sponsored by the company
itself. These treasures may have been impressively
crafted, but they were more or less interchangeable
with any number of other bijoux sold by similar firms
over the last century. The museum seemed blissfully
unaware of the cutting-edge daring of twentiethcentury figures such as Picasso and Calder, whom
weve officially crowned as our cultural heroes. The
fine-art equivalents of JAR and Van Cleef & Arpels
figures like Kinkade or Johnson would never get
through MoMAs front door.
Now if that sounds like a depressing context for
LACMAs Beyond Bling: Contemporary Jewelry from
the Lois Boardman Collection, it shouldnt. The
parlous situation that contemporary jewelry finds
itself in, out in the larger world, can only make a
show like this one that much more important.
You could say that jewelrys Tiffany-and-Cartier
mainstream finds itself where the Paris Salon did in
the 1860s, when it was dominated by slick,
sentimental, expensive works such as the jailbait
angels painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau and
the noble lions sculpted by Antoine-Louis Barye. And
if JAR and Van Cleef & Arpels are our current
pompiers, then the makers included in Beyond
Bling are the Courbets, Manets, and Monets of art
that is worn on the body.

In fine art, the lack of any visible opposition to what

counts as todays cutting edge can make the stakes
feel pretty low. At MoMA, the public fully expects to
see the likes of Jeff Koons or Cindy Sherman on
display; theyd be surprised to find society
portraitists instead. Any debate about what should or
should not be on view at an art museum takes place
within a fairly narrow range of work that, by a pretty
broad consensus, counts as serious contemporary
art. Gallerygoers might debate where any given
artist fits within that categoryKoons or Sherman
might be seen as ranking at its top or its bottom
but they dont expect to deal with work that is
engaged in a completely different discussion.
With jewelry, by contrast, the cutting edge remains
largely unknown outside a tiny circle of specialists,
the way difficult modern art did for its first
decades. A show like Beyond Bling is mounting the
kind of thrilling polemic that was still needed at the
Salon des Refuss in Paris in 1863 or in MoMAs 1939
Picasso survey, which toured the country like a
revival meeting for Modernism. The publics
perception of the art of contemporary jewelry needs
almost complete rejiggering.
Your local Kay Jewelers will have plenty of JAR-ish
brooches, but almost certainly nothing at all like the
oversize necklace that Gijs Bakker made in 1982
from a hyperrealistic, plastic-laminated photo of a
red rose. It will offer its shoppers a heavy bangle
made of gold, but would never think to present a
bauble of precious metal encased in a black rubber
bracelet, so that the glint of its bullion lies hidden
from view, as in Gold Macht Blind by Otto Knzli
from the 1980s. Any branch of Tiffany & Company
will stock gold-and-sapphire rings, but none that look
as though they were drawn by a three-year-old, cast
by a ten-year-old, and then run over by a truck
which is pretty much the look of a Karl Fritsch ring
from 2005. The gap between popular tastes in
jewelry and what happens on its cutting edge is vast
and that much more in need of bridging.
An astute reader will have noticed something about
the Beyond Bling examples I have just given: the

most recent one is more than fifteen years old; the

other two are twice that. As every insider knows, the
battle for the hearts and minds (and bulging wallets)
of the jewelry-wearing public has been going on for
many decades now, often in precisely the same
terms in which its conducted now. My own interest in
the field began fully 30 years ago, when my
linguistics-professor mother began a sideline in
avant-garde wearable art (that was the most
popular term at the time). Her first pieces were
mostly made from commercial embroidery thread
wrapped around roofing slate she picked up off the
street. She had some success with this work. It was
shown by Suzanne Greenaway at Prime Gallery in
Toronto, as well as by the great Helen Drutt in
Philadelphia, source of many pieces in Beyond
Bling. But thinking back, I realize that my mothers
preference for found slate over worked gold was
mostly framed in formal terms: gold just seemed less
interesting, and more clich-bound, than slate; it had
an element of ostentation that was hard to
overcome. In our current world of gross income gaps,
however, the contemporary jewelers long-standing
rejection of precious materials can carry political
weight.
A jewelers brazen refusal to work in traditional
modes can now count as a full-blown repudiation of
our new Gilded Age, whose values dominate the
world of elite bijoutiers. As todays most radical
jewelry takes on a more and more conceptual edge
becomes interested more in what its about than
how it looks it can also engage more directly with
our most pressing social issues.
A recent favorite example is a project titled Wilhelm
Tells Shot, in which the Swiss jeweler Johanna Dahm
has used an assault rifle to blast holes through the
gold coins and little gold bars that are usually used
as a store of wealth. You can put your finger through
your bullet-pierced ingot, ringwise, or wear it around
your neck as a pendant, but the shot that made it
cannot be ignored. The piece is bound to stand for
the violence involved in procuring gold in the first
place, and the violence that gold and gross wealth
then propagate in the world.

Maybe jewelry like Dahms has not achieved the

popular acceptance of equivalent works by Koons or
Sherman because, in a sense, it matters too much.
Day to day, it is easy enough to ignore fine arts
cutting edge; for most people, it lives in its own, faroff world of museums and galleries and art fairs,
doing its own way-out thing. If contemporary art is
supposed to be strange and radical, it is also
supposed to be remotethat is what makes its
strangeness acceptable. Jewelry, on the other hand,
lives on almost every womans body, almost every
day. If Dahm and Bakker and Knzli really managed
to occupy that intensely intimate, familiar space, it
would represent one of the greatest artistic
revolutions of modern cultureas though Bruce
Naumans art videos were to play in rerun on the
nations TVs.
If thats too much to ask of any contemporary
jeweler, no matter how brave and ambitious, its
nevertheless the kind of vision that Beyond Bling
hopes to conjure. Its a vision of a future, however
unlikely, in which our cultures most intimate art form
could be one of its most powerful and trenchant
ones.