Education and Community Programs

The doors to galleries 4, 5 and 6 are tightly closed this week as Walker curators, registrars and installation crew carefully unpack and hang the precious Pollocks, Lichtensteins, de Koonings and Picassos that make up the Picasso and American Art exhibition which opens this Saturday.

To honor the occasion of having Picasso and friends in the house, we thought we'd dive into the phenomenon of the artist and ask:

Just why is this guy so famous?

To steer us through this inquiry, we've invited scholar Joli Jensen to the Walker to share her thoughts from a media studies perspective. A professor of communications at the University of Tulsa, Jensen studies mass media and popular culture and has done a lot of thinking on fans and fandom and other topics ranging from country music, to the history of spas. Her most recent book, Is Art Good for Us? Beliefs about High Culture in American Life questions our taken-for-granted assumptions about the transformational power of high culture.

She took the time to respond to a few questions, in which she discloses her personal opinion of the “master,” and admits her obsession with Law and Order, plus other thoughts about fandom and the value of the arts. Her free talk entitled, Why Is Picasso Famous? Art, Celebrity and Becoming a Fan, takes place on Thursday, June 21 at 7 pm in the Walker Cinema.

What attracts you to Picasso? Why write about him?

I’m interested in art, mass media, popular culture and celebrity. Picasso is a great example of a mass-mediated artist — a celebrity AND an integral part of popular culture.

After all of your thinking on the subject, what is your verdict? Are YOU a fan of Picasso or his work?

Picasso is fascinating as a phenomenon, but I’m not really a fan. But I’ve met plenty of people who have discovered or developed a love of art through Picasso, and who are fascinated by his life as well as his work.

Do you have any fan-like obsessions? Sports? Politics? Nautical fiction?

I get obsessed pretty easily, and then turn it into scholarship. So over the years I’ve become obsessively interested in things like Patsy Cline’s recording career, William James, neurasthenia, the history of spas, Lewis Mumford, false prophets, and Hannah Arendt. I am also a recovering chronic viewer of Law & Order (all iterations).

What other artists or forms of art are you interested in?

I love live theatre (my husband is an actor); I’m interested in all forms of textiles; and in another life, I’d design furniture and jewelry.

You’ve written on a wide variety of subjects from country music to the social history of the typewriter. Is there a thread that connects these interests?

My interests seem to revolve around one question: How do cultural objects have meaning for people? When something matters to someone else, I want to understand what’s going on.

What are you currently working on?

A series of essays on media and culture. I’m also reading all I can by and about Hannah Arendt. And I’m going back to early 20th century Progressive thinkers to find out what they thought about war and cosmopolitanism.

What is on your summer reading list?

The Iron Whim (about the social history of the typewriter); The Human Condition (by Hannah Arendt); Experience and Nature (by John Dewey).

You are involved in a public conversation about how we should communicate the value of art with your book Is Art Good for Us? Beliefs about High Culture in American Life and other publications. You argue that we should move away from talking about how the arts are good for us and to focus on why art is just plain GOOD. This stance creates an interesting juxtaposition to all this buzz about civic engagement and using the art to stimulate social change. What do you make of this trend?

Arts advocates like to use what I call instrumental arguments to encourage economic support for the arts. To claim that we need art to stimulate social change or to enhance civic engagement is to evade our own responsibility for both. We can change the world, artfully. But we can’t just “do art” and expect good things to happen.

In other words, art is a human activity, not a magic elixir. I think it is much better to think and talk about art from an expressive, not an instrumental, perspective. Art IS good but whatever good it does in the world is through the people who create, interpret, understand and respond to it. The arts are cultural forms, but so are the mass media and all the things you can buy at Wal-mart. You can’t fix the world, or uplift people, or reduce crime, or enhance aging, or increase voting just by adding more art.�

Claiming that we need art for social improvement turns art into medicine something imposed on us to make us better. I’d much rather we just shared art forms that matter to us, while finding out more about forms of art that matter to other people.