A colleague of mine recently attended EXPO Chicago, the annual contemporary art fair held at Chicago’s Navy Pier. Afterwards, he lamented to me that much of the work on display this year was “decorator art.”

        I wasn’t familiar with the term. It sounded like a variation of “decorative art,” something so beloved that numerous exhibitions, museum departments—even entire museums—have been created to promote it. “Decorator art” seems less like something a museum would aggrandize, and more like what an interior designer might use to ornament a space they’ve been hired to decorate. That might make it a positive term—if you’re a decorator. But I sensed my colleague meant it as a pejorative—like art and decoration are supposed to be antithetical.

        My instinct is to reject that supposition. All art is potentially decorative, depending on the tastes and needs of whoever encounters it. All art has the chance to be meaningful, too, depending on the same factors. Why roast certain artists or types of art by slapping dismissive labels on them? One person’s decoration is another’s masterpiece.

        Here’s a true story:

        The year was 2019. The place, once again: EXPO Chicago. Attracted by a soft, electric, blue glow, I stepped into a booth to admire a painting by Deborah Kass, titled Good Times. Its top half was painted black. The bottom was painted blue. Across the front of the canvas was the phrase “good times” in neon—hence the glow. As I gazed into the light, a steady stream of other folks stopped to take selfies in front of Good Times. Then these two men in expensive shoes approached, looking excited. One asked a gallery worker for the price of Good Times. “One fifty,” the worker responded, meaning $150,000. “We’ll take it,” the men said in unison.

 

        They asked for some information about the artist. The gallery worker described Kass as a queer, Jewish woman whose art is political. The colors of this painting, they explained, allude to institutional racism. Black and blue reference police violence against people of color. “Good times” is written in neon to reference the spectacles power brokers use to distract people from what’s really going on.

        The two previously buoyant looking men became deflated. “Nevermind,” one of them said. I followed them out and asked why they weren’t buying the painting. They said they wanted something to hang in the entrance of their busy restaurant in Austin, Texas. Good Times seemed perfect, but now that its hidden content had been decoded for them, they couldn’t in good conscience associate it with anyone actually trying to have good times.

        Believing they were entitled to decide for themselves what the content and meaning of a work of art is, they had perceived Kass’s painting as a welcoming beacon to adorn the entrance of their business. Uninitiated into the painting’s privileged content, they missed the symbolic references hiding in plain sight that transform it from “decorator art” into a subversive declaration of truth to power. They thought it was a neon sign.

        Composed of maybe $200 worth of acrylic paint, $300 worth of canvas and stretcher bars, and a few hundred dollars’ worth of custom neon, if Good Times was just a cool looking sign would it still be worth $150K? Would it still be art?

        I posed these questions to Aaron Berger, the Executive Director of The Neon Museum in Las Vegas. Berger cares for one of the largest and most historically significant collections of neon signs in the world. In the museum’s “boneyard,” as Berger calls it, people don’t just encounter neon signs. They encounter the history of Las Vegas and its people.

 

        Just before our interview the museum had finished restoring the iconic neon sign that once graced the Flamingo hotel and casino. Berger said this sign encapsulates everything The Neon Museum stands for. The Flamingo is the oldest continually operating property on the Vegas Strip. You can’t tell its story without also telling the story of the mob, of past racial discrimination against customers and performers, of water rights, and of the rise of cross-country automobile travel. When Hilton Hotel Corporation bought the Flamingo in 1970, they became the first major hotel chain to own a Vegas casino. The artist they hired to redesign their sign was Raul Rodriguez, the most prolific designer of floats for the Rose Parade. Rodriguez publicly identified as gay. The now-iconic neon sign he designed for the Flamingo is connected to the story of LGBTQ+ rights and to Vegas’s transformation into a mainstream vacation destination.

        But is it art, I asked Berger?

        “When I think about our collection I think about evocation,” Berger says. “Art is supposed to be evocative, so yes, these signs are art.”

        Berger explained that Las Vegas is and was a car city. You have to think about the experience through a windshield and ask what’s going to be evocative enough to make someone turn their car into the parking lot of property X. For example, The Neon Museum’s visitors’ center occupies the lobby of the historic La Concha Motel. The La Concha was originally located next to the Riviera, a much larger property with showgirls and pools and a casino. To compete with all that flash, to get people to pull over and stay at their otherwise modest property, the La Concha’s owners hired renowned architect Paul Revere Williams.

 

        “Williams combined the googie architecture of this exaggerated sea shell—that’s what la concha means—with a neon sign that replicated that shape, which is now our logo,” Berger says. “It made people pull off the road. Even if they went to see shows and gamble at the Riviera, they wanted to stay in the La Concha because of its evocative architecture and neon sign.”

        Neon in particular, Berger says, is about emotion. Imagine you’re driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas at night 70 years ago, through this vast, unpopulated desert. Then you see this orange glow miles ahead in the distance. That glow represents a place of rest and respite—a restaurant, a bar, a hotel, someplace to stop.

        “Neon was the first oasis of the American desert,” says Berger. “What’s more evocative than that?”

        Applying Berger’s ideas to Deborah Kass’s Good Times, it’s clear why those Austin restaurateurs—and all those selfie takers—were attracted to it. It represented an oasis from the vast, lonely desert of contemporary life. Regardless of whether its symbolic meaning is evident, Good Times evokes authentic human emotion. That makes it worthy of preservation in a museum, which makes it worth whatever the artist wants to charge, because as Berger points out, artworks in museums tell the story of our culture. They influence future generations, which makes them important.

        In his 1827 essay Aesthetics, or Doctrine of Worldview and Art, German philosopher Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff coined the term gesamtkunstwerk. Translated as “total art,” it describes the synthesis of all human aesthetic pursuits. At that time, as in our time, there was a bias amongst cultural influencers that deemed so-called “high arts” like architecture more important than so-called “low arts” like decoration and craft.

        Trahndorff’s “total art” concept threatened the social order by suggesting all forms of creative expression might be equal—that they might all have the same power to transform the inner lives of people who experience them. Critics loathed him. But his argument resonated with artists. Every significant artistic evolution since has come about through a process of artists pushing back against dismissive, hierarchical, subjective definitions of what art can be.

        In nineteenth-century Paris, the Académie des Beaux-Arts was the arbiter of fine art. If an artist was accepted into their annual juried exhibition, or salon, they were guaranteed a successful career. The Académie’s strict hierarchy labeled history paintings (those with religious, mythological, or historical themes) most important. Next came portraits, then genre paintings, landscape paintings, animal paintings, and finally still lifes. Anything outside this hierarchy was rejected from the salon.

 

        The Académie jury rejected more than half of the artists who applied to the 1863 salon. When the rejected artists protested, their outcry attracted the attention of the emperor, Napoleon III, whose solution was to set up an alternate salon for rejected artists so members of the public could decide for themselves which art was best. The Salon des Refusés, as it was known, attracted more attention than the main salon, and became a tradition. Among others, the Impressionists rose from the ranks of the refused, and in time the Académie’s power to set artistic tastes was replaced by an assumption of public entitlement to define important art. As Andy Warhol is alleged to have later said about art: “If people like it, it must be good.”

        While nineteenth-century France debated hierarchies of artistic content, nineteenth-century America engaged in an even more absurd debate about hierarchies of humanity. American artistic institutions dictated that only members of the majoritarian population—white people, mainly men and mostly straight—should participate in the roll out of American culture. Artists whose identity didn’t fit that definition had few opportunities to have their work judged democratically by the public, and thus few opportunities to participate in the telling of the American story.

        At the turn of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Black Americans fled the racist Jim Crow laws of the post-Civil War south. Many northern cities to which they relocated became bastions of Black creativity. From roughly the 1910s through the 1930s, New York’s Harlem neighborhood was the most prominent locus for Black art in America. Black artists who were refused access to public platforms elsewhere created their own platforms in Harlem, many of which still thrive today. The Harlem Renaissance, as this period became known, transformed Black culture, New York culture, American culture, and global culture. Like the Salon des Refusés, it offered enduring proof that elitist systems of critique based on subjective tastes only impede human creativity.

 

        The 1960s Black arts collective AFRICOBRA faced similar biases when they created a contemporary Black aesthetic based on the visual language of the streets of South Chicago. Their work was beloved by everyday people, but mainstream art institutions at the time all but ignored these artists. AFRICOBRA exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem and other galleries and institutions that supported Black artists. They were welcomed at Howard University in Washington, DC, a historically Black college. And they were included in FESTAC ’77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Nigeria, a validation of their global importance. But two generations would pass before works by AFRICOBRA artists were platformed by elite American museums and commercial galleries.

        Phillip Collins is the founder of Good Black Art, a platform that supports emerging contemporary Black artists. Collins says the experiences of AFRICOBRA and the Harlem Renaissance artists is nothing unusual. He started his company in 2021 because even then he had difficulty locating artists and artworks in the mainstream market that reflected his personal experiences.

        “Regardless of the time period, Black artists have consistently created work that celebrates their culture, documents their experiences, and preserves their stories,” Collins says. “But credit, praise, and/or interest in Black art is generally delayed. Interest in Black art tends to fluctuate in response to societal trends and movements, highlighting broader patterns of cultural appreciation and appropriation.”

 

         So why, Collins asks, should Black artists solely rely on museums, galleries, academics, and institutions to determine their worth and place in history?

        “Traditional institutions are valuable to society and to artists’ careers, but relying solely on them perpetuates power imbalances and reinforces existing hierarchies within the art world,” he says. “Black artists deserve the freedom to shape their careers in real-time and take control of their legacies.”

        Collins points out that his company name doesn’t mean he defines which Black art is good.

        “We refrain from dictating the narrative, the type of artist, or any specific aspect of art,” he says. “Instead, our mission is to provide a platform with a diverse group of artists, giving them the opportunity to share their stories from their unique viewpoints, on their own terms…and we let our community define what they perceive as good art.”

        Female artists also consistently face critical biases. In their 1978 essay Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture, artists Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff detailed the long history of labels that art historians, art schools, critics, and institutions have used to denigrate so-called “decorative art” and “craft art”—not because such art lacks power, beauty, or humanity, but because it is associated with femininity.

        Bias against females has been so pervasive throughout art history that it is even evident within so-called progressive movements. In 1930s Germany, the artists of the Bauhaus revived the gesamtkunstwerk concept, defining “total art” as a communion of visual art, design, craft, and architecture. But even this otherwise open-minded group relegated female artists to work in textiles, barring them from studying painting, sculpture, architecture, or design.

 

        Which brings me back to my colleague—the one who lamented that much of the work at this year’s EXPO Chicago was “decorator art.” To clarify his point, he suggested I compare the work of two artists who were on view at the fair. He said the work of one of them “approaches being wallpaper,” while the work of the other “is a substantive investigation of color.”

        I looked at both and found no objective basis for his assessment. But I did notice that the one whose work was being described as wallpaper, something associated with interior design and beautification, was female, while the one whose work was being elevated with words like “substantive” and “investigation” was male. I’ve never known my colleague to say anything remotely sexist. I nonetheless would challenge him to consider whether his remarks were based on something in the art, or something inside his perception.

        And even if an artist does make wallpaper, so what? Sol LeWitt’s critically revered conceptual wall paintings were designed so literally anyone could paint one according to his instructions. That’s damn close to wallpaper, craft, and decoration. Jeffrey Gibson’s current Venice Biennale exhibition is full of actual wallpaper that Gibson designed. Is Gibson making “decorator art?” Is his work not substantive?

        Haven’t artists proven by now that there’s no such thing as universal taste? When it comes to free artistic expression, subjective labels invented by critics and self-appointed taste makers offer little except intimidation and market manipulation. Labels create classes. Democracy defies classes. Is art democratic? Is it something only for the elite? Or is it for whoever feels it? And who decides?

Phillip Barcio is an author, arts journalist and radio host based in Indiana. His art writing has been published by Hyperallergic, Momus, Tikkun, Western Humanities Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Art Examiner, Widewalls, Art Media Agency, IdeelArt, and many other fine publications. He’s the winner of Boulevard Magazine’s 2023 Nonfiction Contest for Emerging Writers.