The Myth of Artistic Merit

Louise Bourgeois - “Petite Maman” - Torrance art museum - Courtesy of the artist

Canon Paper No. 3

There is a comforting story collectors tell themselves, and it goes roughly like this: the best work eventually rises. Talent, given enough time, finds its audience. If a serious artist remains obscure, it is a temporary injustice, soon to be corrected once enough people finally see what is there.

This story is not entirely wrong. It is worse than wrong — it is half right, which is more dangerous, because the half that is true makes the other half easy to believe without examining it.

Consider an artist whose sculptural work, by any reasonable account, was already accomplished by the late 1940s: formally inventive, psychologically dense, unlike anything else being made at the time. Her first solo sculpture exhibition took place in New York in 1949. For the next thirteen years, her work appeared in the Whitney Museum's annual exhibition almost every single year — a level of institutional continuity most artists never achieve even briefly. The Museum of Modern Art acquired a piece sometime in the early 1950s. None of this was invisible. None of this was a secret waiting to be uncovered.

And yet the retrospective that is now treated as the beginning of her recognition — a full-scale exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, the first the museum had ever given a female sculptor — did not happen until 1982. She was seventy years old. Louise Bourgeois had been making work of evident, sustained quality for thirty-seven years before the institutional world treated her as central to it.

Here is where the two halves of the comforting story come apart. The half that is true: without the quality of the work itself, none of the rest would have happened at all. No amount of institutional machinery manufactures thirteen consecutive years of inclusion in a major museum's annual exhibition, or gets a work into a permanent collection, if the work does not hold up under scrutiny from people whose job is to say no. Quality was not incidental to Bourgeois's trajectory. It was the precondition for everything that followed.

The half that is false: that quality, once present, is sufficient to produce recognition on its own, at a pace proportional to its own strength. It plainly was not. Thirty-seven years is not a delay explained by the work needing more time to be good. The work was already good. What took thirty-seven years was something else entirely — the accumulation of a different kind of evidence, built through repetition, independence, and institutional weight, that eventually reached the threshold at which a museum was willing to organise an entire retrospective around the claim that this artist mattered.

This is the distinction worth holding onto carefully, because it is easy to collapse the two things it separates. Artistic quality and institutional development are not the same variable measured at different speeds. They are different variables. One describes something intrinsic to the work — its formal intelligence, its psychological or conceptual force, the judgment of people qualified to assess craft and originality. The other describes something that happens to the work after it exists: whether museums choose to show it, whether that choice is repeated by other museums independently, whether it becomes durably embedded in collections and scholarship rather than fading after a single moment of attention.

Quality is a condition institutions require before they will engage seriously with a body of work at all. It is very rarely sufficient to make them engage quickly, or at all, on any predictable timeline. Whether they do depends on things that have nothing to do with the work itself — who happens to be paying attention, which curator encounters it and when, what institutional and cultural conditions make a particular kind of work legible or illegible at a given moment. Bourgeois's early work engaged directly with female sexuality and psychological material that mainstream American museums of the 1950s were not, as institutions, prepared to build major exhibitions around. That reluctance said nothing about the work. It said everything about the institutions.

This is worth being precise about, because the alternative — treating institutional recognition as a delayed but accurate referendum on quality — leads to a genuinely damaging conclusion: that whatever is not yet recognised is, by definition, not yet good enough. That conclusion would have made no sense in 1965, applied to Bourgeois's work. It makes no more sense applied to anyone else's, now.

None of this means recognition is arbitrary, or that quality plays no role in the outcome. It means the relationship between the two is not the smooth, self-correcting one the comforting story assumes. Quality opens a door. It does not walk the work through it. What happens on the other side of that door — who validates the work, how often, how independently, and how that validation accumulates or fails to — is a separate process, with its own mechanics, that can take a lifetime to unfold or may never unfold at all.

Understanding that process — what actually accumulates, and what does not — is where the argument goes next.