When you have a corpus of an artist's work or a catalog raisonne, you can wrap your arms around a particular body of work that can be attributed to an artist, say Pablo Picasso or Jackson Pollock. In other cultures such as Africa, which I know best, there's no way of knowing what that corpus was. What we know is what has come out and ended up in collections or what has been documented in the field. There isn't the capacity to know what is the very best, although we can work within the known corpus and say, "These are the most compelling objects within a group and these are the reasons why." But calling something a masterpiece strips away the dynamics of changing attitudes. Our knowledge tends to be a moving target.
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It's a masterpiece, whatever that means
The inaugural exhibition at the new Centre Pompidou-Metz revives a long-standing debate about what, if anything, deserves the lofty label.
Paul Schimmel
Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art
I don't think the notion of masterpieces will ever go away. When you go through a retrospective of an artist's work, you go forward and backward. By the time you are finished you have narrowed it down to certain pieces or bodies of work. It's quite apparent what the masterpieces are, the things that transcend.
And it's not just paintings. When you see a video installation by Bill Viola or Ryan Trecartin, the works might seem the same, but you start looking at them and find that some are richer, more interesting, more complex, more resolved. The same words apply to photographs and works in any other medium.
It doesn't matter how old the artist is or if the works are ancient or contemporary, from the early Renaissance or Angkor Watt or Mayan culture. There are things that, as you look and learn, just stand out. In the 20th century gallery at the Norton Simon Museum, there's a real broad range or works, 50 years in one room. When you see all these things together, the Picasso just jumps off the wall.
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