To those who insist the exhibition installed in Mount Vernon Place by students at the Maryland Institute College of Art is not really art, I can only say that all art is about ideas, particularly the art of today.
In the past, art was easy to recognize because it almost always took the form of an image: The Venus de Milo is a representation of ideal beauty, just as a Raphael Madonna encodes a complex religious theology. These images are beautiful to look at, but we understand them most deeply in terms of the ideas they represent.
The biggest difference between the art of the past and that of today is that today's artists, following the modernist impulse to strip away everything that is nonessential to the work of art, likewise have stripped the image of nearly all its traditional associations. In the extreme case, what's left is merely a sign that points to an idea. It's that idea that holds the meaning of the artwork.
In the 1970s, critic Arthur C. Danto defined an artwork as the embodiment of a meaning. It had to be "about" something, and it had to embody the meaning of what it was about, he said.
The MICA students' pieces in Mount Vernon Place, designed to complement the big map exhibition at the Walters Art Gallery across the street, fulfill both conditions, notwithstanding the controversy provoked by one student's effort to fence off the park grounds for two weeks last month, thus enraging neighborhood residents. But even a fence can be an artwork under Danto's dictum that, today, art can look like anything and be made out of any material.
What's left to consider, then, is not whether the Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square pieces are works of art but rather what kind of art they might be, and what meaning they might hold. Whatever judgments are made will hinge on the quality and relevance of ideas embodied in the works.
By that standard, the most successful works would have to be Um-Gi Lee's diminutive ink stamps of area architectural details, which she installed in tiny white kiosks strategically located around the square, Jonathan Taube's 6-foot- tall cylinder of brooms that he and his collaborators used to sweep up trash around the area last Saturday, which resembles a thrift-store Greek column, and Rachel Faller's knitted bridge at the extreme east end of the park, which serves both as a symbol of racial and class reconciliation and as a handy child's play station.
