State of the Art

Now blank walls greet visitors to the Manhattan apartment where Halle, the founding director of UCLA’s LeRoy Neiman Center for the Study of American Society and Culture, spends three days a week with his wife, Louise Mirrer, and their 12-year-old son, Malcolm, and 14-year-old daughter, Carla. (Twenty-year-old Philip is away at school in Pennsylvania.)

The move was not met with great enthusiasm at home. “We had some pretty nice art, so I was crushed when David decided it was banal,” says Mirrer.

But to Mirrer’s relief, the walls aren’t always blank. There are the periodic slide shows during which Halle flashes large images of artworks on the walls. “It makes for interesting conversation,” she says. “I resisted at first, but David convinced me that we’re displaying much more interesting art now than when we had fixed paintings on the walls.”

It’s the kind of compromise that typifies the bicoastal scholar’s penchant for looking at art in unconventional ways. Marshaling exit polls, demographic surveys and other yardsticks of the social sciences, Halle is known for bringing startling clarity to a realm usually dismissed as ineffable: how people feel about art.

“The main way to study art and culture is interpretation, which is what critics do,” explains William G. Roy, a UCLA colleague in the Department of Sociology. “They assume the general public is going to react the way they do. But David finds out how the general public actually thinks and lives.”

Halle, for example, nabbed headlines with the results of a study he conducted during the 1999 Sensation exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, a show that drew the wrath of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani because it included a portrait of the Virgin Mary by British artist Chris Ofili that incorporated elephant dung as an artistic medium. (Others among the 42 artists represented in the exhibition included Damien Hirst, known for his works composed of preserved slices of animals that are presented in sealed, formaldehyde-filled containers, and the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, whose multi-bodied, multi-body-part figures explore a bizarre world of sexual identity.)

Battles over art and censorship had been raging in America for more than a decade, but Halle’s survey apparently was the first time that a researcher had actually asked museum-goers what they thought of such artworks and the controversies surrounding them. The findings were revealing. Few Catholics, for example — the group that critics expected to be most offended by Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” — attended the show. When some exhibit-goers were offended, they tended to cite pieces that had not been flagged as troublesome by politicians. But even the most-offended visitors rarely felt the museum should have been prevented from displaying the works. In short, even those visitors who were most likely to be taken aback by “offensive” art offered scant support for “sparing” their sensibilities.

Now Halle is focusing his attention on Manhattan’s Union Square/Chelsea District, which in recent years has evolved into the center of the city’s — and America’s — contemporary art scene. His study will examine the area’s art-gallery scene, its gay community, dot-com companies and arrangements for taking care of the poor and homeless.

Eschewing the head-to-toe black uniform of the arterati and dressed, instead, in a blue Izod T-shirt and jeans, Halle looks less, on a recent afternoon, like a cultural insider than someone who thinks nothing of cycling to New Jersey with his older son, a University of Pennsylvania student, or playing soccer with a team of porters and clerks from the United Nations.

Born and raised in England, Halle might not be an obvious choice as a leading authority on American mores. Before emigrating, the most experience he’d had with MacCulture was as an Oxford undergraduate dating an American exchange student whose roommates were being pursued by a Rhodes scholar named Bill Clinton. Halle came to the United States in 1974 to study graduate-level sociology at Columbia.

“The London I grew up in was a nice city, but the subway closed at 11 p.m. and the last bus was at 11:30 p.m. so everyone had to go home,” he says. “I loved the fact that New York is a 24-hour city.”

Now, Halle commutes each week to Westwood. The routine, though grueling, offers Halle a privileged view of the two cities, and that perspective influences the projects of the Neiman Center that he heads. A 1999 conference led to New York & Los Angeles, a forthcoming book of essays edited by Halle. The center is sponsoring an exhibition of photographs of Harlem and South Central Los Angeles. And in cooperation with a City University of New York researcher, and with funding from the National Science Foundation, the center is also creating a series of interactive maps of art galleries in Los Angeles and New York.

Such projects are a divergence from Halle’s original specialization of class issues and political sociology, territory that he covered in his first book, America’s Working Man: Work, Home and Politics Among Blue-Collar Property Owners (University of Chicago Press).

“I was never that interested in art,” he confesses.

While writing the book, which was published in 1984, he became fascinated with the way in which homeowners alter their dwellings. That interest evolved into 1994’s Inside Culture: Art and Class in the American Home (University of Chicago Press), a look at the interior element that struck him as the most revealing of a home’s occupants: art. The book examined such obscure changes as the disappearance of the painted family portrait, which largely has been replaced by framed and clustered family photos.

“I came to the conclusion that family photographs — moveable and clustered together — reflect the fragility of the modern family,” Halle says. “When a new family member comes in and an old one gets ejected, you can just replace photographs.”

Such insights attracted the attention of LeRoy Neiman’s lead dealer, who introduced Halle to the enormously popular artist. “We got on very well right away,” Halle says. Seven years later, Neiman donated $1 million to fund the center at UCLA.

At home, Halle may demand unadorned walls. But in his Westwood office, he’s surrounded by Neiman lithographs, which, as it happens, tell the story of Halle’s dual passions: In the center of one wall hangs a depiction of the Statue of Liberty; on the opposite wall is a Hollywood scene.

“They give the place a bit of a pizzazz,” he says with a smile.