Some experts think that golf, baseball and multi-day bicycle races take too much time to keep fans interested. If those sports don’t cut corners, many think, they’ll disappear.
Something similar is happening in art. The loudest voices want to know a work’s monetary value. The intellectual equivalent of such cut-to-the-chase behavior is wanting to know, right away, what a work means.
In both cases, ambiguity disappears. Along with it goes subtlety, complexity and just about everything that is interesting, including how a piece looks and feels, not to mention its hard-to-quantify consequences.
All of those aspects of aesthetic experience come quietly into focus at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, where “Foreground: The Landscape of Golf in America” presents 176 pictures of golf courses without telling visitors what any of them mean or how much they are worth.