return to homepage The Future
of Art
As we approach the end of the
century, there appears to be a consensus that Art, taken as a whole, is in
trouble. Despite booming museum
attendance, and the undeniable quantity of new art (or of creative
output), there is still a deep-seated feeling that we have fallen from
grace. Even the strongest apologists
for postmodernism admit that the volatility of Art now, and its lack of a
definitive nature, make its continued viability uncertain at best. It still resists being a popular medium,
which some think spells its doom. To
retain somewhat of its exalted status and thereby keep prices high, Art has
found that it must be esoteric even when it is pushing a populist message. But this alienates the masses, and Art has
arrived in the tenuous position of selling mostly far-left ideologies to rich
people who got rich within ideologies of the right. The market shields these buyers from the message by selling art
as an investment. And criticism
translates the message to the masses, hoping to encourage its continued
indulgence. If enough words are
written, if enough public-relations dollars are spent, most may be steered into
the belief that Art is a positive social force and away from the recognition
that it is the grossest of luxury items.
But how long, many ask, can such a dichotomy last, especially in a
society ever more concerned with "elitism"? The tension between idealism and materialism is very high, and
public opinion appears to be moving from disenchantment with contemporary art
to animosity. And even in intellectual
circles, the arguments of art are losing their appeal. With Art as "pluralism," that is,
as everything, theory is in a sense superceded. What is there to say about something that is
all-inclusive? Anyone who has a
limiting definition of Art is wrong, a priori, and the philosophy of art
is, in effect, dead--as in finished.
Avant garde artists have already lost the desire to paint and sculpt; if
critics lose the impetus to talk then Art is left hanging, as just a
commodity. First its status slips, then
its value, then its price. The rich
abandon it as a bad investment. The
masses abandon it as hypocritical. And
we have a corpse. Robert Hughes warned us 15
years ago that the body was already cold, that rigor had long since set
in. And he was mostly right. The market has not yet collapsed, and
criticism has kept its mouth (mostly because graduate programs keep producing
so many tongues), but art history has stopped.
Or at least paused. No new isms,
no new theories, no major artists.
Where to go from here? Some
think Art will become just another mass medium, like pop music or film,
answerable to a mass audience. Artists,
if they are to get rich, will have to do so just like any other creative
person: by selling in quantity. Others
see a return to "high" decorative art, of an aristocratic sort, to
give the wealthy what they want in the first place. There are various arguments about what these scenarios might mean. Some think either one is equivalent to the
death of Art. Some think the first is
what Art should be anyway. Some
think that of the second. Some think
Art should be dead in a
democratic society, and rejoice at its fall regardless. A few, like Hughes, are truly sorry to see
Art go, but cannot solve this dilemma. For Hughes and all those like
him I have tidings of great joy. Art
will survive simply because it is not contained in any of the categories above,
and never has been. This is not some
new-age assertion of hope on my part.
It is a theoretical truth I intend to prove, in this and subsequent
articles, and in my art. Modernism, and
thereby postmodernism, was created by writers in the first half of the century,
beginning with, say, Roger Fry, and ending with Clement Greenberg (but
including many, many others), who invented the schism that still plagues
us. To "revivify" Art (and
for their own greater glory), these critics divided art history into two major
segments: the past, which was regressive, and the future, which was
progressive. All art of the
past, from the Greeks to van Gogh, was tied into a sack and thrown into the
theoretical sea. It had to be to make
room for more art. Old art came
to occupy the category I mentioned above—aristocratic art. That most did not fit in this category did
not make any difference to those who were glad to see it go. Future art, on the other hand, would be an
art of ideas. It had to be an
art of ideas 1) to give it the proper intellectual ballast, 2) so that critics
could talk about it. What all
art since Kandinsky (around 1910) has in common is that it is an art of
analysis. Modern art is the artist or
critic thinking about art. I contend that this definition
of Art was bound to deconstruct, as it has, and that this deconstruction does
not doom us to neo-court painters or to Saturday Evening Post
covers. Criticism has tried to remake
Art in its own image, but Art is not criticism. It is the opposite of criticism.
Art is synthetic. It springs from
the imagination. Its origins are
pre-cognitive; its mechanism ineffable; its consorts, symbol and myth. Criticism is analytic; its methods,
rational. It meets art like matter
meets anti-matter. Art is always
arrayed in mystery. Criticism cannot abide
mystery. When criticism becomes more
powerful than art, its methods begin to systematically destroy the foundations
of art. Reason, continually watered,
crowds out an etiolated imagination, and our dreams become dessicated. But creativity can never be completely
killed off. And talent is ever-renewed,
despite all effort to argue it away. Art as a rational and political
tool, as a subset to language or cognition, as a handmaiden to social
criticism, had a built-in destruct mechanism.
When Art becomes equivalent to criticism, when "thinking about
art" and "art" are the same thing, then you have analysis
analyzing itself, a vicious circle that can do nothing but implode. Artists need to bypass criticism and
themselves ask the question that begs itself here: what is art? Why was Michelangelo not just a
"decorative" artist? Why was
van Gogh not just a "realist," a painter of objects? Why, exactly, was Clement Greenberg wrong:
when the Old Masters were transcending "illustration" (and they
were), what were they doing? What is it
in an artifact that transcends dexterity and cleverness? As Tolstoy told us a hundred
years ago, it is emotion—emotion successfully and powerfully revealed
through a visual medium. Art is not an idea. It is a great artifact. It is a physical thing that must be
imagined and created. And its impetus
is a private passion, not a public mission.
Art cannot take direction, either from the left or the right. It is a gift of the Id, not a presciption or
proscription of the Superego. Some
artists know this, either consciously or unconsciously, and it is these artists
who, despite all the pressures of the markets and magazines, will be the
artists of the future. Whether the
markets or the government or the masses respond immediately to these artists is
of absolutely no matter, as our art history classes were to have taught
us. Art is that thing which transcends
both decoration and politics, and to look to curators, philosophers, and salesmen
to inform us about Art is simply to be lost. Even after a century of chaos,
misinformation, and grand attempts at co-option, the artist remains primary,
and all the others can only play a game of catch-up. What this means for the true
lover of art is that he or she must look for art in the same place the artist
does: that is, inward, not outward.
Like the God of Luther, Art speaks directly and requires no
priests. Modernism is in trouble, but
it has always been in trouble—because it attempts to substitute the sermon for
the oracle, the idea for the deed. Art,
which is now what it has always been, can reassert itself only person to
person, work by work. And the
connoisseur may know these works by the good they do him. If this paper was useful to you in any way, please consider donating a dollar (or more) to the SAVE THE ARTISTS FOUNDATION. This will allow me to continue writing these "unpublishable" things. Don't be confused by paying Melisa Smith--that is just one of my many noms de plume. If you are a Paypal user, there is no fee; so it might be worth your while to become one. Otherwise they will rob us 33 cents for each transaction. |
