What is Conservative Art?
GELERNTER, DAVID
What is Conservative Art? By David Gelernter Several months ago, in an article for THE WEEKLY STANDARD called “The Radware: A Not-All-That-Modest Proposal,” I suggested that conservatives...
...Hopper: Daumier “was great despite his political explications not because of them...
...It’s like any other nude...
...bad art...
...In L.A., you might want to catch Lari Pittman’s show, featuring “gaping sphincters and vaginas” and various other images you don’t even want to read about...
...Yeats says this: “My mind, because the minds that I have loved,/ The sort of beauty that I have approved, /Prosper but little, has dried up of late,/ Yet knows that to be choked with hate/ May well be of all evil chances chief...
...Is it art...
...Not that the art world reads THE WEEKLY STANDARD, but suppose it did...
...are not it...
...Of the many readers I heard from, most liked the idea (a few invited themselves to the opening...
...What are renegades like me doing in the conservative movement...
...hate is the message...
...it’s just that they never used to be quite so drawn as they are nowadays to artworld careers...
...Matisse: “The mission of the artist is important enough for him to preoccupy himself only with his art...
...Increasingly, the conservative intelligentsia is the intelligentsia...
...In a recent news story about a gallery opening in New Orleans (a show called “Guns in the Hands of Artists”), the New York Times had the gall to begin like this: “This is not art that pleases the eye, here in this tiny gallery on Magazine Street...
...Conservative American art has been a welldefined proposition for most of this century...
...Hate-filled art, hateful art, art that dirties the soul...
...An installation can be profound and sublime—look at the tense-and-perfect poise, the endless whispering depth of the best Zen gardens...
...An actual new museum remains remote, but some discussion is taking place about a heterodox artandhistory exhibit to be staged in New York...
...But for myself, the best abstract painting is so powerful and beautiful it commands attention...
...A painting by Frank Moore I have discussed before in this space, on view at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, seems to me to capture the Establishment perfectly...
...the Establishment speaks up in selfdefense...
...it asks plaintively...
...If you stop by the Marlborough Gallery on 57th Street in Manhattan you can see two recent paintings by the superb urban realist Richard Estes.They are warm and spacious and, at their best, give you the poignant sensation of seeing your own time and space from far away...
...This is the American art world, yours and your children’s, circa 1996: so creaky and corny, so hackneyed, so old, so tired...
...I can’t even complain about most artists’ being leftists...
...Each one is like an orthodox Jew posted as food reviewer to the Annual Stuttgart Swinefest...
...Hate is the medium...
...Where do I get the nerve to like abstract art...
...It is the ark we climb aboard until the weather clears...
...John Sloan: “While I am a Socialist, I never allowed social propaganda to get into my paintings...
...But we must be conservatives, because today’s liberal Establishment is no mere defender of freewheeling “anything goes” art versus conservative realism...
...the New Yorker wrote it up in “Talk of the Town...
...Some readers, however, objected, not only to that article but to other related ones...
...I have no intention of denigrating or “delegitimating” genuinely conservative art...
...By David Gelernter Several months ago, in an article for THE WEEKLY STANDARD called “The Radware: A Not-All-That-Modest Proposal,” I suggested that conservatives should stop complaining about culture and do something about it: should create new institutions, starting with a museum...
...most artists have always been leftists...
...Must and will face up squarely to its duty to rebuild culture from the ground up...
...To such true conservatives I extend apologies and regrets, and promise to leave you and your realist paintings in peace as soon as the deluge is over...
...These artists are so proud of obscenity you’d think they invented it...
...Sorry, folks, the world has always been full of boors...
...Nor can I object in principle to the fad for untraditional media...
...I have no principled objection, either, to the Establishment’s infatuation with “installations” as opposed to painting...
...And my own paintings, for the record, would strike no serious person as “conservative” either...
...That’s just the nature of art...
...To celebrate a slash-and-burn abstractionist like de Kooning or a reformed Pop artist like Jasper Johns...
...Look at classical music: The anti-melodic twelve-tone writing of Sch?nberg and his followers had immense prestige for much of the century and is widely admired still...
...Today’s conservative movement is mainly interested in politics, economics, and social issues, but must and will make the transition one day to an institution-building movement...
...We’d even provide the staff with self-help books on request...
...See for yourself...
...There is more, even in this one random issue, but you get the picture...
...This misunderstanding is fundamental...
...Don’t get all huffy about it...
...So you see how it is: Today’s art establishment is fundamentally no good and needs to be replaced...
...The public was bound to come round and love it in the end—to the extent that, as they grow in wisdom and sophistication, migraine sufferers come to enjoy their headaches...
...the breathtaking silence of Luis Barragan’s Mexican courtyards...
...The institutionalized prostitution of art to politics—invented by the twentieth century’s monster tyrannies and reenacted for your edification by the whining fools of 1990s Manhattan...
...THE WEEKLY STANDARD is a conservative magazine and I am supposedly a conservative critic...
...Even a single show is dauntingly expensive and complex to arrange, but stranger things have happened...
...A number raised a point that is too important to ignore...
...What’s up...
...But hate-art colors the whole scene and makes you feel—whatever else is going on— sad and sick and low...
...Today’s artists have made the ridiculous mistake of confusing this sideshow with the main act, like a violin virtuoso announcing that henceforth he will devote his career to rosining bows full-time...
...In a gallery...
...But Joseph Cornell glued together some of the century’s greatest art out of junk he picked up at dime stores, and his art is full of words...
...The museum’s curators would dazzle all comers with their verve and fresh thinking and sheer energy, and promise to give up the culture world’s number-one favorite hobby—rubbing the public’s nose in leftist platitudes—in exchange for something a little more constructive, like macram...
...Today’s mainstream art world is choked with hate...
...Moore’s version shows whites, blacks, and Asians round a festive table as Mother, who is white, presents a platter heaped up with drugs and syringes in the shape of a turkey...
...And yet it is no good...
...here’s Artforum for September—you can buy it at the newsstand this afternoon...
...Artforum pans the exhibit: “But what comes next...
...The opening of Hirst’s show (at the prestigious Gagosian gallery in SoHo) was a big social event...
...And my problems with “true conservative art” don’t end there...
...A staffer at the Museum of Modern Art, whose comments were included in a 1992 show in which museum personnel commented on paintings— in this case, by Modigliani...
...The problem is that hate-art overwhelms the rest: If you stand by a babbling brook to enjoy nature and there is a baby screaming a few picnic blankets over, you might legitimately be told that there are lots of other sounds to listen to—the stream, the birds, the breeze...
...Hmmm . . . a show by Dinos and Jake Chapman in which sexual organs are glued to the faces of plastic dolls, dolls are assembled into copulating ensembles, and so on...
...It is, Artforum helpfully explains, “garden-variety social dysfunction...
...A bunch of realist painters are represented on the gallery scene today: Philip Pearlstine and Alex Katz are prominent examples...
...But no first-rank artist’s reputation has ever rested on it...
...Yes, much work is shown nowadays that is not political and has nothing to do with the mainstream’s sick obsessions...
...Damien Hirst’s pieces include chunks of dead animal floating in formaldehyde...
...Even worse, they have manifested a persistent interest in romance and eros and women, plus an annoying tendency to deal with those themes in their paintings, and it all puts feminists in a rotten mood...
...They are right...
...Stop Being a Leftist Ninny: Ten Easy Steps, etc...
...A painter named Kara Walker, whose subjects are “sodomy, rape, incest, mutilation, bestiality...
...But there is a “structural problem,” also, that renders much of this world unable to deal seriously with the great art of the past...
...The art world, especially the segment of it corresponding to middle management in industry,” Arthur Danto wrote in 1992—in the Nation!—“is today a politicized, indeed an angrily politicized, group of persons...
...And inconveniently, most great artists have been heterosexual men...
...It is the place where love of art and learning and rational argument and country survives...
...Grab an Establishment art magazine at random...
...It deserves to be defended...
...That is exactly what it is intended to do...
...Today’s Art Establishment swarms with feminists, who are of course entitled to their beliefs...
...It’s just one more picture where the woman is naked and the men are clothed” (a painting by Magritte...
...Angrily” is a polite way of putting it...
...Now hold on a minute...
...It’s a wonderful opportunity, to be greeted with joy, a chance to throw open the windows on today’s stale, crushingly conformist scene where played-out, burnt-out leftist nostrums hang muzzily in the air like the stench of cigarette butts...
...Matisse again: “One can have liberal ideas, but the artist hasn’t the right to lose any of the precious time he has...
...The Establishment is unanimous on the topic of feminism and tends (naturally) to go for the bitterest variety...
...The art world’s problem goes beyond mere spite—although spite is a big part of it...
...a vicious circle of spite in which artists parade their angry contempt for the public, the public disdainfully ignores them, artists grow still angrier and more contemptuous...
...Appropriation, much of it from the lowliest of sources, continues to inform much of this art, as does a heavy presence of words, printed or handwritten or scavenged”—so we were told at the legendarily awful 1993 Whitney Biennial...
...Artists have always loved astonishing the bourgeoisie...
...There is such a thing as conservative art, these readers point out, and de Kooning, Johns, et al...
...you see it in the thoughtful, often moody realism of a Bellows or Sloan, a Hopper or Burchfield or Wyeth...
...Everyone knows abstract art is good, which proves nothing...
...We are the movement that challenges orthodoxy...
...It’s a horizontal painting of a female lying naked...
...An art lover today has a moral duty to be against this Establishment...
...To love beauty, truth, and art itself, to judge art without regard to the artist’s race or sex, to admire and defend high culture and teach it to your children—the Establishment hates those ideas...
...And the last thing we conservatives ought to pull is the “come off it, everyone knows abstract painting is good” maneuver...
...It is called “Freedom to Share” and is based on a famous Thanksgiving illustration by Norman Rockwell, “Freedom from Want...
...that goes right to the heart of modern culture...
...But this “institutional renaissance” business may easily look to true artistic conservatives like a hijacking, and they have reason to be unhappy...
...is capable only of expressing violence (which is why the famous “Blut” scene in Berg’s Wozzeck is the only twelve-tone passage that is worth anything) and boring audiences to tears...
...Wrong...
...Astonishing the bourgeoisie is indeed something artists and the art world have long enjoyed—as a hobby, for fun...
...How’s that again, art that doesn’t please the eye...
...It really doesn’t matter how sharp a critic you are...
...you’re disqualified...
Vol. 2 • September 1996 • No. 2
