THE FUTURE OF ART
GELERNTER, DAVID
THE FUTURE OF ART Defending the Artist as Pygmalion By David Gelernter Where does art stand today? Where is it headed? The art world is dark and stormy, visibility is zero, and apocalyptic...
...This plot hinges on the artist's obsession with his own handiwork...
...History suggests what you might guess: Few artists live normal social lives...
...The realist nudes and portraits that are mildly vogueish today are not what the new figure artists have in mind, nor is Lucian Freud's work—these paintings tend to be dark and broken-spirited and earth-bound, admirable, boring...
...He knows that by 1964, tyrannical authority had been dead and "diversity" had reigned supreme in art for over a century...
...Later he played to the crowd...
...seeing that Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, and several others are important and interesting...
...Most of what is getting shown and talked about," Perl writes, "repels curiosity...
...is a brilliant, influential writer and superb critic...
...Nonetheless, his theory fits neatly into a big picture that is wrong...
...This truth threatens the legitimacy of the post-'60s Cultural Revolution and its intellectual leadership: Dare to mention it, and the leaders will shout you down by screaming "nostalgia...
...In 1910, Pablo Picasso's bone-dry desert-colored cubism stood against Henri Matisse's overgrown jungle lyricism...
...Abstract art began in 1912 and blazed brilliantly from the late 1940s through the early 1960s in the "abstract expressionism" of the New York School...
...It is wholly effective only in communicating pure emotion...
...In her recent biography of Clement Greenberg, Florence Rubenfeld discusses the high aspirations of Pollock, de Kooning, and the other artists Greenberg championed...
...Everyone ought to understand his argument and why it is wrong...
...The new art is (or will be) dominated by the more-or-less accurate, undistorted human form...
...Few are normal in any sense...
...It is a mark of his intelligence and penetration that he said, toward the end of his life, "Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, and Goya were great painters...
...Danto is right that by 1964 the Manifesto Age was over...
...Danto's claim rests on interesting distortions of history and psychology...
...In 1947, years before the abstract expressionists became famous, the great critic Clement Greenberg described their isolation as "inconceivable, crushing, unbroken...
...Although artists go on producing, there is no longer any such thing as a predominant school or leading edge...
...In 1840, Ingres's ivory-cool ice-cream paintings were radically different from the hot chili of Eugène Delacroix— and both men were admired by serious art lovers...
...Their reward will be a surprising discovery—that art's immediate future is brighter than it seems...
...They established that art isn't intrinsic to certain things, it is merely a certain way of looking at anything...
...Among the few living artists who are famous and also good, most are abstractionists: Frank Stella, Cy Twombley, Andrew Forge, Gerhard Richter...
...It still exists today, shuffling gamely around the dance floor although the band left thirty years ago...
...All art," says Danto affably, "is equally and indifferently art"—thanks to Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, exhibited in 1964 at the Stable Gallery in Manhattan...
...At the Whitney Museum's 1993 Biennial, every visitor had to wear lapel pins (each an artwork by Daniel Martinez) that together spelled out: "I can't imagine ever wanting to be white...
...The uniformity is hard to recognize at first, because the two main strands of Establishment art seem so different...
...Thirty years is a lot of digesting...
...The impressionists had announced the unique rightness of impressionism...
...Artists would no longer issue bold pronouncements celebrating their own methods and patiently explaining how all others stank on ice...
...The plot is revealing insofar as it deals not only with artistry but with self-absorption and pathetic loneliness...
...Our families, schools, cities, and culture are all in worse shape...
...Photography's rise in the mid-nineteenth century was the greatest liberating event in art history...
...This is significant...
...he has jazzed up the title a little, and some restrictions apply...
...Then there is art based on mockery...
...We have been marking time as we digest abstract expressionism...
...no artist can be on the right side of history, because there is no more history...
...The rear wall had come all the way forward...
...We are less bigoted, richer, and as a nation far more powerful...
...Art stayed out all night, made exactly the sort of discoveries you might expect, and came home transformed...
...And if twentieth-century art drew mainly on Cézanne among the Oldish Masters, the new art draws on Degas, the freest-spirited master of human form...
...He respects them for this knowledge, as they respect him...
...In 1940, the hot Coney Island night of Stuart Davis was met by the stark daylight of Edward Hopper...
...Nevertheless, thinking people ought to know where art is and where it is going...
...It can illustrate stories, too—so long as you already know the stories...
...Arthur Danto is a valuable guide to the past and present state of art...
...In truth we are today finally sorting abstract expressionism out: grasping the pre-eminence of Willem de Kooning and the greatness of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko...
...Danto himself has little sympathy for it, on the whole...
...The drive to make art—in equal parts mental pathology and spiritual striving—is incomparably too powerful for that...
...then Cézanne, beginning in the late 1870s, tipped the horizontal plane (of a tabletop, for example) upward and made the background press forward...
...yet as recently as 1994, the English writer David Anfam claimed that abstract expressionism remains "a shade too serious, strange and extreme" for "outright popularity...
...First there is political art...
...They wish it were otherwise, but, when they step back, they know it usually isn't...
...Mondrian was famous for the acid clarity of his art and for rejecting such lyrical, spill-your-guts romantics as Jackson Pollock...
...By and large, the manifestos Danto makes so much of were high-spirited, masculine chest-thumping...
...Last year's prestigious Venice Biennial, for example, included such artworks as a large stack of identical catalogs, a group of TV sets running test patterns, an installation called "Chandelier" consisting of a chandelier, a collection of underwear to be worn by exhibition guards, and—at an associated exhibit across town—a video show installed in the life-sized hindquarters of three fiberglass cows...
...A sculptor makes an ivory woman so beautiful that he falls in love with it...
...All message art is phony, because no one needs to send a message to himself...
...This enterprise is in keeping with the Stalinist view that artists must serve the people, and to do so—to explain to the people how bigoted they are, how neglectful for not having cured AIDS, and so on—artists must produce plain-spoken, straightforward propaganda, for the people are very dumb...
...But Danto makes the mistake of confusing what artists think with what they feel called upon to say...
...Danto is his own man and no conspirator...
...In 1920, Amedeo Modigliani's intimate boudoir nudes contrasted with Paul Klee's poignantly reserved abstractions...
...The artist William Scharf reports that Rothko would gaze at his own paintings "sometimes for hours, sometimes for days...
...If he focuses his efforts on other people, he may become a great popular artist or performer, but never a true artist...
...In the supermarket, a Brillo box isn't art...
...But they went on making art...
...Starting with Manet in the 1860s, this imaginary space began to flatten out— like a room where the back wall moves ominously forward...
...The art world used to be clear on the shaping role of photography in the rise of modern art, but in recent years it seems to have lost the thread...
...That is today's "committed" art in a nutshell...
...But he doesn't need them...
...Conservatives have a special duty to know, because the Left has abandoned the always-vulnerable idea of "Art for Art's Sake" and left it in a bundle on the Right's front porch...
...In 1907 came the inevitable crash: The wall had moved in so far, it smashed the objects that were supposed to inhabit the painting...
...But Danto doesn't mention that Mondrian, upon examining a Pollock painting in 1943, told the art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, "I have a feeling that this may be the most exciting painting I have seen in a long time...
...American life has improved since 1964 in obvious and important ways...
...But Perl and serious people like him "have by and large been shut out of the discussion": The Establishment is closed to them...
...Notice that, under the covers, this is the Left's all-purpose Creation Myth: the long dark night of meanness leading to the Birth of Tolerance in the golden '60s, like Venus arising (diversely) from the foam...
...For in 1964, says Danto, we entered the "post-historical age," and that's where we are destined to stay— mired in the Age of Nothing...
...Jed Perl updated Kramer's claim in a recent piece in the New Republic: Careful looking is out of fashion—"if not yet lost, then marginalized...
...The new figure art won't claim to be the "only valid" style...
...He is the philosopher and critic who claimed in the mid-1980s that art history is over, and he repeated the claim last year in After the End of Art...
...Aphrodite, goddess of love, is impressed and makes the ivory come alive...
...Dan-to is right: Art is polyphonic...
...And serious art communicates only second-hand...
...When you look at a painting, you gaze into the imaginary space conjured up by the artist...
...he demanded histrionically...
...But isn't art (as nearly everyone says) a form of communication...
...But it is hard to deny that art reached a crux in the mid-1960s...
...it is painful and harrowing to go without them...
...No one needs to entertain himself with mockery...
...Picasso as a young man worked only to please himself...
...Danto Contributing editor David Gelernter is the art critic of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...humans are moved most by human images...
...From Manet to de Kooning they did crazier and crazier things...
...An art that takes account of this truth promises a future much brighter than Danto thinks...
...Today's serious artists face Establishment indifference...
...What can fifty do against a hundred and forty million...
...Although he is no party-line leftist, his account is classically left-wing: It tells about an intolerant, authoritarian culture overthrown in the 1960s by tolerance and diversity...
...Picture-making is so cramped and limited a language, it can't even say "yes" or "no...
...This requirement reveals in turn the phoni-ness of postmodern art—for the only way a true artist can succeed is by working to please himself...
...But Danto's depressing idea is that, on the contrary, tomorrow will be just like today...
...The history of modern art—painted in the broadest possible strokes— goes like this...
...It's not that an artist doesn't want praise and an audience...
...In 1880, Edgar Degas was obsessed with the body as a dynamic machine, Paul Cézanne with the static thingness that bodies share with apples and mountains...
...Art-making is thinking out loud or, the emotional equivalent, feeling out loud...
...Danto holds that art history ended in 1964...
...But one voice always emerges with the melody...
...Most thoughtful people have barred the door against contemporary art in hopes it will blow over—which is understandable...
...The longer you look at this theory, the more upside-down it seems...
...And the experience of great art is in part the moral equivalent of snooping in someone else's diary—which helps to make it compelling...
...This is cubism, where you see objects from many viewpoints at once, because— like crushed-flat figurines newly uncovered by archaeologists—they lie in fragments...
...In the gallery it is...
...But abstract art's greatest achievements were completed by 1964, and almost nothing has happened since...
...But it is the post-de Kooning form: The new figure art draws power from the tension between realistic human shapes and the freedom of post-abstract-expressionist brushwork, color, and sculptural gesture...
...the viewer overhears...
...Yes—a deep but narrow form...
...But when she turns to the art world in 1998, she writes, "Today art no longer aspires to such heights...
...And now artists are facing up once more to art's central reality: Human beings care most about other human beings...
...He is smart and learned, and knows whereof he fails to speak...
...Mondrian conceded that Pollock's work "points in the opposite direction of my painting, my writing...
...Could a great enterprise reaching back to Giotto (and past Giotto to Periclean Athens) be knocked off the tracks by a gang of snickering nihilists...
...But our cultural leadership requires that we not deny the obvious: Life has also gotten worse...
...An artist who puts messages in his art declares that he is not serious...
...I am only a public entertainer...
...Every serious artist is a passionate egomaniac—but he takes it for granted that his fellow artists are too, and is apt to admire at least a few whose methods are radically unlike his own...
...To which serious artists respond: Like hell...
...If serious art is going to be defended, conservatives will have to defend it...
...In 1985, the critic Hilton Kramer summed up his dispute with the postmodern mainstream in the world of art: "What is primarily at stake is the concept of seriousness...
...But henceforth a thousand flowers would bloom...
...The story of Pygmalion is art's basic myth...
...It is inspired not only by abstract painters but by such artists as Giacometti, who squeezed the human form down to its bare essence and made it tremble with intensity...
...Photography played a large part in sending artists off on a spree...
...Picasso and Matisse in 1910 were two champion prima donnas with mutually opposed practices—yet Picasso openly (if grudgingly) admired Matisse's work, and Matisse admired his...
...art is the ogle, not the girl...
...He knows he is the best...
...The serious artist maintains a paradoxical mental balance...
...realizing that such artists as Arshile Gorky, Hans Hoffman, and Barnett Newman were not great painters but occasionally produced great pictures...
...And we are poised to go forward in a new direction...
...And this new figure art that is now emerging will carry the melody, at least for a while...
...By describing the artwork as the image of a beautiful woman, the ancient myth makes the artist's obsession comprehensible...
...As Danto understands it, Warhol's coup brought to a close the "Age of Manifestos...
...Manet suppressed modeling and shadows to make his paintings shallower...
...Rothko would have been staggered by Jed Perl's report of the "almost universal feeling" in today's Establishment that "art ought to be taken in quickly, instantaneously...
...The art world is dark and stormy, visibility is zero, and apocalyptic predictions split the air...
...They had day jobs, mostly—de Kooning doing carpentry and house painting, Rothko teaching at Brooklyn College (and being denied tenure), Pollock handling odd jobs at an art museum...
...In 1960, de Kooning's gorgeous abstracts differed from Alberto Gia-cometti's austere portraits and nudes...
...But this was "no reason to declare it invalid...
...Imaginary space has disappeared and paintings are abstract: There is no room inside them for anything real...
...What the new "post-historical," post-1964 generation actually created was not artistic diversity but ideological uniformity...
...The painter doesn't address the viewer, he addresses himself...
...They can take it, understanding as they do—in words today's Establishment knows how to laugh at but could never begin to understand—that it has always been and will always be an honor to live for art...
...Piet Mondrian is such a fine example of intolerance that Danto quotes him: "True art like true life takes a single road...
...Danto mistakes the Age of Mouthing Off (which is history) for an Age of Intolerance that never existed...
...He doesn't mean exactly what you might think...
...Today's mainstream art has two main strands: radical politics and postmodernist mockery...
...Likewise the pointil-lists, fauves, cubists, and many others...
...It relieved artists of the quasi-secretarial task of recording appearances—relieved them not so much of specific duties as of expectations that weighed heavily...
...like broken records or demented parrots...
...he knows that other artists know they are the best...
...The political art and the mock art have this in common: Each is a form of oratory and therefore requires an audience—to cheer the screaming and snicker along with the mocking, or to be mocked and belabored itself...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 46
