in which ugliness has not only
triumphed in our culture but is everywhere held up as something one must
embrace as attractive? How many more fashion ads featuring hideous “fat
positive” females do we need?
… Conservatives in the West long ago ceded culture to the Left.
… Back in 1973, Irving Kristol wrote an essay called “On Capitalism and
the Democratic Idea.” In the course of that essay, Kristol touched upon
the conservative indifference to the claims of culture. “For two
centuries,” he wrote,
the very important people who managed the affairs of this society
could not believe in the importance of ideas—until one day they were
shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped
by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or
seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important.
The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society—the economic
institutions, the political institutions, the religious
institutions—are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the
people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so
immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and
will—perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably—twist a familiar
institution into an unrecognizable shape.
… one day [“the very important people” who manage the affairs of our society] woke up and found the art world, and even the formerly
staid world of museums, was awash in sexualized garbage, postmodern
inanity, and race worship. Their indifference mutated first into
outrage. Then, as they took note of the prices fetched by the garbage,
it mutated into capitulation.
This process did not take place in a vacuum. It was part and parcel
of a larger cultural rebellion against bourgeois values that got going
in earnest with the advent of modernism. In art, as the Australian
philosopher David Stove observed,
Western Europe found that its anti-academy had become its academy
‘even in the twinkling of an eye.’ The galleries were suddenly full of
the art of African societies formerly the most despised. Victorian
architecture was all at once the object of a universal detestation, or
rather horror. Black music began its long and excruciating revenge on
the white man. The Jazz Age, in short, had arrived.
Today, we are living in the aftermath of that avant-garde: all those
“adversarial” gestures, poses, ambitions, and tactics that emerged and
were legitimized in the 1880s and 1890s, flowered in the first half of
the last century, and that live a sort of posthumous existence now in
the frantic twilight of postmodernism. Establishment conservatives have
done nothing effective to challenge this. On the contrary
… it is worth noting that great damage has been done — above all to
artists, but also to public taste — by romanticizing the tribulations of
the nineteenth-century avant-garde. Everyone is brought up on stories
of how an obtuse public scorned Manet, censored Gauguin, and drove poor
Van Gogh to madness and suicide. But the fact that these great talents
went unappreciated has had the undesirable effect of encouraging the
thought that, because one is unappreciated, one is therefore a genius.
It has also made it extremely difficult to expose fraudulent work as
such. For any frank dismissal of art — especially art that cloaks itself
in the mantle of the avant-garde — is immediately met by the rejoinder:
“Ah, but they made fun of Cézanne, too: they thought that Stravinsky
was a charlatan.”
This is the easiest and also the most shallow response to criticism.
It has been adopted as much by the Right as the Left. To quote David
Stove again, it is yet another version of what he called “The ‘They All
Laughed at Christopher Columbus’ Argument.” … If the Columbus Argument is puerile when applied to politics and morals,
it is equally puerile when applied to art. In the first place, most
artists whom we now associate with the nineteenth-century avant-garde
did not set out to shock or “transgress” moral boundaries: they set out
to make art that was a true articulation of the world. Today, the
primary — often, it seems, the only — goal of many so-called “cutting
edge” artists is to shock and transgress. The art is secondary, a
license for bad behavior.
There is also the uncomfortable and inegalitarian truth that in any
age most art is bad or failed art. And in our time, most art is not only
bad but also dishonest: a form of therapy or political grumbling
masquerading as art. Like everything important in human life, art must be judged on the basis
of first-hand experience: no formula can be devised prescribing its
assessment, including the formula that what is despised today will be
championed as great work tomorrow. The art world today retains little of
the idealism that permeated Romanticism, but it remains Romantic in its
moralism and hubris about the salvific properties of art.
On second thought, though, I realized that I could give an
abbreviated answer to the question implicit in my title in just three
words: indifference, capitulation, kitsch.
[The] familiar but exemplary episodes from the annals of contemporary
art [that Roger Kimball mentions regarding the Dada movement, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Pinoncelli, etc] illustrate the cynical truth of Andy Warhol’s observation
that “Art is what you can get away with.” Warhol’s own career, and,
indeed, a large part of the contemporary art world testify to the power —
if not the truth — of that observation. The sad fact is that today,
anything can be not only put forward but also accepted and celebrated as
a work of art.
How Did We Get Here?
What had to happen such that a bisected cow in a tank of formaldehyde
is accounted an important work of art? That is a complicated question
to which there is no short answer. But if one had to sum up volumes in a
single word, a good candidate would be the word “beauty”: What the art
world is lacking today is an allegiance to beauty. … But art without beauty was, if not exactly a
contradiction in terms, at least a description of failed art.
But if large precincts of the art world have jettisoned the
traditional link between art and beauty, they have done nothing to
disown the social prerogatives of art. Indeed, we suffer today from a
peculiar form of moral anesthesia: an anesthesia based on the delusion
that by calling something “art” we thereby purchase for it a blanket
exemption from moral criticism — as if being art automatically rendered
all moral considerations beside the point.
George Orwell gave classic expression to this point in “Benefit of
Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí.” Acknowledging the deficiency of
the philistine response to Dalí’s work — categorical rejection along
with denial that Dalí possessed any talent whatever — Orwell goes on to
note that the response of the cultural elites was just as impoverished.
Essentially, the elite response to Dalí was the response of l’art pour l’art, of extreme aestheticism. “The artist,” Orwell writes,
is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary
people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K.
Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O. K.; kicking little
girls in the head is O. K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows, among other things, detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.
A juror in the obscenity trial in Cincinnati in 1990 over Robert
Mapplethorpe’s notorious photographs of the S&M homosexual
underworld memorably summed up the paralyzed attitude Orwell described.
Acknowledging that he did not like Mapplethorpe’s rebarbative
photographs, the juror nonetheless concluded that “if people say it’s
art, then I have to go along with it.”
“If people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.” It is
worth pausing to digest that comment. It is also worth confronting it
with a question: Why do so many people feel that if something is
regarded as art, they “have to go along with it,” no matter how
offensive, foolish, or corrosive it might be? Part of the answer has to
do with the confusion of art with ‘free speech.’ Another part of the
answer has to do with the evolution, and what we might call the
institutionalization, of the avant-garde and its posture of defiance.
You know the drill: black-tie dinners at major museums, tout le monde in
attendance, celebrating the latest art-world freak: maybe it’s the
Chapman brothers with their pubescent female mannequins festooned with
erect penises; maybe it’s Mike Kelley with his mutilated dolls, or Jeff
Koons with his pornographic sculptures depicting him and his now-former
wife having sex, or Cindy Sherman with her narcissistic feminism, or
Jenny Holzer with her political slogans. The list is endless. And so is
the tedium. Today in the art world, anything goes but almost nothing happens. As with any collusion of snobbery and artistic nullity, such
spectacles have their amusing aspects, as Tom Wolfe, for example, has
brilliantly shown. In the end, though, the aftermath of the avant-garde
has been the opposite of amusing. It has been a cultural disaster. For
one thing, by universalizing the spirit of opposition, it has threatened
to transform the practice of art into a purely negative enterprise. In
large precincts of the art world today, art is oppositional or it is
nothing. Celebrity replaces aesthetic achievement as the goal of art.
The right, especially the libertarian right, has been complicit in
this development, first in its indifference, second in its capitulation,
third by its embrace of kitsch.
… The novelist Milan Kundera … noted
that “Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into
the language of beauty and feeling.” Kitsch is histrionic,
self-dramatizing.
… it is no secret that much if not most art in recent decades has
abandoned beauty, abandoned the ambition to please the viewer
aesthetically. Instead, it seeks to shock, discommode, repulse,
proselytize, or startle. Beauty is out of place in any art that
systematically discounts the aesthetic.
But “beauty” is by no means an unambiguous term. In degenerate or
diluted form, it can mean the merely pretty, and in this sense beauty
really is an enemy of authentic artistic expression. But beauty is not
always the “merely pretty” or agreeable. One thinks, for example, of
Dostoyevsky’s observation, in The Brothers Karamazov, that “beauty is the battlefield on which God and the devil war for man’s soul.”
The point is that, in its highest sense, beauty speaks with such
great immediacy because it touches something deep within us. Understood
in this way, beauty is something that absorbs our attention and delivers
us, if but momentarily, from the poverty and incompleteness of everyday
life. At its most intense, beauty invites us to forget our subjection
to time and imparts an intoxicating sense of self-sufficiency. Our art
closes us to the experience of the beautiful.
… Art today is enlisted in all manner of extra-artistic projects, from
gender politics to the grim linguistic leftism of neo-Marxists,
post-structuralists, gender theorists, and all the other exotic fauna
who are congregating in and about the art world and the academy. The
subjugation of art — and of cultural life generally — to political ends
has been one of the great spiritual tragedies of our age. Among much
else, it has made it increasingly difficult to appreciate art on its own
terms, as affording its own kinds of insights and satisfactions. This
situation has made it imperative for critics who care about art to
champion its distinctively aesthetic qualities against attempts to
reduce art to a species of propaganda.
… . By the nineteenth century, art had long been free from serving the
ideological needs of religion; and yet the spiritual crisis of the age
tended to invest art with ever greater existential burdens — burdens
that continue, in various ways, to be felt down to this day. The poet
Wallace Stevens articulated one important strand of this phenomenon when
he observed that “after one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is
that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” The idea that
poetry, that art generally, should serve as a source — perhaps the
primary source — of spiritual sustenance in a secular age is a Romantic
notion that continues to resonate powerfully. It helps to explain, for example, the special aura that attaches to art and artists, even now
… This much, I think, is clear: without an allegiance to beauty, art
degenerates into a caricature of itself; it is beauty that animates
aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience
itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an
end in itself, untested by the rest of life. As I have put it elsewhere,
the trivialization of outrage leads to a kind of moral and aesthetic
anesthesia not the least of whose symptoms is the outrage of
trivialization.
