Part two of my introductory overview of the history of art. Part one, here.
Modern Art
Impressionism was born with technology, the technology of the railway, the factory, the city and the camera, all of which radically split the meaningful subject from an increasingly inaccessible, meaningless, and therefore boring world. Artists responded to this world by journeying into themselves, where they discovered light, truth, beauty and all the wonders of the seven heavens, but these were now unable to meaningfully affect the ‘real world’ which was now imposed on them, imposed on all of us. The radical art of modernism likewise was a reaction to a now alien, and alienating, existence.1
When art turned again from considerations of objective reality to subjective impression, the focus of the critic, curator and artist turned to effects produced by paint, colour and canvas. This changed taste from a matter of sensitivity to experience to a question of education. This in turn combined with the removal of art from life into the unplace of the gallery, and its concomitant commodification, to produce elite art; that which only properly trained experts can really enjoy, and commercialised art; that which is valued for its authenticity and for its arbitrary price-tag, rather than for its quality. Another word for this elite, commercialised art is pornography.
While art stills the mental-emotional self-world, revealing ineffable consciousness or the immanent context, porn moves; emotionally exciting the self, either negatively (fear, revulsion, etc.) or positively (arousing the appetites). The road towards pornographic art began as we have seen, long, long ago, at the dawn of ‘civilisation’, but as society has descended further and further into egoic unexperience, so art, more and more separated from the context, has become more and more pornographic until, in the last half-century, it has reached its logical endpoint; the hyperporn of postmodernism.
The first stage of artistic hyperporn was when the medium—of paint or clay or what have you—began to form part of the artistic message. This process (combined with a new non-standard feeling for the subtle quality of life) initially permitted the exquisite panjectivism of artists such as Turner, Monet and Van Gogh—the great impressionists (and post-impressionists) who used the canvas in the same way as the ancients used the cave—but soon developed into the degraded modernism of Picasso, Braque and Moore, in which art started to become its own subject, and then into abstract expressionism, in which the object became irrelevant. By the time we reach ‘artists’ like Mondrian, Johns and CIA employee Pollock, experience no longer had anything to do with art.
So what was going on? What was this new art about? Here is an account, from the celebrated art critic Arthur C. Danto, of the aesthetic priorities of two famous abstract expressionists Robert Ryman and Jennifer Bartlett:
The De Stijl movement allowed itself only three colors—red, yellow, and blue—and three noncolors—white, gray, and black. These have a certain metaphysical resonance: the colors are the primaries, and the noncolors define the end and midpoints of the axis through the center of the color cone. But orange and green, for someone with this orientation, are mere secondary hues, as suspect to the purist as diagonal lines were to Mondrian, who despised van Doesberg for indulging himself with them. So one can say that whatever the reasons were for Ryman turning to white, they were like those he held for using orange and green, with no metaphysical cosmological implication whatever. When Jennifer Bartlett executed her dot paintings of the 1960s, she arranged them like Cartesian points on a grid, and employed (shades of Duco!) just black and white and the primary colors as they come from the little bottles of Testor's enamel, used for painting models. But she later confided to her profilist, Calvin Tomkins, that ‘it always made me nervous just to use primary colors. I felt a need for green! I felt no need for orange or violet, but I did need green’. This concession to need immediately negates the Neoplatonic overtones of the primary hues and the geometrical ones of the axis of the cone, and makes plain that we are dealing with impulse and subjective inclination…2
The emphasis is now on microscopic shades of meanings between purely subjective—which is to say, infinitely trivial and selfish—decisions. White squares can be exhibited, or green dots, and the properly trained critic can nod in sage wonder at… hold on! no, it’s not the white radiance of eternity but, rather, a disclosure of personality. Do you see? What’s that? Bullshit you say? Are you sure you’re serious about art?
With canvasses comprising a single dot of red paint, the selfish subjective-objective pendulum seems to have swung all the way over to me, me, me and my thoughts and my emotions. But no—there was one extraordinary final step to take towards pure conceptual abstraction, which was first tentatively made by Marcel Duchamp, with his famous ‘Fountain’ and then decisively taken by Andy Warhol, with his ‘Brillo Box’.
We have now reached what Danto correctly identified as the end of art; postmodernism. Now everything is irrelevant to art, which enables anything, anywhere, to be presented and commodified as art. High and low culture collapse into a hyper superficial, self-referential marketplace which runs on pure whim—albeit professionally accredited whim. The gallery owner or wealthy collector decides that something is art, and, on this decision alone, it becomes valuable.
Almost nothing is expressed by the artform now but ‘why did the artist choose this?’ A tape recorder on a step-ladder playing the sound of a running tap, or a stuffed crow wearing dentures, or an unmade bed covered in semen provokes one kind of conceptual response only—a series of abstract ideas on why these objects have made it into gallery heaven and not those—and one kind of oscillating emotional response—I-like-it-don’t-like-it-like-it-don’t-like-it.
In order to justify this ludicrous superficiality the concept of art had to be reconfigured as a form of depth—aka ‘philosophy’. The whole point of postmodern art became to ask the so-called ‘philosophical’ question ‘what is art?’—is it this bucket of ordure? Does a glass nipple count? Why is this huge furry ocelot hanging in the Tate? The answer is the artist’s whim, combined with the ‘training’ of the professional art-decider which informs him that a) this bullshit is slightly different to all the other bullshit and b) it’s the right kind of bullshit; sufficiently bleak, ironic, irrelevant or titillating.
Hyperpornographic bullshit cannot gain access to the modern canon unless it meets one or more of these five postmodern criteria.
Irony is the sine qua non of pomo hyperporn—without the modern artist’s religious commitment to the idea that ‘It’s not supposed to be taken seriously’, (itself based on the foundational philosophy of extreme relativism—that nothing is or ever can really be good) his or her lack of any skill whatsoever would lie threateningly exposed.
Titillation is the only component of modern art that is part of a tradition—kind of—the tradition of porn. The fat naked women and delicious, tastefully lit food of yore have now become gusts of strawberry-smelling air, high-tech blobs of latex that feel oooh, slightly odd to the touch and piercing screams from vents in the floor that makes us feel sick (you don’t like it? you prude!).
Irrelevance Intimately connected with extreme formality is the necessity of all modern art to have no meaningful bearing whatsoever to what is actually happening in the world. Protest art, that attempts to address merely political realities, can occasionally get access to (and be co-opted by) the gallery, but this is the superficial exception that proves the rule.
Bleakness—a commitment (popular in the pseudo-art of photography) to reflect the cold brutalism (or extreme boredom3) of the modern living space through an absence of natural vivacity, vibe or colour (although note that garish kitsch is also permitted, even encouraged, provided it is sufficiently ironic).
Formality, meaning, as we have seen, lack of function. It is absolutely forbidden for postmodern art to have any kind of use. A chair you can comfortably sit on? Fail. A teacup cut in half? Pass. A picture that would add genuine serenity to your bedroom? Big fail. A close-up of a bleeding vagina, preferably your own? Pass with merit.
Actually, there are two other, pomo-tactics, which occasionally grant access to The Marvellous World. The first is reportage, or pseudo-realism—replicating ‘material reality’ precisely (extra points if the medium is soot, or Elvis Presley’s dandruff, or if it provokes the response ‘ooh, that must have taken ages to do!’). This, however, like protest art, is a dodgy tactic for the ambitious artist, because it smacks of the measurable and the objective and is therefore considered unsophisticated, gauche—likely to get you on the front page of Reddit or a feature in Metro, unlikely to win you a Turner Prize or a round of applause from a hard-faced broadsheet art critic.
The second officially approved art style is corporate deco or management bland. This is a style of illustration used by the institutions of the late-capitalist system to promote its ‘values’. In corp-dec, body forms are massively distorted—there is no such thing as a healthy body—and they usually have strange coloured skin, with no recognisable ethnicity. It is placeless (no context, no recognisable milieu, could be anywhere) with an emphasis on movement (nothing static, everything wow). There is no recognisable gender, with dimorphism de-emphasised, for there is no such thing as difference. Finally, emphasis is placed on technology, the various characters glued to their devices. All of these attributes mirror and normalise the New Human™, a rootless, pasty, formless, fungible technical node with no distinguishing features.
Artistic Lies
The pointless ugliness of contemporary art, the gladhanding venality of the art scene and the absence of sensitivity, intellect or originality in art criticism are usually submerged under a river of pseudo-intellectual pomo-babble along the lines of ‘my work interrogates identity and memory’, or ‘I am concerned with the interplay of light and form’, or ‘the artist has always rejected the gaze of linearity, preferring instead to speak to refraction and reflection’, or ‘it’s a deeply honest archaeological excavation of transitory abjection in the inter-subjective self’. A great deal of art ‘training’ is in learning this religious jargon, and in ‘teaching’ students to spot and produce high-scoring pomo products without ever explicitly admitting what’s going on.
Anyone untrained in bourgeois values and styles of perception who takes an art course at, say, Goldsmiths, or who reads contemporary art criticism, or who wanders, for the first time, into a modern art gallery is in for quite a shock. They might look at the religious awe of their fellow gallery goers (a sub-class of ‘religious awe’ that goes by the name of extreme boredom) and question their own intelligence or sanity. If they have any confidence in their own experience—if they are capable of perceiving the pompous manner in which seasoned art critics and gallery goers talk about art and stare at it—they are likely to have the distinct feeling that, actually, they are drifting through the mind of a complete madman. And they are right.
Art has now descended into a schizoid state of total virtual irrealism or intellectual self-absorption. Bounded by an intensely focused mind, entirely cut off from embodied experience, it is necessarily characterised by precisely the same attributes as schizophrenia, namely rationalism, adversarialism, smug irony, self-referentialism, intense scrutiny of details, cool detachment, hyper-relativism and humourless absurdity. Actual experience becomes thinner, and thinner, and thinner, while all the time claiming—with breathless expressions of fanatical delight—to be more and more universal. For those trained to desensitise themselves to their own embodied experience, to the voice of their conscience, to the lived reality of the context and to the world as it actually is, none of this is objectionable. Oh yes, a huge sphere made of cotton buds, mmm, fascinating, delicate, suggestive, subversive, sensual, vibrant. So, lunch at Ottolenghi yeah?
The disembodied nature of modern and postmodern art also explains why it all looks more or less the same, wherever it comes from and whoever produces it. Like modern management, the modern painting, sculpture and installation could be produced by anyone, anywhere for any purpose. It is completely interchangeable and can be positioned in any modern institution, any boardroom, any Olympic park or any virtual landscape and look equally unplaced—scenius is as inimical to its creation as genius is. There are occasionally ‘influences’ and ‘references’ to local styles, but pretty much any modern painting today could have been made pretty much anywhere, at any time. It could be French, or Japanese, or South African, from the 2010s or from the 1950s. And yet, timeless it ain’t, any more than an Ektorp is or a Eurovision song entry, all of which are products of untime, or dead time. Culture everywhere, odourless, tasteless, has died, and all it can produce are the same spasms when stimulated by the cattle-prod of its master, technocratic capital.
And just as the art all feels the same, so the artists all look and sound the same. Listen to an interview with any famous painter or sculptor of the past twenty or thirty years and you’ll be struck by how banal they all sound; the same characterless faces mouthing the same characterless platitudes. They look like what they are; management. One gets much the same sense from listening to architects talk, prize-winning novelists and politicians.
I said that modern and postmodern art has to sell itself as an empty form of philosophy; but there are a few kinds of valid philosophic art. Good philosophical artworks are mostly illustrative and protest pieces. Such art, because it is designed to express a meaningful and largely explicit message, is, firstly, pretty crude—often downright vulgar. Secondly, if it is any good—if it strikes at the root of the problem—it will thereby be officially taboo. It might still end up getting a price tag, through its popularity, and be admitted (or rather co-opted) into the club, but the message will be ignored.
There can also, obviously, be interesting philosophy about art; we can think about pretty much anything and, with the right kind of attention and experience, produce interesting essays and speeches on just about any subject. Likewise we can be inspired by a cathedral to write a ‘cathedralish’ song, or even somehow express our emotions in what we are cooking. But generally—and in the postmodern case very specifically—philosophical art is a decadent absurdity. It’s like dancing a novel, or making a slightly self-conscious omelette, or working for ‘Mojo’. The fact that libraries are filling up with books on ‘the philosophy of art’ is evidence that art itself is no longer fulfilling its pre-rational function. The experience of the seeing eye has given way to intellectual expressions of the staring mind. We are not invited to resonate to the primal reality of the inspired image or form, but to think about an idea, and a mundane one at that.
This is why language is so very important to postmodern and avant-garde artists, for what they create is not to be looked at or experienced, in context, but to be thought about, discussed and traded by the critics, curators, journalists, dealers and academics who comprise the actual art world. It is they—businessmen and professionals—through their market activities, who add the value that amounts to modern art, just as it is businessmen and professionals who add the value that amounts to modern farming, manufacture, care-work and so on, and they do this through the production of verbiage.
Brian Ashbee in his fine account of the language required to justify postmodern art points out that pomo obfuscation (‘artbollocks’) has a few predictable features. It avoids all value judgements (such as ‘great’), it tends to hide its bewilderment by attributing it to the work (‘It seems at once to embrace and reject the entire sweep of artistic production’), it extols mediocrity, banality and meaninglessness (which is the very point of the work), it prattles on about ‘deconstructing narratives’ and it substitutes facts and opinions with abstract concepts. ‘Bi-polar’ opposites are extremely common in constructing artbollocks, expressions such as ‘the work is about corporeal presence and absence’, which can be applied to any work of art, as there’s either a body in it, or there isn’t.
To some extent all this nonsense also happened with avant-garde music and literature, but modern and postmodern writers and musicians found it much harder to get away with fifty minute ‘symphonies’ of tennis balls striking a dead cow or the letter ‘e’ written 200,000 times, even if 200,000 art critics publicly swooned, because these art forms are inherently, albeit slightly, more functional than the visual and plastic arts. Naturally, there were no such experiments with the most functional arts and crafts. Imagine if architecture had fully taken the postmodern turn, if the point of every building was for us to ask, with reverent perplexity, ‘but is it a house?’ Imagine if all restaurants now served bricks, bits of ear-wax, shattered light-bulbs and tiny plastic tigers. ‘Waiter, I can’t eat this’. ‘You’re not supposed to eat it sir. You’re supposed to question its validity as food’.
With experience now irrelevant, with everything (or everything that gets a price tag) now considered, potentially, as art and with even the object itself being secondary, you have to ask; why bother having the object at all? Postmodern art would serve its limited purpose just as well by being a descriptive placard. We don’t actually need Duchamp’s urinal or Warhol’s Brillo Box to ask why they chose to exhibit them.4 We would be far better off by putting the whole lot in a book, a long catalogue of descriptions, in nice Swiss fonts, and then let the readers form their precious concepts from those.
Danto asks us what’s the difference between a work of art, say a dog made of balloons by Jeff Koons, and an identical balloon-dog made by a cheap children’s entertainer? The answer—which pomo-enthusiast Danto would never give—is a combination of mob rule and professional decree. The same process which makes Tracy Emin’s bed worth a fortune is that which makes a storm-trooper’s helmet valuable and the word ‘ho’ offensive. Again the shameful nihilism of this can never be officially acknowledged while fortunes are made by ‘artists’ who exhibit their eyebrow hairs.
And just as everything is art, so, as pomo performance artist Joseph Beuys had it, ‘everyone is an artist’. Everyone is a musician too if you redefine the anus as a trumpet.
Artistic Truth
Danto tells us that there is no further direction for the history of art to take. It can be anything artists and patrons want it to be—except good of course, or real; words which, to the modern artist, are either meaningless or the active source of an anxiety which must, at all costs, be effaced; either through the usual appeal to relativism (‘à chacun son goût’) or by effacing the exigencies of artistic truth behind a refusal to be restrained by genre, style or medium.5
The famous critic of modernism, Clement Greenberg, explained that artists are essentially stand-ins for God, creating things valid on their own terms, ‘in the way nature is valid’. Which is fine; if the creation, like landscapes and trees, is natural—paradoxical, integrated into a context, fractally beautiful, and so on. But is it? Is a typical painting in the moma ‘valid’ in the same way as a splendid fairy wren is? Balls! If you find Gilbert and George’s ‘naked shit pictures’ as beautiful as a dew-laden spider’s web, we have moved well beyond questions of taste. We are drifting into realms of insanity.
You might be wondering at this point, who are you, sir, to say what good is? Who are you to determine natural beauty and psychological meaning and artistic truth for me? Isn’t it intolerable arrogance—perhaps even a kind of fascism—to divide up art in this way into the valid and the invalid? Isn’t the age of manifestos—both political and aesthetic—dead?
Firstly, regarding the ‘fascist’ application of truth-standards to art, note again the five postmodern criteria above. I repeat, for a work of art to count as art today it must meet one or more—ideally all—of these standards. That they are unspoken, or implicit (Huxleyan) makes them no less fascist than having an Orwellian Ministry of Beauty issue artistic decrees.
Secondly, I am not saying what artistic truth is. As I have already suggested; ‘I’ am beside the point. Both objective measures of quality, those encoded in realistic ‘standards of excellence’, and the arbitrary subjective decisions upon which modernism is founded, are components of the self. To assume that a declaration of truth is either a call for an objective scientific measure, or a command for the world to bow down before my subjective decree, is itself an example of ideological positioning. To ask ‘who are you to say?’ sneaks in an assumption that there can only be me in here.
While it is certainly true that I have my own artistic preferences, and am keen to learn and promote objective standards, traditions and techniques (particularly when it comes to writing, my preferred trade), quality, or the root of good taste, ultimately has nothing to do with either. It is not me who has decided that Bach is the greatest composer of his time (perhaps all time?), or that Shakespeare is superior to Marlowe, and it won’t be me who will decide that Almodovar, Haneke and Scorsese are second-rate, or that the Beatles are almost infinitely superior to the Rolling Stones. Quality clothes itself in the form and fashion of self, but, ultimately, it is selfless (which is to say, timeless).
Artistic truth is neither objective nor subjective; it is panjective. It manifests as the objective-subjective self—and, therefore, depends on objective technique and tradition and on subjective preference and style—but is paradoxically irreducible to either. We therefore find that artistic truth, or artistic standards, can appear anywhere within the ‘self-spectrum’; from the formal realism of Michelangelo, or Robert Crumb, or the transcendent craft of William Morris and Eric Gill, through the genius of Hokusai, early Picasso and Egon Shiele to the formal abstraction of Insular art or Mark Rothko. We also find that artistic truth cannot appear at the extremities of the self-spectrum. Artistic standards bounded by the absolute objectivity of photography or digital virtual reality at one end and the absolute subjectivity of postmodernism and pornography on the other, in ruling out panjective paradox, are inherently hostile to artistic truth. And, finally, we find that when artistic truth does appear it nearly always conflicts with fashion—the artistic mob-rule of time, space, groupthink and groupfeel.
Fashion may determine that objective quality does not exist, or that feminine styles of art are inferior, or that illustration and craft are lesser arts, or it may determine that only properly trained, civilised, bourgeois artists can produce art worthy of gallery validation; but whatever criteria those on high decide you must meet for admission into their wondrous club, the true artist, seeking quality that transcends the subjective-objective pole, will find himself in a fight for his life, for his very soul, against the established taste of the monomind. The work of artists who came from or who were dedicated to the experience of the working classes, such as Millet, Courbet, Hokusai and Van Gogh, had to struggle for acceptance.
In fact, as we have seen, Van Gogh, Turner and Monet, were struggling to overcome more than mere professionalism—they were also devoted to the non-photographic suchness of phenomena, but this too had a social dimension. As John Berger points out,6 the working-class (aka ‘primitive’) artist knew from ‘his own lived experience’ that he was an outsider and that this gave him the right, usually manifesting as a kind of ‘difficult’ arrogance, to express himself as an artist.
Whether the great artist is struggling against institutional power, or fascist artistic objectification, or the pornographic art of capitalism, his own lived experience—rather than his technical expertise or his subjective whims—radiates from the work. This is the subtle thread that connects the cave paintings of Chauvet, Sesshū’s Splashed Ink Landscape, Caravaggio’s Inspiration of Saint Matthew (the first version) and Munch’s Madonna. Their work, like all great art, was ultimately independent of the subjective-objective fashion of the time they were produced in. They were expressions of genius and scenius, which come clothed in the style of the day, but which, ultimately, transcend the swing of the formal, selfish, pendulum. And how does great art do this? Because the great artist has. He has overcome the pseudo reality of his self, which means he can see the miracle of sensory experience that lies beyond his mind and emotions, and he has mastered the tool of his self, which means he can do justice to the transcendent reality which presents itself to him, squirming in ecstasy.
Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art.
There have been sophisticated attempts to justify this as a ‘revolutionary act’, that through overcoming one’s boredom before modern art, one revolts against the boring world. The reader can just for herself how revolutionary this is.
Actually, to be fair to Marcel Duchamp and Tragic Andy, their trickster philosophies, unlike the vacuity of their many, many imitators, has something to be said for it. I’d certainly enjoy spending a few hours in their company.
Hegel, in an uncharacteristic moment of clarity (even Great Philosophers must make themselves understood when venting spleen) wrote:
Everybody allows that to know any other science you must have first studied it, and that you can only claim to express a judgment upon it in virtue of such knowledge. Everybody allows that to make a shoe you must have learned and practised the craft of the shoemaker, though every man has a model in his own foot, and possesses in his hands the natural endowments for the operations required. For philosophy alone, it seems to be imagined, such study, care, and application are not in the least requisite.
And not merely philosophy, but also art and poetry.
John Berger, About Looking.