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Notes on Art at the End of the Eighties
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13781 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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12 / 1988 |
2,562 Words |
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Hilton Kramer
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The best way to understand what has happened to the contemporary art scene in the penultimate decade of the twentieth century is to see the many ways in which it resembles its historical counterpart in the Paris of the later nineteenth century. For today we are living with the consequences of one of the great reversals of cultural history—a reversal that has made avant-gardism (which must be distinguished from the kind of authentic avant-garde that no longer exists) the contemporary equivalent of nineteenth-century academicism and has relegated those artists who remain opposed to avant-gardist orthodoxy to the realm of the outsiders.
Most of us carry a certain picture in our heads of the oppressive and reactionary institutions that made it so difficult for artists of real quality to survive and prosper in nineteenth-century Paris. Simply to name those institutions is to conjure up a world in which philistinism was the dominant cultural power—the state-sponsored annual or biennial Salons whose governing committees were adamant in their resistance to new artistic ideas; the academies that were closed to any but the most conventional approaches to art; the press, with its timid corps of critics, that did little more than ratify established opinion; and the patrons who, more often than not, were terrified at the thought of embracing, or even permitting, anything that deviated from accepted taste.
From Courbet and Manet to Gauguin and Van Gogh and well into the early decades of even Picasso and Matisse, what we would now call the establishment stood firm—if only for a generation or so—against the acceptance of the greatest art of the period. That art came to be identified with the concept of the avant-garde, and it is as monuments and ornaments of an authentic avant-garde culture that the masterworks of Modernist art have become enshrined in our museums, in our textbooks, and in the artistic imagination itself. What was once, of necessity, a vital antiestablishment art has been transformed in the course of time into a tradition—indeed, into the tradition that is seen to stand in a direct line of descent from the masters of the Renaissance and the Baroque and the Neoclassic and Romantic epochs of Western art.
Toward this tradition the art world of the 1980s stands in a curious and uncertain relation. There is no shortage of adulation and publicity for the masterworks of the past, as we can see in the steady succession of so-called blockbuster exhibitions that are now the favorite enterprise both of our major art museums and of the government and corporate sponsors that finance such events. It would probably be a mistake, however, to assume from either the frequency or popularity of these superscale exhibitions that the public derives from them any very clear conception of what great art is. Still less have we any reason to assume that these exhibitions have the effect of enriching the creation of new art.
Of course, there are artists among us for whom an encounter with the great art of the past is crucial in providing inspiration, and not only aesthetic inspiration. In art there is also what might be called moral inspiration, and only the greatest art can offer it. But it is my impression, anyway, that such artists are now—as in the past—a tiny and beleaguered minority, and they are unlikely to be the artists who receive the lion's share of attention, publicity, and patronage from the many institutions that nowadays devote their resources to supporting new art. These institutions—the great majority of our
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