3rd St.

LIBRARY ANNEX

HAS MODERNISM FAILED?

 HAS
MODERNISM
FAILED?

Suzi Gablik

3
T&H

Thames and Hudson

3rd St. LIBRARY ANNEX

 ™

Copyright © 1984 by Suzi Gablik

First published in the United States in 1984 by Thames and

Hudson Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10110
First published in Great Britain in 1984 by Thames and
Hudson Ltd, London
First paperback edition 1985
Reprinted 1986

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,
or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog' Card Number 83-51075

Designed by Janet Doyle

Printed in the United States of America

Portions of this book have appeared previously in Art in

America and The New Criterion.

3rd St. LIBRARY ANNEX

ANV BREMER MEMORTAL LISRARY
TAM. ERANCISCO ART INSTITUTE
For Melba and Manny
 CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION:
The Waning of the Modern Age 11

INDIVIDUALISM:
Art for Art’s Sake, or Art for Society’s Sake?
20

ANXIOUS OBJECTS:
Modes of Cultural Resistance 36

BUREAUCRATIZATION:
The Death of the Avant-Garde 55

PLURALISM:
The Tyranny of Freedom 73

SECULARISM:
The Disenchantment of Art
(Julian Schnabel Paints a Portrait of God) 88

7 GRAFFITI IN WELL-LIGHTED ROOMS 103

8 HAS MODERNISM FAILED? 114

BIBLIOGRAPHY 129
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NS
A work of art is a gift, not a commodity. . . . Every
modern artist who has chosen to labor with a gift must
sooner or later wonder how he or she is to survive in a
society dominated by market exchange. And if the fruits
of a gift are gifts themselves, how is the artist to nourish
himself, spiritually as well as materially, in an age whose
values are market values and whose commerce consists
almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of
commodities?
Lewis Hyde, The Gift
)i

E | 7o
PRt e TN S SR
CHAPTER ONE:
INTRODUCTION
The Waning of the Modern
Age

Modemism—the term that has been used to describe the

art and culture of the past hundred years—appears to be
coming to an end. As we live through the unsettling moral
and intellectual consequences of what the American critic
Irving Howe has called the “decline of the new,” it has
become harder and harder to believe in the possibility of yet
another stylistic breakthrough, yet another leap into radical
form. In the complex transition from modernism into post-
modernism, a new terrain of consciousness is being occu-
pied—one in which the limits of art seem to have been
reached, and overturning conventions has become routine.
As long as we are willing to consider anything as art, innova-
tion no longer seems possible, or even desirable. At this
point in the breakup of modernist culture, as we draw away
from it, we might do well to consider exactly what we have
gained, now that the avant-garde has exhausted its tasks;
and equally, what we may be losing as a result of its disap-
pearance from the scene. It is not easy to represent to our-
selves a whole that has been made up of so many changes
and violent contrasts. Arewe leaving behind us a period of
success and resonant creativity, or one of impoverishment
and decline? Has modernism succeeded, or has it failed?
And now that pluralism is all the rage, does postmodernism
offer even greater scope for freedom, or is it merely the
effect of what Hegel called the bad infinite—which claims
to comprehend everything but is, in reality, a false complex-
ity that merely covers up a lack of meaning?
In 1952 the sculptor David Smith declared in a speech at
Deerfield, Massachusetts, that “nobody understands art but
the artist, because nobody is as interested in art, its pursuits,
its making, as the artist.” At that point there were only
about fifty modern artists living in New York, who de-
pended mostly on each other for support, and less than
twenty galleries. Even a5 late as 1961, only about twenty-
five artists of the older generation, according to the art critic
Thomas B. Hess, were making what could be considered a
“living” in New York. From the start, the mystique of mod-
ern art has always been that it is not generally popular, or
even comprehended, except by an elite few. The art dealer
and critic John Bernard Myers once asked Marcel Duchamp
how many people he thought really liked avant-garde art,
and Duchamp replied, “Oh, maybe ten in New York and
one or two in New Jersey.” That was back in 1945. More
recently, a drastic expansion has taken place, and there are
more people now concerned with art, either as producers or
consumers, than ever before. There is currently a two-bil-
lion-dollar-a-year art market in New York City alone, and
the 1982 Summer Gallery Guide, published by Arf in Amer-
ica, listed 14,000 artists with gallery affiliations. The turning
point is marked by no single event, but indifference and
hostility have definitely given way to enthusiasm and wider
audiences. Ambitious collectors and corporate buyers pur-
sue works by high-priced artists as good investments, and
today, a successful artist routinely expects a bulky income
from his work. Museums are full to the point where people
anxious to use them are often left standing outside. At the
recent international Zeitgeist exhibition in Berlin, the scene
was one of frantic buying and selling—one critic counted
three dealers to every artist. The auction markets prosper:
a single night’s sale at Sotheby’s can bring in over twenty
million dollars, proving that the rewards of collecting are by
no means exclusively aesthetic. And, as Calvin Tomkins
commented some time ago in The New Yorker, given the
choice, most artists would probably prefer to live at a time
when art is in demand even if for the wrong reason.
In many ways, postmodernism seems not so much a
revolution in styles as a surge of “rising expectations” on
the part of everyone swept up by art’s quantitative advance,

12
and its piling up of vital possibilities. In a sense, everything
that is good and bad in our present situation has its root in
this general rise of expectations and escalating demands.
And although the presence of a thriving market, and of
galleries that are overflowing, suggests that the battle for
acceptance has been decisively won, the world of art—now
mediated by a bureaucratic megastructure that is imper--
sonal, increasingly powerful, and potentially sinister—has
become dangerously overinstitutionalized. This is no mere
wild statement. Anyone who wishes can observe that at this
point the art world pretty much divides up between those
who manage and those who are managed. It is hardly an
original observation to state that culture in postmodern so-
ciety is increasingly “administered”—transmitted and con-
trolled by means of corporate-management techniques,
public relations, and professional marketing.
The world into which artists today are born displays
features radically new to history. It is not like the world
with which we were familiar during the high period of
modernism. It is a world complicated by changes without
parallel. Models and standards from the past seem of little
use to us. Everything is in continuous flux; there are no fixed
goals or ideals that people can believe in, no tradition suffi-
ciently enduring to avoid confusion. The legacy of modern-
ism is that the artist stands alone. He has lost his shadow.
As his art can find no direction from society, it must invent
“its own destiny.
To the public at large, modern art has always implied a
loss of craft, a fall from grace, a fraud, or a hoax. We may
accept with good grace not understanding a foreign lan-
guage or algebra, but in the case of art it is more likely, as
Roger Fry once pointed out, that people will think, when
confronted with a work they do not like and cannot under-
stand, that it was done especially to insult them. It remains
one of the more disturbing facts about modernism that a
sense of fraudulence has, from the start, hung round its neck
like an albatross.
Lack of faith in the authority and authenticity of what
he does is not the only negative factor the modern artist has
had to contend with. With art and artists breeding like
bacteria under favorable conditions (it has been pointed out,
for instance, that the education system in America fabri-
cates as many graduate artists every five years as there were

13
 people in fifteenth-century Florence), we are having to put up
with an overload of stimuli and contradictory values, to-
gether with an absence of order and coherent purpose. This
rise in quantity has in no way led to a rise in quality, though
few have had the courage to say so. The overwhelming
s spectacle of current art is, at this point, confusing not only
to the public, but even to professionals and students, for
whom the lack of any clear or validating consensus, estab-
lished on the basis of a common practice, has ushered in an
impenetrable pluralism of competing approaches.
It is not easy any more to picture to oneself clearly what
art is, or how it got that way, or more importantly, how if can
be justified. What, finally, made modernism so different from
other traditions? Renoir once wrote that works which were
eminently collective and done for a community were possi-
ble in the past because painters possessed the same craft and
had the same vision of the world, and the same faith—
everyone learned to paint in the same way and had a reli-
gious feeling in common. Until the modern period, art and
artists had always been imbued with a quasi-religious as
well as a moral and social mission, and art was very much
integrated with the social and spiritual orders. One of the
deepest distinctions between other historical periods and
our own is that whereas in the past, belief and hope per-
meated all human activity—and art had a clear consensus
behind it—our own epoch is characterized by disbelief and
doubt hat were once quite clear and satisfactory have
become vagué or irrelevant. And although many histories of
" modernism get written—scholarly analyses that investigate
every cadence of style and manner—inevitably these fall
short of giving the real curve of the thing: a reasonable
account of \ghy, in modern society, art breeds mistrust—why
it seems calculated to provoke and disturb, and to make
fi;{eopie neasy. Certainly the problem of the popularity or',
Marity of art is inconceivable outside modern culture.
The erosion of art’s authority and credibility over the last
fifty years, in a world that has become progressively more
commercialized and career-oriented, must be linked, inevi-
tably, with certain fundamental assumptions handed down
to us by advanced capitalist society.
. Since the nineteenth century, we have always classified
art by schools and styles, viewing it as a history of forms
that derive from some kind of dialogue with (or rebellion

14
against) previous styles and forms; but perhaps a classifica-
tion by function would be better. For after all is said and
done, what is the purpose of art? Art history, like all history,
is woven of many discordant purposes; there is not just one.
As John Cage once put it, “If there were a thousand artists
and one purpose, would one artist be having it and all the
nine-hundred and ninety-nine others be missing the point?
Is that how things are?” In our society, artistic forms and
purposes are no longer given by tradition; they cannot be
taken for granted. The momentum of social change in the
modern world has altered not only the nature of art, but also
the psychological drives and motivations of those who
shape it, to the point where we now find ourselves without
ruler or compass in evaluating all these changes. To convey
one instance of how much the common discourse flounders,
I include the following edited extract from some Arf and
Language symposia that took place in Melbourne and Ade-
laide, Australia, in 1975. The transcripts were edited by
Terry Smith, and I quote them at this length because they
have the value of contemporary evidence. Many readers of
this book will no doubt have observed or participated in
such unfruitful exchanges at one time or another:

HK (a member of the audience): What interests me is

the question: What sort of things are you trying to
achieve through doing art? . . . so among your set of
aims when you do art are self-expression an -
nication? ? { LA -
Artist- Part1c1pant It is just like jumping off a trarfi it's
a vehicle for going somewhere. I could ask you ‘why
you are sitting on a chair. You are always gomg why,
why, why? I en)oy it, that’s all. -«
HK: But you enjoy lots of things, going to thbfcucus—
what is special about your enjoying doing art?
Artist: I agree art should not be put up on a ped
.. My aims change all the time, they are different
drawings to paintings—the lecturers here are always at
me because I haven’t really got a style, they think I
don’t know what I'm doing.
HK: How do you recognize when you're doing art as
opposed to other activities?
Artist: 1 don’t. . . . Everything’s art, there’s just different
ways of expressing it.
HK: But that’s robbing the word of any meaning. . . .

15
 Artist: But art’s a special language which doesn’t con-
tain words on your sort of level at all. Henry, what do
you do? Who are you? . . .
HK: I'm a philosopher of science, my PhD is in mathe-
matical physics. . . . I'm part of the public who is enti-
tled to ask you what you think art is.
Artist: Isn’t it better to just go on painting? We are
going to finish up with everybody talking and no one
painting. This is so boring!
HK: Well, if you don‘t find it valuable, you can leave.
If you aren’t enjoying the boredom, why don’t you get
a paintbrush and paint here?

One of the things I should like to achieve in this book

is to bridge the gap in understanding that exists between
people outside the art world and those within it. Although
1 have two different audiences in mind, I shall address my-
self—hopefully in a manner which is sympathetic both to
the art and to those who have difficulty in understanding it
—to anyone thinking seriously about art today but finding
it hard to come to terms with some of the more conspicuous
contradictions of the present scene.

Modern society has emerged in a single evolutionary arena

—the West. It represents a systematic reversal of the values
by which people in traditional societies have always lived.
The emergence of modern art during the early decades of
this century resulted from the coalescence of certain compo-
nent ideas that form the basic structure of modern society:
secularism, individualism, bureaucracy, and pluralism.
These variables have formed the core of modernity; I shall
need to examine the fate of art in relation to each of these
great modernizing ideologies in turn, since they have had a
determining impact on the modern social character and are
what sets the modern world off from its predecessors.
By secularism I mean the despiritualization of the world,
the modernist refusal of the sacred. It refers to that rational-
izing process, tributary to the development of science and
technology, through which the numinous, the mythic, and
the sacramental have been, in our society, reduced to rags;
and the gradual triumph, under advanced “late” capitalism,
of a bureaucratic, managerial type of culture characterized
by mass consumption and economic self-seeking.
The loss of art’s moral authority—that authority which,

16
in a more enclosed social framework than ours, normally
achieves legitimacy through its roots in tradition—is ulti-
mately the true sub]ect of all these essays. All culture is
“situation-bound,” and related to the circumstances that
generated it. At this point in our history, art finds itself |
without any coherent set of priorities, without any persua-
sive models, without any means to evaluate either itself or
the goals which it serves. To the postmodernist mind, ev-
erything is empty at the center. Our vision is not integrated
—it lacks form and definition. Is it any wonder, then, that
art has fallen prey to difficulties of legitimacy—or that, like
a dark body which absorbs everything and gives out noth-
ing, it should be undergoing what seems, by now, like a
permanent crisis of credibility?
-~ What artists expect for themselves has radically changed
over the last fifty years as the lineaments of the art world
have gradually shifted from an amorphous power structure
into a clear-cut power structure irradiated with corporate
values. The essays here are all concerned with the implica-
tions of this shift. In emphasizing the sociological character
of art, this book stands in complementary and dialectical
relation to my previous book, Progress in Art, which dealt
with the cognitive character of art. My claim that art has a
“progressive” history and structure (a claim which is not
meant to imply moral or aesthetic improvement so much as
a cognitive “growth” of styles) presupposes that the history
of art, as a system of human interaction with the world, can
undergo cognitive development similar to that in individu-
als. The history of art can be seen to ramify along many
different lines of development, however, and is the outcome
of several kinds of conditions. The present book is an at-
tempt to take my previous analysis several steps further, by
coming to grips with the modern era as a whole; it tries to
grasp, describe, and analyze the psychological and social
circumstances under which the art we possess has come into
being.
As cultures change, so do the types of personality that
are their carriers. The revised self-image of artists in post-
modern culture means that art at this point requires some
analysis in terms of its relation to contemporary character
ideals. We have not arrived at our postmodern culture by
accident—there is a discernible progression of events that
has brought us to the current situation, which I propose to

17
 -
uncover. No proposition can be advanced about this sub
l
ject, however, without my giving credit first to the centra
en
ideas I draw upon so unreservedly, and which I have tak
so much to heart. Hardly any of these ideas originates with
me: many authors have struggled with the problems I try to
confront here. There may be no question of presenting new
truths—and indeed, I am often no more than a medium in
the transmission of insights to be found throughout the vast
sociological and philosephical literature on modern West-
ern society—but what I have done is to register the impor-
tance of these ideas by extending their application to pre-
sent conditions in the art world. I cannot name individually
all those whose thoughts have been crucial to the writing of
this book—either quoted directly or used as background—
but I should like to acknowledge my special obligation to
certain authors whose works have been indispensable, and
without whom, quite simply, my own book could not have
been written. Among these are Daniel Bell, Peter Berger,
John Dewey, Emile Durkheim, Erich Fromm, Anthony Gid-
dens, Martin Green, Jiirgen Habermas, Irving Howe, Her-
bert Marcuse, Lewis Mumford, Robert Nisbet, José Ortega
y Gasset, Philip Rieff, Theodore Roszak, Edward Shils,
George Simmel, Max Weber, and the co-authors of Organi-
zational America, William Scott and David Hart, whose views
on the rise of the “organizational personality’”” have been
invaluable. With Scott and Hart I share the hope of produc-
ing a book that may be one more step in a de-conditioning
process which may help people to become aware of the
lethal dangers that arise from simply muddling along with
the status quo. A
Central to the later chapters are the ethical writings of
Hannah Arendt, Séren Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, Alasdair
Maclntyre, and Ralph Ross, writers for whom paying atten-
tion and thinking are moral acts. It is to their theories of
human nature—the ideals they believe it is legitimate to
seek—that this book is dedicated. There are many other
authors who need to be acknowledged, too numerous to
mention here. Their names will be found in the bibliogra-
phy at the back of the book. Having written with a view to
making difficult subjects accessible to all, I have tried to
simplify things by avoiding footnotes and page references.
The content of each of these essays could not have been
expressed, as in the thesis of Progress in Art, as a central

18
argument whose proof is gradually adduced. Rather, it is a
collection of arguments, organized musically around a con-
tinuous line of thought, with themes recurring in different
keys that eventually orchestrate a particular point of view.
Some people will respond to my account of the situation as
an invitation to despair, but that is not my intention. It is
more an uncovering of the social unconscious, a bringing to
the surface of what is lying in the depths. The environment
is merely a reflection of what is in us, and if the environ-
ment is to change, something in us must change. Nothing
will change, however, as long as we remain unconscious of
the fundamental forces which shape our lives, embedded as
we are in the general cultural ambience. At this point, we
need some fairly coherent organizing picture of what has
been happening to us, so that we can weigh the costs of
what we are doing. If we can penetrate to the true inward-
ness of a situation, if we do not dull our minds to its danger-
ous or unpleasant features, we are less likely to be seriously
manipulated. We have the possibility of choice, once we see
clearly what is going on. Basically, our need is for a full
acceptance of the moral nature of so many of the problems
that we face. Then perhaps we can find a way to pass
through these conditions and transcend them, like Edgar
Allan Poe’s sailor who was able by careful observation as he
sank into the maelstrom to understand the nature of the
vortex, and thus could be carried up by the same spiral that
sucked him down.

19
CHAPTER TWO: .
INDIVIDUALISM
Art for Art’s Sake, or Art for
Society’s Sake?

Anyone trying to face the full reality of modernism can

between
still get caught, even at this point, in the cross fire
its admirers (those who defend abstraction and art-for-
art’s-sake) and its detractors (those who believe that art
must serve a purpose or be socially useful). The instability
of art in our times, the confusion over what its purpose is
and to whom, by rights, it should be addressing itself, have
become, in recent years, a new Spenglerian darkness. In
England, for instance, ever since the manifestations of anti-
modernist outrage several years ago over the price paid by
the Tate Gallery for a brick sculpture by Carl Andre, the
snarling and ranting at certain kinds of late-modernist ab-
stract art have hardly ceased; at that point the public, the
critics, and David Hockney were all united in their savaging
of monochrome canvases and the poor, scandalous bricks.
Those who defend modernism claim that art need not
serve any purpose but should create its own reality. (The
composer Arnold Schénberg went so far as to declare that
nothing done for a purpose could be art.) Abstract art
brought into being not only a new aesthetic style, but also
a change of understanding regarding the very raison d étre of
art itself. For the committed modernist, the self-sufficiency
of art is its salvation. Aesthetic experience is an end in itself,
worth having on its own account. The only way for art to
preserve its truth is by maintaining its distance from the
social world—by staying pure.
Quite deliberately, during the high period of modernism
between 1910 and 1930, art cut itself loose from its social
moorings and withdrew, to save its creative essence. The
“dehumanization” of art that took place in the early decades
of this century was very much a response to the artist’s
spiritual discomfort in capitalist and totalitarian societies
alike. As Kandinsky put it, “the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’ is ,
really the best ideal a materialist age can attain, for it is an
unconscious protest against materialism, and the demand
that everything should have a use and practical value.” In
opposition to materialist values, and because of the spiritual
breakdown which followed the collapse of religion in mod-
ern society, the early modernists turned inward, away from
the world, to concentrate on the self and its inner life. If
valid meaning could no longer be found in the social world,
they would seek it instead within themselves. In the think-
ing of most early-twentieth-century artists, a work of art
was an independent world of pure creation which had its
own, essentially spiritual, essence. The artist saw himself as
a kind of priest who divined the interior soul, or spirit.
Kandinsky and Malevich and many other early modernists
had a concept of life which was essentially transcendental,
although not tied to institutionalized religion. “Art no
longer cares to serve the state and religion,” Malevich de-
clared. “It no longer wishes to illustrate the history of man-
ners; it wants to have nothing to do with the object as such,
and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without
things.” The attitude of art for art’s sake was essentially the
artist’s forced response to a social reality he could no longer
affirm.
This “inward turn”—the conviction that self-fulfillment
was to be found in the encounter with oneself—inspired, in
the early period of modernism, almost a theodicy of indi-
vidual being; for many artists at that time abstraction was
no less than an aesthetic theology. (Malevich went so far as
to claim he saw the face of God in his black square, and
Theo van Doesburg declared that “the square is to us what
the cross was to the early Christians.””) This notion of the
artist as the last active carrier of spiritual value in a material-
ist world remained attached to all abstract art until the end

21
 d, for in-
of Abstract Expressionism. Mark Rothko claime
terms
stance, that if the spectator read his paintings solely in
led to
of spatial and color relationships, then he had fai
thing
understand them. “You might as well get one
an abstrac-
straight,” he once told-an interviewer. “I'm not
or or
tionist. . . . 'm not interested in the relationship of col
ic
form to anything else. I'm interested in expressing bas
break
human emotions. . . . And the fact that a lot of people
ws
down and cry when confronted with my pictures sho
when
... they are having the same religious experience | had
I painted them.”
The Abstract Expressionists considered themselves as
still belonging to a spiritual underground in the heroic tradi-
tion of Kandinsky and Malevich. “So long as modern soci-
ety is dominated by the love of property,” Robert Mother-
well wrote in 1944, “the artist has no alternative to
formalism. Until there is a radical revolution in the values
of modern society, we may look for a highly formal art to
continue. . . . Modern artists have had to replace other social
values with the strictly aesthetic.” Even in its most abstract
form, modernism was self-consciously dissident, setting it-
self against the social order and seeking its own freedom
and autonomy. The bourgeois might identify himself in
terms of a role requiring that he orient his life around
money, but the modern artist sought his identity through
opposition to a society that offered him no role he was
willing to accept. The original meaning of the term avant-
garde implied a double process of aesthetic innovation and
social revolt; it took the form of an estranged elite of artists
and intellectuals who chose to live on the fringe of society.
During the 1960s and ‘70s, however, late modernism
began to cast up increasing instances of a self-referring for-
malism which denies to abstract art any kind of dissident
role or meaning within the social framework. The stylistic
innovations of the color-field painters who emerged around
the critic Clement Greenberg—Helen Frankenthaler, Morris
Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski—are only aesthetic;
they harbor no revolutionary pretensions, no religious fer-
vor, no remnants of transcendence hung like clusters of ice
on the very trellises of dawn. Greenberg in particular re-
jected the notion that there is any higher purpose to art, or
any “spiritual” point to its production. Art only does what
it does: its effect is limited and small. It is there to be aes-

22
 thetically “good.” Only the “dictates of the medium”’—
pure paint and the flatness of the picture plane—were held
to be worthwhile concerns for painting. The very idea of
content was taken to be a hindrance and a nuisance, and
L——looking for meaning was a form of philist'mis-a The work
is a painted surface, nothing more, and its meaning is en-
tirely an aesthetic one. Stripped of all experience except a
variety of painterly effects, and devoid of communication,
however, it came to seem as if the pig in the pigment were
missing (if I may borrow a favorite phrase from the writer
William Gass). (As always, within our complex modernist
scene, there are countervailing instances, exceptions to the
rule of what I am saying—artists like Dorothea Rockburne
in her Angel series, and Brice Marden in his Annunciation
pieces, who continue to work close to the spiritual heart of
abstraction.)
In a sense, then, for the committed modernist, the audi-_
ence doesn’t really exist. Barnett Newman always claimed
that the real reason an artist paints is so that he will have
something to look at. Once, when an interviewer asked the
painter Clyfford Still whether he was concerned that his
work reach the people, Still replied, “Not in the least. That
is what the comic strip does.” “Then you paint for your-
self?” “Yes.” Creation, then, is pure freedom, and art must
justify its own independent existence, in contrast to what
Baudelaire called the “forced labor” of professional life. For
Still, and other artists of his generation, painting was the
one act of ultimate freedom that could transcend politics,
ambition, and commerce. The shrewd and self-effacing
painter Jasper Johns, when he was asked early on in his
career about the strong public response to his work, replied,
“Well, I liked the attention. And I thought it was interesting
that other people had a reaction to my work, because prior
to that time I had assumed it was mostly of interest only to
myself.”
Such remarks would probably have mystified a Renais-
sance artist, who was always acutely aware of the particular
patron who commissioned or bought his work. In Lives of the
Artists, Vasari recounts how Michelangelo was beset on all
sides by the public demands on his time and talents. Pope
Clement wanted him to paint the walls of the Sistine
Chapel; not only did he command him to paint the Last
Judgment, he also determined that it should be a masterpiece.

23
 Meanwhile, Michelangelo was also being pressed in a trou-
blesome way to execute the tomb of Pope Julius. Then, in
1534, when Pope Clement died, Pope Paul summoned him
to enter his service, and when Michelangelo refused, he
became angry and said, “I have nursed this ambition for
thirty years, and now that I'm Pope am I not to have it
satisfied? I shall tear the contract up. I'm determined to have
you in my service, no matter what.”
Until we come to‘the modern epoch, all art had a social
significance and a social obligation. To suggest that classical
art was concrete but indentured (in the sense of the bondage
attaching to a public task), and that modern art is free but
abstract, is merely to point out that impulses to autonomy
and individualism run counter to processes of socialization
and tradition. It is to raise the question of whether the
modern artist has enough power over circumstances, and
the means within himself, to resolve this contradiction. No
longer compelled to direct art toward the collective ends of
society, he must—if he can—distinguish himself through
outstanding uniqueness. But this emphasis on uniqueness
has hindered the development of any collective style—in
the face of such continuous questioning of all aesthetic
modes and norms, modernism has never established a style
of its own. Ever since the advent of romanticism in the
nineteenth century, singularity has been the norm instead
of, as in the past, mastery over technique, or skilled knowl-
* edge. The overarching principle of modernism has been au-
tonomy. Its touchstone is individual freedom, not social
authority. Liberation from rules and restraints, however,
has proven itself to mean alienation from the social dimen..
sion itself; and perhaps the time has come when a more
circumspect state of mind may perceive the need to
strengthen art against its present condition of arbitrariness
and fragility. As for the idea of freedom, we ought perhaps
to examine it now more closely, to see whether it does
not
have a perilous shadow side that is leading only to “the dead
end of a narcissistic preoccupation with self,” which
Chris-
topher Lasch writes about with such pessimism.
The most widespread attack on modernism and
on the
whole notion of art for art’s sake has always come from
Marxists, for whom the idea of art’s function as something
purely aesthetic and individual, and without external
at-
tachments, is spiritually sterile and corrupt. It represents
the

24
devitalization of culture in the final stages of capitalism,
when the social-functional aspect of art dries up because the
bourgeois artist sees art as a private activity, as part of the
quest for self-realization, and as a means for the release of
the individual from traditional restraints. In these terms, to
know oneself becomes an end, instead of a means through
which one knows the world.
. True art, Marxists argue, examines the social and politi-
cal reality behind appearance and does not represent it ab-
stractly, divorced from appearances and in opposition to
appearances. Marxist aesthetics demands that art illuminate
social relationships and help us to recognize and change
social reality. For art to be a social force, it must have a wide
audience, and it must pass judgment ‘on the phenomena of
life. It must have as its subject the social world. Marx con-
stantly stressed that art has a human social reality and must
be integrated in a world of meanings—it is not a separate reality.
Both these positions—art as the expression of the indi-
vidual or as the fulfillment of social needs—seem equally
intelligible, but their conflicting demands at this point
frame a major crisis in our culture: truth to the self or truth
to the values of society. The sensibility of our age is charac-
terized by this dilemma. When we assume either of these
positions, we feel, more and more, that we are somehow
being mutilated. We cannot satisfactorily adjust ourselves
to either position, since each of them renounces what the
other retains. Nor can their contradictions be resolved un-
less we manage to achieve some consensus as to the role art
actually plays in modern society. Certainly the notion of
things having no meaning outside themselves—of being
valuable for their own sake—is relatively new, and we must
see ourselves as light years away from the time, for instance,
when art was used as a pedagogic tool for the church to
illustrate religious stories, in an era when few people could
read or write. Now, as Andy Warhol says, artists make
things for people that they don’t really need.
.~ As the most outspoken feminist/socialist critic in Amer-
ica, Lucy Lippard has always gone against the tide, arguing
against formalism even when it was unfashionable to do so,
and insisting emphatically on art with a message. Devoted
herself to social and political issues, she has been one of the
people seriously worried over the shift from radicalism into
aestheticism that has characterized so much late-modernist

25
art. Finding little middle ground between purely aestheti-
cized art and social propaganda, she states, “I'd like all art-
ists to be socially responsible whatever their art is. But it is
not easy to figure out one’s individual options between the
extremes of total immersion in the queasy ethics of the art
commodity system or furious rejection of all that it stands
for.”
Lippard was among the: first to perceive a widespread
disaffection among artists refusing to accept the restricted
optic of art for art’s sake, or the dominant control of the
gallery system over our access to art. “While some artists
have never questioned the current marginal and passive
status of art,” she writes in her most recent book, Overlay,
“and are content to work within the reservation called the
‘art world,” others have made conscious attempts over the
last decade to combat the relentless commodification of
their products and to reenter the ‘outside world.” In the late
’60s, after a period in which most avant-garde art was dras-
tically divorced from social subjects or effects, many artists
became disgusted with the star system and the narrowness
of formal ‘movements.” They began to ask themselves larger
questions. When they looked up from their canvas and
steel, they saw politics, nature, history and myth out there.”
Lippard’s previous book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the
Art Object, was a chronological history of the period 1966—
1972 when many artists, seeking alternatives to painting
and sculpture which might provide a chastening corrective
to the opportunism and callousness of the marketing sys-
tem, developed new modes such as conceptual, antiform,
earth, process, body, and performance art. (These will be
discussed in chapter three.) Immateriality and imperma-
nence were the main strategies used to dematerialize art so
it would no longer be a “precious object” and thus alluring
to the market—after all, you can’t really sell an X trodden
into dusty grass in Africa, or parallel chalk lines drawn for
two miles in the Mojave Desert. The paradigmatic figure
who provides Lippard with a model and occupies a place of
honor in her writing is Robert Smithson, who was a pivotal
figure in the development of “site sculpture’” made for spe-
cific outdoor locations. His most well-known earthwork,
the “Spiral Jetty,” was a reclamation of disused land in the
Great Salt Lake in Utah, and part of Smithson’s importance
for Lippard is that he was the one artist of his generation

26
concerned with the fate of the earth, and the artist’s political
responsibility to it. Lippard first became politicized herself
by a trip to Argentina in 1968, when she talked to artists
who felt that it was immoral to make art in the kind of
society that existed there. Since then, she has attempted, in
all that she does, to reverse the modernist notion that you
have to give up art to be in the world—or give up the world
to be in art. In her own mind, there is no confusion as to
whether the essential qualities of art lie in formal organiza-
tion or in communication. She has passionately championed
antinuclear and antiwar art, black and feminist art, and
mass-produced art (in the form of printed matter and pam-
phlets)—in short, unself-centered art that is frequently in-
digestible by the market but still hopes to change the social
system.
Similar debates over ethics and aesthetics, instigated by
Marxist critics, took place in England during the late 1970s,
eventually taking on the dimensions of a fierce civil war—
much as, in Gulliver’s Travels, the Big-endians and the Little-
endians disagree over the proper way to break an egg. There
has always been a tradition of hostility and suspicion to-
ward avant-garde and experimental art in England, notably
in the writings of Sir Ernst Gombrich, Sir Kenneth Clark,
and John Berger (although I don’t mean to suggest that any
of these writers are linked by a common point of view). In
the late 1970s, however, a new group of neo-Marxist writers
emerged as the self-styled emissaries of cultural change.
They expressed their indignation at the fecklessness of art
under capitalism, while simultaneously proclaiming a crisis
in contemporary art. Primary among these younger critics
were Peter Fuller, a declared disciple of Berger’s, and Rich-
ard Cork, former editor of Studio International and art critic for
London’s Evening Standard. Fuller’s main claim is that art has
become malignantly decadent under monopoly capitalism,
and rendered impotent by advertising and the media, while
Cork was especially active during the late 1970s in organiz-
ing exhibitions intended to present an alternative to mod-
ernism—"to rap the hegemony of painting over the knuck-
les,” as he chose to put it. Both condemn the practice of
formalist abstraction as an impotent form of intellectual
elitism deprived of all possible meaning.
One of Cork’s exhibitions, entitled “Art for Whom?”
and held at the Serpentine Gallery in London in the spring

27
of 1978, investigated the possibilities for artists of working
within more “egalitarian” contexts than are available
through galleries and the dealer system. Factories, hospitals,
schools, libraries, pubs, football clubs, bingo halls, street
corners, and town halls, according to Cork, are some of the
options open to an artist prepared to forgo the artifice of the
gallery ambience and willing to make art for ordinary peo-
ple instead of for other artists. All the work exhibited the
idea of community and group experience—a principle of
social integration as distinct from the idea of personal self-
expression. There were posters to save Bethnal Green Hos-
pital from budget cuts, a work by Conrad Atkinson in-
tended to bring to public attention safety issues with respect
to iron-ore workers, a community scheme in which artists
collaborated with children in Islington to design decorations
for the walls of their school building. Taking us back to
familiar, social reality was Cork’s way of refuting what he
considered to be the vacuous irrelevancies of late modern-
ism’s bricks and stripes—indeed, of all art which, like the
owl, does nothing for a living but hoot.
Another point of Cork’s is that critics should actually
articulate a direction for art to pursue. One of his major
complaints has been that most artists today want to retreat
into some kind of inner sanctum, some private world of the
imagination. It behooves the critic to intervene in this state
of affairs, as a corrective measure, and to insist that “artists
start to reverse their deadening tendency to address each
other alone . . . without ever affecting the lives of those
outside.” The avant-garde, according to Cork, are united by
their refusal to work for anyone apart from themselves, and
cling like drowning castaways to the raft of what they
quaintly call “creative freedom.” Art must now discard the
incestuous tactics of “stylistic infighting’” and begin instead
to convey meanings to “a public whose needs have been
neglected for too long.” It should belong once more to the
mass of people rather than to a dwindling elite.
More recently, two lesser-known critics writing in Art in
America, Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard, claimed that the
neighborhood arts movement is in fact the basis of a new
avant-garde. The community artist is the one type of artist
at this point who has successfully resisted the values of the
marketplace, offering up his skills in the service of the com-
munity. Only the community artist avoids the role of

28
 “Sleeping Beauty,” to which other kinds of artists in our
society are condemned since they are always waiting to be
“discovered.” Their whole mode of life is devoted to pre-
paring for this discovery. By not waiting each day to be
discovered, the community artist is able to use art to trans-
form the experience of a community. But, like the earlier
avant-garde, they too are subject to the old debate of “Is it
art?,” since what they do may be too useful and therefore too
much of a departure from the art-for-art’s-sake norm.
I do not wish, myself, to be cast in the role of defending
modern art against any of these one-sided views; but the
fact is, I incline very much toward Marx’s view that capital-
ist society, although it has gone beyond previous societies
in economic development, and still further beyond them in
science and technology, cannot hope to produce art equal to
that of certain earlier forms of society—since capitalist pro- |
duction, because it stresses the profit-making value of art
and turns it into a form of merchandise, is hostile to the
spiritual production of art. (The Austrian economist Joseph
Schumpeter once remarked, in a similar vein, that the stock
exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail.) Marx’s
main criticism of capitalism was that it crippled man be-
cause of its preponderance of economic interests; and he
observed, more than a century ago, that “a writer is a pro-
ductive laborer not insofar as he produces ideas, but insofar
as he enriches the publisher who publishes his work.” There
was no “art world” in Marx’s time, but the comment is
equally apt in relation to contemporary artists and their
dealers.
If the artist’s role has become marginal in modern West- /
ern society, it is not because modern art is intrinsically de- .
fective; it is because our society has dl\&sleiart_afllmu
aesthetic value, just as it has deprived us of meaningful
~spiritual experience. If the disaccord between the artist and |
society in modern times is to be seen as a defect, it must be
understood as a social problem, due not to any defects in-
herent in art, but to defects in the value system of modern ‘
society. Marx felt that the supreme value of a work of art
—its ultimate aim and reason for being—is achieved along \
with and through other values: social, moral, and religious. |
But modern life has by now largely deprived us of belief in |
these values. As many writers have pointed out, the real |
problem of modernity has proved to be the problem of

29
 belief—the loss of belief in any system of values beyond the
self.
In traditional societies, the individual lives submerged in
tradition which is, for him, immutable reality, transmitted
from a venerable past; the individual does nothing on his
own account, apart from the social group. Indeed, nothing
is more terrible than to be cast out of the collective and to
remain alone. It is hard for us to realize that modern West-
ern notions of the individual—his selfhood, his rights, and
his freedom—have no meaning in the Orient, or for primi-
tive man. Self-seeking and the pursuit of profit are now seen
as the natural characteristics of man, not as part of an histor-
ical process. Primitive art, however, is never personal. It
doesn’t reflect a private point of view; it isn’t innovatory, or
produced for a market. Medieval society, to cite another
instance, placed art at the service of religion. The artist
exalted the dominant values of his society, and society in
turn recognized itself in an art that was expressive of its
values. Both had a concept of man which was essentially a
religious one. Religion, ritual, and art existed primarily to
support the social order.
Modern capitalist society, on the other hand, has been
largely an object of dislike by its artists. Our great art has
almost never been socially celebrative; it has been overtly
hostile or coldly indifferent to the social order. Not only
have we been living for some time now without any shared
ideal, we have largely been living without any ideals at all.
The paradoxical truth of individualism is that it can only
progress at the expense of the strength of common beliefs
and feelings. Our one common belief at this point seems to
be that no one can be made accountable: any form of limita-
tion is experienced as a prison. These social and psychologi-
cal facts have dislocated artists from their embeddedness in
the real world. Gustave Flaubert (the patriarch of our alien-
__ation, according to Jean-Paul Sartre) wrote in one of his
letters, “I'm frankly a bourgeois, living in seclusion in the
country, busy with literature and asking riothing of anyone,
not consideration, nor honor, nor esteem. . . . I'd jump into
the water to save a good line of poetry or a good sentence
of prose from anyone. But I don’t believe, on that account,
that himanity has need of me, any more than I have need
ofii 1t

30
 For better or worse, modern consciousness is solitary,
consequent to the disestablishing of communal reality. It is
the most intense form of individualism the world has ever
known_Modern life is lived inworld
a turned upside down,
in which we are painfully aware ware of our separateness but
have lost sight of our connectedness. This fact expresses,
however paradoxically, the reality of our social situation: the
most fundamental assumption of modernity, as Daniel Bell
has pointed out, is that the social unit of society is not the
group, guild, tribe, or city, but the person. That the contem-
porary bourgeois artist, as a result of these historical pro-
cesses, sees his relation to art as an individual, and not as
a social, relation is inevitable. Individualism and antitradi-
tionalism are one and the same psychological force.
But does the isolation of the modern artist’s work, or his
personal loneliness, deprive his accomplishment of social
meaning? Not according to Harold Rosenberg, who re-
marked long ago that “the individual is in society—that
goes without saying. He is also isolated and, like Ivan Ilyich,
dies alone. I find it no more noble or picturesque to stress
the isolation at the expense of participation than to stress
the sentiment for the social at the expense of isolation.”
, Marxists, on the other hand, reject the nonconformism
and isolation of the modern artist as expressive of an abnor-
mal and warped relationship to society—a form of negative
interaction that implies personal moral and psychic degen-
eration. Modern art, because it is primarily an elucidation of
the artist’s inner world, is seen as too narrow, and incapable
of expressing deeper social values. The English neo-Marx-
ists have denigrated artistic freedom as a mere figment of
bourgeois ideology and have attacked individualism as “the
most tacit and virulent assumption in art.” According to
Peter Fuller, the contemporary artist’s freedom is, in any
case, illusory, since it is restricted solely to aesthetic ques-
tions. It is, he claims, “like the freedom of madmen and the
insane; they can do what they like because whatever they
do has no effect at all. . . . They have every freedom except
the one that matters: the freedom to act socially.” It is easy
enough to attack the restless vanity of capitalist culture
under the umbrella of radical Marxist aesthetics, but the |
fact remains that the great art of recent centuries has
emerged largely under capitalism, and not under socialism.

31
 achieving better
Socialist systems have not been notable for
the individual less
art than market systems—they just grant
freedom and restrict his powers of choice.
er Fuller
There is a crucial sense, however, in which Pet
rig ht: if the art ist has tot al fr ee do m— if art can be any-
is
ng the art ist say s it is— if will also nev er be any thi ng more than
thi
The rea l cri sis of mo de in is m, as ma ny peo ple have
that.
y cla ime d, is th ep er va si ve spi rit ual cri sis of We stern _
rightl
ci tion: the absence of a system of beliefs that justifies
allegiance to any entity beyond the self. Insistence upon
negative
absolute freedom for each individual leads to a
to one’s
attitude toward society—which is seen as limiting
rx-
projects, and ultimately constricting. We need not be Ma
sism,
ists to perceive the extent to which overweening narcis
me
compulsive striving, and schizoid alienation have beco
7 the dark underbelly of individual freedom in our soc
There is no doubt that even freedom can become desola
iety.
ting,
to do
that after a while, even the artist may not know what
ole
with it. In a word, we can no longer really avoid the wh
r
question—so poignantly put by Peter Berger—of whethe
the modern conception of the individual is a great step
r
forward in the story of human self-realization, or whethe
it is, on the contrary, a dehumanizing aberration in the
history of mankind. At the very least, it is a phenomenon
with a very short history that has not been essential in the
past to human survival, or to a rich human culture—and
with the backfire of scrutiny, we may yet come to see that
it may prove inimical to both.
If the great modern enterprise has been freedom, the
modern hubris is, finally, the refusal to accept any limits. If
previous societies were formed on the limitations of man’s
destiny, our own suggests a definition of life which meets
with no limitation whatsoever, and allows the individual, as
a result, to abandon himself to himself—without any com-
munal obligation that might regulate freedom and prevent
it from becoming narrow and selfish. Our present predica-
ment rests on whether we can find some way of balancing
the desire for individual freedom with the needs of society
—and whether, at this point, we are able to shake ourselves
free of the modernist notions of uninhibited individualism
and endless innovation, which have become a sterile mo-
notony. There is no doubt that the consequences of exag-'
gerated individualism—which disposes the individual to

32
isolate his own interests from the mass and to leave the rest
of society to look after itself—are being questioned on all
sides. In the words of Daniel Bell, “We are groping for a new
vocabulary whose key word seems to be limits: a limit to
growth, a limit to the spoliation of the environment, a limit
to arms, a limit to the tampering with biological nature.”
The real question, however, is whether we will also set a
limit to the exploration of cultural experiences. Can we set
a limit to hubris? The answer we give to these questions,
according to Bell, could resolve the cultural contradictions
of capitalism, and of its deceptive double, the culture of
modernity.
* Once we have seen how much art and society are cor-
relative, perhaps we can find a position of equilibrium be-
tween the two extremes of Marxist socialism, which tends
to ignore the aesthetic character of art, and an aesthetic
formalism that treats art as socially unconditioned and au-
tonomous. What is required is some sort of reconciliation—
not a fixture at either pole. Even just specifying these ex-
tremes, setting them side by side as I have tried to do here,
is enough to evoke all the difficulties attached to giving any
workable definition—that is, one that might be held more
or less consciously by everyone—as to how art should func-
tion in modern society or what it is for. Socialist art deprives
us, on the whole, of formal and aesthetic qualities, being
strong on message but often weak as art; whereas formalism
obliterates meaning and purpose, often to the point of
transforming meaninglessness itself into a primary content.
Neither of these roads has been able, in our own day, to
reach the transformational center from which redemption
comes; but this is another question, of which more later.
A few artists working today have managed, all the same,
to move beyond a socially indifferent formalism toward a
more community-oriented framework, without any sac-
rifice at the level of aesthetic quality. One of these is John
Ahearn, a New York artist associated since 1977 with Colab
(Collaborative Projects, Inc., a group of young dissident
artists who came out in favor of art as a radical communica-
tions medium rather than as a circular dialogue with the
traditions of the past). Ahearn casts life-sized portraits of
neighborhood groups and families in the South Bronx,
which succeed in combining a powerful level of aesthetic
expression with an energizing social meaning: the convic-

33
tion that both art and society concern everyone. For Ahearn,
sculpture is a form of art which can appeal to a wide public.
He has set up working “studios” in unusual places like
elementary schools, nursing homes, and bowling alleys,
where he casts directly from live sitters—who nearly always
receive a sculpture in return for their participation. The
finished portraits are luxuriqusly hand-painted; imbued
with an almost visionary radiance, they express a passionate
openness to the world, and love of it.
One of the intentions of the Bulgarian-born Christo,
famous for “wrapping”’ objects, buildings, and landscapes,
is to stimulate others to collaborate in his art. But, as he
says, after the strains and complexities of dealing with the
world which the realization of any of his major projects
entails—the construction of Running Fence, for instance, in-
volved half a million people—having an exhibition in Soho
seems like a holiday. The artist, Christo claims, used to be
the man who put things together, until the Victorian age,
when they became specialists, like horse-painters. Today,
the art world manipulates all art into a make-believe reality.”
His own projects are far from specialized; they take place
outside the art world and often require environmental stud-
ies, legal battles, material production in factories, and the
mobilizing of thousands of volunteer labor forces. Getting
it all together is a collaborative effort on the part of many
people, and energy for the work is drawn as much from the
community as it is from the artist himself. When Running
Fence was constructed in California, a twenty-four-and-a-
half-mile length of white nylon had to be stretched across
land belonging to ranchers, most of whom were initially
hostile to the project. Part of Christo’s “work” involved
winning them over; it took nearly a year to convince sixty
families to let their land be used, but in the end they gave
him not only the desired permission but also immense sup-
port, promoting press conferences themselves to defend the
project publicly.
The collision of so many highly contradictory currents
at the end of the 1970s produced the cultural whirlpool
from which a pluralist ethic, with its appetite for all-encom-
passing multiplicity, was able to emerge. Pluralism is one
way the dialectical contradictions of modernism get erased.
Now, as we advance into the 1980s, we find ourselves sur-
rounded by all the disorder of our unresolved intentions—

34
 at the same time that we are besieged by all that is possible. 2
_~ But, as I shall argue in a later chapter, the danger is that \/
when everything becomes art, art becomes nothing. For
how can we ever succeed in forming a concept of something
which is so totally open that all attributes apply to it
equally? The 1980s so far have led us to the discovery that
the craving for unlimited freedom may be ultimately en-
tropic. It deprives art of direction and purpose until, like an
unwound clock, it simply loses its capacity to work.

35
CHAPTER T‘HRE_E: ANXIOUS
OBIEET S
Modes of Cultural Resistance

The phrase “anxious object” was first used by the critic

Harold Rosenberg To describe the kind of modern art that
makes us uneasy because of uncertainty as to whether we
are in the presence of a genuine work of art or not. Faced
with an anxious object, we are usually challenged, and may
even find ourselves baffled, disturbed, bewildered, angered,
or just plain bored. The difficulty is to discover why this is
art, or even if it is art. Consider, for instance, one of Jasper
Johns’s painted bronzes. How do we know if what we are
seeing is a sculpture or just an old coffee can with some-
body’s paint brushes in it? Can we find the answer to the
question by simply looking? Anxious objects often contrib-
ute to the confusion of one thing with another. What Johns
has done is to “reconstruct” the Savarin coffee can that
holds his paint brushes by first casting the real objects in
bronze and then painting the cast to look exactly as the
objects looked before he cast them. The result is so true to
life that a genuine confusion arises as to its identity. By
creating a situation of tension and ambiguity, anxious ob-
jects raise questions about how we know what we perceive.
They force us to overcome our routine responses and to
develop finer and more discriminating ones. Perception, we
learn, depends on more than just looking—it depends on
our ability to interpret what we see.
People are trained, in modern bureaucratic societies, to
 carry out monotonous routines. A person whose whole life
is spent performing a few repetitive tasks becomes mech-
anized in mind; hardly ever breaking through the surface of
his routine, he finds little opportunity to exert his under-
standing, judgment, or imagination. The critical faculties
grow dull and perception is blunted, hardened by a crip-
pling sameness. This sort of collective trance, with its auto-
Smatic
and reflex responses, usually remains constant: the
conformist mind does not change, or grow with experience,
unless something happens to disrupt it.
Difficult and disturbing art acts as a countertendency to
this leveling process—precisely because it disrupts our hab-
its of thought and strains our understanding. By being sub-
versive of perception and understanding, art can break
through stereotyped social reality and produce a counter-
consciousness that is a negation of the conformist mind.
Indeed, it is only through estrangement—according to Herbert
Marcusé—that art fulfills its function in modern society. Its
~“niegating power’ breaks the false automatism of the me-
chanical mode of life.
An anxious object, then, is instantly recognizable by its
subversive tendencies. Usually, it has not been made in the
manner in which we expect art to be made. Often it touches
the limits of credibility, putting itself just beyond the
boundary of what is acceptable. The quintessential anxious
object—arguably the first of its kind—was Marcel Du-
champ’s urinal which he entitled Founfain and submitted to
the Independents’ Exhibition in New York in 1917, under
the pseudonym of R. Mutt. More than any other object, it
tests our assumptions about art—and our ability to find out
whether all that professes to be art really is art. The urinal
demands an answer to the question “Why is this art?”” But
Duchamp, the most agile and adroit ironist in the business,
preferred to pose a different question: “Can one make a
work which is not a work of art?”” Always inclined to push
things to their philosophical, moral, and aesthetic limits,
and intrigued to find out exactly what it is that makes some-
thing a “work of art,” Duchamp picked an ordinary, com-
monplace object—a manufactured and mass-produced uri-
nal—chosen precisely for its lack of aesthetic qualities, and
exhibited it as art. It was like handwriting in the sky that
sketched out the pattern of things to come: art would never
be quite the same again. What shocked people most was the

37
utter artlessness of the object, and the fact that no “work”
was involved. “Works” of art, in Duchamp’s view, resulted
from the artist’s intentions, not from craft or skill, which
required repetitious actions that could be learned by any-
body. Real artistic invention depends on something else—
on a departure from all routines, on gestures that destroy
our expectations. To imitate qr repeat oneself meant that
one risked developing a “stylé,” by which one could then
be known or categorized. The main thing, therefore, was to
contradict oneself as much as possible. Having thus trans-
formed an ordinary object into art, Duchamp then set about
reversing the procedure. He declared that a painting by
Rembrandt should be used as an ironing board.
What Duchamp demonstrated was that art could be
made out of anything. There is nothing about an object—
no special property or function—that makes something a
work of art, except our attitude toward it, and our willing-
ness to accept it as art. One of the more subversive aspects
of the readymade was that it undermined the usual motives
for acquiring art—urinals can be acquired by anyone in
quite ordinary ways. There are enough of them around so
that one might just turn up anywhere—as indeed one did.
A urinal quite similar to Duchamp’s was found, by chance,
in Alaska, where it had been mysteriously abandoned in a
woods sixty miles from the nearest highway. The urinal was
found by a former student of a young Conceptual artist,
Ronald Jones, who lives and teaches in Sewanee, Tennessee.
Knowing of Jones’s special interest in Duchamp, the student
had the urinal brought out by helicopter and shipped to
Sewanee—at which point the reversals of the modernist
plot become even more stunningly complex. If Duchamp
started it all by appropriating a found object and turning it
into a work of art, Jones followed suit by making a work
which was a “found” replica of Duchamp’s found “origi-
nal.” The whole enterprise, undertaken apparently in a
spirit of pious imitation, survives by virtue of the artist’s wit
and talent for parody. When Jones exhibited his urinal, he
appended two texts to the installation. The first was a state-
ment by Duchamp himself, extracted from a letter to the
Dadaist Hans Richter. Written in 1961, it read, “I threw the
urinal into their faces as a challenge, and now they come
and admire it as an art object for its aesthetic beauty.” The
second text was a statement by the aesthetic philosopher

38
George Dickie: “But the Fountain has many qualities which
can be appreciated—its gleaming white surface, for exam-
ple. In fact, it has several qualities which resemble those of
Brancusi and Moore.”
Balanced as if on a knife edge between brilliance and
absurdity, the urinal has served as a trigger for many subse-
quent works—for example, the artist Bruce Nauman photo-
graphed himself in 1966 with water spouting from his
mouth and titled the photograph Portrait of the Artist as a
Fountain. One of the earliest examples of an artist appro-
priating someone else’s work or idea was Robert Rauschen-
berg’s Erased Drawing, done in 1953. Rauschenberg asked the
painter Willem de Kooning to give him a drawing so that
he could érasDe eit:Kooning eventually agreed. The draw-
ing Rauschenberg was given had been made with grease
pencil, ink, and crayon, and it took him a whole month, and
forty erasers, to succeed. Rauschenberg then exhibited the
erased drawing as a work by himself. More recently, a
young New York artist called Sherrie Levine—also inter-
ested in appraising our notions of art’s uniqueness and orig-
inality, and following closely on the heels of Duchamp and
Andy Warhol—has begun duplicating the photographs of
famous photographers such as Walker Evans and Edward
Weston, which she then exhibits under her own name. Le-
vine lays no claim to traditional notions of “creativity.” By
willfully refusing to acknowledge any difference between
the originals and her own reproductions—by expressly de-
nying their rightful authorship—she is addressing her work
in a subversive way to the current mass cult for collecting
photographs, and their absorption into the art market as one
more expensive commodity. Obviously, ideas like these are
“successful” as a negation of commodity-oriented culture
only until commodity culture succeeds in accommodating
even these “pirated” creations and turning them into yet
another salable item within the framework of institutional-
ized art-world distribution—at which point they become
more parasitic than critical, feeding on the very system they
are meant to criticize.
Modernism has thrown up many aggressively absurd
forms of art that simply cannot be understood outside their
corrosive relation to the contradictions that capitalist soci-
ety poses for the artist: namely, the fact that art’s value
tends to be defined, not by its spiritual, intellectual, or emo-

39
tional content, but by its economic worth. Duchamp under-
stood, perhaps better than any other artist in our time, that
once shaped by the market, art is on a collision course with
itself, and its subversive value will be distorted, buried, or
misappropriated. His own solution was to go underground
and let everyone believe he had given up making art in order
to play chess. That way he was able to avoid becoming
“occupationalized,” or “professionalized.” Somebody once
asked him why he didn’t work, and was against working,
and he replied, “Lazy people like myself cause the least
trouble.” The truth was that he was secretly engaged for
twenty years in making one of the great masterpieces of our
century—the large environmental work Etant Donées—which
only came to light after his death and is now in the Philadel-
phia Museum.
If Duchamp recoiled from the idea of ever repeating
himself, the opposite is true of Andy Warhol, who is abso-
lutely fixated on the notion of doing the same thing over
and over again. Warhol first began painting serial paintings
of Campbell soup cans in 1962. They were banal, morally
weightless images, but they managed to turn our ideas
about painting inside out like a glove. By mass-producing
silk-screened pictures on an assembly line in his Factory,
with sometimes as many as fifteen people filling in the
colors and stretching the canvases, Warhol, too, was sub-
verting the notion of the handmade, “original” work of art.
. In Warhol’s work, there aren’t any originals—there are only
reproductions. In place of the unique work, Warhol substi-
tutes a plurality of copies. “I used to have the same lunch
every day, for twenty years, I guess,” he explains, ““the same
thing over and over again.” Sameness, boredom, and above
all, repetition are what, for Warhol, express the structures
and modulations of consciousness—so we should not be
astonished to learn that he once owned eight cats all named
,Sam. By making no distinction between what is genuine
and what is counterfeit, Warhol makes even the authorship
of his work appear dubious. “I think somebody should be
able to do all my paintings for me,” he says. “That’s proba-
bly one reason I'm using silk-screens. I think it would be so
great if more people took up silk-screens so that no one
vxlrogld”know whether my picture was mine or somebody
else’s.
The attempt to deprive works of their “aura,” or unique-

40
 ness, as a means of deflecting their transformation into a
consumer object was a primary aim of the Conceptual art
that emerged in the New York and European art worlds
toward the end of the 1960s. Many Conceptual works did
not exist as objects at all, but as ideas only. “Once you know
about a work of mine,” declared Lawrence Wiener, “you
own it. There’s no way I can climb into somebody’s head
and remove it.” And Robert Barry, in 1968, stated, “The
world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not
wish to add more.” These artists, together with Joseph
Kosuth, were among the first to work in this new mode of
art as idea, or information, which opposed other, more tra-
ditional aesthetic orientations like painting and sculpture.
Reducing art to pure thought, Barry produced a Telepathic
Piece in 1969 that consisted simply of the statement “during
the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a
work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that
are not applicable to language or image.” Such works deny
not only the motive, but even the possibility of acquiring
the work, since there is, quite simply, nothing to acquire.
Kosuth’s classic early piece One and Three Brooms, for instance,
has no object which, properly speaking, serves as the art.
The work consists of a proposition about real objects and
their corresponding representation in images or words: a -
real broom has been hung on the wall, together with a
photograph of it and a dictionary definition of the word
“broom.” Kosuth has stated that he thinks art should be
more like pure science or philosophy, which are totally self-
sufficient, don’t depend on audiences, and have no com-
modity or investment value. In the case of Art and Lan-
guage, an international group of Conceptual artists with
whom Kosuth was associated for a time, their primary prac-
tice took the form of conversations, discussions, and modes
of linguistic and cultural analysis. (More recently, however,
they have taken to painting mock Neo-expressionist pic-
tures by holding on to the brushes with their teeth.)
To exhibit a concept, according to the French artist Dan-
iel Buren, does not really dispose of the art object, sifice-it
—comefosthe same thing—one is simply replacing the object
with a concept. Buren seeks, himself, to create work that is
neither an object nor a concept. Since 1966 his work has
consisted of vinyl sheets made up of white and colored
vertical stripes and glued over surfaces such as walls and

41
fences, either indoors or outdoors. In Watch the Doors Please,
done in 1982, Buren covered the exterior double doors of
165 railroad cars belonging to the Illinois Central Gulf Rail-
road with stripes. He refers to the composition of these
works as “zero” (there is none). The internal structure of
each piece (the vertical stripes) stays the same and is con-
tinuously repeated; only the external structure varies, de-
pending on the work’s location or “frame.” A giant two-
story window in the Art Institute of Chicago which
overlooks the train tracks serves as the frame for Watch the
Doors Please. Posted next to the window is a schedule telling
the times when the trains are due to pass. At that moment,
the work may be seen; after that, as the train travels away
from the museum frame, it is exposed to many more viewers
and, in a sense, becomes anonymous public property.
Buren, too, is trying to overcome the exclusivity of private
ownership, which he perceives as standing in direct contra-
diction to the public (and collective) function of art.
It must be said that many late-modernist works of the
past two decades have violated the “time-honored forms”
in order to shift the meaning of creative activity away from
the value of the finished product. The intention of such
works has been to remain relatively free from the realm of
consumerism, the exigencies of the market, and fluctuations
of supply and demand. In changing the very nature of art,
however, they have exacted a fundamental adjustment in
our .ideas about structure, permanence, durability, and
boundaries. At the furthest extreme, the Frenchman Yves
Klein (who pioneered Minimal and Conceptual, as well as
Performance and Body art) presented the idea of art as
nothing, emptying a Paris art gallery of furniture, painting it
white, and exhibiting the empty space as art. Three thou-
sand people came to the opening. On this occasion, empti-
ness became a “prime object,” in George Kubler’s sense—
that is to say, a prototype of great generating power able to
provoke a revolution in perception. It wasn’t that one thing
simply replaced another, but that by inversion, the context
(in the form of the gallery itself) became the art. To borrow
again from William Gass, it was as if the moon had been
made to jump over the cow, or the fiddle play the cat.
Conceived in this way, art is no longer a thing—its vitality
lies elsewhere than in an ultimate substance. But if even the
Void can be art, so can its opposite, as when the French

42
sculptor Arman filled a Paris gallery with two truckloads of
rubbish in 1960; or when Walter de Maria, an American
sculptor, filled a New York art gallery with 220,000 pounds
of earth. In this case, the outrageously worthless was soon
converted into the expensively prestigious, since the artist’s
dealer (functioning as the Director of the Dia Foundation,
a trust fund which functions both as a support foundation
for artists and as a tax loss for the de Menil family in Texas)
then bought the entire building in which the installation
had been made, in order to keep it there permanently. An-
other sculpture of de Maria’s (also sponsored by the Dia
Foundation) consisted of a gigantic hole drilled one kilome-
ter deep into the ground in Kassel, Germany, in 1977. A
brass rod one kilometer long was inserted in the hole, which
was then capped with a metal plate, rendering the work
permanently invisible, known only through its absence.
This venture, which cost the Dia Foundation $300,000,
prompted the critic Robert Hughes, well-known for his
skeptical turn of mind, to hail the vanity of such an under-
taking as an “epigram of waste”’—a criticism likely to seem
scandalous to an artist who sincerely believes he is dealing
in thunderbolts. Art like this, however, is bound to encoun-
ter difficulty in getting itself believed. For we are up against
two different attitudes of mind—one reserved for the art-
ist’s creative activities, in which he makes violently antiso-
cial works intended to defy the ruling ideology, and one for
his personal interaction with society, in which he does not
resist that ideology. Art which lodges itself firmly in a world |
of superabundance and excess—and ultimately, of super-
fluity—can hardly serve as a model of cultural resistance. In
its conspicuous identification with the cash-nexus, it is
hardly the negation of our consumer culture, but is its com-
plement, implementing the established order rather than
breaking with it. The estrangement effect has changed into
a luxury occupation.
Other artists, concerned with a more ecological ap-
proach, have used gravity, chance, stones, water, and even
walking as materials from which to make art, often choos-
ing remote sites for their work in order to circumvent the
artificial environment of the art world. Robert Smithson
liked pouring tons of asphalt, mud, or glue down the slopes
of gravel pits or eroded cliffs in order to study its movement.
Smithson inevitably chose swamps, slag heaps, and indus-

43
trial wastelands as sites for his earthworks, partly because
he felt museums were too much like graveyards—they neu-
tralized the power of art by confining it and removing it
from the world. “A work of art,” he wrote in 1972, “when
placed in a gallery loses its charge and becomes a portable
object or surface disengaged from the outside world.”
Smithson was one of those artists who foresaw, quite early
on, that “the investigation of the apparatus the artist is
threaded through would become a growing issue.”
In contrast to sculptors who prefer industrial materials
and produce enormous, indestructible monuments, the En-
glish artist Richard Long uses only natural materials, and
also chooses unusual locations for his work. Although he
makes some works which can be exhibited in galleries and
sold, his outdoor sculptures—a stone line laid out in the
Himalayas, or a stone circle in the Andes—are not subject
to possession or ownership. They are not even objects added
to the landscape, just simple rearrangements of what is al-
ready there. His art, he claims, “is about working in the
wide world, wherever, on the surface of the earth. . . .
Mountains and galleries are both in their own ways . . . good
places to work.” His real concern is to show that radical and
robust art can be made in a simple, quiet way and with
minimal intrusion of the artist’s ego. “In the sixties,” Long
claims, “there was a feeling that art need not be a produc-
tion line of more objects to fill the world. My interest was
in a more thoughtful view of art and nature, making art
both visible and invisible, using ideas, walking, stones,
tracks, water, time, etc. in a flexible way. . . . It was the
antithesis of so-called American ‘Land Art,” where an artist
needed money to be an artist, to buy real estate to claim
possession of the land, and to wield machinery. True capi-
talist art. To walk in the Himalayas . . . is to touch the earth
lightly . . . and has more personal physical commitment,
than an artist who plans a large earthwork which is then
made by bulldozers. I admire the spirit of the American
Indian more than its contemporary land artists. I prefer to
be a custodian of nature, not an exploiter of it. My position
is that of the Greens. I want to do away with nuclear weap-
ons, not make art that can withstand them [like Michael
Heizer].” Art of this sort is ultimately political even though
it deals with things that are not in the least political.
The nomadic, ecological way of thinking is not bound to

44
any particular style. The American artist Robert Janz makes
chalk drawings in the street, for instance, that are com-
pletely ephemeral—rain eventually washes them away. His
circular shapes, drawn on the outside of the Victoria and
Albert Museum in London, slide gently out of alignment as
they traverse obstructing angles in the architecture. Work
like this subverts all our notions about what art should be:
measurable by the constancy and quality of its effects and
by its substantial presence in space and time; the embodi-
ment of an exemplary craft; a meaningful message about the
world. How much do we insist on these conditions? With
their own kind of modesty, these drawings assume an eco-
logical obligation not to pollute the world with more ob-
jects. To condemn the artist for his failure to conform to
traditional criteria of skill or permanence is to quite miss the
point, since he rejects those values and proposes radical new
ones instead. As does Jacqueline Monnier, an American art-
ist living in France, who makes kites, conceived not for
galleries or museums, but to live in their natural habitat of
sky and sea. “The sky,” she writes, “is really a virgin space.
The blue, you feel you can go on and on in it.” For Monnier,
kites are a form of collaboration with nature. It is the kite
tails which enact her dream of movement and color in the
sky. Sewn and glued into festive and lacy patterns from
simple materials like crepe paper, rayon, or cellophane, they
quite literally sculpt the air, each one like a bird with its own
characteristic plumage. If the wind is strong enough, some
kites will take up to eleven tails. Watching them ascend is
to experience a lovely, suave, fluid electricity in the sky.
More recently, Monnier has been making kites which uncoil
like ancient marine reptiles under the sea, where, by con-
trast, they are very slow moving, having a specific gravity
similar to water.
In Australia several years ago, I had occasion to meet an
artist who also works directly in the landscape, using only
natural materials like twigs and stones, gently modifying
the site but never dominating it. When I visited John Davis
in his studio in Melbourne, he showed me a number of
fragile, devotional objects he had made. They resembled
aboriginal ceremonial sticks or shamanistic prayer arrows. I
wanted to buy one, but it turned out that, with the excep-
tion of major pieces to museums, Davis was not eager to sell
his work. He preferred to give it away, or to barter it for

45
other people’s work, as an homage to the gift-exchange
practices of primitive cultures, which for them was an im-
portant part of social life. Since he earns a good living
through teaching, he doesn’t need to sell his art, which
leaves him free, on occasion, to give it away, because that
is closer to what he believes in. (The American artist Joseph
Cornell also had the habit of giving away his boxes; but as
they increased in value, this became more difficult to do, as
they were always in danger of being sold or stolen.)
There are many artists who have perceived the danger
of becoming a mere agent of our social tendencies and have
tried, personally, to draw back from it by making work that
is in some way unsuitable for immediate consumption. But
since consciousness is, in the end, largely determined by the
interests of the established society, and since the individual
who has a career in mind will obviously be eager to promote
his or her own cause, ideals must be bent to suit the de-
mands of the times. “As artists we have sold off inspiration
to buy influence,” the Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre has
said. “We have always had the histor ical
choice of-either
lying through or living through our contradictions. Now
through the genius of the bourgeoisie we have the chance
to market them.”
Andre began stacking and piling beams in 1961, but a bit
later he turned to arranging bricks, laying them out in a
repetitive manner horizontally along the floor. He made his
sculptures hug the ground. It was a way of getting away
from all the accumulated verticality of more traditional
forms. “The engaged position is to run along the earth,” he
said. “My ideal sculpture is a road.”” A row of bricks can be
made by anybody—nor does it seem wildly salable. Still, it
gets sold, and for a high price, even though, like the urinal,
it shows no visible signs of “work” or craft. All the parts are
equal and interchangeable; there is no composition, no con-
struction or carving, no expressiveness. For this reason,
Minimal art is boring to many people, who consider it not
informed by any creative struggle or search. But boring the
public—as the critic Barbara Rose pointed out about this
new art back in 1965—is one way of testing its commitment.
“The new artists seem to be extremely chary,” she wrote.
“Approval, they know, is easy to come by in this seller’s
market for culture, but commitment is nearly impossible to

46
 elicit. So they make their art as difficult, remote, aloof and
indigestible as possible.”
It is undoubtedly a truism that different types of art are
produced by different societies, but modern Western soci-
ety does seem to be unique in regarding its art as a commod-
ity to be sold in exchange for money, prestige, and power.
The idea of making art for profit appears when spiritual,
moral, and economic life begin to be separated from one
another with the development of foreign trade, and it marks
the distinction between a gift-giving society and a market
society. Aboriginal society, for instance, did not perceive art
“in terms of its commercial value—no pre-industrial culture
ever did. Art was a living thing, not something external to
the artist to be sold at a profit. It was a means of coming into
contact with the life-force of nature. Sacred designs were
painted in secret and revealed only in ritual—guarded from
women, strangers, and the uninitiated, and often burnt
when they had served their purpose. Today, bark painting
flourishes only in Northern Australia, and under Western
influence, the paintings are now made for a market of art
dealers who sell them in urban centers, mostly to tourists.
In his book The Gift, Lewis Hyde claims that the way we
treat a thing can sometimes change its nature. He also argues
that in its fundamental nature, art is a gift and not a com-
modity. So it is hardly an accident, given the detached na-
“fure of commodity exchange (in contrast to bonding
the
power of g’fts}, that we have called those nations known for
their commodities “the free world.” The phrase doesn’t
seem to refer to political freedoms; according to Hyde, it
merely indicates that the dominant form of exchange in
these lands does not bind the individual in any way—to his
family, to his community, or to the state. It is only when a
part of the self is given away that community appears.
Commodity systems have their own sort of growth, but
they bring neither the personal transformations nor the so-
cial and spiritual cohesion of gift exchange. Indeed, for
those who believe in transformation (either in this life or in
another), ideologies of market exchange have become as-
sociated with the death that goes nowhere.
As present-day modern culture becomes increasingly
depersonalized and administered by bureaucracies, some
artists have reacted by producing works whose extremities,

47
 peculiarities, and individualizations are so exaggerated that
they cannot be reduced to monetary equivalents. In some
cases they are using their own bodies as a medium—the
/ aggressive intimacy, for example, of ¥ito Acconci putting a
match to his breast and burning the hair off his chest. On
another occasion, in a work called Trademarks, Acconci bit
himself all over, as much of his body as he could reach. He
then applied printer’s ink to the bites and stamped bite
prints on various surfaces. One reason art like this makes us
anxious is that it violates our sense of boundaries; no dis-
tinction is made between public and private events, be-
tween real and aesthetic emotions, between art and self. For
Acconci, all experience is aesthetically provocative. He has
said that the end of a performance, because of the extremity
of its stress, might even be the development of a handicap.
But performance as a life-event becomes ambivalent as
art: Yves Klein, for instance, in 1960, dressed in a business
suit and necktie, leaping from the window ledge of a build-
ing into a Paris street. Just as Malevich in 1917 declared
himself to be the “President of Space,” proposing his new
objectless paintings as an analog of cosmic space, Klein
thought that bodily flight into space was the most revolu-
tionary of all acts. He thought the whole universe was his
stage. “Today,” he wrote, “anyone who paints space must
actually go into space to paint, but he must go there without
any faking, and . . . by his own means: in a word, he must
be capable of levitating.” Is it theater—or is it real? On the
occasion of the photograph, Klein did jump from the second
story, but was caught in a tarpaulin by friends. (The photo-
graph was then doctored and the tarpaulin removed.) On
several other occasions, however, he made similar leaps
without any protection.
Along with notions of impermanence and inaccessibil-
ity, then, we also find artists making use of violence, self-
mutilation, and high personal risk as acts of provocation
that force the viewer to examine his or her own emotional
responses. Our society is one which devalues suffering,
hardship, and adversity in favor of comfort, efficiency, and
occupational success. Almost as if by compensation, certain
artists have felt compelled to bring us back to an experience
of the negative, as when the California artist Chris Burden
crawled half-naked across broken glass. BuMuchrdof en’s —
early work centon er phy
edsical and psychological endur-

48
 ance tests, and sometimes even disfigurement. In a work
called Transfixed (1974), Burden had himself nailed to the
roof of a car. “Inside a small garage on Speedway Avenue,”
~wr
he ote, “T stood on the rear bumper of a Volkswagen.
lay on my back over the rear section of the car, stretching
my arms onto the roof. Nails were driven through my palms
into the roof of the car. The garage door was opened and the
car was pushed half-way out into Speedway. The engine
was run at full speed for two minutes. Then it was turned
off, and the car was pushed back into the garage. The door
was closed.” In an even earlier work done in 1971, Burden
had himself shot in the left arm by a friend holding a .22-
caliber rifle standing twelve feet away. Asked why some-
body in his right mind might want to do such a thing,
Burden explained, “It’s something to experience. How can
you know what it feels like to be shot if you don’t get shot?
t seems interesting enough to be worth doing it.” Once the
editor of a now-defunct art magazine entitled Avalanche
asked Burden why he considered that his work was art. And
Burden replied, “What else is it? It’s not theater. . . . Getting
shot is for real. . . . Lying in bed for twenty-two days.
... There’s no element of pretense or make-believe in it. If
I just stayed there for a few hours or went home every day
to a giant dinner it would be theater. . . . Now I know what
to expect. The unknown is gone. I mean, there’s no point in
ever getting shot again.”
Mounted on a red velvet plinth, the nails that were
driven through Chris Burden’s palms were subsequently
sold in a New York art gallery. It is but one of endless
instances that demonstrate how art-world priorities now get
into every bit of our behavior—and how what ends an
individual seeks are very much a matter of the kind of social
structure in which he finds himself. The artist believes that
he has done well. He does not perceive his art as being
distorted, or its effectiveness impaired, in order to conform
to the practices of a money culture. Or, if he does perceive
this, he believes it is in his own interest not to care. Once
an institution like the market system has been accepted as
legitimate over a long period of time, it inescapably acquires
a life and momentum of its own. It then produces a “false
consciousness,” whereby we all uphold and participate in
this set of arrangements, believing them quite indispensable
to our well-being. But we can see how advanced art today

49
 is no longer a caus e,ins no moral imperative. Even
and conta
~F the individual artist is persuaded that these social ar-
rangements are on the wrong track, he cannot (as Goethe
once said in a similar connection) be required to gain in-
sights that threaten his life-conditions, as long as a chance
at economic and sociological security is also involved. But
the estrangement effect withers once it is absorbed into the
dynamics of consumption, and the purpose it originally set
out to serve is falsified at its core.
The Australian artist Mike Parr, who lives and works in
Sydney, has often used real violence in his work as a tactical
measure—in an effort to make it impossible for the audience
to retreat into passivity about what was happening by as-
suming it was only a theatrical experience. In an early work
called Leg Spiral, he tied a gunpowder wick around his leg
and set it afire. Forced to cope with a direct assault on its
understanding, the audience becomes implicated and in-
volved. Parr turns the emotional urgencies of his personal
life into material and means for a powerful kind of perform-
ance art. A more recent tableau consisted of him chopping
off his arm with an axe. Parr’s left arm is congenitally un-
formed, and much of his early work dealt with his feelings
about this disability. The arm he chopped off was an abso-
lutely lifelike prosthesis made out of latex and stuffed with
animal livers. Afterwards, his sister and wife removed the
remains, and his sister attached in its place a pink knitted
arm she had made. The pink arm has not been put up for
sale, nor have the remains of the prosthesis.
+ The now unrelenting pressure on art to be “successful”
fusually ends up requiring that insight be separated from
\practice. Success and status are compliance-producing
forces, inducing us to interpret art in the fashion provided
by our culture, and to cling tenaciously to certain ways of
behaving. Someone not brought up in our society, and
therefore not automatically committed to those goals—the
Taiwanese-born performance artist Tehching Hsieh, who
entered the U.S. illegallyin 1974, would be an example—
finds himself under less pressure to compromise. Economic
success and security, comfort and pleasure, were not part of
his upbringing in China and have not formed his outlook.
The performances of Tehching Hsieh last for a whole
year. His first long work, entitled Cage Piece, involved re-
maining in a cage he built in his loft on Hudson Street for

50
one year (1978-79). “No read, no write, no TV, no radio,”
he states. Following upon that was a time-clock piece
(1980-81) in which the artist punched a time clock every
hour on the hour, twenty-four hours a day, for one year. In
1981 he began a third work in which he set himself the task
of remaining entirely outdoors for a whole year, in Manhat-
tan. During this time, Hsieh documented his activities,
photographing himself daily. He never once went indoors,
or entered a building, subway, train, car, or tent. He slept
in doorways, parking lots, or under the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Each day outside I spend like bum,” he has stated. “But
piece is not a bum. Is an artist. . . . I choose to do this. I plan
it, I am prepared. Outdoors is my symbol for outside world.
People can hurt you, the winter can hurt you. Is more dan-
gerous. Outdoor piece is symbol for human struggle in
world. . .. In New York much freedom, but to be good artist
freedom not enough, you need discipline.” Hsieh makes his
performances last for a whole year because he believes that
a year symbolizes a whole life—to do a piece for only a
week is to make a separation between his art and his life,
and thus to feel himself perform. For Hsieh, it is crucial that
his life and his art be one thing—his medium is real time,
and real deprivation. And the more difficult his art becomes,
the more it challenges him to touch his own limits and
potentials, to see what point in himself he can reach. The
Viennese psychoanalyst Otto Rank once wrote (in 1932)
about the artist: “His calling is not a means of livelihood,
but life itself . . . he does not practice his calling, but is it.”
Today, however, whatever we do, we are supposed to do for
the sake of “making a living,” and the number of people,
especially in the artistic and intellectual professions, who
might once have challenged this view has notably de-
creased.
Obviously, art does not do the same thing, epoch after -
epoch, merely changing its style; its function varies enor-
mously from one society to another. Art has alwayin- s
teracted with the social environment; it is never neutral. It
may either reflect, reinforce, transform; or repudiate, but it
is_alway s of necessary relation to-the social
in some kind
structure. There is always a correlation between society’s
values, directions, and motives and the art it produces.
Modernism, as we have seen, has cultivated its objects
largely as a mode of cultural resistance—as antidotes to a

51
 of
bureaucratically administered and overrationalized way
n
life. The art of the last fifty years, in particular, has bee
dominated by a style of perception that is difficult, willfully
inaccessible, and disorienting. Anxious objects do not elicit
the standard, cherished responses to art—rather they seem
to openly contradict ‘traditional functions of uplifting, re-
deeming, and reconciling, substituting instead the disequi-
librium of shock and doubt. Their primary function has
been to create a critical consciousness; but more often than
| not, this critical function has simply disappeared, as mass
bureaucratic culture assimilates potentially subversive
forms of art and deprives them of their antagonistic force by
converting them into commodities.
Because we live in a consumer economy, where the cash
value of things has become their primary value, it is difficult
for us to imagine another way of life, or mode of thought,
than ours. Looking over the vast range of human achieve-
ment, however, makes it quite clear that our values are not
the only standards by which art can be understood and
judged. In primitive societies, the incentives for making art
are chiefly non-economic; they arise from tradition, and
from religious considerations. There is no art of revolt. It is
only in some societies that artists are specialists. Carving a
temple gate or making a set of ritual masks in Bali, for
instance, is done anonymously, nor can the Balinese social
structure be seen as a collection of individuals vying for
status and prestige. The American Indians and the Aus-
tralian aborigines valued art for its magical powers; and
among the Kalabari of southern Nigeria or the Maori of
\New Zealand, sculptures are intended as “houses” for spir-
lits, to achieve some control over them.In China the great
painters lived like hermits, in the solitude of nature, from
which they drew their inspiration. They avoided the life of
the court, and gave away their pictures.
Clearly our modern Western world is only one of a large
number of possible worlds, but the assumption nevertheless
remains that modernity is not only distinctive, but superior
to all that has preceded it. Modernism’s freedom and auton-
omy, however, which would have been inconceivable in
previous societies, is becoming increasingly hazardous and
ambiguous as it collides head on with our society’s distor-
tions of artistic and cultural life. Just how successful the
strategy of estrangement has been in liberating the artist

52
 from becoming yet another commodity-producer—of aes-
thetic “goods”—or in establishing any real alternative to the
corporate value system, is open to question, since, as I have
also tried to show, most of that art is ambivalent all the way
through. Whether the modern artist’s alienation can still be
considered a socially productive resource or whether he,
too, seduced by the promise of a little affluence and a more
comfortable life, sold out to the system long ago, is an issue
still to be resolved. The paradoxical nature of co-option has
been nowhere better stated than by Hans Haacke, an artist
who is preoccupied with tracing corporate systems of power
and influence, and who uses his art to come to grips with
just such social and moral issues. According to Haacke,
" co-optation occurs when the intentions with which our ac-
tion is taken are reversed in practice, and one ends up serv- -,
ing the opposing interests. The problem is that in spite of '
all these distortions, museums and galleries as the estab-
lished channels of communication remain the most power-
ful tools for getting a message out. So that even artists like
Haacke, who remain dedicated to preserving an attitude of
skepticism and a critical distance from the system, realize
the impossibility of entirely rejecting the moral and social
codes of our time. “I'm afraid,” Haacke states, “that to forgo
the use of these amplifying transmitters for the sake of
purity would force me, embittered, into a sectarian corner
and in the end would leave me totally impotent. . . . In order
to contribute to the gradual decomposition of the belief
structure of today’s fantastically resilient capitalism, one
cannot but mimic and play along with some of its ways.
Only history will tell in retrospect who was co-opting
whom, if one can really speak of co-optation in such a
dialectically complex setting.”
In such a setting, one thing is sure: any artist in contem-
porary society who sets out to create values must engage
actively with the outside world—keeping free of the system
is no longer a viable option. Solitude paralyzes the faculties,
and purity and innocence will only be a handicap. At this
point, our whole culture resembles the fly who cannot get
through a pane of glass. It is more and more difficult to find
a position of estrangement that continues to be relevant, or
potent. The negation in the outsider’s position has lost its
urgency; meanwhile, we find ourselves lodged in a network
of proscribed solutions for our lives that commits us to the

53
 against it.
culture of bureaucracy even while our art rages
hands
Since anyone who resists can only survive by joining
ost
with everything he once rejected, the choice would alm
we
seem to be between artistic or moral suicide. When
candidly examine the value-scales that have been set up,
this
what we are driven to understand is surely the lesson of
age: that art cannot survive along the capitalist “faultline”
except by being compromised.

54
CHAPTER FOUR:
BUREAUCRATIZATION
The Death of the Avant-Garde

For some time now it has been evident that the critical
intransigence of the avant-garde is evaporating in front of
our eyes. Provocations that once seemed radical have long
since lost their power to shock. Even the most difficult art
has become comfortably familiar, and the unpredictable
predictable. Whether in spite of itself or due to circum-
stances beyond its control, the vanguard concept has been
traded in for good marketing strategy, and has become a big,
booming juggernaut. The critic Peter Schjeldahl put it well
when he wrote that the ritual anticommercialism of the late
’60s and "70s has had “roughly the impact on capitalism of
a beanbag hurled against cement.”
Those who are concerned over the bankruptcy of mod-
ernism frequently argue as though it were a relief to have
it over and done with. But the truth is that in many ways
the subversive impulse of modernism has been our culture’s
saving grace; the avant-garde functioned as the conscience
of bourgeois civilization, the only antitoxin generated
within the body of our society to counteract the pernicious
spread of secular, bureaucratic consciousness. I think we
shall perhaps only perceive the true meaning of what we
have lost by becoming conscious of the dynamics by which
modernist culture has been displaced, and of the conse-
quences now posed to the balance of forces within our social
scene.
 d in
If the adversary psychology of modernism originate
ues
the contradiction between a society with corporate val
s that
and interests and the kind of spiritual consciousnes
of
can only come from religion and art, what the death
ns
modernism really signifies is that our art no longer sustai
of
and protects this contradiction. The steady displacement
radical consciousness by theforces of professionalism, bu-
to
reacracy, and commexcialism has caused avant-garde art
lose its power of rebellion and has crippled its impact. Art
no longer presents a significant alternative to bourgeois val-
ues. In this new situation, what was once seen to be a defect
is now raised to a virtue: submission to the established
order. Those archetypes of the artist and the businessman,
which previously straddled our culture as adversaries, have
now joined hands. “Being good in business,” writes Andy
Warhol, ““is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money
is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
... 1like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a
$200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie
it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited
you the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.”
Comments like these may be just talk—like everything
Warhol does, they are amusing and morally ambiguous, but
they leave nobody flinching nowadays; rather, they are a
disconcerting sign of just how far artists have drifted in the
direction of cultural conformity. Perhaps the most interest-
ing thing about Warhol is the way he brings into question
the whole sphere of authenticity. Are his statements ironi-
cal, or are they a put-on? Or is he serious? From whatever
angle we look at these comments, they manage to preserve
their enigmatic character. Warhol guards his secret well—
we will never really know what goes on behind the mask.
That is the root of his power. But the lack of moral tone of
his vision is, at this point, an essential element in the con-
clusion of the modernist story. Trapped more and more in
a situation that seems both hopeless and inescapable, artists
have become increasingly dependent on the complicated
bureaucratic machinery which now organizeand s adminis-
tersthe-consumption of art in our culture. This apparatus
does much more than merely organize and administer, how-
ever; it also preconditions the drives and ambitions of those
whose well-being it ostensibly exists to promot e.
It enc our-
ages accommodation and surrender to our society’s predom-

56
inant values, and in so doing, it has undermined the very
basis of artistic alienation. The “alienated” element, which,
according to Marcuse, was the token of the artist’s truth, is
now viewed condescendingly. Negativity and opposition
have been transformed into acceptance and collusion.
Anyone who doubts the extent to which society’s corpo-
rate and bureaucratic interests have become the innermost
drives of its artists need only consider the number of artists
who parachute down in Soho each week, hoping to make it
in New York, even if it means hanging from the lampposts
until they can secure those emblems of success, a loft and
a dealer. Others have commented on Soho’s quasi-factory
conditions, its atmosphere of mass production, and its daily
invasions of trained “modern artists” for whom there are no
“jobs” in relation to the market. Recent estimates given for
the number of artists in New York begin with 30,000 and
go as high as 90,000. The Soho dealer Ivan Karp has com-
mented that he sees up to one hundred artists each week,
some ninety percent of whom he considers totally profes-
sional, all looking for galleries in which to sell their work.
This has never happened in the past. Such standardiza-
tion is an example of what Erich Fromm has called “consen-
sual validation”—the assumption that since a majority of
people share certain attitudes and feelings, the validity of
those attitudes and feelings is proven. But individuality
loses its quality of freedom if it is exercised en masse. This
social pattern—in which everybody believes that what the
majority wants must be worth striving for—now constitutes
reality for most artists. Most people seem to accept that this
is the way things are. This sharing of a specific social con-
struct of reality among so many members of a given culture
gives it the semblance of natural reality; the individual re-
sponds to this socially constructed reality as if it were con-
stant and not socially conditioned—thus a way of life is
established as lawful for all.
When a society is profoundly wrong for the artist, he
cannot, after all, remain unaffected. The mental and moral
capitulation of our society has no parallel in history. Its
effects have invaded everyone’s mind and character, so that
most of our allegedly radical artists now reflect the culture
of consumerism more than they challenge it. “I sure wish,”
writes California artist and critic Peter Plagens, “I had the
balls to be dyspeptically weird, to hate things out loud, to

57
take crazy, half-baked, unprincipled, vacillating stands on
pointless questions, to pee in somebody’s fireplace. But,
Your Honor, I'd also like to become a licensed manufacturer
baubles-for-the-rich, with a palatial studio and a
of
baronial wine cellar. I want Zuni baskets on plexi coffee
tables. . . .” That everyone now has like-minded interests
precludes the emergence of any effective opposition against
the whole system. 5
Marcuse is very -instructive here, pointing out exactly
how the productive apparatus becomes totalitarian: how it
determines not only social occupations and attitudes, but
also individual needs and aspirations. The transformation
from rugged individualism into bureaucratic conformism
has been induced gradually by a system of economic re-
wards. Production for profit (whether it is art or consumer
goods) is a basic institution of our society; but it has been
internalized into a set of needs which the individual now
feels he is entitled to satisfy. The painter Robert Henri’s
comment, made in 1923, only sixty years ago, that “the only
sensible way to regard the art life is that it is a privilege you
are willing to pay for” is a statement unlikely to have, at this
point for our society, any emotive potential whatsoever.
The shoe has moved to the other foot—artists now want art
to serve their careers rather than seeing themselves as serv-
ing art. Creative humility is no longer in style, and it may
worth asking ourselves how such a reversal in our think-
be
ing has come about. What was formerly an ideal has become
the very framework of ambition: “making it on sales alone.”
Today, this is quite simply the main measure of an artist’s
success. “Cash,” interpolates Warhol. “I just am not happy
when I don’t have it. The minute I have it I have to spend
it. And I just buy stupid things.”
Qur culture is perhaps the first completely secularized
culture in history, and what seems most ominous at this
point is that the whole idea of the artistic vocation—of the
artist who renounces worldly ambitions in order to dedicate
himself to values that cannot possibly be realized by a com-
mercial society—does not exert much power of attraction
any more. Careers depend more and more on advertising,
promotion, and good public relations. I'm not saying this is
the case for everyone, but that the rationale of success virtu-
ally requires this pattern of behavior. We are not likely to
see another Albert Pinkham Ryder, a lonely, reclusive artist

58
who lived one hundred years ago and cared nothing for
money, social prestige, or comforts. Ryder lived frugally on
thirteen cents a day and slept in a carpet roll; at night he
wandered the bridges, ferries, and waterfronts of New York,
“soaking up the moonlight” and watching the shadows a
boat’s sail made upon the water. “The artist,” Ryder wrote,
“must live to paint and not paint to live. He should not
sacrifice his ideals to a landlord and a costly studio. A rain-
tight roof, frugal living, a box of colors and God’s sunlight
through clear windows keep the soul attuned and the body
vigorous for one’s daily work.” His refusal of a dealer’s offer
to pay him liberally for ten pictures to be completed over
a period of three years—although he badly needed the
money—seems all but unthinkable now, a self-imposed
austerity that is mildly eccentric and certainly out-of-date.
These are not ideas that today’s art major is likely to pick
up about his or her role. He or she will learn instead that all
serious artists must eventually go to New York. If artists
like Ryder were ever role models in the past, they certainly
are not today. As it happens, Ryder was somewhat retarded
when it came to financial matters, which seemed a complete
mystery to him. Checks or cash that came his way were left
lying around his rooms, and once, when a fellow artist,
Horatio Walker, asked him if he had any money, Ryder
replied that “there was some on a paper in the cupboard.”
Walker then explained about cashing checks, took him to a
bank, and helped him open an account. Later Ryder was to
describe Walker as not only a fine painter but also a great
financier.
Modes and categories inherited from the past no longer
seem to fit the social reality experienced by the new genera-
tion, for whom the only reliable machinery for making
reputations is the bureaucratic art world. New artists know
no other standard by which to evaluate things. Social condi-
tions today foster a survival mentality—what is admired is
an ability to hold one’s own and to get ahead. The ways in
which Ryder suffered, his religious asceticism, his ardent
ideals about art, have all but lost their allure for an art world
transformed beyond recognition by material prosperity.
Thus, the Pop artist Robert Indiana candidly replied to Bar-
baralee Diamonstein, when she asked him in an interview
how important it was to be part of the art establishment:
“Enormously important, if you want to ‘make it.” Every-

59
thing in life seems to be who you know and when you know
them and where you are, and to be in the right place at the
right time with the right thing is about what Pop amounted
to. And it’s certainly my case. . . .” Obviously, skepticism
about the rules of the game is not really possible if one
wishes to fulfill certain ambitions.
The Australian-born sculptor Clement Meadmore la-
mented, in an interview with Geoffrey De Groen published
in 1981 in Art and Australia, his own failure to be in the right
place at the right time: “One of the things about American
art is that you have to be part of a movement to become well
known. If I'd shown the things I did in 1964, if I'd had a
gallery by then, I should have been considered one of the
Minimalists. It was fairly Minimal work. It wasn’t truly
Minimal, philosophically, but it would have been near
enough to have been lumped in with them, in terms of
reviews and writing about it. . . . That didn’t happen. . . .
[My work] didn’t fit into any movement and I never got
written about in terms of movements. It’s a very slow pro-
cess then to get known all by yourself. I really should have
come here about 1960 and got a gallery, so that by the time
I was doing the Minimal works I should have been part of
that bandwagon.”
Success and security now play such a central role in the
American imagination, the inducements of a conformist so-
ciety are proving so great, that even artists have learned to
strive along an imposed scale of careerist values, mapping
out their lives like military strategists. If early capitalism led
to the formation of ascetic tendencies, late capitalism has
spawned a more acquisitive and exploitative form of in-
dividualism, together with an art more oriented toward pro-
duction and profit. Anyone who professes to be motivated
by sacrifice or asceticism—by a need to hold something of
himself forever from the world’s reach—is met by derisive
disbelief. Thus it is that modernism’s former historic role of
rebellion has changed into eager acquiescence in the im-
pulse to advance and become established. It is as if, in the
words of Abraham Maslow, the frustrated will to meaning
has been compensated by the will to power plus what one
might call a “will to money.” And once harnessed into the
bureaucratic apparatus, the artist becomes chained to his
activity as a “producer.” He becomes yet another function-
ary integrated into the mechanism with a vested interest in

60
seeing that the mechanism continues its function. These
days art is a “worldly” calling, and the intellectual refusal
to go along—to play the game by the rules even if one is
lacking in conviction—appears neurotic and impotent.
Such is the tenor of the times that Ryder’s exemplary
life, his commitment to negotiating on his own terms,
doesn’t stand for much. For by now, the iconoclastic posture
of the artist as an outcast—who stands for another way of
life than the established one—whose purpose as a religious,
spiritual, or moral hero is to create a symbolic life that will
have meaning for others—has been reduced to the same
kind of mechanical order and bureaucratic fixity that en-
gulfs other professions in our society. Why do people
think artists arespecial?”’ asks Warhol. “It’s just another
job.” This assimilation of creative ideals into an 1mpersonal
calculating, secular reality indicates the extent to which the
realm of the soul or spirit has been translated by our mate-
rial culture into pragmatic terms. Hence the need for endless
compromises, and the conflicts arising from the fact that
aims and standards have been confused beyond anyone’s
comprehension.
Obviously, this shift in gears has not been accepted by
everyone with equanimity. Undoubtedly the Minimal artist
Robert Mangold was speaking for many others when he
voiced his disillusionment with the current scene in a recent
issue of Art in America:

The early 60s in New York were like the 50s in a sense.
It was a very small art scene. You could throw a loft
party and literally everybody in the art world would be
there. Everything would open on Tuesday evening. In
one evening you could see everything that was shown.
That changed somewhere around the mid-60s—the
size of the art world, the number of galleries, a lot of
things started shifting; things also shifted politically.
By the end of the 60s the whole scene was very differ-
ent. I left New York, very disillusioned, in 1970. For
one thing, I felt there was a kind of commercialism
taking place that I found offensive. I felt the need to put
distance between me and the art world. Things were
happening that somehow seemed so divisive, and ev-
eryone was jealous of everyone else. . . . I just wanted
to get the art world out of my head. I didn’t want to
think about who was on the cover of the art magazines,

61
 or whether this or that article was mentioning me or
not. To me it seemed a deadly context to live in.

As we move into the era of postmodernism, we seem to

be witnessing the rise of a new psychological type of artist:
the bureaucratic or organizational personality who lives in
a condition of submission ta:a cultural and economic power
system because of the rewards of money and prestige which
are offered in return for such submission. In America, this
process is now far advanced as a new power elite of manag-
ers continues to grow and consolidate, encompassing all
aspects of life. Thomas Whiteside has written eloquently in
The New Yorker about the corporate takeover of the publish-
ing industry; the same tendencies now threaten all levels of
the art world, where a commercial morality can only have
the same effect on art as it has had on book publishing: the
promotion of mediocre work through aggressive forms of
mass-marketing and advertising. The high period of mod-
ernism-is-over, and we are clearly moving on to something
else—to the emergence of a new value system, described by
William Scott and David Hart in their book Organizational
America as the “organizational imperative.” Scott and Hart
believe that the most significant source of the subversion of
the individual is the modern organization—in which the
moral burdens of autonomy are traded in for the comforts
of security. The “organizational imperative” functions on
the basis of the idea that whatever is good for the individual
can come only from the modern organization. In the case of
the art world, the bureaucratic power structure is turned
into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is
expected. Bureaucratic rules and procedures take the place
of personal morality: this is what institutionalized individu-
ality means. The old values of individuality, indispensabil-
ity, and spontaneity are replaced by new ones, based on
obedience, dispensability, specialization, planning, and pat-
ernalism. The goal is security: to be part of the big powerful
machine, to be protected by it, and to feel strong in the
symbiotic connection with it. In the case of artists, these
values are hostile to all that we know about the nature of
creativity. And yet, to survive in this new order of things
all must conform to the requirements of the modern organi-
zation—therein lies the problem.
Coincident with this change in mentality are basic, if

62
hardly acknowledged, changes in the ideas by which life is
interpreted. Contemporary American cultural identity now
includes the idea that the individual artist cannot function
without the aid and guidance of some dealer, an idea which
may seem incongruous in a society constantly proclaiming
the value of freedom and the independence of the artist.
Under the “organizational imperative,” what rises to the top
through the engineering of taste by media promotion and
dealer advertising must be seen to be the best. “To be suc-
cessful as an artist,” according to Warhol, “you have to have
your work shown in a good gallery for the same reason that,
say, Dior never sold his originals from a counter in Wool-
worth’s. A good gallery looks out for the artist, promotes
him and sees to it that his work is shown in the right way
to the right people. No matter how good you are, if you're
not promoted right you won’t be one of those remembered
names.” Increasing reliance is now placed upon a
managerial elite of dealers and curators—who are not only
the main means for the promotion of art, even more than
critics, but who exercise fairly unassailable control over
which art gets promoted—with the result that individuals
now exist for the benefit of the organization, rather than the
organization for the individual. If they choose to, dealers
can ignore artists” demands because they realize that at this
point, with a handful of exceptions, artists need dealers
even more than dealers need artists. Of course, there will
always be some cases that do not fit this state of affairs—
but as a basic trend it is still incredible in its stark and simple
truth. The following comments by the Soho dealer Ivan
Karp, made to Barbaralee Diamonstein, make pretty explicit
this inversion of priorities: “We put on forty-four separate
exhibits a season, which is more than any art institution in
the country. . . . I play an active role with my artists. . . . I
am frequently with them and visit their studios. I help them
sort out their works. I pronounce opinions and convictions.
They don’t have to listen to me, but I will only show the
works that I like in the gallery. In other words, if an artist
who is scheduled to show does not produce the kind of
works that [ want to dignify my gallery with, then I won't
show them.”
Like Karp, most dealers—if not all—have long since
recognized and learned to exploit a situation in which very
little of importance can be accomplished any more outside

63
their organizations. The individual artist in this new scheme
of things really is of diminishing importance, and his per-
sonal influence more negligible, as he becomes an inter-
changeable unit among dealers. Like many scientists today,
managers tend to be judged, not by the morality of their
ends, but by the effectiveness of their means. The dealer
Mary Boone, for instance, wtho at thirty has been described
by the media as the new priestess of the art world,” moni-
tors very carefully all the sales of her artists’ works. One
cannot just arrive off the street and buy a Julian Schnabel,
no matter what one’s resources are. Boone’s shows are fre-
quently sold out before they open, but she does not sell to
“just anyone.” Collectors are carefully screened according
to how influential they are, and how frequently they buy
from the gallery. Replying to the accusation that she orches-
trates her artists’ careers, Boone commented in Life: “If an
artist is introduced and doesn’t make the right splash, he
may never recover . . . not enough can be said of the impor-
tance of developing an entire image for the artists I repre-
sent: placing the painter in certain shows, getting the right
attention from the right art magazines, throwing the right
parties at the right clubs. It’s all so very important.” Janelle
Reiring, co-director of the Metro Pictures Gallery in Soho,
speaks for many of the younger, new, successful dealers
when she claims that being a dealer today “is not the pursuit
of a nineteenth-century gentleman. Business is one of its
most interesting aspects, and I think you will be seeing more
—and more aggressive—dealers.”
Clearly, all this has not happened suddenly. But as the
difficulty of climbing out of the current becomes greater and
greater, artists—for the sake of their careers—must increas-
ingly shut their eyes to the hopelessness of ever harmoniz-
ing their aspirations, standards, and ambitions with the eco-
nomic and social demands of the times. Since there is little
doubt at this point that the career progress of professionals
depends on making organizational values an intrinsic part of
their lives, the artist gears his aspirations and his work to
the situation he is in, and from which he can find no way
out. Many artists remain prickly and ambivalent about this
state of affairs, but the pressure to conform usually super-
sedes the importance of trying to achieve consistency be-
tween one’s beliefs and actions. As the young Italian Neo-
expressionist Sandro Chia remarked on the occasion of his

64
inclusion in the last international art exhibition “Docu-
menta” held in Kassel, Germany: “I feel it was both coarse
and superficial to invite someone like me to take part, when
I am one of the first to hope that their undertaking will be
a failure.” And so it is that everything that is done today—
even in one’s inner conscience—is provisional. Ultimately,
the problem of real moral choice must be shunted aside by
anyone keen-on status advance.
Hegel never said that the direction taken by history was
“ineluctably necessary,” but only that history can be seen
to have happened as he described it. The truth is that mod-
ern managerial practices, which have come more and more
to set the tone of our society and to establish its cultural
pace, were not central to the attitudes of such early art
dealers as Alfred Stieglitz and Henry Kahnweiler. Stieglitz,
who established the first American gallery devoted to
avant-garde art in New York, found it necessary to sacrifice
the practice of his own photography in order to nurture the
creative development of the artists—Arthur Dove, Marsden
Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe—whom he be-
lieved in. He did not charge a standard commission, and the
gallery lost money; but Stieglitz was not looking to reach a
large audience or to become famous himself. When he first
opened the Secession Gallery in 1905 (it was later to become
Gallery 291), there was no publicity. “Those who love and
understand and have the art-nose will find their way,” he
said. One of his artists, Marie Rapp, has described how
Stieglitz had no time for those who saw art in financial
terms or who bought for investment: “What he resented
more than anything else was to have someone who had
money come in and offer to buy a painting as if it were a
shop or as if the work were some commodity. If he thought
they wanted to buy just because they had money, he might
double the price of the painting. If someone else came in and
was just crazy about something, and had nothing else in
mind, he would let them have it for half-price!”
The extent to which “unworldly” values have fallen
from grace in our own times is nowhere more grimly exem-
plified than in the conspiracy to defraud the Rothko estate
after the artist’s death, which was instigated by his dealer
Frank Lloyd, the director of a multimillion-dollar interna-
tional network of Marlborough galleries. The climax of this
affair was a criminal lawsuit in 1972 that dragged on for

65
months and months, through nineteen lawyers and 20,000
pages of testimony, and was described at the time in New
York magazine as “the art world’s own little Watergate.”
Henry Kahnweiler, by contrast, was as dedicated in his
approach to art as was Stieglitz. When Kahnweiler launched
the first “modernist” pictures of Picasso and Braque in his
gallery in the rue Vignon in 1907, he categorically refused
to exhibit them in the publi¢ salons. Like Stieglitz, Kahn-
weiler kept healthy little daggers of contempt up his sleeve
for what he considered the merchandising approach, and for
the mass consumption of art. “People always think that an
art dealer ‘launches’ painters with a lot of fanfare or public-
ity,” he writes in his memoirs. “I didn’t spend a cent, not
even for announcements in the paper. . . . In the old days,
people went to the Indépendents to get mad or to laugh. In
front of certain pictures, there would be groups of people
writhing with laughter or howling with rage. We had no
desire to expose ourselves either to their rage or to their
laughter, so we stopped showing the pictures.” Protected
from the need to play to large audiences by their dealer,
Picasso and Braque were able to pursue Cubism as a private
and personal exploration. Seventy years later, in 1980, more
than a million people visited the Picasso retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show cost $214
million to put together, and seven thousand people a day
came and went. Many of them had to purchase tickets in
advance, and the overwhelming floods of visitors meant
that 105 attendants had to stand guard over the pictures at
all times.
Changes in the marketing of art are by no means limited
to the private sector of commercial dealers, however: mu-
tant intentions have also redefined and altered the role of
the museum. As government endowments and private
funds diminish and operating costs increase, many mu-
seums have turned to corporations for support. Over the
past decade many large corporations, most notably oil com-
panies, have gained a considerable foothold in U.S. mu-
seums. In New York, for instance, few major exhibitions are
produced any more without corporate money. Contribu-
tions to the arts from corporate philanthropy in America has
risen from $23 million in 1963 to $463 million in 1979.
Supporting the arts provides corporate sponsors with an
opportunity to enhance their public image. The artist Hans

66
Haacke, who has published articles, given interviews, and
made art exposing the corporate rationale for the support of
art, has described how, during the 1960s, the more sophis-
ticated executives of large corporations began to understand
that the association of their company’s name with the arts
could have considerable long-term benefits. Under the
seeming altruism of underwriting museum exhibitions, cul-
tural television programs, or concerts, a large oil or cigarette
company with a public-relations problem realized that by
associating its name with a human activity that carries high
social prestige, it could improve the company image. One
Mobil public-relations man, for instance, has described the
payoff his company receives for its tax-deductible contribu-
tion to culture as its “goodwill umbrella.”
Haacke frequently uses his own art to provoke a critical
consciousness about this situation. One of his works in-
volved collecting a series of statements (mostly found in
management journals) made by corporate executives and
politicians as to the good business rationale of supporting
the arts. Haacke reproduced these statements on aluminum
plaques in a style imitating the technique of corporate ad-
vertising. One statement, for instance, had been made by
David Rockefeller, as Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank
and Vice Chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, in a
speech to the National Industrial Conference Board. It
reads: “From an economic standpoint, such involvement [in
the arts] can mean direct and tangible benefits. It can pro-
vide a company with extensive publicity and advertising, a
brighter public reputation, and an improved corporate
image. It can build better customer relations, a readier ac-
ceptance of company products, and a superior appraisal of
their quality. Promotion of the arts can improve the morale
of employees and help attract qualified personnel.”
Corporations are inevitably interested in sponsoring ex-
hibitions that are likely to yield the greatest public-relations
dividends through their popular and sensational appeal.
Throughout the organization of the show, and particularly
in its promotion, the corporate influence is felt. Exhibitions
themselves will often become “merchandise’ and the public
a “market.” When the Tutankhamen exhibition was held at
the Metropolitan Museum (“the sort of thing any corpora-
tion would love to support,” according to Thomas Messer,
Director of the Guggenheim Museum), it was accompanied

67
by bulk merchandising on such a scale that for months
“King Tut” became a trademark image. The New York critic
Carter Ratcliff commented at the time in Art in America: “For
the Tut glut to qualify as a full-scale cultural phonomenon,
there has to be a link between the consumption of mass-
experience and the ‘consumption of mass-produced pro-
ducts.” A great deal of businesslike attention was given over
to enticing the public to buy Tut T-shirts, bath towels, silk
scarves, rock-and-roll records, tie clasps, tote bags, and cal-
endars. It is one of the paradoxes of our present society that
the more art becomes an available commodity, the less it
becomes a rare treasure. As the links between business and
art proliferate, the atmosphere of museums has changed in
quality and tone. Under the new cultural style, the success
of an exhibition is measured—in Hollywood terms—by
media coverage and box office. Attendance figures become
the great yardstick for everything.
Since museums first stumbled onto the road of corporate
image-building, the addiction to corporate funds has stead-
ily grown. Today, the managerial elite is winning every-
where; its power is such that it has re-formed the expecta-
tions we have for our lives, and reordered our priorities. As
organization and management penetrate further into the
social order, there is no longer much difference between
what artists define as their individual aims and what
managers try to accomplish within their organizations. The
bureaucrat’s main desire is to advance, and he can best do
so by becoming part of the organizational imperative. An-
other telling example of how much career progress, even in
art, now depends on making organizational values an intrin-
sic part of one’s life may be seen in the “Survival Work-
shop” that took place during the summer of 1981 at the
University of Maryland. These workshops are now prolifer-
ating. The assumption is that success in the higher corporate
world of art requires training in the techniques of business
administration, and it leaves no doubt that the principles
and practices of corporate management now produce the
psychological model shaping even the lives of artists.
It is not so much that the defects of bureaucracy and
commercialism have begun to outweigh their virtues, but
that everyone, including artists, now reinforce the same
values. All these tendencies toward conformism merely
help to endorse the assumption that the avant-garde, and its

68
 MARYLAND SUMMER INSTITUTE
For the Creative and Performing Arts
and
U.S. SMALL BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
in cooperation with
National Endowment for the Arts
National Assembly of State Arts Agencies
Artists Equity Association, Inc.
University of Maryland Department of Art
present

THE BUSINESS OF

A-RTIST Survival Workshop for the 80’s

Monday-Friday, June 8-12, 1981
: UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND :
: COLLEGE PARK 5
THE PROFESSIONAL ARTIST June 8
Balancing Your Life « Alternative Careers « Goal Setting « Designing
Your Living/Work Space » Assertiveness Training « Health Hazards

BUSINESS AND LAW June 9

Contracts « Copyrights/Patents/Trademarks s Co-operatives « Non-Profit
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THE MARKETPLACE June 10

Galleries/Collectors « Museums « Corporations « Commissions e
Alternative Art Spaces

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GRANTS AND SERVICES June 12

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State Arts Councils « Foundations « Slide Repositories/Registries

REGISTRATION is open to the general public. Workshop fee is $15.00 per

day or $50.00 for all 5 days. Space is limited. Early registration recommended.
The University of Maryland, College Park Campus is nine miles northeast of
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For information, brochure and application call (301) 454-5910 or 454-

2763, or write MSICPA, Summer Programs, University of Maryland, College
Park, MD 20742.
ssese escsssscssscsssssssssssses
 obsolete or
modes of protest and resistance, have become
still to be
irrelevant. Whatever complex crosscurrents are
cy does
found in the present art scene, the dominant tenden
m to be adj ust men t to the sys tem , and cap itu lation to its
see
or age nci es of con tro l. To dwe ll on the dar k side of this,
maj
rity
however, is to blaspheme against our religion of prospe
no
and success. But the notior: of art as a counterforce is
ence
longer being defended—the critical obligation to dissid
ing
has lost its hold on the moral imagination. And yet, as Irv
hile
Howe noted already in 1962, the future of any worthw
modern culture would seem to depend precisely on the sur-
vival of the kind of dedicated group that the avant-garde
has been. The need for refusal and subversion is, if any-
thing, even more urgent now than it was fifty years ago,
before the corporate elements of our society began to distort
beyond recognition the inner life of the world in which art
is produced. Certainly there is nothing at this point that
gives us cause for reassurance or relaxation—nothing that
gives us reason to turn our backs on principled dissent.
The growing acquiescence in the aims and practices of
bureaucratic society troubles many observers of modern
culture. Corporate bureaucracies have as their avowed mis-
sion the production and sale of goods and services at a
profit; they are chiefly institutions for selling and market-
ing. Values alien to the efficiency of operation are abolished.
The self-determined, independent, creative being becomes
just another cog in the mechanism which prescribes to him
a fixed route of march. It was Max Weber’s greatest fear
toward the end of his life that the world might one day be
filled with nothing but these little cogs, little men clinging
to little jobs and striving toward bigger ones; he wondered
how to keep a portion of mankind free from “this parceling-
out of the soul,” as he put it, from this supreme mastery of
the bureaucratic way of life.
Until now, that oppositional force in our society has
been embodied in the small, conscious elite known as the
avant-garde, and in its permanent challenge to the estab-
lished order. Being an artist has always meant maintaining
a certain independence of mind and not adapting to the
competitive performances required for well-being under the
established system, even at the cost of intense personal
sacrifice. But since Ryder’s time, we have experienced a
radical decline in the individual’s potential to stand firm and

70
alone. There seems to be nothing innate in individuals that
will force them to resist if the rewards for adaptation are
sufficient. There is no reason to insist on self-determination,
as Marcuse has shown, if the administered life is comfort-
able; the need for refusal is arrested by our society’s “deliv-
ering the goods” on a huge scale. After all, if everyone is
happy with the rewards handed down by the system, why
should anyone demand that things be different? Affluence
is the great social tranquilizer.
But as the years go by, all these benefits and rewards
exert a hidden pressure, and the temptation to strike out on
one’s own, or to take another path, becomes less and less.
What is more, every act of compliance constitutes positive
feedback—a vote of confidence for the system. The problem
has never been as acute as it is today, because individual
conscience has never before been replaced by an organiza-
tional imperative that relieves one of the task of thinking
for oneself. In accepting its reality, we are becoming all the
same, as our allegiance quietly shifts from individualism to
obedience in following the same managerial rules and goals.
Accepting our society’s stress on achievement and economic
growth has provoked acrisis for artists, distorting the ways
in which they value art and altering their motives for creat-
ing it. Howis it possible, then, for artists living in a society
centered on production, consumption;-and success-to be-
come independent personalit again, and to once
once ies
more exert their influence on society? Only, perhaps, by the
willingness to apply an inner brake that says “no” to the
dominant claims of our times, even when everybody else
says “yes.” Rather than vainly attempting to abolish the
system, it will mean altering the values that motivate one’s
striving. Marcuse also makes the point that unless revolt
reaches into this “second” nature—that is to say, into the
infrastructure of our longings and needs—social change will
remain self-defeating. The future prospects of art obviously
depend very much on how artists define their needs and
aspirations, and how they interpret their own interests.
One thing, anyway, is clear. If present trends continue,
we are almost certain to wind up in circumstances whose
long-range implications for the future of art are negative.
““Management” is a recent phenomenon, not more than sev-
enty-five years old. As Scott and Hart emphasize, it is domi-
nant because we made it so. “We did this,” they state,

74
 ion would
“pecause we believed that the modern organizat
safety and
provide us with material affluence, physical
would have
peace of mind. We were not aware . . . that we
But
to buy a whole sack full of new values in the process.
za-
something does not come for nothing; once the organi
tional imperative was set in motion, it became so powerful
to
that we lost our sense of how to control it, let alone how
turn it off.” As a society, we have become so hooked on
environmental and’ bureaucratic artificiality that there
seems little chance of escape from it. The agonies of even
partial withdrawal are more than most of us dare contem-
plate. It must be said, however, that at this point the ma-
chine can be controlled only by people willing to change
their whole value system, their whole world view, and their
whole way of life. R T

72
CHAPTER FIVE: PLURALISM
The Tyranny of Freedom

P ostmodernism is the somewhat weasel word now being

used to describe the garbled situation of art in the ’80s. It
is a term which nobody quite fully understands, because no
clear-cut definition of it has yet been put forward. Its use
arose synonymously with that of pluralism toward the end
of the “70s, and at that point it referred to the loss of faith
in a stylistic mainstream, as if the whole history of styles
had suddenly come unstuck. Since then, under the more
recent umbrella of Neo-expressionism, the old stylistic divi-
sions now mix, blend, and alternate interchangeably with
each other: dogmatism and exclusivity have given way to
openness and coexistence. Pluralism abolishes controls; it
gives the impression that everything is permitted. Meeting
with no limitation, the artist is free to express himself in
whatever way he wishes.
If modernism was ideological at heart—full of strenuous
dictates about what art could, and could not, be—postmod-
ernism is much more eclectic, able to assimilate, and even
plunder, all forms of style and genre and circumstance, and
tolerant of multiplicity and conflicting values. Originally,
the modernist assertion of self represented a rebellion: by
taking a path of active, self-sacrificing struggle, modern
artists sought to improve the ethical image of our world.
Central to avant-gardism were the concept of alienation and
protest and the assumption that art must be something more
than the production of superfluous luxury products. The
engagement of modernism, even in its most “alienated”
manifestations of art for art’s sake or anti-art, always in-
volved a negative attitude toward bourgeois society: refusal
of easy success, dissatisfaction with the values of the mar-
ketplace, and that permanent revolution waged against the
tempting habit of conformity. One of the things that seems
to separate postmodernist from modernist thinking—and
the one that will concern me particularly here—is the rejec-
tion of any serious concern about art’s moral center. “There
is a morality of art,”” the composer Arnold Schénberg ob-
served in the heroic early days of modernism, “to serve as
a counterpart to this world that is in many respects giving
itself up to amoral, success-ridden materialism in the face
of which all the ethical preconditions of our art are steadily
disappearing.”
That comment was made at a time when modernist cul-
ture was uncompromisingly dissident and subversive—
when its current was still running very much against the
tidal patterns of the larger culture. Now, of course, there is
a decidedly open alliance between society as a whole and
art’s economic status, and once-"alienated” works have ac-
quired an investment value beyond anybody’s imagining.
The result is a currently thriving art industry, in which the
artist has become the means for the economic interest of
other people, or himself, or the economic machine—while
the ethical coordinates that give art its tutelary force are
being obliterated. Nearly all art today is the product of
energies freed from direct social purpose or obligation.
What began before World War I as a burning involvement
of artists in the future of their societies (this was the radical
and evolutionary implication of the term avant-garde) had
subsided by the mid-1970s into acknowledgment that art
would never change the world. In the era of postmodernism,
heroism and high art are out of style.
It was this loss of hope, more than anything else, that
transformed the avant-garde from an ethical into an aes-
thetic movement. Speaking of how the concept of the “sub-
lime” has been increasingly devalued by our skeptical age,
and of the “scaled-down ambitions” of our artists, the critic
Peter Schjeldahl wrote recently in Arf in America:

74
 Art as a substitute religion—and it was no less than this
for Rothko, as for Mondrian—has disappointed us, and
there is a general understanding, I think, that artistic
grandeur is not worth the terrible human investment
required to attain it. That’s the way things are. It would
be more than a shame, however, to let our understand-
able present cynicism be made retroactive, denigrating
great work created at the last high tide of artistic faith
... for it is the pressure of the values that creates the
intensity of the work, and to assume otherwise is to
have no comprehension of how art actually happens.
... Rothko lacked the wisdom of the ‘70s, which seems
to be that to believe in anything at all is messy and
dangerous, and this does give us an edge on him.

In many ways, the abandonment of ideology in favor of

a pluralist situation seems to offer colossal and unparalleled
opportunities for every kind of artistic expression; it would
seem, moreover, to be a liberating release from intolerant
exclusiveness and from the avant-garde imperative of con-
tinual innovation. But there are negative consequences
lurking undetected in such an “overoptioned” situation
which threaten our art with the imprint of meaninglessness.
It is not my intention to inject cynicism or doubt into what
many people consider the invigorating effects of so much
stylistic freedom, but I do perceive that there are two sides
of this emerging tendency that need to be pondered. The 4 §
positive benefits of pluralism go hand in hand with its nega- A
tive, or disintegrative, character.
For one thing, allowing unlimited freedom of expression
in a sense undermines the importance of what is expressed,
while the sheer overavailability of options actually lowers
the degree of innovation possible. In the early days of mod-
ernism, to experiment was to have the feeling of being
poised on some outermost brink; departing from the norm
was a radical act that meant staking one’s life as an artist and
risking everything. In the new pluralistic situation, how-
ever, all modes of art can claim equal status, and they do.
Many divergent claims to authority have begun by now to
undermine and weaken art’s integrity and plausibility, since
what pluralism really means is that the lines between what
is acceptable as art and what is unacceptable no longer exist.
Everything can now be accommodated. The problem with

75
the option of accommodation, however, is that once taken,
it tends to escalate to the point where the plausibility of the
tradition collapses, as it were, from within. The disintegra-
tion is not merely of this or that aesthetic assumption, but
of the overall pattern of meaning. When the natural order
of things runs down, we get entropy—a move from sys-
temic order toward increasing randomness and loss of direc-
tion. What I am saying is that once art no longer lays claim
to the dignity of the absolute, it loses its charismatic,
“meaning-giving”’ function.
For a tradition to be in place, there have to be some
shared standards of excellence, some rules that are already
established. These standards and rules cannot be deter-
mined by the individual—their authority derives from the
fact of being socially determined by the practice. Only then
can we criticize and try to change them. The central attitude
of pluralism—that art is various, that whatever artists define
as art is acceptable as an “end” to be pursued—breaks down
the unity of a narrative history that until now has made art
intelligible and sustained its practice. Once there is no
longer any ultimate agreement as to the rules which consti-
tute and sustain a practice—once there is no longer anything
to impose constraints—all that pluralism can do is obscure
the depths of our conflicts. Hilton Kramer alluded to the
problem some time ago in The New York Times:

If there is something appealing in the very openness of

this postmodernist art scene, there is also something
dismaying in it, too. For it reminds us that ours is now
a culture without a focus or center. . . . Perhaps we
know too much about art to believe in the absolute
efficacy of any single style or tradition. Are we con-
demned, then, in the art of the ‘80s, to remain in a
perpetual whirl of countervailing and contradictory
styles and attitudes? I think we probably are. This eager
embrace of art of every persuasion seems to suit us. It
satisfies our hearty new appetite for aesthetic experi-
ence while requiring nothing from us in the way of
commitment or belief.

Whether we like it or not, traditions have histories; to

succeed they need to generate stable and durable criteria. It
is possible that what we most need from art at this point is
a counterinsistence on psychological stability and on the

76
preservation of certain continuities—or exactly the opposite
of what we are getting. Even the “estranged” artist needs to
find moral identity in and through a network of social obli-
gations and responsibilities: the notion of escape is an illu-
sion, and one with painful consequences. Pluralism means
we can no longer rely on tradition or cultural habit to give
us our values. But in such a circumstance, it is possible to )
become value-blind, like a person who is color-blind or
tone-deaf.
Traditional societies have many disadvantages—which
include considerable restraints on freedom—but as we find
it harder and harder to resolve our own dilemmas, we may
come to see the logic of traditional systems with new eyes.
We may begin to perceive that it is wrongheaded—and
perhaps even fatal—to have no proven standards of value,
no constitutive rules that are inviolate. The extreme degree
of freedom offered by our present-day pluralism has placed
everyone under increased pressure to choose for themselves
among unlimited alternatives. But with the breakdown of
social consensus, it has become harder and harder to know
how or what to choose, or how to defend or validate one’s
choice. The freedom from all determinants leads to an in-
determinacy so total that, finally, one has no reason for
choosing anything at all. Pluralism is the norm which can-
cels all norms. It means we no longer know where the truth /
lies. (The only truth pluralism allows is that it is absolutel
true there is no such thing as absolute truth.) But if values
no longer admit of truth and are merely arbitrary, if art is
something always provisional and never definitive, how
shall we ever grasp its meaning? For either we accept that
there are real and inherent values—eternal truths which -/
transcend individual existence—or there are no such truths,
in which case we are free to make them up, and one meaning
is as good as another. But if all ideas are equal, what can
vouchsafe to art its charismatic power and its moral author-
ity? Arbitrariness is the pitfall of unlimited freedom. How
can meaning survive when nothing acts as a regulating prin-
ciple within the practice to protect whatever presupposi-
tions and interests are involved?
We have come full circle from traditional society where
the individual was rarely, if ever, thrown back on himself.
Not only are our artists at liberty to make art in any manner
they please, they must choose between alternatives whether

Zird
they like it or not. As Peter Berger has pointed out, “Modern
consciousness entails a movement from fate to choice.”
Choice is a modern idea; there was no choice in traditional
societies. Our relativistic philosophy may seem more ap-
pealing, but it has against it the deeper instinct that too
much freedom has distinctly negative consequences for the
emotional economy of the.individual. The “anguish of
choice,” which has been written about so eloquently by
Erich Fromm, can bécome a burden and a danger, since
everything now depends on the individual’s own effort, and
not on the security of his traditional status. Whatever cer-
tainty there is must be dredged up from within the subjec-
tive consciousness of the individual; it can no longer be
derived from the external, socially shared world of mean-
ings and values. In taking away our faith in transcendence,
and our respect for authority, modernity has made us all
fearful about belief in anything. It has also made us isolated
and anxious, and denied us the certainty of being part of
some larger purpose. We take the absence of superior forces
to be liberating, preferring autonomy; but the cost of such
freedom has been the loss of security that comes from tradi-
tion and which would normally guarantee for art both
moral and practical significance. Indeed, according to
Fromm, insecurity is what ultimately breeds the compensa-
tory craving for fame and the compulsive striving for suc-
cess. Fromm even goes so far as to claim that the character
traits engendered by our particular socioeconomic system,
and by our way of living, are actually pathogenic. Because
the circumstances which surround modern man diminish
him and damage him psychically, they eventually produce
a sick person and a sick society.
It can be argued, of course, that ever since the Renais-
sance—a period which saw the transformation of the artist
from an anonymous craftsman into an intellectual with spe-
cial creative powers—artists have always been preoccupied
with the pursuit of fame and fortune. Ambition, greed, and
self-seeking were not exactly absent from the social struc-
ture at that time, a period which saw the rise of desires for
recognition and status that were rare or unknown earlier.
Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, for instance, is full of waggish
accounts of professional rivalry, such as the jealousy that
Torrigiano, a minor artist, felt toward Michelangelo on see-
ing him much more honored and talented than himself.

78
Torrigiano began by mocking Michelangelo and at one
point hit him on the nose so hard he broke it—for which
undignified conduct he got himself banished from Florence.
Have things really changed such a great deal since then?
I think the answer is that they have. Individualism took
a different form in the past, being tempered by social and
aesthetic controls and balanced by a more harmonious de-
velopment of spiritual powers. The Renaissance was a
world in which the sacred and the secular were still united:
Leonardo’s interest in technology, engineering, and machin-
ery was counterbalanced by an equally lively interest in the
world of nature and of the spirit. The difference between
earlier conditions and those of today lies in the tension
between individualism and communal values, and in thex/
belief or nonbelief in higher realms of being—domains of
existence that begin precisely where science stops. Belief is
the ontological divide that separates tradition from moder-
nity. In the Renaissance, the artist’s mission was twofold: a
direct one imposed by the requirements of city, church, or
patron, and an indirect one arising from the need to express
individuality and to find originality within an established
order. A work of art was an individual achievement and a
social fact, the affirmation of obedience to an established
order, and the transcendence, through originality, of that
obedience. Although the artist had come to recognize him-
self as an individual with a free personality—and was no
longer satisfied to create anonymously, as in the Middle
Ages—he was equally conscious of himself as a social being.
In Italy at the time of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt has
written, we find artists “who in every branch created new
and perfect works, and who also made the greatest impres-
sion as men. Others, outside the arts they practised, were
masters of a vast circle of spiritual interests.” The fifteenth
century is, above all, the era of the whole man, known for
what the Renaissance called virti—the capacity for showing
oneself a man—not the specialist absorbed solely by profes-
sional ambitions. Religion provided a source of authority
that opposed itself to-more worldly pursuits: the individ-
ual’s dependenceon God made just as high a claim on him
as the world did. The self had not yet acquired its illusion
of self-sufficiency. It had not yet come to believe it had all -
the rights and nene-of the social obligations. Individual
striving was thus kept in balance because it was but one

79
variable in a total system. Late capitalism, by contrast, has
maximized this particular variable to such an extent that it
seems to have broken the inward harmony of the social
organism as a whole, causing it to go runaway, and maybe
even to destroy itself.
Our present situation is one in which art, having ab-
dicated any connection with a transcendental realm of
being, has lost its character’as a world-view—as a way of
interpreting either nature or history. In other societies, the
fundamental function of transcendental systems has been
the avoidance of chaos and the overcoming of contingency
—the very contingency that modernism so self-consciously
embraced and raised to a virtue. Such systems provided art
with its “meaning-giving” function, and kept it from laps-
ing into mere self-expression: traditional authority has al-
ways drawn its vitality and influence precisely from the
belief that its values transcend those of any one individual
and go beyond merely personal aims. The modern artist, by
contrast, assumes the freedom to express himself as his
natural, established condition, without any special cause for
it. Nothing from outside incites this freedom to recognize
limits to itself or to refer to any authority higher than itself.
The pragmatic liberalism of Western society renounces
every transcendent goal in favor of freedom and the private
enjoyment of life; but if we have gone to great lengths to
prove we cannot live with such authority, we have not yet
proved that we can live successfully without it. For those
who see transcendence as being as vital to the human mind
as hope—and as indestructible—the irreverence of modern-
ism is a real threat to the social and psychological bases of
human greatness. It may well be that the individual, in order
to believe in himself, must believe in the existence of some-
thing which surpasses and supports him; and in the same
way, it may be that art needs collective ideologies, if only
to overcome them from time to time by the force of person-
ality. Society—if not the individual—needs such pillars of
truth and authority to guarantee its continuity and perma-
nence. Indeed, the fluctuating relationship between individ-
ual freedom and social constraint constitutes, for each soci-
ety, a field in which it organizes itself—that is why different
societies have different moral densities.
What I have been trying (in several ways) to establish is
that the more closely we examine the pursuit of freedom in

80
modern society, the more we comé up against an unac-
knowledged split between our ethical and our aesthetic
standpoints. The present system encourages the artist’s de-
sire to be thought of as radical and revolutionary; it allows
great freedom of rhetoric, but it does not insist that we
match our lives to the rhetoric. We tend to take this phe-
nomenon for granted, because in our society talent is so
often detached from the personality as a whole and used as
a kind of skilled gadget that can be marketed successfully.
This was nowhere better exemplified than in the way graffiti
artists were suddenly taken up by establishment dealers
after the “Times Square Show” organized by members of
Colab (Collaborative Projects, Inc.) in 1981. It was yet an-
other attempt, by a group of young dissident artists, to
produce “unsalable” art as a specific reaction against the
art-marketing system. Some one hundred artists were in-
cluded, and despite the studied crudity of the works, the
show received wide media attention, much of it friendly.
Obviously, being approached subsequently by rich galleries
puts the “outsider” artist in a hopeless double-bind, and
requires him to make decisions that are crucial for his future
life—in this case, mostly at an age when few, if any, are
likely to have the strength to carry out what their individual
conscience demands, and what the economic conditions of
the times may make virtually impossible.
It would certainly seem that in order to get back on the
road to moral (as distinct from aesthetic) innovation, there
must be some alienation from the current social and eco-
nomic imperatives that seem so inexorably to condition our
expectations and aspirations. There must be some reintro-
duction of the kinds of ideals that in recent years have fallen
into ruin. If we observe which human achievements attain
the highest honors, we find them always to be those which
manifest the most depth, the most exertion, the most per-
sistent concentration of the whole being; it is a matter of the
individual’s struggle in life to make maximum demands on
himself, rather than demanding nothing special of himself.
The trend nowadays is for an ever more one-sided type of
professional achievement which, at its highest point, often
permits the personahty as a whole to fall into neglect. Chan-
neling all one’s energies into an exclusive task does not leave
much time to renew the life-principle. The assembly-line
mentality that characterizes so much art-making today

81
 ) causes the artist to lose that necessary contact with the flow
BN
of life, and makes his activity become mechanical—a dead
formula, emptied of meaning and its original emotional im-
pact. If creativeness lies equally at the root of artistic talent
and of life experience, the most important object of produc-
tiveness will be the human personality itself, which must be
perpetually made over. The work of art, then, is merely the
evidence of the individual’s self-transformation—the
tracks, but not the actual animal. Build living Buddhas, says
the Zen maxim, not pagodas.
The essence of a personality that has achieved a high
degree of growth and integration is that it radiates being-
authority. Such people demonstrate by what they are as much
as by what they do. “My work is writing,” William Saroyan
once said, “but my real work is being.” It is as if all our
frantic doing has involved a loss of being—as if the tremen-
dous expansion of artistic production has been accompanied
by a shrinkage of the individual personality—together with
the contents and the significance of life as a whole. To us,
productivity means efficiency of output—works of art com-
ing off an ethically blank assembly line like automobiles—
but not the individual’s potential for creating himself, for
becoming, as Aristotle proposed, an excellent person. The
goal of the aesthetic life is one’s own satisfaction, whereas
casting off conformist ambitions and setting an example of
high spiritual devotion is what gives one’s mode of life an
ethical stamp. Certainly, as a culture, we no longer believe in
the value of hardship or risk; we no longer take the view
that art derives its special quality precisely from the burdens
and sacrifices undergone to achieve it. All of the resources
of the permissive society are directed toward making things
easy, and the capacities for heroism—for courage, sacrifice,
and for self-transcendence—are being eradicated, denied by
the emergence of a character that does not want to appear excep-
tional.
Generally speaking, the dynamics of professionalization
do not dispose artists to accept their moral role; profession-
als are conditioned to avoid thinking about problems that
do not bear directly on their work. They believe the job is
what counts in their life—is what gives meaning to their
actions. Our radical disenchantment with regard to the art-
ist’s “vocation” was made evident during a symposium held
at Julian Schnabel’s New York loft in the spring of 1982.

82
Artists Ross Bleckner, Brice Marden, Francesco Clemente,
Sandro Chia, Susan Rothenberg, Joel Shapiro, and David
Salle were gathered together to show slides and talk about
their work before an audience of other art-world luminar-
ies. Afterwards, a question from a member of the audience
seemed to embarrass everyone. Did they think, the ques-
tioner asked, that their success in the world implied any
moral responsibility? “No,” said Rothenberg; “we’re just
folks.” David Salle laughed. “That’s wrong,” said Marden,
“we’re very unusual people because we're free.” Schnabel
extended his arms and shrugged. “Of course we have a
responsibility to the public. That’s why we’re here, aren’t
we?” After which, as one commentator on the scene re-
marked, everyone shut up. The episode testifies to just how
barren is our comprehension at this point of any moral
imperative—that is, of any necessary relation between free-
dom and responsibility. Our culture no longer makes moral
demands—on the contrary, it permits us more and more,
while “demanding of us less and less—so that we have lost
“the ability to think our way through to the moral founda-
tions of what we are and what we do. Our artists are paid
to produce, not to make themselves into exemplary beings.
The notion that an artist or intellectual might actually
risk his life in pursuit of an idea—like Solzhenitsyn, who
wrote always with the knowledge that a single line could
cost him his life—or might undergo the kind of existential
suffering that someone like van Gogh did, has become re-
pugnant to a society ruled, fed, and clothed in accordance
with the standards of affluence. Material or psychological
deprivation has become difficult to grasp, and appears as
false heroics—a self-conscious abdication from success and
freedom and acceptance of intolerable limitations or sac-
rifices. Only among Russian dissidents do we still find that
kind of struggle and brave refusal—and the kind of moral
transcendence that seeks to create values rather than accom-
modate itself to the existing order. But as André Sakharov
has remarkthe ed, fact that Western artists face no threat of
prison or labor camp for taking public stands in no way
diminishes their responsibility. The struggle to preserve
those ethical values—the defense of mankind’s lasting in-
_terests—is the responsibility of every artist. For only in this
can art find its justification, and the creative powers their
reatdepth. One of the chief functions of a cultural tradition

83
 is the creation of exemplary models for a whole society, life
histories which may be held up as paradigms or archetypes,
and which give meaning and create value.
Jackson Pollock once said that every good painter paints
what he is. And Duchamp claimed he did not believe in art,
but only in artists. What our postmodern age has yet to
resolve for itself is its own cultural and social definition of
the artist, which may also involve a redefinition of how
artists see themselves. Self-images are important: we tend to
fashion ourselves to their likenesses, coming to resemble the
portraits we draw. Obviously, the governing personality-
images that have served Western culture in the past cannot
be made consistent with the values of a modern secularized
society; the contrast between the past and the present is too
enormous. Does truth lie, for instance, in the lonely defiance
of van Gogh, bruised by poverty and pain, who claimed that
the only lesson we have to learn from life is how to stand
up to suffering, or does someone like Warhol provide us
with a model image for the artist in our time, with his social
bravura and celebrity life, playing it straight to a world in
which everyone can be famous for fifteen minutes? (Ac-
cording to Warhol, fame is what makes life livable.) No one
is likely to dispute the extent to which these conflicting
images of power and personality are totally at odds with
each other. They give us two very different images of the
destiny and possibilities of being human. It may well be that
the notion of the artist as a special individual, as a charis-
' matic figure poised to transcend the cultural categories—an
individual who holds nanconformist perceptions of truth
that result in conscious and independent moral innovation
—has been replaced by a quite different sort of social char-
acter, one who prefers to forfeit the charismatic role, and
who has scaled down his ambitions to conform to society’s
idea of the normalized job-holder.
The real test, of course, is not whether an artist subverts
social and aesthetic norms in his work, but whether or not
his character-structure obeys them: nonconformity in one’s
work does not necessarily mean nonconformity in charac-
ter-structure. The writer Murray Kempton once observed in
ameditation on the personality of Stefan Cardinal Wyszyn-
ski that “the great lives are lived against the perceived cur-
rent of their times. There are men who change history by
stubborn resistance to it and they represent the greatness

84
that rises from appreciating the relevance of what the mod-
ern mind tends to dismiss as obsolescent. Churchill would
have ceased to be Churchill the first moment he decided to
be someone more up-to-date than a seventeenth-century
Whig; and Wyszynski could not have been Wyszynski if he
had ever left off being a thirteenth-century bishop.” To be
of one’s own time, as far as the painter Ingres was con-
cerned, was a measure of failure rather than an achieve-
ment.
In a sense, what is really at stake is the relationship
between the charismatic and the ordinary. Max Weber has
defined charisma as “a certain quality of an individual per-
sonality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary
men and treated as endowed with special qualities.” Charis-
matic figures change the tradition of their societies by their
exemplary conduct; as outstanding personalities, they act
directly on the conduct of other persons in their own time.
Charisma, in Weber’s view, was the only conceivable bul-
wark against the seemingly irresistible force of bureaucrati-
zation and the channeling of energies within the confines of
a limited and overspecialized task. Obviously, both the ro-
mantic and the modern artist accumulated influence by as-
suming this role—of strong, charismatic persons who seek,
on the whole, to put themselves outside the routine ways
and assumptions of everyday life, including its comforts
and securities; and who, trusting their inner experience,
have gone their own individual ways, taking the risks of |
overt deviation. When we refer to the avant-garde, we are
really speaking of just such isolated figures, who have
shared the burdens of intransigence and alienation; writers
and artists who have been ready to take the consequences
of their choices.
Charisma is essentially unstructured power; it is not pro-
grammed to advance one’s status or to make money—the
kind of mental “set” with which so many artists now ap-
proach the world, and the view of life that generally propels
them into action. At this point, the long-term development
of occupational roles, and the emphasis on production for
profit, have actively countered the charismatic qualities that
once provided art with its resonance and its authority.
Today, power operates impersonally. We need only consult
the current literature on contemporary art—catalogs filled
with long lists, like computer print-outs, of every exhibition

85
 and every collection that includes any work by the artist—
to see how our psychology of validation functions entirely
through external credentials and assertions of manic pro-
ductivity. The inner biography occupies a marginal place—
even though it is the one that explains most things.
In a sense, what it all comes down to is that everything
depends on the quality of the individual. For we are what
we are devoted to, and what we are devoted to motivates
our conduct. I do not believe an artist gives meaning to his
/ audience. What he may give is an example of personal com-
mitment to the search for value and for truth. To recognize
truth is not a matter of talent but of character. Among the
existential modes of truth-telling are the solitude of the
philosopher and the isolation of the artist: this is what the
modern artist understood in maintaining an independent
position as an outsider. For the majority of people, the crite-
ria of truth are to be found embedded in cultural categories;
their identity is rooted in a one-sided adjustment to the
dominant power institutions because they have not seen
through them. Pursued as a career, art becomes inevitably
less concentrated as a charismatic activity, and less able to
break with prevailing cultural values or archetypes. Indeed,
the conceptual opposite of charismatic authority is the ra-
tional authority and power identified with administrative
bureaucracy. If we accept that the root of all influence lies
in one’s inner being, then the meaning of an artist’s work
can only be given out of his whole existence; in the words
of Erich Fromm, “no great radical idea can survive unless it
is embodied in individuals whose lives are the message.”
Every civilization exhibits a certain image of man, and
we can see this image reflected in its art. A society organized
for convenience, glamour, and comfort does not lead to the
production of heroic figures. Our society lives in the image
of economic man whose desire is to increase his rewards and
cut his costs. And as modernism has been transformed into
a “profession”—big, official, capital-intensive, and bureau-
cratic—its heroic age has ended. The period of self-actualiz-
ing ascetics like Cézanne, working more or less alone, or of
embattled outsiders like Pollock, is behind us. Artists like
these have been replaced by professionals geared to the
organizational imperative, who feel a proper respect for all
the advantages that can be gained through official channels
and obedience to institutional procedures. In this regard, it

86
may well be that in his vacancy it is Andy Warhol who
provides us with the truest image of the artist in our time.
Compulsively addicted to glamour, openly aligned with the
competition for money, status, and power, he fits into the
culture as though he were made for it, allowing us to see
how much avant-garde rebellion is already out-of-date.
It would almost seem, at this point, that if we could just
find the right concept of the charismatic, we could somehow
preserve the meaning of art. And this, in turn, might open
the way for knowing what promise art holds for those art-
ists who stand at the threshold of postmodern times. In the
era of pluralism, when there are no longer any limits to what
we can imagine or produce, very few people, as far as I
know, have any real sense of what our art is for.

87
CHAPTER SIX: SECULARISM
The Disenchantment of Art
(Julian Schnabel Paints a
Portrait of God)

During 1982 Julian Schnabel was the most talked-about

artist in New York. In that one year he had eight solo
exhibitions and was included in twenty-two group shows,
and there were no less than four pages of bibliographic
references for his work. It became impossible in certain
circles to attend a dinner party where Schnabel was not the
center of conversation. Everybody, it seemed, was asking
everybody, in an effort to get at the heart of the matter,
“What do you think about Julian Schnabel?”” Meanwhile,
like some storybook prince with sunset-colored hair, the
artist himself stood poised on the edge of his own spectacu-
lar success. Paintings which in 1977 had sold for $3,000
were now alleged to be worth upwards of $60,000. To the
Brooklyn-born Schnabel, who had arrived in New York in
1973 fresh from the University of Houston, it must have
seemed. as if his ambition to become “the greatest artist in
the world” might be realized before the age of thirty.
When a mini-retrospective of his work was mounted at
the Tate Gallery in London in the summer of ‘82, the English
art world grew similarly agitated. There was a curious sense
on opening night as if the Queen of Sheba or some other
great figure out of history had put in an appearance. The
truth is that a certain narcissistic drama has surrounded the
whole enterprise of Schnabel’s meteoric career, to a point
which has made even his admirers uneasy, and which seems
to transcend all responses to his work. If, as many people
believe, Schnabel is truly a tuning fork for our postmodern
times, why does even the mention of his name set off so
many unsympathetic vibrations?
“Schnabel,” Robert Hughes has written in Time, “is im-
mensely fashionable with collectors for reasons the work
does not make clear.” Surely a cultural world that for years
now has been accustomed to old tires and stuffed goats as
part of the normal vocabulary of painting cannot look with
anything but aplomb upon the presence of broken plates
and a few antlers hanging on the wall. Surely it is not the
clutter of broken crockery that sets his disapprovers so
much on edge, for when you get down to it, these are not
threatening pictures—not in the way that Lichtenstein’s
comic strips were threatening when they first appeared, or
Frank Stella’s all-black stripe paintings. These are not radi-
cal pictures: if anything, they seem to have an old-fashioned
visionary core, the subject matter ranging at times from St.
Francis in Ecstasy to images of Christ on the Cross. Schnabel
has even painted a portrait of God. Is it the inexplicable
intrusion of religious subject matter that suggests, to those
who are made uneasy by Schnabel’s work, a shadowy,
counterfeit practice? Or is it the artist himself that they are
unwilling to endorse?
It would seem to be provocative, after several decades of
self-referring abstract art, that a number of artists are rein-
troducing mythological and religious themes in their pic-
tures. We can point also to the work of Sandro Chia, Fran-
cesco Clemente, and Mimmo Paladino. Are we to view this
new trend as evidence of the artist’s dissatisfaction with a
closed secular world—as an authentic reaching out on their
part for the sources of lost myths? Is Neo-expressionism a
true renaissance of sacramental vision, an attempt to recon-
stitute a world of archetypal symbols forgotten by our soci-
ety and to bring back to light their meanings? Or is it just
another demythologizing tactic of postmodernism, one
more form of eclectic pastiche, that merely recycles old,
metaphysically picturesque images into yet another new
salable genre? How can a critic, or anyone else for that
matter, determine this? At this point, not unexpectedly,
opinions are very mixed. Inveterate Conceptualists like Jo-
seph Kosuth claim that Neo-expressionism, and the whole
revival of painting in general, is market-oriented and re-

89
gressive; while others—the critic Donald Kuspit being per-
haps the most incisive among them—believe that Neo-
expressionism (particularly its German axis) reinstates the
power of imagination after the dry, hard-edged cerebralism
of Conceptual art and the bankruptcy of late-modernist
abstraction. What the new painting obliges us to decide is
whether, in transferring their energies to vaguely religious
characters and symbols, these artists are acting on whim, or
out of stylistic necessity, or from a belief that art can have
real mystical value again.
When, in the Renaissance, Michelangelo depicted God
touching the hand of Adam, it was felt by everyone who
saw it as a sacramental action; nor is it necessary to identify
with any specific religion to experience the way this image
“causes” grace, almost as if it were itself imbued with the
hidden presence of God. The image hits one just where it
counts. By contrast, the florid blue blob that constitutes
Schnabel’s portrait of God is like light transmitted through
an opaque stone. Seen through the eyes of a spirituality that
belongs to another state of culture than ours, it appears to
have no depth to its spiritual consciousness—there seems
more self-indulgence in it than visionary affirmation. If
Neo-expressionism indicates a genuine struggle to liberate
the visionary powers—to reclaim for art those irrational
components previously suppressed not only by Conceptual
and Minimalist modes, but also by centuries of modernist
secularism—does it also aim to correct the spiritual imbal-
ance in our culture? After all, if one believes in the world
view of modern secularity, then it is naive to accept the
existence of a transcendent reality. And if there is no tran-
scendent reality, then we are free to play with its symbols
at will, irrespective of our prior convictions concerning the
real and the divine. Symbols can be lifted out of their time
and place, and plundered, as it were, for their picturesque
qualities. But in the absence of any correspondence, or loy-
alty, to a transcendent reality, can such imagery have any
symbolic value? In a society where faith has no currency,
can myth be anything but banal and dysfunctional?
Schnabel, it would seem, has no particular feelings about
God one way or the other—it is just another image to ma-
nipulate. Referring to one of his recent exhibitions, he ex-
plains, “. . . the paintings were all part of one state of
consciousness. It had a chapel-like feeling. I wanted to have

90
a feeling of God in it. Now I don’t know if there’s a God up
there or anywhere. . . . Maybe I make paintings larger than
I am so that I can step into them and they can massage me
into a state of unspeakableness.” As far as I can see, it would
be a mistake to look for any visionary function on the part
of these works, which seem to aim more at the artist’s own
emotion than at any communion with the divine. Schna-
bel’s negative encounter with a world that has lost its divine
presence seems to take it for granted that we have no proper
standards for judging the spirituality of our times. What it
tells us, instead, is just how much we have lost the very idea
of God—how numb we have become to the experience of y /
the sacred—and how the capacity to express religious truth o
seems outside the contemporary artist’s horizon. Certainly,
sacred symbols are doomed to make-believe and artifice in
a society where their inner purpose has been suppressed and
their forms deprived of any root meaning. And yet, the
paradox of Schnabel’s art, and part of its hold on us, is the
way it frequently does seem to aspire to a numinous dimen-
sion—which poses the question of the motives from which
this art has been made. If no religious impulse informs
Schnabel’s art, what reasons can there be today for painting
St. Francis, Christ, and God?
I wrote to Julian Schnabel to ask him this, but there was
no reply. The reason may be found—perhaps—in a com-
ment by the critic Carter Ratcliff, who wrote in Art in Amer-
ica about the mythological overtones of Sandro Chia’s imag-
ery, that “the conventions of iconography are bearable in
our era so long as the artist retains his privilege of con-
founding them. This leaves each member of the audience
alone with his responsibility to speculate, to see what he can
see.” One of the tyrannies of the secular world view, and
the penetration of rationalism into all spheres of life, is that
it has become virtually impossible to raise serious questions
about the existence of God, or any transcendent realm. We
have learned not only to disapprove, but also to ridicule, the
significance of the sacred, and to trivialize spiritual themes
in which we “can no longer” believe. This loss of symbolic
resonance is the peculiar degeneration of consciousness
from which we suffer as a culture, and it both defines and
limits the conditions of our existence. “One can be quite
sure,” writes Elizabeth Baker, the editor of Arf in America,
“that the iconographical nuances of much recent Neo-

Lk
expressionist painting are often no more specific in their
meaning to the artist than the viewer. Nor need these artists
be indicted for such an attitude.” Another critic, writing in
Flash Art about Mimmo Paladino’s work, claims in a similar
vein that although: Paladino’s paintings are filled with
mythological symbols, any attempt to analyze them fails,
since the signs are disconnected from any source and there-
fore only represent themselves. And as for the supposed
religious overtones of the new art, one of its main support-
ers and promoters, the critic and curator Diego Cortez, com-
mented recently in Arfs: . . . I hate religious art. I wish it
would disappear once and for all.”
If Neo-expressionist works are indeed immune to inter-
pretation, being filled with a symbolic content that proposes
not to signify, it is difficult to see how they pose a challenge
to, or reverse the trend of, formalism, as has been claimed.
Rather, they seem to extend the formalist mode, by creating
yet another aesthetic style whose primary meaning seems to
be that of shifting around parameters in the art world. Be-
yond this context, the ultimate ground of their truth re-
mains unclear. Not embedded in enduring beliefs or prac-
tices, locked out from any ultimate meaning, symbols can
only float, gargantuan and occluded, through the spiritual
vacuum created by our culture, emancipated from all con-
viction. It’s not just a matter of recognizing that symbolic
images are important, but of finding the means to animate
them. Schnabel claims his paintings allude to some kind of
power—the power of primitive, magical things—but you
can’t attach some broken plates and a pair of antlers to a
canvas, pass it on to Mary Boone to sell, and hope for
mythic significance. The essential inner attitude is missing
—the devotional frame of mind. In addressing this issue, of
the way signs of ultimate meaning have been devalued by
our culture to objects of transitory and commercial interest,
it seems to me that we are really addressing a much larger
theme: the failure, in our secularized age, of the moral and
religious impulse, and a serious disturbance in man’s rela-
tionship to God.
For nearly all of human history, the world was en-
chanted. As material and rationalist values have gained in
preeminence, however, spiritual values have declined in di-
rect proportion. Once uprooted from the world of symbols,
art lost its links with myth and sacramental vision. The kind

92
of sacramental vision to which I am referring is not that of
routine church-going or religious dogma as such, but a
mode of perception which converges on the power of the
divine. It is what Theodore Roszak has called “The Old
Gnosis,” a visionary style of knowledge as distinct from a
theological or a factual one, that is able to “see” the divine
in the human, the infinite in the finite, the spiritual in the
material. This sacramental vision, which underlies our per-
ception of the Absolute, can never be completely uprooted,
according to Mircea Eliade; it can only be debased. However
much we ignore, camouflage, or degrade art’s ““sacred ele-
ments,” they still survive in the unconscious. Indeed, the
recalling and setting up of sacred signs is the even more
urgent task of an artist in times estranged from symbol and
sacrament. Obviously, where the psyche is our principal
working tool, the psychic attitude is of paramcunt impor-
tance. Before art can be successfully remythologized, we
must, as a society, suspend our unbelief. And this means
breaking through the terrible limitations of modern secular-
ism.
Traditionally, artists have used art as a material means
of reaching spiritual ends. Many sociologists have pointed
to the fact that there is no known human society without
some conception of a supernatural order, or of mystical
forces governing ordinary events. Only modern Western
society has taken it upon itself to discredit the mystical,
believing that such “baggage” ought to be dispensed with,
and that rational man should “face reality” without any
superstition; but this attitude is in no way true of the origi-
nal human condition. Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and
Alexis de Tocqueville all maintained that the religious im-
pulse, far from being mere superstructure or illusion (as
Marx and Freud claimed), is functionally necessary to soci-
ety, and is, moreover, an indispensable mechanism of inte-
gration. “Men cannot abandon their religious faith,” de
Tocqueville wrote, “without a kind of aberration of intellect
and a sort of violation of their true nature. . . . Unbelief is
an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of man-
kind.”
Among those who see transcendence as a necessary con-
stituent of human life (and secularism as a dehumanizing
aberration) are the contemporary sociologists Robert Nisbet
and Peter Berger, for whom the decline of the sacred in

93
human affairs is the most traumatic change man has ex-
perienced since the beginnings of settled culture in the Neo-
lithic Age. Freud may have rejected religion as a neurotic
illusion, judging the world of myth and magic negatively as
errors to be refuted and supplanted by science, but as illu-
sions they have been positive and life-supporting, provid-
ing civilizations with their ¢ohesion, vitality, and creative
powers; and where they have been dispelled, there has been
a loss of equilibrium, a sense of uncertainty and nothing to
hold on to. In refusing to acknowledge the reality of any
experience that is not scientifically provable, the scientific
world view has condemned much that is vital to culture and
creative growth. To see things in this alienating way may be
the particular compulsion of the modern Western mental-
ity, but it does not necessarily reflect the way things are.
Although we may value technological power more than
sacred wisdom, scientific rationalism has so far failed to
prove itself as a successful integrating mythology for indus-
trial society; it offers no inner archetypal mediators of di-
vine power, no cosmic connectedness, no sense of belonging
to a larger pattern. Science, in the twentieth century, has
had little to say about spiritual values; nor, it would seem,
has art.
In primitive spiritual cosmology, power comes from the
mysterious forces of the cosmos. Art was a form of media-
tion, a means of establishing contact with this spirit world
and participating in its creative energies. Seen from the
standpoint of the individual, the sacred has always been
something emphatically other than himself, its power trans-
mitted from a pool of ancestors and spirits to which the
individual gives his allegiance, and which in turn gives his
life the only abiding significance it can have. Man found his
own truth by recognizing that he cannot, with any meaning,
live out of himself alone. Our own secular ideology has led
us to eclipse this sacred dimension—the sense of participa-
tion in a timeless reality—and to pursue immortality
through the individual’s own acts and works. Hubris means
forgetting where the real source of power lies, and imagin-
ing, as we now do, that it is in oneself. The celebrity trades
on his gifts, he does not sacrifice to them or give them away.
In modernist culture, nothing is sacred. We live in a
world that is constantly more managerialized and power-
hungry, but with considerable confusion as to where the

94
power really lies. This reached fairly ludicrous proportions
recently in the chicken-and-egg situation which developed
over the difficulty of determining exactly who is responsible
for Julian Schnabel’s huge success. Some magazines have
presented him as the “protégé” of his dealer, Mary Boone,
who, as it happens, received more publicity in recent
months than any of her artists, having been written up
during the last year in New York magazine, Life, Esquire, Satur-
day Review, Savoy, and People. Being described as Mary
Boone’s protégé, however, enrages Schnabel, who was
quoted in Arf News as stating that “Basically she is known
because of me. I think Mary is famous because Leo [Castelli]
is famous. But what artist is really famous,” he adds, “com-
pared with Burt Reynolds?”” “I cannot make an artist if he
does not have the proper qualities,” Leo Castelli comments
in New York magazine. “But I can do it better. Mary and .
We can make an artist charismatic.”
Charismatic power cannot come to anyone except from
his innermost being, through the resonance of his belief in
his task. At this point in our managerial society, it has
become virtually impossible to balance out the simple ex-
pression of the individual against its full-scale commercial
manipulation and exploitation. Belonging to a prestigious
gallery that competes for the artist on the market means that
all esteem earned in this way is doomed to remain equivo-
cal. There will always be uneasiness over the significance of
any success where the claims of merit are derived from
power blocs seeking to secure their own dominant interest.
The paradoxical nature of contemporary moral experience
has been well demonstrated by Alasdair MacIntyre in his
study of moral theory, Affer Virtue. MacIntyre argues that
each of us is taught to see ourself as an autonomous moral
agent, but each of us also becomes engaged in modes of
practice which involve manipulative relationships with oth-
ers. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned
to prize, we aspire not to be manipulated by others; but in
the world of practice we find no way open to us to embody
our own principles except through those very modes of
manipulation which each of us aspires to resist in our own
case.
A market atmosphere, with its constant demands for
something new, is highly unfavorable to the creation of
authentic and permanent values. The form of a producer-

95
consumer society has made the world into an enclosed
world: nothing exists outside it. Its ends are to be found
within itself. It produces in order to consume what it pro-
duces. When this tendency becomes monopolistic, it drives
out all others, and a peculiar false life, which seems the most
“matural” thing in the world to us, begins to grow at the
expense of more valid life. The situation is so extreme at this
point that, in MacIntyre’s view, belief in managerial exper-
tise has all but replaced belief in God in our culture, and we
no longer seem to have any justifications for authority
which are not bureaucratic and managerial in form. Modern
mass culture has tried very hard to avoid the moral and
spiritual aspects of human living, and affluence has become
the major alternative to religious renewal.
Our own era seems to be producing increasing numbers
of artists who are content to receive their stamp exclusively
from the power apparatus of the New York art world, and
‘who, in their mode of life, reproduce the ideology of the
society that molded them. Adapted to and perfectly at home
in the system, they understand the language of these condi-
tions and how to handle them; the world does not impose
on them any mission beyond the realization of their own
professional aims. In the life of a professional, there are no
ultimate concerns, only present ones. The world is per-
ceived as an arena for the achievement of one’s own success
and satisfaction; there is no struggle to realize spiritual or
ethical values. And to the extent that art itself has lapsed
into this function—of primarily serving the career interests
of artists and their dealers—it has come to lack what used
to be its unquestionable moral substance, its link with in-
trinsic value. To the extent that an artist seeks only personal
objectives, personal satisfaction, and self-aggrandizement,
we cannot say that he fulfills any moral obligation.
According to the sociologist Emile Durkheim, there are
no genuinely moral ends except collective ones; behavior,
whatever it may be, directed exclusively toward the per-
sonal ends of the individual does not have moral value.
Moral goals involve something other than individuals: their
object is society. Morality is threatened, therefdre, when
individualism comes to play an excessive part in the life of
a society, subordinating everything else. Individualism de-
stroys that complex equilibrium within a society whose
various elements limit one another—since from the stand-

96
point of liberal, individualist modernity, society is simply
an arena in which individuals are free to pursue what is
useful or agreeable to them. Certainly, much time has been
spent during recent decades in denying that art has any-
thing to do with either spiritual or ethical values. Its purely
aesthetic purpose was reemphasized recently by Clement
Greenberg at a conference on culture at the University of
Brfilfiglumbia. “It is barbarism, as Thomas Mann once
said, to take aesthetic values and introduce them into ques-
tions of morality. . . . I have never felt that morality should
in any sense be affected by the aesthetic factor. . . . I don’t
see art as having ever, in a real sense, affected the course of
human affairs,” he stated.
Many of our artists, suffering the repercussmns of this
desacralized mentality, have pretended for some time now
that painting is merely a way of solving formal problems.
The total opposition between art and life that formalism
proposes exempts art from its moral tasks. “What is of
importance in painting is paint,” Jules Olitski declares; and
in the same way, Kenneth Noland states, “It’s all color and
surface, that’s all.” Conspicuously missing in this “demys-
tified” art is the mediation between God and man that has
been present in art for most of its history until now. This
is one of the things that makes recent modern art a thing for
which there is, on the whole, no historical analogy: this act
of the will which consists in man’s shutting himself off
against any “higher reality,” or divine life. The very concep-
tion has largely been lost to artists in the late twentieth
century.
In a sense, Schnabel’s desire (along with other Neo-
expressionists) to reinstate subject matter of a mythic and
symbolic kind, and even to draw on traditional religious
iconography, ought to be a corrective breath of fresh air,
after so much reductive abstraction. And in many ways, it
is: the mystical world view that emerges from many of these
pictures strikes a lot of people as right. On the other hand,
it is difficult to believe in the prophetic consciousness of
someone so frankly out to get what he wants—personal
success in the New York art world, not metaphysical truths.
Culture-bound artists are likely to be content with the situ-
ation as they have found it, not objecting too much to the
competitive demands of a system which they view prag-
matically as promoting their own best interests. An artist in

97
today’s world who believes that everything is in order as
l—
long as the power apparatus continues to serve him wel
to be
who trusts the world as it now is—does not need
equipped with moral courage. Merging himself successfully
with the coming and going of the contemporary scene, hav-
ing no will but that of realizing himself in his career, he can
abstain from any criticism of.it, because he is indifferent to
what sort of future he is helping to bring about.
It is at this point that I should like, baldly, to pose a
question. Can we study art for moral results as we already
study it for social and aesthetic ones? I am convinced not
only that we can, but that we must—that the social, the
aesthetic, and the moral are inextricably intertwined, and
that we have absolved ourselves of these vital connections
at our own peril. Art is not value-free, as science tries so
hard to be—it is motivated and purposive. When the ques-
tion is one of moral worth, however, it is not the finished
product which we see that concerns us, but the inner values
directing it, which we do not see. We infer these values—
since we cannot know them directly—from their expression
in behavior. Moral philosophy offers a partial analysis of
the relationship of an individual to his motives and inten-
tions, and the intended (or unintended) consequences of his
actions. The Machiavellian, for instance, does things to at-
tain ends he never mentions or actually denies, while pro-
fessing other ends which he wants everyone to believe.
The word “end,” of course, can mean either an aim being
openly pursued or an end incidentally achieved. Is making
mary or an‘incidental
a pris,
money, and becoming a succes
function of making art? This distinction may seem irrele-
vant, only because our unwillingness to consider the gap
between our consciously intended goals and the mode of
life now necessary to achieve them has brought about a
situation in which art is ceasing to serve the values it once
did, and is beginning to serve other values not originally
connected with its ends. For this state of affairs we tend to
blame conditions, not individuals. The Kafkaesque quality
of the bureaucratically structured existence is that things
. are done but no one is answerable for them. Unless we come
to see this fact in some detail and clarity, we shall be unable
to appreciate the true crisis of art in our time, or to reverse
our present tendencies. Every artist today finds himself in-

98
creasingly enveloped by a cultural system that makes up his
destiny and requires that he act in certain ways, predeter-
mining in crucial ways his relationship to things. More and
more he finds, following the spirit of the times, that he
needs to “go along to get along.” Decisions become a profes-
sional rather than a moral affair. It is not difficult to see that
the same situation comes into view quite differently, de-
pending on which of these perspectives—professionalism or
ethics—is applied to it. Professionalism offers a shortcut—
an easy way out of moral dilemmas—because it artificially
insulates the process of decision-making against the influ-
ence of more than one type of factor. Manipulating strategic
factors in the environment in order to promote careers and
products successfully becomes what matters. Success is op-
erational, and any means may be used for achieving it.
When bureaucratic claims and demands take precedence,
the authority of morality is diminished, and its purposes in
varying degrees frustrated. Everyone is reduced to being a
reflex in the system.
What if we believe that however we act at this point, the
results will be the same—that individual actions are quite
helpless against the entrenched bureaucratic modes of our
culture? Are we then justified in doing nothing? Obviously,
no single individual is responsible for a social situation he
finds himself in if nothing he could have done would have
prevented it. But he may be responsible for not trying.
Gandhi said the act you do may be very insignificant but it’s
very important that you do it. The assumption that my
action will be useless does not absolve me of responsibility
for the actions I might have taken but didn’t. An individual
who feels uneasy about events surrounding him but
becomes paralyzed and unable to act is more responsible for
the continuation of those events than the person who strug-
gles to improve them and fails. The first step in breaking the
bureaucratic oppression under which we are living is to
develop the willingness to acknowledge that we are all a
cause in this matter. When we view our actions merely as
part of the general course of events, it seems impossible to
attribute the events to individuals. But each individual is a
tiny wheel with a fractional share in the decision that no one
effectively decides. This, it seems to me, is the central problem
of responsibility: that we are all responsible for the events

29
of this world in terms of our own actions, even though it is
not possible to relate these events to ourselves causally in
a definite and clear manner.
What I have been trying to argue is that the artist has
a basic choice as to whether or not he is to be an agent of
moral transformation. In those situations where conflicting
interests come together, unless we find the right means to
the goal, the “good” that we seek escapes us. Social ideals
of what is “good” are implicit in our way of life; they set
limits to the ways and means by which we conduct our
lives; they condition our sense of right and wrong, and
underlie our criteria of success. Social responsibility does
require some sacrifice of individualism—and a sense that
one is working for society rather than for oneself.
Hannah Arendt has pointed out that whenever true au-
thority existed, it was always joined with responsibility for
the course of things in the world. The solitary shaman does
not exist simply for his or her own benefit. It is precisely this
exalted conception of the artist’s mission that gives art its
authority—the conception he has of his work, and the moral
ideal to which he is committed. One of the more worrying
side effects of modernism’s posture of estrangement has
been the generalized refusal on the part of artists to assume
responsibility for the course of things in the world. As a
society of “professionals,” we have no objects of dedication
except a specialized pursuit. Specialization, however, is
what makes us feel powerless—it makes us experience ev-
erything that is outside our specialized competence as be-
yond our control. Arendt speaks of the “sad opaqueness” of
a private life centered on nothing but itself. Authority, she
states, gave the world permanence and durability, which
human beings need. Its loss is tantamount to the loss of the
groundwork of the world. A consumer’s society cannot pos-
sibly know how to take care of a world, because its central
attitude to all objects, including art—the attitude of con-
sumption—spells ruin to everything it touches.
So what are we to do? How do we enact this vision of
returning soul to the world and keeping some parts of our
social, cultural, and spiritual life out of the marketplace?
Obviously, we do not all agree on moral principles and on
particular obligations, even if we are all more or less re-
signed to the business of earning a living. Does this mean,
then, that basic practical conflicts have no ethical solution?

100
Obviously, as F. Scott Fitzgerald used to say, the test of a
first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed
ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability
to function. The subject of art and ethics has its longueurs,
and sometimes it strikes people that I am claiming that
worldly failure is the only virtue which can possibly keep
the ideals of the profession from fading at this point. And
if it can’t be done, Gertrude Stein once nearly said, why
insist on trying to do it? Why spend time shooting at pen-
dulums?
Because, after all is said and done, moral pursuits are
unlikely to advance anyone’s career today, and will only
produce a conflict of values which cannot be resolved, given
the general state of affairs. Since everything suggests the
continuation of these trends, how can we keep ourselves
from becoming gifted functionaries of the system on the
one hand while still managing not to starve to death on the
other? Unfortunately, these questions cannot be solved;
they can only be faced. But the fact that there is not a clear
set of priorities for settling them in no way frees us to
abandon the problem. All that can be said is that there are
two obvious dangers to be avoided.
One is the danger of defeatism—succumbing to the feel-
ing of powerlessness that makes it seem as if we are being
dragged along in the wake of a system we cannot hope to
challenge. To oppose this process—of resigning oneself to
the fate of being helpless—is one of the crucial functions of
the artist, and of any individual at this point who wishes for
the survival of the world. The second is the danger of elimi-
nating as irrelevant all moral considerations that cannot be
brought within the scope of pragmatic careerism. In today’s
complex world, the kinds of values that motivate us are
often contradictory; they will not combine readily into an
easy solution determining what we should do. But the
seeming impossibility of complying with these contradic-
tory demands has led us, in many cases, to evade them
altogether. Ambiguously alluring is the possibility of setting
oneself against the world, turning away from it and avoid-
ing its reality—as many of the early modernists did. Their
very remoteness from the world gave them an inward dis-
tinction. The social situation of today, however, compels
immersion; retreatism and rebellion are as unsatisfactory as
submission and conformity. The romantic outsider, discor-

101
 to the task.
dant with everything, will not be adequate
it leads the
Resistance remains essentially negative unless
sonal self
self beyond a mere posture of defiance. Only a per
in ethical
able to resist the tyranny of the world, by standing
ding
personal relationship to it, will stand a chance of hol
environ-
out against the imperatives of the bureaucratic
ce
ment. Through our choices, changes can begin to take pla
ld from
in and through us. We can begin to move our wor
in any
a position of moral ambiguity to one of clarity. To be
ction
sense effective, however, we must proceed in conjun
for
with the system, but using its institutions as channels
positive change instead of for self-seeking. Only in this way
are
can we strive for rescue from the system, even while we
enmeshed in it. We are the stewards, not the victims, of our
circumstances.

102
CHAPTER SEVEN
Graffiti in Well-Lighted Rooms

In a world as socially complex as ours, it is hardly surpris-

ing to find deep ambivalence within the artistic community
on the subject of graffiti art, which until recently existed
totally outside of the cultural art scene. Graffiti art has
managed to thrive on controversy, making a name for itself
on insults and praise alike. For many people, the abrasive
existence of graffiti on public property in New York raises
a fundamental ethical question of right or wrong. From
what points of view might an act of vandalism be seen as
right—or justified? What makes the person who did it wor-
thy of praise or blame? Does graffiti writing, with its indis-
criminate appropriation of surfaces all over the city, repre-
sent the destructive excesses of individualism gone haywire
in our culture, or is it an authentic new form of community
art?
To many people, the presence of graffiti in the environ-
ment has come to symbolize violation, social anarchy, and
moral breakdown. They see it as vandalism, pure and simple
—a crime signifying that we can no longer take orderly
society, its laws and arrangements, for granted. “I think it’s
a kind of theft,” states New York artist Mark Lancaster, “an
assault on the right to feel that public transport is a reason-
able means for getting from one place to another. I think it’s
frightening to a lot of people. I can’t separate it from fear,
from someone pulling a knife on you and robbing you in a
public place. You have to have an immunity to violence if
you use the subways. The presence of graffiti increases the
sense of lawlessness and danger, like driving through red
lights, which has become normal in New York.” This view
is reiterated by the English artist Michael Craig-Martin,
who states, “Painting the subways is a way of intimidating
people. It’s part of a general sense of being intimidated in
New York.” And in an article on the subways in The New
scribed
York Times Magazine, author Paul Theroux recently de
prop-
graffiti as nothing more than the defacement of public
atches on
erty—"crazy, semi-literate messages, monkey scr
s claims
the wall,” while a well-known editor of art book
that graffiti artists should be sent to work camps.
re-
There are others, however, who believe graffiti art rep
an
sents a genuine aesthetic, the personal expression of
oppressed and disenfranchised people. The composer John
an
Cage says we should cherish every mark; and Norm
Mailer, an early and sworn supporter, wrote in his 1974
book The Eaith of Grafiti that the phenomenon was a tribal
rebellion against an evil industrial civilization, and “the
beginning of another millennium of vision.”” More recently
Diego Cortez, who has curated a number of influential exhi-
bitions of work by graffiti artists, stated in Flash Art that
“graffiti should be looked at as a highly sophisticated art
form which is the image of New York, and is definitely the
soul of the underground scene at the moment.” Meanwhile,
New York’s Mayor Koch announced a new $6.5 million
program to discourage graffiti, complete with trained guard
dogs to attack artists working illegally in the train yards. His
is not an aesthetic response; it is crimson wrath, burning
with the logic of retaliation and revenge.
The phenomenon of graffiti is colored everywhere not
only by effusions of spray-can acrylics and magic marker,
but by animated, archetypal emotion. Make no mistake: the
aggressive component is unnerving. Paradoxically, it is
crossing the border into criminality that gives graffiti its
ethical quality and its note of authenticity. Just as skulls on
sticks serve as a warning to initiates in.certain cannibal
tribes of New Guinea that a territory has been demarcated
and taken possession of, so have graffiti artists (or “writers”
as they tend to call themselves) staked out their claim on
this mechanical, late-industrial Underworld.
But it is not simply the appropriation of public property

104
that makes graffiti disturbing. At a time when the main-
stream of modernism is losing its impetus, it is disconcerting
to have a fringe phenomenon—a mere street subculture—
enter the art market in a big way and become “legitimized.”
Of course graffiti has, in one form or another, been appear-
ing in art contexts for more than a decade—imported from
Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx (along with its musical
and dance counterparts called “rapping” and “breaking”) to
the downtown clubs of Manhattan and even occasionally in
alternative spaces. (One of the first large-scale exhibitions
of graffiti was held at Artists Space in 1975, with a catalog
essay by Peter Schjeldahl.) But it only surfaced in a big way
as art after the “Times Square Show,” organized in June
1980 by Colab (Collaborative Projects, Inc.) and Fashion
Moda, a South Bronx storefront gallery started in 1978 by
two artists, Stefan Eins and Joe Lewis, who conceived of it
as an outlet for neighborhood artists. Fashion Moda’s ac-
tivities were written up in the Village Voice, after which Eins
and Lewis were invited by the New Museum to curate an
exhibition of street artists from New Orleans and New
York. Meanwhile, a whole new multiracial, multiethnic
generation of artists was appearing, many of them from
amid the desperations of ghetto life, only to find themselves
suddenly pursued by important New York dealers. Another
influential exhibition, “New York/New Wave,” curated by
Diego Cortez and held at P.S. 1 in 1981, consolidated the
trend. Fashion Moda were also responsible for organizing a
boutique at Documenta in 1982 to sell graffiti T-shirts, but-
tons, multiples, and posters.
From these few decisive events, a complex cultural ar-
chaeology has emerged. Having begun life underground,
laying claim to subway cars and public walls, the unofficial
graffiti subculture seems, almost more than anything else, to
mark the passing of the heroic and the exalted, and to re-
verse the image of an “international” modernism so concen-
trated on “purity” that it had all but obliterated much of
what was distinctive in regional art. Many issues have been
raised by graffiti’s integration into the institutional frame-
work of the art world, and its consequent absorption into
the success ethic. One of these is that it is no longer possible
to characterize the graffiti phenomenon by one specific prac-
tice (such as spray painting subway cars), or to an exclusive
set of intentions. Thus, some graffiti writers remain dedi-

105
 cated to an aggressive and predatory street art, whereas
others—Jean-Michel Basquiat, for instance, who for a brief
time wrote sentences in subway stations under the name
Samo—are now more interested in being successful artists
in the art world. Keith Haring is a special case, since he
effectively keeps a foothold in both worlds. He is known
equally for his anonymous chalk drawings on subway bill-
boards of crawling babies and barking dogs—depicted in a
hieroglyphic style that has been described as “New Wave
Aztec”—as for his numerous exhibitions in Soho and on
57th Street. Both Haring and Basquiat now live entirely off
their art-world work; but there are others, such as Futura
2000 and Fab 5 Fred, who remain committed to their indige-
nous graffiti audiences, although they have begun to at-
tempt more visually complex statements in the context of
the fine-art marketplace.
Does all this produce a conflict of values of the sort I
have been trying to delineate in many contexts throughout
this book? Are we confronted with yet another instance
where mass-consumption capitalist economy expands into
a taboo area in order to transform private behavior into a
commodity? Does becoming part of the art establishment
give new meaning and purpose to these artists’ lives, or has
it merely spawned another money-making game for its par-
ticipants, while weakening graffiti’s soul-energy as “out-
sider” art? Are these artists being rescued from a life of
ineffectuality and insecurity, or have they sauntered out
onto a limb that will not ultimately support them but only
breed false hopes and expectations? It is difficult at this
point to judge the long-term results of suddenly catapulting
individuals who are ill-prepared socially and economically
into a drastically altered income level—since, as Emile
Durkheim has pointed out, poverty exerts its own disci-
plines and limits, but affluence, by its nature, usually does
not. Affluence breaks down these limits, and substitutes for
them a set of expectations which rise almost constantly. Are
these artists being encouraged beyond any reasonable eval-
uation of their talents? How, finally, are we to define the
underlying meaning of an experience which, to the unini-
tiated, appears as sheer nasty babble—at best a hermetic
Morse code of hieroglyphs, at worst a violent and menacing
assault?
As I talked with a number of people connected in differ-

106
ent ways with the graffiti movement, I became aware that
their attitudes did not clinch any arguments so much as
illuminate different aspects of the problem, with each per-
son giving a glimpse of the situation from a different van-
tage point. The first person I met with was Keith Haring,
something of an anomaly in the graffiti world because he is
white and middle-class and has been to a New York art
school. At that point, Haring was twenty-four years old,
and had been arrested several times for defacing property,
although since then the police have come to recognize him
as a reputable artist. I asked Haring whether becoming fa-
mous in the art world had in any way altered the thrust of
his activities, or changed his intentions and goals. Did he
think that working for gallery exhibitions and for big
money was in conflict with his more anonymous and illegal
subway activities?
7
“Art is about something being seen,” he replied,
“whether it is absorbed by the eyes of people in the sub-
ways or of people in galleries. In the subways, one needs
total abandon; since the work only exists for a fleeting mo-
ment, it can and probably will be erased. The moment when
it is seen may be all that is left of it. Objects, of course, have
much less chance of disappearing, they will be protected,
and this changes the value that is placed on them. But
permanence and impermanence are both plausible out-
comes to an activity. If I believed only in ephemeral things,
that would be too hard a philosophy to live by; you have
to believe in concrete things too, things that don’t go away.
There shouldn’t be anything wrong with things that don’t
go away. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with things
that stay there and accumulate meaning by becoming part
of someone’s life. There shouldn't be anything wrong with
that, although the situation which surrounds it does seem
to pervert it. The Rockefeller wing at the Met is a perfect
example of that kind of perversion, of the ability of people
with money and resources to take things away which are
vital to the lives of other people. The question is how good
or important is it for us to see these extraordinary things
compared to what those people had to lose for us to be able
to do so—it’s enlightening for me to see them, but it’s awful
for them. There is no answer, for it’s a paradox; an answer
would mean it was one way or the other, and anyway, it’s
the way things are. . . .

107
 “I've always thought I didn’t want to be paid a lot for
what I do, just enough to keep things going—but there’s no
way to do that. If you sell your work cheaply, you just get
used by the system; somebody else buys it and sells it for
more, so you have to take it from them. I don’t know of a
way to control prices. Money’s like a drug, [ see it in every
walk of life so far; I've not found any way to make a dent
in, or alter that. In some sense, I'm already addicted. It’s
really hard not to bé*—it’s such a basic idea of the world
now, always to want more, to want bigger and better. And
when you don’t have to do something else to survive, it’s
hard to want to work for somebody else at $2.50 an hour,
just to maintain your integrity. If anyone was given an alter-
native to that situation, they’d take it, obviously. If I say
‘Things are going great, I guess,” the response is ‘I'd give
anything to be in your shoes.” So that even if you can see
that something is wrong, someone else would change places
with you immediately. Even if your own thoughts about the
situation haven’t changed, you find the situation has
changed you, and you can’t reverse that.”
When I talked with Jean-Michel Basquiat, on the other
hand, a twenty-one-year-old black artist born in Brooklyn
of Haitian parents, he seemed unequivocally delighted with
his amazing success. Basquiat was invited in 1981 by the
Soho art dealer Annina Nosei to join her gallery after she
had seen his work in the “New York/New Wave” show at
P.S. 1. For a year he worked out of the basement of her
gallery where—in something like a hothouse atmosphere of
forced growth—he produced ever more prodigious paint-
ings teeming with a psychosymbolic iconography of
skeletonized figures, skulls, bones, arrows, and Twom-
blyesque scrawls. According to Basquiat, people are getting
credit now for graffiti as if it were something new, when, in
fact, they're really only fifth or tenth string. Basquiat was
never part of any graffiti group; he stayed on his own a lot.
At fifteen he left home and went to Washington Square
Park. “I just sat there dropping acid for eight months,” he
said. “Now all that seems boring—it eats your mind up.
Then I went to high school for a little while, where I made
those typical teen-age psychedelic pictures of people’s faces
with stars. [ was also selling handmade postcards and hand-
painted Abstract Expressionist sweatshirts to make money.
I'even went to Inferview magazine and bugged Andy Warhol,

108
you know, to find out how to get closer to it. Then I was
in Diego Cortez’s ‘New York/New Wave’ show at P.S. 1. In
those days I never had enough money to cover a whole
canvas. I wouldn’t be surprised if I died like a boxer, really
broke, but somehow I doubt it. I was joking one day and
thought maybe I should go to the Art Students League—to
see if it’s really conducive to anything—but students’ work
is so sad. I had more artist friends before I began to make
money; now only other artists who make money want to see
me. I feel much happier now—my whole life is focused.
Before, there was all this energy and nowhere to put it.”
Another black graffiti artist from the upper West Side,
Futura 2000, took his name from a car made by Ford.
Known as “the Watteau of the spray can” (although his
current paintings are more like space-age Kandinskys), he
has spray-painted murals on IRT trains and on the sides of
buildings in New York and London. He has also col-
laborated with a rock group called The Clash, and shows
currently with the Fun Gallery in New York. When the
nineteen-year-old graffiti curator Crash first organized a
show, in September 1980, for the directors of Fashion Moda
—which included Futura—neither he nor the other graffiti
writers were even aware of Soho. “The idea was to make
graffiti on plywood,” Futura stated, ““to do the subway stuff
on something that wouldn’t be moving: it would just sit on
a wall. That was the moment of transition, trying to capture
the experience to be looked at in a gallery. It was the first
time graffiti writers were brought above ground. Suddenly
it seemed there was an opportunity for me to become an
artist—not just a graffiti writer. But Soho and 57th Street
intimidate me, which is why I like the Fun Gallery. I don’t
want to work on demand; Fun doesn’t use me as a token
figure. I'd be afraid to be in a big gallery where they would
be trying to make money off of me—those people don’t
even ride the subways! My art’s not for exclusive buyers.
Artists in Soho get paid to produce more and more of the
same stuff. I wonder what will happen to some of those
people in three years. I prefer to control the level of what’s
happening, so it will be slower. I wouldn’t mind going to art
school if I could get a scholarshin, but it would probably
interfere with my work. . . . For lots of us, the subways
remain the only outlet: a moving vehicle. The work has to
be done quickly; its finest hour may be when it’s just rolling

109
by. I see the paintings more as a documentation of what
goes on in the trains, a memento. Obviously, nobody can
have an actual train, although in a few years’ time some
museum will probably buy one.”
Futura is one of the “older” graffiti artists, twenty-six
years old, and he began making graffiti in 1971. For years it
was his whole life; he did it every day, full time, after
finishing his morning job. “You can either go in with a crew
or alone,” he says; “that’s a personal thing. I like to go with
four people at most, who I know can handle the element of
danger that’s always involved. I always hope I'm making
things look better; you never set out to destroy anything.
You never go over someone else’s work you respect, espe-
cially if it’s something good, unless it’s half gone already
from the acid baths. When the trains are standing parked in
a yard or tunnel is when it’s best to penetrate. You can turn
on the lights, blow the horn, or work with a flashlight.
... I guess I'll always be a spray painter, but no, I won’t still
be spraying trains at forty. If you get caught when you're
older, the penalties are much more severe. I don’t want to
get sent to Riker’s Island, which could happen if I was
caught on a top-to-bottom full-car job at night in a tunnel.
But if it was all legal, it wouldn’t be the same; you need the
edge, the consequences of being busted.”
The spectacular success and popularity of the graffiti
style generated a new type of entrepreneur, personified by
Mel Neulander, the organizer (together with Joyce Towbin)
of Graphiti Productions, Inc., a workshop for “house-
broken” graffiti artists who have been encouraged to trade
in the trains for money-making canvases and worldwide
commissions. Among the artists belonging to this group are
Crash, Freedom, Wasp, and Lady Pink. In May 1982 Neu-
lander held his first official exhibition of “Graffiti Above
Ground,” at the Stuart Neill Gallery in Soho. When I asked
Neulander how he found his artists, he replied, “On the
grapevine. Five or six new ones show up every week with
their portfolios to join our workshop. Now we're starting to
promote and market graffiti out-of-town and overseas. Qur
artists are prolific, well-spoken; they don’t meet the stereo-
type of the dropout. They’re not into drugs or violence.
They walk around, thousands of them, with sketchbooks,
doodling and drawing. They’re consumed by art, but they
were frustrated, with no money to buy canvas or supplies.

110
There’s an incredible mix of kids that transcends racial,
economic, and educational barriers, and they all have a tre-
mendous camaraderie. We formed our corporation, Graffiti
Above Ground, in June 1981. I had seen a documentary on
graffiti on TV and loved the work. I decided to commission
the kids. An article came out asking ‘Is it art, or isn’t it art?”
When that happens, you can always be sure that, two years
later, it’s art. So I thought, lemme get on to the bandwagon.
For me it was a money-making proposition, but I didn’t
know how to merchandise art, so I got together with Joyce,
who had run an art gallery and been an art teacher. It took
us five months to put it all together. These are ghetto chil-
dren, not flower children. They want Cadillacs. They’re not
into the old ethic of giving up material gains to keep artistic
integrity. They can do both. Now they have a market and
an identity. Their needs are being satisfied by what’s hap-
pening.” Neulander’s artists design record jackets; they did
a thirty-foot mural on rollers at the Winter Garden Theater
with Twyla Tharp; they were in the centerfold of a big
fashion ad in New York magazine. Painting shop signs,
vans, and buildings, for many of these artists, is the only
alternative to mugging or drugs, given the neighborhoods in
which they grew up—the only way to get out of the ghetto,
where people are so desperate they are often ready to kill
for a few thousand dollars.
The “upgrading” of graffiti into a commercialized art
form is not viewed as salutary by everyone, however. Tim
Rollins, for instance, the director of Group Material, an
artists’ collective started in 1979 and dedicated to promoting
radical art focused on political and social issues, is quite
appalled by the situation. Group Material is interested in art
that is both formally and politically radical at the same time.
They want to fill the gap between artists and the American
working class. Among the three dissident groups—Colab,
Fashion Moda, and Group Material—all have different aes-
thetics, methodologies, class stances, and politics, but what
is shared is a desire for constructing an alternative set of
social relations which will reconnect art with neighborhood
communities.
“People tag Group Material as trying to develop a social-
ist modernism,” Rollins states, “but we have a much more
radical approach to materials and processes. Mural art, for
instance, doesn’t advance art aesthetically; murals are like

(LT
coloring books for the working class. So often the whole
thing is just set up in advance, and the community people
fill in the colors. Graffiti, on the other hand, is extremely
important. It’s radical art with a radical methodology be-
cause it’s illegal. It’s radical because, mostly, the artists are
non-artists. Formally, it’s not like anything else. It’s art that
falls out of a social condition, and that helps us to find out
about what the art means to éverybody. It’s not like Schna-
bel and Salle, who are wildly self-conscious. The problem
is, of course, that now it’s turning into a style, and the artists
are becoming compromised by the lure of success. At the
core, all that’s fishy: we all worry about art being something
to entertain rich people with. And so much graffiti is terri-
ble; there are only a few who do wild and authentic work.
The vitality of graffiti is in its indigenous situation. It is
difficult to accept it on white gallery walls. Then it becomes
part of the commodity market. The social context is what
gives it its meaning, and this is being ripped from it.”
Fab 5 Fred is a black graffiti artist from Brooklyn (best
known for having painted a train with Warhol-like soup
cans) who shares Tim Rollins’ view. Fred, whose real name
is Fred Braithwaite, took his graffiti name from the Number
5 train on the IRT, and was one of the first artists to put
something on a train that wasn’t just a name.
“The way I look at it,” he says, “there’ve been three
waves in the graffiti movement. The first wave started way
back with Taki 183. He was the first person to have a name
and a number. After him, there was Flowers, Dice, Super
Hog; these guys developed a social network of writing
clubs. Meanwhile, I was getting my shit together in Brook-
lyn. We all wanted to do something cool in the streets other
than just breaking heads. The Ex-(perienced) Vandals, the
Vanguards, Magic, Inc., the Nod Squad, the Last Survivors
—these were the Brooklyn wall-writing groups. They put
the name of the group up and everybody would tag around
it. I got into graffiti after checking out these guys. Then the
Brooklyn writers began to merge with writers from the
Bronx and Manhattan. We picked up on each other’s styles;
we taught each other different techniques. Many styles
began to merge, and out of that came ‘Wild Style.” It's
Brooklyn-style structured lettering with Upper Manhattan
spray techniques. Wild Style is totally illegible unless
you're initiated.

112
 “I think street subcultures are a breath of fresh air. We’re
becoming aware of the fine-art scene, but those people ap-
proach us more than we approach them. For instance, Mel
Neulander came to Futura and me. He had all these articles.
He asked did we want to make money? I knew right away
he wanted to make a fast buck—cheapen the scene. I defi-
nitely wasn’t making any moves in their direction. Joyce
and Mel encourage the artists to paint pictures of trains;
then everybody comes and tags on it. They stopped taking
risks. That’s what I see Graphiti Productions as doing. It’s
like a Peter Max. It’s really bad. I hope they blow away. But
a lot of guys really wouldn’t have any other outlet. They’re
not treated like real artists, though; it’s like social work.
““A lot of people who approach us think we’re not really
hip to their game. I'm not motivated to sit on my ass for the
rest of my life and be somebody else’s racehorse. What I do
is motivated by other things than being an art star. I want
to make paintings that people from where I come from will
still see that it’s rooted in graffiti. That’s the real beauty of
the graffiti scene; it’s not self-conscious like Kiefer, Schna-
bel, Chia. Those dudes all have the graffiti thing in their
work—XKiefer slashes white paint, Chia’s scribbles look like
tags to me, but it doesn’t have the vandalism aesthetic.
.. . Graffiti symbolizes people doing what they want to do;
but there’s no profane language, no political statements. It’s
only names. Like if Jackson Pollock were around, he’d love
it. I've even seen a review where they refer to Pollock as
‘graffiti-calligraphy.” Calligraffiti, I call it. Graffiti isn’t doing
bad things, but we sort of threaten the whole notion of fine
art. They think anybody not steeped in tradition has to be
folk art. But New York is the most advanced ghetto in the
world—what we do reverberates like a satellite, bang, all
over the world. To do things in painting that have never
been done before—that’s my objective. That’s what gives
you the real good feeling. The best is yet to come. I'm
working on it now.”

113
CHAPTER EIGHT:
Has Modernism Failed?

I n a film shown in 1982 at Documenta in Kassel, Germany,

the English “living sculptors” Gilbert and George take turns
enumerating their own characteristics. They tell us that they
are unhealthy, middle-aged, dirty-minded, depressed, cyni-
cal, empty, seedy, rotten, badly behaved, arrogant, stub-
born, perverted, and successful—finishing with “we are art-
ists.”
Who could ask for anything more? In the artificial,
decaying environment of urban industrialism, art is not
born of moral virtue; it is not meant for the saving of souls.
If my attempt to throw light on the main issues of our
present situation—to show what contemporary art is and
does, and how it came into being—has been realized at all,
it must be fairly obvious by now that ours is not a healthy
society, enjoying an optimistic, conciliatory kind of art. If
the modern artist once embraced modernism with hope,
pride, and a crusading spirit of disobedience, at this stage of
the day he seems to cling on with desperation, feeling in-
definably sad and shoddy. If Gilbert and George can be
taken as any yardstick, it is from his unfitness that the
contemporary artist draws his power. The mood has
changed from vehemence to decadence and weary cynicism.
Are these words, then, a reasonable obbligato to what has
become of Western cultural history—a tradition of revolt
gone sour? Do they draw a fair portrait of the collective
sensibility of an age dying of industrial exhaust, and with-
out a breath of rapture?
I would betray the seriousness of the question were I
simply to declare that modernism had failed, or even that
it has come to a sticky end. The fact is no answer can be
given without first examining what the ideals of modernism
have been, and what has been essential to its system of
values. What we finally think about all this will depend on
what we now regard as the true end and purpose of art.
The period through which we have just lived has been,
on the whole, one in which whatever was inherited from the
past was thought of as a tiresome impediment to be escaped
from as soon as possible. The first Futurist manifesto, pub-
lished in 1908 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, declared that
only by becoming free of “the stinking gangrene of . . .
professors, archaeologists, touring guides and antique deal-
ers,” only by burning libraries and flooding museums, could
Italy save itself. The new world of speed and technology
required a new language of forms derived not from the past
but from the future. A second manifesto declared that only
by denying its past could art correspond to the intellectual
needs of our time. Tradition was reactionary. Modernism
alone was revolutionary and progressive.
But between that time and the end of the First World
War in 1918, disenchantment of another kind set in. By the
1920s, the postwar generation of Dadaists was already
doubtful—given the mercenary nature of our society, which
in the words of Richard Huelsenbeck “is at best a cartel of
pelt merchants and profiteers in leather, at worst a cultural
association of psychopaths”—whether it was feasible, or
even morally justified, to make art at all. The catastrophic
effects of the war had shattered everyone’s faith in a ratio-
nal and peaceful future. A civilization that had condoned
such inhumanities did not deserve the conciliations of art:
it had lost its credibility. And so the public was baited with
meaningless, aggressively absurd objects—white-haired re-
volvers, Lesbian sardines, vaccinated bread, and flashes of
lightning under fourteen years old. The Dadaists and Sur-
realists wished to infiltrate a disturbed world, in order to
destroy all its existing patterns, all its accumulated truth,
however compulsive and authoritative.
Once art began its relentless advance into traditionless-
ness, every new style served as a new beginning, a new

115
 plunge ahead. Beliefs had to be continually changed, re-
placed, discarded—always in favor of newer and better
ones, which would only be rejected in turn. (Neither science
nor art in our era has been content with what has been
believed before, associating traditional beliefs with back-
wardness and a lack of momentum.) The “new” became the
chief emblem of positive valie. “Being an artist,” in the
words of Joseph Kosuth, “means questioning the nature of
art. If you make paintings, you are already accepting (not
questioning) the nature of art.” The impulse to experiment
continuously is profoundly different from the goal of tradi-
tion, which implies a conservative attitude and considers
the past as a model, or guiding example. But what the early
modernists failed to foresee, in their dedication to the new,
was that such a conception of history could only be built on
sand, since no belief ever had anything solid to support it.
Maximizing the variable of change—stimulating it artifi-
cially and making it the most important thing on the stage
—destroyed stability. Pressed to its ultimate conclusion, the
steady violation of expected continuities—which has been
the crucial element in modernist “progress”’—is radically at
odds with systemic wisdom and equilibrium.
To sustain itself, a society must also have values that
resist change. One of the social functions of tradition has
been to foster stability, and so to hinder change. The reflex
of negation, in the effort to perpetuate itself as a mode of
thought, has ended up destroying not only tradition, but
also the art of the previous avant-garde. At this point, the
possibilities for stylistic innovation seem, paradoxically, to
have reached a limit. Radical consciousness has been sty-
mied, along with the authority of tradition. Art must now
proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority
nor held together by tradition. So many metamorphoses and
revolutions of every kind, so many differing values pre-
sented simultaneously, have finally done away with the
.

entire frame of things—and destroyed the conviction that

there are any limits to art at all. Having thus removed any
standard against which we might any more measure our-
selves, we no longer know what rules we ought to follow,
much less why we ought to follow them. And so the very
question of what constitutes success or failure has to be an
ambivalent one: it can only be judged by being measured

116
against some valid conception of what a work of art is, and
this is a conception we no longer have.
Only with hindsight can we now see that tradition and
authority may be necessary, even to make a genuine avant-
garde possible—in order to provide something to revolt
against. At this point, we have neither: the polarizations
have flattened out, and everything simply reverses into its
opposite. The artist finds himself under continuous pressure
to be modern, but discovers that to be modern now is to be
traditional—a law of history that Heraclitus called enantio-
dromia. That is to say,/when one principle reaches the height
of its power, it collapses into its opposite. Artists are finding
that the only way to make something new is to borrow from
the past. All this has led, in the last few years, to a disaffec-
tion with the terms and conditions of modernism—a repu-
diation of the ideslogy of progress and originality.
Traditions are a product of the recurrent affirmations
that have gone into their practice. When modernism made
its massive assaults on the accomplishments of the past, it
deprived subsequent generations of artists of any ground
plan or guidance for the future. More stable traditions of art
imposed certain standards on their practitioners—patterns
which were accepted as the natural and right way to do
things, and which became part of the individual’s practice
and second nature as an artist. These standards were trans-
mitted from teacher to pupil, handed down from master to
disciple. This transmission is what has sustained practices
and given them their history. One of the unsettling charac-
teristics of modernism, as a tradition, is that it has failed to
develop the means for training artists. Nowadays, the artist
has no function to transmit traditional skills, or even to
impart a knowledge of art—nor is there any consensus as to
what should be learned. Certainly, nothing more sharply
distinguishes the modern view of art from that of the past
—a state of affairs that was well described by the painter
Bruce Boice in a lecture I heard recently at the School of
Visual Arts in New York. The talk was entitled “What It
Means to Be an Artist,” and Boice was addressing a group
of students. ““After leaving school,” he said, “students often
don’t work, because there’s no reason to work. Nobody
pays attention any more, so there seems no reason to press
on. There’s never a reason to do art work—it doesn’t seem

L7
to matter—it all looks all right, but it just doesn’t matter.
You get bored doing it because you're in a vacuum. There’s
no motivation, no rules to say what you should do, or
whether it’s good or not. Confidence is the thing that allows
you to work eventually—you know you can do this thing
and succeed at it. It gets harder all the time, but you get
more used to the frustration. If there were rules it would be
simple enough to know what to do. But you find yourself
looking for something;' and you don’t know what it is. So
how do you ever know when you find it?”
Needless to say, these comments underline the core
weaknesses of the modernist ethos—the retreat into priva-
tism and self-expression, which means that there is no ex-
ample to follow, no authority to rely on, no discipline to be
received. It is almost as if the freer the artist has become, the
more impotent he feels himself to be. If we accept as accu-
rate Erich Fromm’s description, in The Sane Society, of which
human needs are basic and essential—the need for related-
ness, for transcendence (a concept which for Fromm has
nothing to do with God but refers to the need to transcend
one’s self-centered, narcissistic, alienated position to one of
being related to others, and open to the world), the need for
rootedness, for a sense of identity, and for a frame of orien-
tation and an object of devotion—then the achievements of
modernism would appear to have been had at too high a
cost. Its renunciations of so much that is crucial to human
well-being—in the name of freedom and self-sufficiency—
are what will have failed us. In the end, we could not sustain
these virtues without suffering their defects. Seductive
though it may have seemed to escape from the world into
the self, something vital has been lost along with the forsak-
ing of reality. “Failure” is perhaps a very highly charged
word—but in ways that are only gradually coming to light,
something, it would seem, has miscarried.
We have obviously reached a threshold where the
achievements of modernism can only really be understood
against the implicit contrast of other values. The question
of whether or not modernism has failed turns, finally, on the
question of whether it was appropriate in the first place to
reject tradition. It is just this sense that we may have taken
too much to heart the drive to innovate and emancipate—
regarding them wrongly as the only goals to be pursued and
claiming them as the standard for all that progress and

di8
modernity mean—which has led the philosophers Edward
Shils and Alasdair MacIntyre to argue on behalf of tradi-
tions as essential to the worthwhile life. The relentless
emancipation from all traditions has resulted, in the opinion
of Shils, in the loss of much that is indispensable to the good
order and happiness of individuals. Traditions set standards
from which to draw practical guidance as to what is right
and wrong; they generate stable and durable systems of
relationship, which help to situate individuals in the social
order and establish for them a network of social obligations
and responsibilities. Modernism so embraced notions of
freedom and autonomy—and of art needing to answer only
to its own logic, its own laws, the pure aesthetic without a
function—that we now have whole generations of artists
who doubt that it was ever meant to be organically inte-
grated with society in the first place. It was during the 1950s,
among the community of artists out of which Abstract Ex-
pressionism emerged, that the totally self-possessed, self-
reliant individual became the model for the typical artist’s
role. The gesture of putting paint on canvas became the
ultimate gesture of liberation—not only from political and
social norms, but from previous art history as well. History
(which implies responsibility to the past and a dependence
on the achievement of others) was the obstacle to be tran-
scended. A new art was necessary, and according to Barnett
Newman, “we actually began . . . from scratch, as if painting
were not only dead but had never existed.” Harold Rosen-
berg wrote at the time, about Willem de Kooning, that he
“discards all social roles in order to start with himself as he
is, and all definitions of art in order to start with art as it
might appear through him.” In a similar vein, but much
more recently, the German Neo-expressionist Georg Base-
litz has stated, “The artist is not responsible to anyone. His
social role is asocial; his only responsibility consists in an
attitude, an attitude to the work he does. . . . There is no
communication with any public whatsoever. The artist can
ask no questions, and he makes no statement; he offers no
information, message or opinion. . . . It is the end-product
which counts, in my case, the picture.”
Individuality and freedom are undoubtedly the greatest
achievements of modern culture. But insistence upon abso-
lute freedom for each individual leads to a negative attitude
toward society, and the sense of a culture deeply alienated

119
from its surroundings. The desire for an unconditioned
world can only be realized, when all is said and done, at the
cost of social alienation—in the absence of integration and
union. If freedom is the absolute value, then society limits,
or even frustrates, what is most essential and desirable.
When art had a social role—when artists knew clearly what
art was for—it never functioned entirely in terms of self-
interest. Today, there is a sehse that only by divorcing
themselves from any sdcial role can artists establish their
own individual identity. Freedom and social obligation are
experienced in our world as polar opposites which run at
cross purposes to each other.
But the paradox of freedom, as I have been trying all
along to show, is that it is very difficult for the individual
to preserve his identity in a society where traditional insti-
tutions and values offer no support. Liberation and aliena-
tion turn out to be inextricably connected—reverse sides of
the same coin. Beyond a certain point, freedom—Ilike tech-
nological progress—is counterproductive: it defeats its own
ends and becomes alienating. For artists to lose the sense of
being members of a tradition which transcends both them-
selves and their contemporaries leads to demoralization.
In its quest for autonomy and its belief that art cannot
possibly thrive any longer constrained by moral or social
demands, modernism discouraged the individual from
finding any good outside himself. But, as Alasdair MacIn-
tyre argues so cogently in Affer Virtue, in a society where
there is no longer a shared conception of the communal
good, there can no longer be any substantial concept of
what it is to contribute more or less to that good. A tradition
can only maintain its character as a tradition if it exists in
a medium of certain virtues which impose restraints and
provide a conception of excellence. A good is something
that is not uniquely mine—it is bound up with the concept
of observing a limit. For practices to flourish, it is necessary
that they embody the virtues. In societies in which the
virtues are not valued, it is difficult for practices to flourish.
Modern society views discipline as a form of constraint
submitted to grudgingly, but certain aspects of the moral
character can be achieved only through the exercise of vir-
tues that exist independently of each individual, and cannot
be altered according to taste. The imperative quality of the
rule lies precisely in the fact that it is binding—the element

120
of choice is taken out. It requires us to act in a certain way
simply because it is good to do so. Virtues are the necessary
instruments which help to keep a balance between stasis
and change, conservation and innovation, morality and self-
interest—and which provide us with a sense of limits. It is
this balance which our culture seems fatally to have lost.
Obviously, what the good life is taken to be is always
relative to the individual’s historical and social context. We
act according to the way we see things. MacIntyre points
out that the virtues are fostered by certain types of social
institutions and endangered by others—cultures differ con-
siderably in the kinds of self they enable the individual to
develop. In our society, satisfaction is to be found in the vice
of acquisitiveness, and virtue concepts play almost no part
atall. What were vices in the Aristotelian scheme, and in the
Athenian milieu—specifically, the wishto have more than

world, it is the driving force of modern productive work.

Modernity emphasizes quantity—more is always better.
Between the values of tradition and those of modernity,
there has been a fateful conflict—a radical alteration in what
the human imagination is prepared to envisage and demand.
Desires, needs, and expectations have expanded exponen-
tially. Confronting each other are not merely two ideolo-
gies, but two very different modes of being. What is re-
quired to live well and flourish in the tradition of the virtues
is very different from what is required to live well and
flourish in the culture of bureaucratic individualism. In-
deed, the possession of the virtues—the cultivation of
truthfulness, moderation, and courage—will often, accord-
ing to Maclntyre, bar us from being rich or famous or pow-
erful.
“Thus,” he states, “although we may hope that we can
not only achieve the standards of excellence and the internal
goods of certain practices by possessing the virtues and
becoming rich, famous and powerful, the virtues are always
a stumbling block to this comfortable ambition. We should
therefore expect that, if in a particular society the achieve-
ment of worldly success were to become dominant, the
concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then
perhaps something near total effacement.” Within the com-
petitive ideals of capitalism, virtue and success are not easily
brought together.

121
 In itself, capitalist society cannot foster a communal
spirit or generate the virtues—it can only generate affluence.
By now it must be clear that one of the ways in which the
adversary culture of modernism has failed was through sur-
rendering its inner independence to the pressures of exter-
nal, bureaucratic poweér. The growing dependence on a mar-
ket-intensive, professionally .manipulated art world has
resulted in artists losing their power to act autonomously
and live creatively. This particular change happened with-
out being instigated. It was nondeliberate. It happened be-
cause late capitalism, with its mass-consumption ethic,
weakened the capability of art for transmitting patterns of
conscious ethical value. And, as we have seen, this was so
because often the very same artists who opposed capitalist
ideology in their art were not really resistant to it; at the
level of personal intention, they had a double standard, and
were in complicity. They were unwilling to put their own
career interests at stake in the service of convictions they
were ready to accept in their art. Whether or not this process
can be reversed will depend on what we all now think of
the hopes and ideals with which the modern era began—
and whether we believe that art is related to a moral order,
or that its function is purely an aesthetic one.
Many artists, imagining perhaps that the time has come
for a resolute turning away from this forced antithesis be-
tween tradition and modernism, have begun to relinquish
the modernist imperative to break with the past, and are
doing some antiquarian shopping in old styles. The Italian
Neo-expressionists, in particular, are working in all direc-
tions—backwards and forwards, up and down. It is almost
as if there were a general consensus among younger artists
that, since the market has been so successful in capitalizing
on innovation as a profit-making factor, the only relevant
approach to the present situation is to be found in the absence
of innovative and radical art. At this point, however, it is
hard to tell. Ambiguities abound, given the even greater
financial success of Neo-expressionist works. It may also be
the case that for many of these artists, capitalist society is
here to stay, and they no longer find the means to condemn
it, or see any point in maintaining a radical position or
posture. There is also the ironical feeling that complicity
itself is now passed off as subversion—and being hospitable
to traditional values is the most radical act.

122
 These situations may well mirror one another, but they
are not at all clear. All that postmodernism has proven so
far is that something can be more than one thing at the same
time, and can even be its own opposite. Obviously, the key
question of the moment is whether Neo-expressionist
painting is yet another symptom of our society’s compulsive
need to disenchant, or whether it holds the potential—how-
ever amorphous still—to restore a failing mode of con-
sciousness. All that can be said so far is that it brings the
problem to the surface in a very compelling way. Writing
in Art in America, the critic Craig Owens, for instance, inter-
prets Sandro Chia’s depiction of the Sisyphus myth as a
testimony to the painter’s ambivalence about his own activ-
ity. Chia portrays Sisyphus as a comic, slightly ridiculous
figure—a grinning bureaucrat in a business suit and fedora,
condemned to the eternal repetition of pushing a giant
boulder up the side of a mountain. In Owens’ view, the
myth of Sisyphus has been trivialized by Chia into a joke,
and its tragic despair parodied. What we are witnessing,
Owens feels, is the wholesale liquidation of the modernist
legacy, in the form of contempt. Raiding the antique and
commandeering the forms of tradition become the fate of
the artist who finds that his avant-garde mission has failed.
If Nec-expressionism is indeed our peculiar, crippled
effort to understand the lifeless symbols we inherit, the
issue at stake will be how to determine which artists are
merely scavenging the past and which are seeking, more
actively, to influence and transform the spiritual vacuum at
the center of our society. Ours is a culture in which, as the
sociologist Theodore Roszak has pointed out, the capacity
for transcendence has become so feeble that when con-
fronted with the great historical projections of sacramental
experience, we can only wonder what these exotic symbols
really meant. After more than a century of alienation and
a negative attitude toward society, art is showing signs of
wanting to be a therapeutic force again. There is no doubt
that a new process has started asserting itself; but the prob-
lem remains of sifting out that which is largely sensational-
ism geared to the media-machine from that which carries a
genuine potential for developing a more luminous culture.
If the eclectic image-plundering of the Americans Julian
Schnabel and David Salle never quite coalesce into commit-
ment or meaning—and therefore seem more like a symptom

123
of alienation than a cure—there are others, like the German
Anselm Kiefer, whose imagery is engaged and even suggests
a willingness to believe again. Kiefer, it seems to me, is one
of the few artists working today who opens up the vision
and ideal of apocalyptic renovation and makes the effort to
regain the spiritual dignity of art. It is as if he were opening
up the fenestra aeternitatis—the window onto eternity and
spiritual clairvoyanceN—which in our society has been closed
for a long time.
Kiefer lives in the countryside somewhere between
Frankfurt and Stuttgart, and avoids art centers. Nature, in
his pictures, is projected as the center of a timeless, archety-
pal reality—rich with symbols, evocations, and incanta-
tions. The burned and parched wheatfields, often encrusted
with real hay and straw, are metaphors for a devastated
earth, but at the same time—since Kiefer is almost Words-
worthian in his nature mysticism—they hold out hope for
a regeneration of the Wasteland. Like his mentor Joseph
Beuys (whom he once visited every day for two months, in
arare instance of genuine discipleship), Kiefer would like to
bring back the ancient healing function of art. Both Kiefer
and Beuys perceive that the only way to create significantly
political art today is by making the visionary powers central.
This widening of the creative field by grounding oneself in
transformational vision is the only thing that can eliminate
the spiritual sterility of modern life, and possibly save the
world from suicide.
In a remarkable series of works, Kiefer has converted
disused Nazi architecture—former Gestapo headquarters—
into painters’ studios. These provocative images assimilate
the burden of German culture—its agony and its defeat—
by transforming shame into renewal. In Kiefer’s vision, art
once again can be the great redeemer, a cure for the mistakes
of the past; but for this to happen, not only is a mythical
language of transcendence necessary, but the virtues, too,
must be reinstated. In a remarkable image called Faith, Hope,
and Love, he presents us with an image of the tree of life in
which art and the virtues are one. The three theological
virtues of faith, hope, and love (which were added by the
Christian religion to the four cardinal virtues of the Roman
world—prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice) are writ-
ten on the trunks of three trees whose roots are embedded
in an artist’s wooden palette. In a related work, Resumption,

124
 done in 1974, a winged palette—Kiefer’s emblem of the
artistic imagination—hovers like a spirit in the sky above a
grave heaped with ashes. We have a source outside the
world, this art seems to say, and it is from this source that
we affect the world. Kiefer’s work allows no escape into
despair. It is not easy optimism either, but afirmation— that
all has not been lost, that something, some potentiality,
even from the shadow of Hitlerian evils, will emerge again.
Like Kiefer, Joseph Beuys has a declared interest in the
reenergizing of art’s transformational power. Both share a
preoccupation with images of planting and growth, with
energy fields, and scenes of death and transfiguration. Beuys
has described his sense of purpose as the need to provoke
people and make them understand what it is to be a human
being; and teaching has always been a major aspect of his
creative life. But his real interest lies in the potential of
radical transformation—whether of thought patterns,
materials and substances, states of consciousness, or politi-
cal and social reality.
In 1943, in a now legendary event, Beuys was shot down
in the Crimea and rescued by Tartar tribesmen, who saved oz
his life by wrapping him in fat and felt to help his body
regenerate warmth. As a result of this experience, Beuys
found himself drawn to the healing properties of these
materials, which later became the basis for many of his
sculptures. Among his early works are a piano which has
been completely covered with felt, and a chair whose seat
is covered with a thick layer of fat. These substances were
deliberately chosen by Beuys because normally they would
be considered unaesthetic and economically worthless. Fat
expands and soaks into its surroundings. Felt attracts and
absorbs what surrounds it. “It is the transformation of sub-
stance,” Beuys has written, “that is my concer in art, rather
n
“than the traditional aesthetic understanding of beautiful
appearances.” Once he spent a week with a coyote in a New
York art gallery. While the artist himself lay on the floor
wrapped in felt, the coyote played with copies of The Wall
Street Journal.
Beuys’ work has always had a multiplicity of layers. He
does not place primary value on the artist as the producer
of his work, but on the quality of his vision and imagination
—on his ability to function as a pontifex, or bridge-builder,
between the material and spiritual worlds, and between art

125
 and society. The emphasis is always on moving art out of
the private studio into a more worldly concern, in which
politics and art become linked through the idea of social
sculpture. Education should have the socially engaged per-
sonality as its goal, not the disaffected, dropout genius.
Trying to make meaningful art in a society that doesn’t
believe in anything requires breaking down the rigidity of
specialization, the segregation of functions and activities,
both within the personality and within the community as
a whole. It means reintroducing the artist in his role as
shaman—a mystical, priestly, and political figure in prehis-
—toric cultures, who, after coming close to death through
accident or severe illness, becomes a visionary and a healer.
The shaman’s function is to balance and center society,
integrating many planes of life-experience, and defining the
culture’s relationship to the cosmos. When these various
domains (the human and the divine) fall out of balance, it
is the shaman’s responsibility to restore the lost harmony
and reestablish equilibrium. Only an individual who suc-
cessfully masters his actions in both realms is a master sha-
man. The artist as shaman becomes a conductor of forces
which go far beyond those of his own person, and is able
to bring art back in touch with its sacred sources; through
his own personal self-transformation, he develops not only
new forms of art, but new forms of living. By offering
himself as a prototype for a new creative mode—that of a
self without estrangement, able to transcend the world
without negating it—Beuys shows us how we might actu-
ally achieve the possibility of a society that would maximize
personal autonomy and social relatedness at the same time.
Learning to shuttle from one wave length to another as
healer, diviner, leader, and artist offers an alternative to
entrapment in the web of bureaucratic imperatives and sty-
listic gamesmanship. Beuys seeks an enlarged vision that
carries the artist outward, toward a new externality, and
away from the mutually destructive relation of alienation—
that reduction of the link between art and society to a
purely negative function. In this sense, he provides us with
a model which has passed through the fundamental errors
of modernism, and whose raison d étre is grounded in a deeper
source. In dialectical terms, the tension between traditional
and modern values is resolved by the creation of an interest-
ing synthesis of elements from both.
Obviously, it is not possible to simply give up our in-
dividuality and return to earlier times when the freedom of
human action was more limited and social roles were strictly
prescribed. Our present problems cannot be resolved by
seeking to restrain individualism through the reimposition
of traditional forms of authority, or by a regression to a past
state in which they had not yet been brought into being. At
this point, our possibilities rest with the use we make of our
freedom—whether we decide, finally, to use it for self-
aggrandizement or for moral rearmament. If anything is to
change, we will need to subordinate the overdevelopment
of this valued function to the dynamic good of the whole,
and a new object of devotion must take the place of the
present one. “I've been rich,” Sophie Tucker once said, “and
I've been poor, and believe me, rich is best.” As long as
money remains the one unambiguous criterion of success,
the standards of the moneyed life will continue to prevail.
The effort to get rich, and then become richer, will remain
the sovereign value, as other values become weaker and
weaker. The revolution in aspirations and expectations, as
many have pointed out before me, must be the single great
revolution of our time. It is only as individuals that we can
find the way back to communal purposes and social obliga-
tion—and reconstitute the moral will. If we accept as rele-
vant and necessary the project of spiritual regeneration, we
will look for means by which we can approach art again as
total human beings—not only with an aesthetic nature, but
also with a moral nature, and with a philosophical and social
purpose in mind.
Qur art seems, in the last few years, to be leaving its
experimental period behind. There has been so much varied
activity over the past half-century that most prejudices
have now been destroyed. The old and the new intermingle;
and it has become clear that imitation and invention are not,
of themselves, either good or bad. In our present state of
freedom, there is no recognized means of prescribing or
forbidding anything to anyone. We can see now, however,
that rebellion and freedom are not enough: modernism has
moved us too far in the direction of radical subjectivity and
a destructive relativism. At this point we might do well to
make the most of a few well-observed rules again, for this
is the mainspring of all art. Only when traditional rules
exist, and one is used to expecting them, can one then enjoy
breaking them. Tradition teaches wisdom, and the final les-
son of modernism may be no more than this: that we need
a fruitful tension between freedom and restraint. The con-
cept of the good is necessarily bound up with the concept
of observing a limit. Perhaps after a long phase of rebelli-
ously throwing out everything, we are more able to recog-
nize that what is most acutely missing now is a sense of
limits. Since immunity from the responsibility of tradition
has itself become a tradition, perhaps we can go forward
from the point we have reached by also going back, with a
new knowledge of how form, structure, and authority sus-
tain the spirit and enable us to live our lives with more
vision; they are a necessary condition of our well-being.
It may well be that only a cultural critic who looks at the
dynamics of the total situation can contain and express its
contradictions—rather than taking a stand on one side or
the other, or submitting to serve the ends of any particular
ideological group or stylistic tendency. The role of criticism
today, as I see it, is to engage in a fundamental reconstruc-
tion of the basic premises of our whole culture; it can be
nothing less than challenging the oppressive assumptions of
our secular, technocratic Western mentality. It is not just a
matter of seeing things differently, but of seeing different
things. Our culture expects us to be manic—to overproduce,
to overconsume, and to waste—but in all this, something
vital is missing: the knowledge that life can be transformed
by a sacramental experience. For this reason, the essays
assembled here invite the reader to step outside our current
outlook, and its fixed investments in the soulless power-
politics of cultural bureaucracy, in order to see it in perspec-
tive—to compare our world view with others, and to acquire
insights that defy cultural conditioning. Direct knowing is
the only thing that can break the cultural trance: deliber-
ately and soberly changing one’s mind about the nature of
truth and reality, and about what is really important.
Like all ideas, the idea of modernism has had a lifespan.
Its legacy requires that we look at art once again in terms
of purpose rather than style—if ever we are to succeed in
transforming personal vision into social responsibility
again. Perhaps the real answer to the question of whether
or not modernism has failed can only be given, in the end,
by changing the basic dimensions in which we measure not
only happiness and unhappiness in our society, but also
success and failure.

128
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3rd St. LIBRARY ANNEX
How is it, asks Suzi Gablik in her provocative study of the contem-
porary art world, that most of our radical artists now reflect the
culture of consumerism more than they challenge it? And how is it
that the avant-garde now supports a two-billion-dollar-a-year
market in New York City alone; that instead of a small, elite
audience, millions of people now crowd into exhibitions funded
by patrons, corporations, foundations, and government grants?
s Modernism Failed? is one of the first books by a serious art
critic to confront the social situation of contemporary art, to de-
scribe the resonance between the myriad styles, forms, and atti-
tudes of contemporary art and the moral and economic setting in
which this art occurs. Suzi Gablik adds ethical, sociological, and
economic perspectives to her already formidable credentials as an
art critic as she confronts an art milieu that seems to be without
purpose or moral authority. This is one of the rare works of
criticism that, with fervent intelligence, speaks to everyone who
cares about the state of our culture.
Suzi Gablik was born in New York City. Well known as a
lecturer, she has taught at the University of the South, and her
collages have been exhibited widely in the United States and
abroad. Her previous books include Progress in Art and Magritte.

“A thoughtful and sometimes scathing analysis of late-twentieth-

century art.”—The New Yorker
“An explosive indictment of modern art. This thought-provoking
book should be read by everyone who browses in museums an
galleries.”—Publishers Weekly

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