Monday, August 25, 2003
(6:29 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Modern Art
As I mentioned earlier today, while I was in New York, I enjoyed modern art in superabundance. I hit the Big Three art museums: the Metropolital Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The Guggenheim's exhibit "From Picasso to Pollock" was of special interest to someone like me, who has long been "interested" in art but whose knowledge comes mainly from paying extra close attention to Olivet's "Intro to Fine Arts" class. It was practically "The Norton Anthology of Art, 1900-1950," in that it had just a few selections from each of the artists being displayed -- somewhat disappointingly, MoMA had a more impressive Pollock than the single one at the Guggenheim. The exhibit on Kazimir Malevich was less interesting, in that I was more moved by the explanations on the wall than by the art itself. By far the best was the Kandinsky Watercolors. At the MoMA, the best part was the incredibly large exhibit of Max Beckmann, for which I did not even read the huge introductory text. Aside from Picasso himself, he seemed to be the most diverse artist I saw -- I took Thomas Merton's advice and just focussed on a few, which I looked at very, very closely. At the Met, we looked mainly at the older stuff and some Asian things.
If I lived in New York, I'd likely spend too much money on getting a membership at all of them and go all the time (much like I currently subscribe to an excessive three literary magazines, something no human being can keep up with). In keeping with my normal masochism, I genuinely enjoy modern art, and in fact I find that the older stuff, even the early Impressionists, does not move me. Although Kevin made an obvious joke at my expense when I expressed this preference, modern art seems to speak to my own experience more than earlier things (he pointed to a ridiculously abstract painting and said, "So that speaks to your experience?"). I look at many of these paintings and see that that really is how the world is -- at this point, any attempt at direct representation, even the more "subjective" approach of the Impressionists, seems like some kind of bad joke.
What bothered me toward the end of "Picasso to Pollock," though, was that some of the artists seemed to give up on the world altogether, and the point became merely to continue the respected tradition of applying paint to canvas. Zizek talks about this in The Fragile Absolute, the fact that the role of contemporary art seems to be to try desperately to keep the space for "art" open, even after art itself seems to be exhausted and in some sense over. Art becomes nothing but a commentary on art, much in the same way that the study of literature shifted toward the study of theory some time around the 1970s. It's not that students are "reading Derrida instead of Proust, if they read anything at all" (Jameson), but rather that there is no more Proust, or that in some sense Derrida is our Proust, just as Harold Bloom may be our James Joyce. Every artist is painting (or sculpting, or assembling urinals, or photographing) about art, leading to an increasingly academic feel to the art world, just as in the literary world, we have a flood of novels about an aspiring novelist prevailing over his MFA program and finally learning to become a novelist who writes about writing novels.
At the same time, some false sentimentalism of the authentically "popular" art (Thomas Kinkade) is clearly inadequate, because our knowledge of marketting lets us see that the preferences of the masses are not in any sense authentic. Art loses its subversive power -- all the subversiveness is taken into account in advance and is in fact expected, as illustrated in this Onion article. Everyone can continue to play their meaningless little game, the academics effectively neutralized in their little circle jerk, the public pacified by corporate propaganda materials. The figure of the heroic artist writing in protest is rendered absurd in our context; even a figure such as Kafka seems to be impossible, and if one did come about, we would patronizingly diagnose him with some psychological disorder or other. I don't know if there is a solution to this situation or if it needs a situation, if the evacuation of meaning might possibly be considered a good thing, a gift to be given to as many people as possible through the spread of the mass market and democracy.
My analysis is probably hampered by my disproportionate emphasis on literature in a post supposedly about art; I apologize. I also completely left out classical music, but it seems to follow largely the same trajectory. The only possible "solution" seems in my mind to go back to the classical modernism of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, or Arnold Schoenberg, but even a "return" to Thomas Pynchon, Jackson Pollock, or John Cage seems like wishful thinking.
Yes, I did write this long post in the misguided hope that I would provide something to comment on -- I know I have at least occasional readers who are more knowledgable in the areas that I have just commented on, and I painted such a sweeping picture that I'm bound to have screwed up somewhere. So let's have it.
