The End of Art?

The End of Art?

"The Trivialization of Outrage: The Artworld at the End of the Millennium" by Roger Kimball, in Quadrant (Oct. 1999), 46 George St., Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia 3065.

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"The Trivialization of Outrage: The Artworld at the End of the Millennium" by Roger Kimball, in Quadrant (Oct. 1999), 46 George St., Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia 3065.

The controversial elephant-dung Virgin Mary recently exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum of Art was another reminder that almost anything can be accepted as art today. This is "bad for art—and for artists," says Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion. "It is especially bad for young, unestablished artists, who find themselves scrambling for recognition in an atmosphere in which the last thing that matters is artistic excellence."

Artists desperate to say or do something new in an "art world" obsessed by novelty "make extreme gestures simply in order to be noticed," Kimball observes. But the audience becomes inured. "After one has had oneself nailed to a Volkswagen (as one artist did), what’s left?"

To fill the aesthetic void, Kimball points out, politics rushes in. "From the crude political allegories of a Leon Golub or Hans Haacke to the feminist sloganeering of Jenny Holzer, Karen Finley, or Cindy Sherman, much that goes under the name of art today is incomprehensible without reference to its political content."

The avant-garde, which emerged with its "adversarial" gestures in the late 19th century, Kimball avers, "has become a casualty of its own success. Having won battle after battle, it gradually transformed a recalcitrant bourgeois culture into a willing collaborator in its raids on established taste. But in this victory were the seeds of its own irrelevance, for without credible resistance, its oppositional gestures degenerated into a kind of aesthetic buffoonery."

Too much is made, Kimball contends, of the tribulations of the 19th-century avant-garde artists, such as Edouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent Van Gogh. "The fact that these great talents went unappreciated has had the undesirable effect of encouraging the thought that because one is unappreciated one is therefore a genius." The truth, however, writes Kimball, is that, in any era, "most art is bad. And in our time, most art is not only bad but also dishonest: a form of therapy or political grumbling masquerading as art."

The contemporary art world, in his view, has lost touch with beauty—and "without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself." Yet a purely aesthetic conception of art, divorced from the rest of life, is also unsatisfactory. Art needs "an ethical dimension," Kimball insists. "We have come a long way since Dostoyevsky could declare that, ‘Incredible as it may seem, the day will come when man will quarrel more fiercely about art than God.’ Whether that trek has described a journey of progress is perhaps an open question."

 

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