Postmortem on Postmodern Art

Donald Kuspit’s withering critique of postmodern art,  “The End of Art,” surgically exposes the mocking, entropic cynicism that has ravaged this creative ethic for decades. It is also an inspired defense of the great aesthetic formally known as “high art”.

by Wayne Owens

Remember that queer psychic malaise that kept nagging at you while you were sipping a glass of wine at that high-end art opening your friends dragged you to last month? How something in your soul couldn’t shake the feeling of vanity and emptiness that kept insinuating itself as you strolled among the unsatisfying pictures?

Are you still trying to find your way clear of the dense fog of soul negation and outright chicanery being offered up—or is it down?—by what still, despite all evidence to the contrary, lays claim to the appellation “The Art World?”

Take heart, my friend. You may be surprised to learn that it’s probably not necessary to consult your therapist…or your astrologer…or to up your dose of whatever pharmacological miracle you’re currently using these days to ward off The Demons.

Indeed, your reaction to much of what currently lays claim to the exalted status of “postmodern art” may be ironic proof of your insistent sanity. You are surely not alone. In fact you are in very, very good company.

Donald Kuspit’s withering critique of postmodern art is an inspired defense of the great aesthetic formally known as high art, as well as a surgical exposure of the mocking,
entropic cynicism which has ravaged this creative ethic for decades. His courageous book, The End of Art, makes the claim that ominous forces have overwhelmed the ancient understanding that art is purposed to serve our understanding of the transcendental.

Despite the ever-changing array of ephemeral art-theories and fashionable schools of strictly surface concern, Kuspit remorselessly outlines how what he describes as “postart” has purposely obliterated that unique gift which can relieve us of the agony of a stark materialism, and which alone enables us, mercifully, to exist with integrity in what is clearly a madhouse world. Kuspit begins where he sees the genesis of this relentless and willful obfuscation: with the famous readymades of Marcell Duchamp and the primal, pre-Adamic existentialism of Barnett Newman.

It was Duchamp who deliberately projected a sort of baffling double-mindedness onto his notoriously ordinary objects; who attempted to seduce the observer into the fantasy notion that his works of art were all and nothing at once—a simultaneous degradation-exaltation radiating from an elusive center which would vanish the instant it was conceptually apprehended.

Can one see such objects both ways—as everyday artifacts and elegant works of art simultaneously? That is exactly how Duchamp would like us to see his readymades. They have a double identity. They are socially functional artifacts that have been changed into sublime artistic masterpieces by the creative act of Duchamps’ psyche. But they retain their everyday functionality; they revert to it in the blink of a creative eye, or rather in the mind. In short, they embody aesthetic osmosis while remaining inert matter. Supremely ambiguous, they are supremely perverse; that is, they blur the difference between art and non-art, an act of differentiation all too often regarded as the gist of modern creativity. The tantalizing ambiguity that is the readymade precludes aesthetic idealization. When The Fountain, (1917) was praised as beautiful and tasteful, as occurred when it entered the museum, Duchamp became angry, for it was understood exclusively on the aesthetic plane, which destroyed its confused identity as art/non-art, that is, mentally art, physically non-art.

It was Duchamp’s attempt to dismiss the aesthetic responsibilities of the artist be feigning a sort of sublime indifference to it—by leeching it of emotion—and by therefore suggesting that a crippling ambiguity is the actual source-condition of existence; that indeed a kind of elemental confusion is the native and eternal condition of mankind. Duchamp intended to strike at the very heart of art itself, by denigrating aesthetics as a farcical absurdity. It is Duchamps’s insistence on a primal ambiguity that exposes his loveless nihilism—he retreated to the rigors of chess after relegating art to a sort of secondary concern—as well as his need to lay waste to the totality of culture which had come before him. Indeed Duchamp’s methods seem to embody what Blake decried as “ a pretence of Art to destroy Art” which has, not surprisingly, devolved over the decades into what Kuspit now dismisses as anti-art, or postart, or mere commercial entertainment and creative degradation.                                                                       
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In the case of Barnett Newman, Kuspit finds the aesthetical under siege in the anti-human insistence of Newman on certain primitive, almost animistic energies which he felt were the essence of all created phenomenon. For Newman, art involved a sort of return to a state before the fall of biblical man, before civilization and its accelerating madness. He experienced himself as defiantly alone in a profoundly inhospitable universe. He believed in a regression to some pre-human state of being which was essential to his notion of creativity, to his dependence on a kind of preternatural energy which could elevate him above the bleak mediocrity of industrial society. His was a sort of abstract paganism, in which only a mythic return to pre-human creative energies could justify the lonely howl of the artist, acutely separate and adrift in a universe of eternal night.

What Newman calls the “primal aesthetic root” is inseparable from “original man, shouting his consonants…in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his helplessness before the void…It was a primal act, full of the futility of self-recognition, acknowledging human isolation in an inhuman universe.

It is the unique gift of Kuspit to see behind these clever masks of mental seclusion; and to follow the devastating trends in art which have brought us at last to the point where we can no longer assert that art has any real import in our lives at all. What both Duchamp and Newman held in common was the bedrock notion that the aesthetic of art be confined to a strictly mental function; that indeed the separate, personal mind of the artist is the seminal truth in art, and that the actual process of making a work of art and the end-product itself are inferior to its isolated conception. That is to say, they each represent two different modes of a willful retreat into the personal labyrinth of human subjectivity, into a kind of gloomy mental isolation. Thus Newman and Duchamp exemplify what occurs when the dynamic energy of life and love are deliberately withdrawn from the actual human world of culture and art, when what Freud called the “death instinct” lays claim to our most passionate relational aspirations. 

Kuspit brilliantly traces the downward-spiraling trends of this malevolent assault on aesthetics in art; and we arrive at last at the melancholy present, where commerce and the surface diversions of mere entertainment have almost entirely subsumed what was once known as fine art, or high art. The inspired art that can move us deeply, that can re-connect us with the healing realms of the great unconscious, can find no path into the shrill markets of postmodernism, where the exaltation of the vulgar, the banal, the commercially viable and the strictly ideological are the price of entry.

Andy Warhol most negatively embodies Kuspit’s most passionate concerns. With Andy Warhol we reach the final entropic hell of art in the western world. Warhol’s genius, if such it could be called, was in his cynical manipulation of the market mechanism in the artistic realm. He saw how the market, with its inhuman dynamic, could be used to exploit art in a mass culture driven by commercial advertising. It is with Warhol that the vivifying energy so critical to human culture is handed over to a passive, assembly-line mechanics, a pervasive dullness which can only appeal to the latent morbidity of the human ego. It is with Warhol’s cynical celebration of profit over inspiration that postmodern art becomes what Blake called “the mere art of guinea-mongering.”

By identifying art with money, Warhol devalues art while giving it the value of money—which is valueless unless it can be exchanged for something. Art loses spiritual cachet to gain social and economic cachet—the credibility, influence, and power that only money has in a consumer society. The artist was once thought of as sacred—he had a spark of God’s creativity in him—but Warhol’s artist is a businessman, profaning everything sacred and creative by putting a price on it, as Marx said. Warhol is a born salesman; with him art loses its mystery and openly becomes a commodity for sale. It seems to have no other identity than that of a commodity and no other value than the economic value it acquires by being sold. It also has the built-in obsolescence of every commodity. It inevitably loses excitement with time—after the fifteen minutes in which it was famous, and thus exciting, as Warhol said. Warhol’s art exploits the aura of glamour that surrounds material and social success, ignoring its existential cost. His art lacks existential depth; it is a social symptom with no existential resonance. He began his career as a commercial artist, and never stopped being one, ultimately making upscale commercial art—a deadpan art about commercial celebrities, including himself. He assimilated art into money, robbing it of spirituality and integrity. For Warhol, art is not a private religion that promises salvation, but a branch office of the religion of money. Warhol, like Duchamp, who was also obsessed with money, and also made deadpan art, is what the law calls a “corrupt persuader”, not to say panderer, toying with desire the way Duchamp played with intellect.

It is not so much that Kuspit is pointing out that the emperor has no clothes; rather it is that he understands that the emperor is a corpse; and that we are all of us participants in a collective pathology, a bizarre postart cult which is an ironic and exhausted consecration of death.
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Yet even as our world careens toward some grotesquely-willed apocalypse, Kuspit announces the resurrection of the aesthetical ideal with the arrival of what he calls the New Old Masters. These are emerging artists who, while honoring both the traditional and the avante-gard, are creating works of art which regenerate the great spirit of the past with a visionary penetration of contemporary life. They are returning art to its natively unified dynamic—they insist that the concept be alive in the creation; that there is no enduring hierarchy between the mind of the artist, the process of creation, and the final, material work of art itself. Hence the elusive barriers which have so bitterly isolated the public from any genuine sense of a unifying aesthetic are being dissolved; and we are reminded, yet again, that in the ancient cultures the word artist was best translated as “worker for the people.”

Donald Kuspit has reminded us that when art and science become corrupted, there remain no effective means for civilization to honor all that which is great in God and man. He has with mpeccable integrity shown us the price we all of us must pay when these noble arms of humanity become withered, become preoccupied with a mocking triviality; a fascination with greed, fame, and a fearful immunity from the simple human fate of living-and-dying.

 

Wayne Owens is a writer who lives in a spiritual community in Northern California.
 

 

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