Gara’s Weblog

It was a comment to my previous post, and the acute analysis on modern and postmodern art that Steven Pinker makes in The Blank Slate which prompted me to write about this issue that has been bothering me for a long time, since I was a History of Art student at university and got sick of attending self-pleasing lectures by academics who liked to embellish their discourse with never-ending pretension and shallowness. Back then, my boyfriend at the time and myself decided that we should manage to make a good living of creating a character, a put-on gay artist who would create an enormous amount of conceptual artistic crap, all backed up by a good amount of literature (to explain the work), and some good marketing (to explain and sell the artist). We thought that with the right strategy in place, the venture would no doubt take off. Sometimes still, when I visit certain exhibitions, watch some films or read a text with the same sort of resonance, or when I simply sit day after day in an office, I do wish we had at least given it a shot.

I will not copy every single extract from this chapter on The Blank Slate that is worth posting here or on any other blog because I would have to sit here for the rest of the evening, but there go quite a few which illustrate what I tried to exemplify with the previous video and the opening paragraph of this post.

First, Tom Wolfe:

Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed to me for the first time.. All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many thousand Pollocks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses, Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back, now moving closer -waiting, waiting, forever waiting for… it… for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be there- waiting for something to radiate directly from the painting on these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this moment, into my own optic chiasma. All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well- how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had got it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing”, you ninny, but “believing is seeing”, for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.

Now, Pinker and a special guest:

“Postmodernist scholars, taking off from the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, distrust the demand for “linguistic transparency” because it hobbles the ability “to think the world more radically” and puts a text in danger of being turned into a mass-market commodity. This attitude has made them regular winners of the annual Bad Writing Contest, which “celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles”. In 1998, first prize went to the lauded professor of rhetoric at Berkeley, Judith Butler, for the following sentence:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

This is NOT, may I note, made up. More Pinker:

“Though moral sophistication requires and appreciation of history and cultural diversity, there is no reason to think that the elite arts are a particularly good way to instill it compared with middlebrow realistic fiction or traditional education. The plain fact is that there are no obvious moral consequences to how people entertain themselves in their leisure time. The conviction that artist and connoiseurs are morally advanced is a cognitive illusion, arising from the fact that out circuitry for morality is cross-wired with our circuitry for status.”

“The moral and political track record of modernist artists is nothing to be proud of. Some were despicable in the conduct of their personal lives, and many embraced fascism or Stalisnism. The modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos” and added, enviously, that “artists, too, sometimes go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world”. Nor is the theory of postmodernism specially progressive. A denial of objective reality is no friend to moral progress, because it prevents one from saying, for example, that slavery or the Holocaust really took place. And as Adam Gopnik has pointed out, the political messages of postmodernist pieces are utterly banal, like “racism is bad”. But they are stated so obliquely that viewers are made to feel morally superior for being able to figure them out.

As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class -personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighbourhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy- are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members in good standing who adopted a few bohemian afectations. Given the history of the twentieth century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them. And if they want to hang a painting of a red barn or a weeping clown above their couch, it’s none of our damn business.

The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they’re surprised that people are staying away in droves?”

“In the year 2000, the composer Stefabia de Kenessey puckishly announced a new movement in the arts, Derrière Guard, which celebrates beauty, technique, and narrative. If that sounds too innocuous to count as a movement, consider the response of the director of the Whitney, the shrine of the dismembered-torso establishment, who called the members of the movement a bunch of crypto-Nazi conservative bullshitters“.

Enough copied for now. In doing this, of course, I’m also letting myself be the devil’s advocate- not all the effects of postmodernism are reprehensible, but about the flip side of the argument I will write some other time…