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The Great Modern Art Conspiracy 2

Post #12
Christian De Boeck (South Africa) wroteon December 5, 2008 at 8:07pm
Critiquing the Critic by Laurie Hogin
http://lauriehogin.com/writings_2.htm

Art criticism, in its modern form, was arguably an invention of the 19th century. Along with industrial models of production, there came to be what the social theorist Jurgen Habermas has called “professional expertise complexes”, bodies of specialized knowledge that are reproduced in the modern academy. Habermas was suspicious of them, and was critical of their impermeability and considered their existence counter to democratic ideals of free discourse on matters of concern in the civic arena.

The academic, and even institutionalized, practices of art criticism since then have required the artist to remain a mute, inarticulate producer of cryptic, symbolic, or beautiful objects or gestures that are then subject to demystification or aesthetic, technical, or other evaluation by the “critic”. In recent years, however, the legitimacy of those strictures has come into question. As art practices fall away from traditional media, gone are many of the traditional academic criteria for judging works of art; this is obvious enough. Certainly, this does not mean that there are no criteria, just that they are more complex and ethereal, determined ever more by the multifarious practices of artists themselves. It is no longer the job of an artist simply to draw a figure, or render, or compose well, though those things may be relevant to a particular artist’s practices. Rather, artists have many jobs (and unlimited choices of media), but all can be described as creative. It is the job of the accountant to account for fiscal realities; it is the job of the attorney to make sure the rules are followed; it is the job of the artist to insert something into the culture that wouldn’t be there otherwise, and to have it mean something.

This is where the critic comes in: It is the critic’s job, in part, to discuss how well the artist succeeds, and it is the critic’s job to engage in a process of revelation and exchange that promotes the free exchange and development of new ideas. It’s complex and very, very important. If the artist fails to orchestrate all the elements of the work with some degree of coherence (even if the coherence is available only subconsciously), then the work is a failure. If the critic fails to pick up on clues to the coherence that are present and available to the perception, to a careful reading, then the critic has failed. Again, this is a simplistic and incomplete discussion, but my point is this: Fortunately, artists are no longer considered to be mute, inarticulate creatures: Part of the job is participating in the discourses involving the huge and multiform strategies of expression that constitute art. As the critic points out the artist’s failures, so the artist is free to discuss the critic’s failures. Add in the increasing interest in multidisciplinary practices, and current trends in art schools to teach art as a way of thinking, of seeing, and of making that involves critical analysis, visual and cultural literacy, and language of all sorts, and you’ve got something Habermas might have liked. Critics and theorists write. Artists speak. Artists write. Sometimes they are the same people. This makes art all the more interesting.

The unconscious is always operative in the production of important (to the artist) art. Art deals in the realm of the symbolic, and engages with aspects of emotional life and memory that are often contradictory or ambivalent; works of art are more than expository essays in another form. This is not to undermine the importance of the conceptual. Pictures are puzzles, as Jim Elkins says. As I imply above, part of the artist’s job is to orchestrate multiple references, ideas and impulses into a communicative apparatus of some description. But, as an artist and as a teacher, I know that works of art embody these contradictions, sites of stress and ambivalence, and this is part of what gives them their power. Pictures also want things, as Tom Mitchell points out. They engage with deep needs, fears, joys, outrages, and memories we may not even know we have. Pictures require us to feel and do things. It may be the job of the critic to decipher these, as the contradictions and emotional ambivalences embodied in symbolic works often reflect the contradictions in our lives. These are important topics for discussion.

Among the first thinkers to question the traditional relationship between artist and critic were feminist theorists, artists and writers, Lucy Lippard and Griselda Pollock among them. Their critique of the critic was based in an analysis of patriarchal traditions in the academy and in the marketplace. These traditions emphasized authorities that were deployed in service of social control and exclusion, as the criteria for judgment and taste, as articulated in the 18th century by the likes of Kant and Goethe, excluded, as Goethe put it, “women, children, and the savage races”. There has always been bias in the deployment of critical expertise; even in it’s supposedly most enlightened corners, the world is still a very sexist and racist place.

Having said all that, I would like to respond to David Pagel’s review of my work in the LA Times on November 24th. I do so not as a wounded animal, as it were, but rather in a spirit of collegiality, firm in the belief that a broader discourse is a good thing. Unfortunately, the LA Times is an institution that Pagel has available to him in the publication of his thoughts and ideas; I remain, in the context of that discussion, mute and inarticulate. But I have the Web, and the gallery, so it is to these fora that I will turn.

Pagel’s discussion of my work begins with the statement that my use of materials is “all over the place”, but he does not expound. Contemporary art is full of examples of artists who vary their media strategies, using whatever materials are appropriate to a given concept. Painters who do this seem to be offered less critical tolerance than other artists, perhaps because certain mythologies about paintings not being “things” in the same way as other objects persists, and this fact requires greater attention from the artist if it is to be overcome. Further, given an artist’s prerogative not to be bound by restrictions on her practice, I was surprised that these efforts (my sculptures and “film costumes”) were not met with a critical analysis based on their effectiveness in deploying meaning within the context of the show, but with dismissal.

Then I realized he had a good point. The installation failed as such because I did not practice due diligence in relating one set of media practices to the others in the space. I am interested in the way that things, including paintings, generate meaning in accumulation with other things. (Bill Brown’s work on “thing theory” is an important discussion of things and meaning.) I have made successful installations in the past, but those were very site-specific and had limited numbers of paintings. I recognize I must proceed with greater care.

I take the greatest issue, however, with Pagel’s characterization of my work as “all striking the same high-pitched note, as if shrieking, ’The end is near. Modern culture is an aberration, utterly fake and irredeemably alienated from nature.’”

First off, the use of quotation marks around words I never said, nor would say, is mocking and disrespectful. The use of “high-pitched” and “shrieking” brings to mind an image of hysteria, with all the gender connotations associated with the etymology of the word. The history of phallocentric, masculinist discourses are replete with images of silly, hysterical, shrill women. This is intolerable enough in its apparent misogyny, but the fact is that I am not high-pitched, and never do I shriek.

Secondly, it is astounding that a critic of Pagel’s stature and experience would fail so utterly to read the content of the work. Of course, structuralist linguistics and the feminist theorists who deal with it identified the tendency of Western cultures to organize concepts in binary opposites, and to understand the world as sets of such binary pairs; chiefly influential among these are “nature” and “culture”. Gender, the binary opposites of “masculine” and “feminine”, is the organizing metaphor of patriarchy; as such, “nature” and “culture” have developed mythological attributes that correspond to the poles of this metaphor. “Culture” is active and rational, among other manly traits. “Nature” is disorganized and passive, mysterious, and virgin, the objectified Other to “man’s” active gaze. I am not an eco-feminist, but an ecologist (that is to say, interested in ecosystems, which I define according to the derivation of the word from the Greek eco-, meaning “home”) and a feminist, and a modernist in the Enlightenment sense.

The paintings in this show are not about the impingement of evil modern culture on hapless nature, but rather they are about the way in which SYMBOLIC representations of “nature” exclude the natural processes of hybridization, incorporation, evolution, complexity and diversity—the tendency (Darwin pointed it out, of course) of things to combine and recombine, the very enmeshment of “nature” and “culture” that constitutes who we are. They are intended, actually, to bear witness to the very interconnectedness of all things that the history of landscape excludes. My pictures are intended to challenge the myth of the binary as it pertains to the mythologies of “nature” evident in Western pictorial traditions. (As a straight woman, and a mother, in this man’s world, the binary structures of our language and culture have done me no good. It has done my gay friends and racialized friends even more harm.)

I make no easily discernible value judgments on “nature” as opposed to “culture”. That would be simple-minded. My feelings are contradictory and ambivalent. Nature is scary, deadly, and infectious, red in tooth and claw. Nature offers transcendence, a sense of what some call the spiritual, beauty and comfort. Modern culture is scary, destructive and overwhelming. Modern culture gives me my warm home and vaccines for my child. It’s all part of the same condition, the same truth. It is in the process of hybridization, as with evolution, that there are possibilities for change. My images are intended to bear witness to the emotional collateral of this process as I imagine and exaggerate its embodiment; these emotions are often contradictory, as the process suggests a future that is inherently fraught with anxiety. This is partially because hybridization, mutation and recombinance suggest a loss of identity. This is profoundly threatening to the binary systems on which our symbolic lives and social relationships are based, particularly masculine supremacy in the context of gender. At the same time, my invocation of natural history displays, field guides and landscape histories describes a system of naming that reiterates the taxonomies, divisions, and even demographics that feeds our narcissism. This is comforting, and to me, a little bit funny, especially since my creatures, mutants and hybrids all, reflect characteristics of products and processes, including shopping, advertising, politics, and language, that attempt to define me.

As for the compositions being static here, they certainly are. They are meant to refer to various histories and traditions in display and representation, including—and this information is in the press release and in the titles of the works—natural history dioramas, department store shelf and window display, and the history of landscape. I use these tropes because they have meaning, not just about the histories they represent, but about wishes and desires, including visual pleasure, narrative fantasy (in the psychoanalytic sense), the transcendence of time and death, and the exploration of identity promised by the collecting of things. Pagel writes, “The small paintings of single birds have all the drama of field-guide illustrations.” The piece is titled “Field Guide”! I did not want drama, at least not the visual kind that Pagel seems to wish I’d provided. I wanted them to resemble field-guide illustrations specifically to invoke the history of taxonomy and its implications for our (mis)understanding of our relationship with the rest of the world and the things in it we wish to dominate and possess even as we desire to recognize and connect.

He says, “…The medium-sized ones have the presence of generic portraits”. The faces, with their mutton-chop whiskers, were modeled on portraits of 19th-century captains of industry and other members of the ruling elite of the time, such as those that hang in public libraries, university buildings, and older corporate headquarters. In other words, they are modeled on generic portraits, again for the purpose of lending a specific set of meanings based on these references. Each single monkey represents an iconic white male. Each still-life object defines an allegorical narrative intended to satirize some aspect of current domestic policy. U.S. environmental policy is a monkey enjoying a fat cigar dangerously close to a gasoline can; disaster ensues. U.S. agricultural policy is a mustard-colored monkey jealously guarding his fast-food meal; our tax dollars subsidize really gross factory farming of exactly the foods that are contributing to the obesity epidemic. The “Red-Necked Red State Ring-Tail” brandishes his firearm as he engages in a nasty territorial display. This version of the phallic white male has great symbolic currency all over the heartland. It is much less visible in the blue islands of urban sophistication, but this particular allegory reflects a real phenomenon. The symbolic values, some of which derive their currency from binary metaphors, which I’m trying to satirize are arguably responsible for some of the mess we’re in now. Cooler heads don’t prevail when jingoistic identity is at stake, and environmental degradation is much more likely when “nature” is “other”. Really, is that so wrong of me? Maybe my satire is a bit heavy-handed, but in my defense, that’s characteristic of a lot of satire.
The large paintings look like natural history museum dioramas because they are supposed to. See above.

Pagel writes, “Hogin’s sculptures and costumes suggest that she feels similarly confined by her paintings”. This is useful. While it is not true any more than my interest in my job or my family suggests I feel confined by my studio practice, the sculptural objects are manifestations of interests I have in visual forms besides painting, but I can see how they fail to connect with the paintings because the installation lacked completeness and specificity. I love paintings, but I am interested in other forms, too. What is confining is a critical suggestion that diverse interests indicate a problem. The sculptural objects may not be as refined and complete in their concept and execution, but they represent a risk in my practice and an attempt to evolve. I still like them and feel they have value in my work, and will peruse them with Pagel’s critique in mind, and for that I am grateful.

It’s all one big colorful mash-up of all I am as a modern human, in this place, at this time, reveling in and revolted by what surrounds me, at turns outraged and thrilled by the way our desires manifest in the world.

Pagel closes by suggesting that “breaking out of the still life format by allowing narrative, drama and more fantasy into her pictures might solve the problem better than leaving painting behind for sculptural objects”. I would like to close by suggesting in turn that this exhortation is most distinctly not the job of the critic. The problem for him seems to be that he is bored by some of my subject matter but likes my technical facility well enough to want his interests (fantasies, dramas and narratives) expressed in my style. (Might I suggest a commission? Failing that, perhaps he should get his own studio!) I am pleased he thinks I am a good painter; I work very hard at it, but I am not interested in the type of fantasy that is implied here, and though I am interested in narrative and drama, and I am in no way leaving painting behind, but attempting new forms. My problem with his review of my work is not that it was critical, but that it’s harshness was gratuitous and disrespectful, perhaps a little sexist, even, and a little dishonest when he uses my intentional references as disparagements as though they were mistakes. I really wished he’d taken the time to be more than half-right about the subject matter. He is certainly capable of it. Collegiality demands no less, and I would look forward to future discussion.
Laurie Hogin
11/29/06

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Post #13
Christian De Boeck (South Africa) wroteon December 16, 2008 at 9:54am
Postmortem on Postmodern Art by Wayne Owens
http://www.dharmacafe.com/index.php/...ostmodern-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”.

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.

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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Post #14
Christian De Boeck (South Africa) wroteon December 17, 2008 at 3:17am
A bastion against cultural obscenity
In a speech delivered at Burlington House last night, the critic
Robert Hughes calls for a revitalised Royal Academy to defend art
against the degrading power of the wealthy collectors

Robert Hughes The Guardian, Thursday 3 June 2004 Article history
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2004/jun/03/art

Many years ago, when I was still cutting my first pearly fangs as an art critic, one thing used to be taken for granted by me and practically everyone I knew in what is so optimistically termed the "art world".

That thing was that all Academies were bad, the enemies of progress - and though nobody knew how to define that slippery notion of progress in the arts, we were all in favour of it, that went without saying.

What, you didn't like progress? You and Sir Alfred Munnings, fella. And the Royal Academy excited our particular scorn. It seemed to stand for everything that was most retrograde and irrelevant. No serious artist could gain anything from having the tarnished letters RA tacked on to their name, so redolent of boardroom portraits, cockle-gatherers at work or sunny views of Ascot.

Now, historically, this was an odd situation. For, as it was originally set up in 1768, the Royal Academy was only one of a number in Europe: unlike those in Paris, Madrid and elsewhere, it was probably the least official, a product of the English genius for structured informality.

Despite its name, it did not get subventions from the monarch. It enjoyed no government support and no guarantees of private patronage. It supported itself with annual shows, from whose sales it took a modest commission. These shows, which started in 1769, were for many years the chief artistic events in London.

Burlington House was not in any real sense the arm of a cultural establishment, as the French Academy was under the iron thumb of Le Brun. It attracted most of the most gifted and advanced artists then working in England. Nobody could say that a society that counted geniuses of the order of John Constable, JMW Turner or Henry Fuseli among its members was an enemy of inspired art. The counter-example always given is William Blake, who resented Joshua Reynolds' Discourses and his own tastes in painting, which ran towards Rubens and Rembrandt as well as Michelangelo. This created the idea, which many people still hold, that Reynolds hated Blake and was determined to repress him for his visionary genius.

There is no truth in this. It is one of the pious legends of modernism, a fiction of holy martyrdom. Blake certainly disliked Reynolds, and wrote a number of fierce epigrams to show it. "When Sir Joshua Reynolds died/All Nature was degraded/The King dropt a tear into the Queen's ear,/And all his pictures faded." Blake was not the only genius to be intolerant and slightly paranoid. But in fact the Academy didn't do so badly by Blake, and he continued to exhibit at it throughout most of his life. And there were a number of issues, such as the need for an art of high spiritual and historical seriousness, on which the two men certainly agreed, though they had different ideas on how to create it.

The myth of Reynolds' opposition to Blake fitted in nicely with a much later idea of the Academy as enemy of the new: but this really took hold in the first half of the 20th century, during which the Academy elected a series of ever-more conservative presidents, a process that reached a climax of sorts in the late 1940s when Sir Alfred Munnings - a brilliant horse-painter in his better moments but a paranoid blimp of a man - set out to use his presidency as a stick with which to beat Picasso, Matisse and assorted other Frogs, Wops, Huns and other denizens of that despicable place, Abroad.

Since Munnings raucously hated everything that Hitler had just been trying to wipe out as Degenerate Jewish Art, his timing was distinctly off. The Royal Academy, it seemed, had shot itself in the foot so dramatically that it no longer had even the stump of a leg to stand on.

By the time I first came to live in England, and for years thereafter, the obsoleteness of the Royal Academy as a benign factor in the life of contemporary art was simply assumed as a fact. I never heard any of the artists I knew at the end of the 60s mention it, let alone talk about some desire to join it. Nevertheless, one went to its shows, which were sometimes complete eye-openers. I will never forget the impact that the great Bonnard exhibition of 1966 had on me, or more recently, the 1987 show of British art in the 20th century. The chance to see shows like that, I realised, was one reason why I had wanted to leave Australia in the first place.

Anyway, as the years wore on, it began to seem a bit absurd to bear the Academy ill-will for things that happened in Burlington House when you were less than 10-years-old, or even not yet born. The rhetoric of Modernism had tried very hard, desperately hard, to separate itself from the Academic. It was as though the Academy were a kind of Medusa's head, whose gaze could turn talent to stone. The very term had been made into a dirty word, a word of abuse. But could that be the whole story? Looking back, I do not think so. As we know from Joshua Reynolds' Discourses, if we take the trouble to read them - which practically no one does - the Royal Academy once had very pronounced views on what constituted the great and the good in art. These views are now so out of currency that no one holds them. The idea that a revived Academy would or could clamp an iron fist of conformity on English painting and sculpture is simply absurd. It did not do that even in the 18th century. But there are quite clear and to me convincing reasons why we need such a revival today. And they have nothing to do with the elaboration of rules and conventions.

First of all, the idea of a democratised institution run by artists is an extremely valuable one. It was valuable in the 18th century and it is still today. And the good it can do for art cannot be replaced by either the commercial dealing system or by the national museums. I don't want to disparage dealers, collectors or museum directors, by the way. But I don't think there is any doubt that the present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso - close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states - something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological. As Picasso's biographer John Richardson said to a reporter on that night of embarrassment at Sotheby's, no painting is worth a hundred million dollars.

An institution like the Royal Academy, precisely because it is not commercial, can be a powerful counterweight to the degrading market hysteria we have seen too much of in recent years. I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between, and what else is news? I know, as most of us do in our hearts, that the term "avant-garde" has lost every last vestige of its meaning in a culture where anything and everything goes. Art does not evolve from lower states to higher. The scientific metaphors, like "research" and "experiment", that were so popular half a century ago, do not apply to art. And when everything is included in the game, there is no game to be ahead of. A string of brush marks on a lace collar in a Velásquez can be as radical as the shark that an Australian caught for a couple of Englishmen some years ago and is now murkily disintegrating in its tank on the other side of the Thames. More radical, actually.

But I have always been suspicious of the effects of speculation in art, and after 30 years in New York I have seen a lot of the damage it can do: the sudden puffing of reputations, the throwing of eggs in the air to admire their short grace of flight, the tyranny of fashion. It is fair that collectors should have influence: some of them really deserve to have it, although these are often the ones who care least about the power trip of wielding it - one thinks of those great benefactors the Sainsburys, for instance. But it is ridiculous that some of them should have the amount of influence they do merely because the tax laws enable them to use museums as megaphones for their own sometimes-debatable taste. Now England is far ahead of the US in such matters. I don't know of one major American museum that has an artist on its board of trustees, as the Tate, the National Gallery, and others here do. But you should go further. I believe it's not just desirable but culturally necessary that England should have a great institution through which the opinions of artists about artistic value can be crystallised and seen, there on the wall, unpressured by market politics: and the best existing candidate for such an institution is a revitalised Royal Academy, which always was dedicated to contemporary art.

Part of the Academy's mission was to teach. It still should be. In that regard, the Academy has to be exemplary: not a kindergarten, but a place that upholds the primacy of difficult and demanding skills that leak from a culture and are lost unless they are incessantly taught to those who want to have them. And those people are always in a minority. Necessarily. Exceptions have to be.

In the 45 years that I've been writing criticism there has been a tragic depreciation in the traditional skills of painting and drawing, the nuts and bolts of the profession. In part it has been caused by the assumption that it's photography and its cognate media - film and TV - that tell the most truth about the visual.

It's not true. The camera, if it's lucky, may tell a different truth to drawing - but not a truer one. Drawing brings us into a different, a deeper and more fully experienced relation to the object. A good drawing says: "not so fast, buster". We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at their own game. This was not a problem when the Academy was founded, because in 1769 such media were embryonic or non-existent. A quarter of a millennium later, things are different. But drawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies - the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid relation with the things we see and yearn to know about - is apparently immortal. And that, too, is why we need the Royal Academy: perhaps even more now than 50 or 100 years ago. May it live as long as history allows.

© Robert Hughes.

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Post #15
Christian De Boeck (South Africa) wroteon December 18, 2008 at 1:05pm
His TV series The Shock of the New changed the way people thought about modern art.
A quarter of a century on, Robert Hughes has returned to the story - and found a world overtaken by money and celebrity
Wednesday 30 June 2004
Robert Hughes: "the art world 'is taking on some of the less creditable aspects of showbiz'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2004/jun/30/art1

Twenty-five years is a mere eyeblink in the story of Egyptian, Mayan or even medieval English art, but it is a long time in the modern or (weasel word) post-modern context, and if one is given a single programme - a mere 55 minutes - to bring the story up to date from where The Shock of the New left off when we finished making the series, one is bound to fail. Too much has happened in art. Not all of that "too much", admittedly, is compelling or even interesting, but the ground is choked with events that defy brief, coherent summary. So we decided to sample rather than summarise. Most of the "1980s artists" over whom such a fuss was made have turned out to be merely rhetorical, or inept, or otherwise fallen by the wayside. Is there anyone who really cares much what Julian Schnabel or David Salle, for instance, are now doing? Do the recent paintings of Sandro Chia or Georg Baselitz excite interest? Maybe in your breast, but not in mine.

The period has been full of conceptual art, but conceptual art makes for utterly droning TV. On the other hand, there are a few - a very few - artists of the "neo-expressionist" generation whose work continues its efforts to take on the burden of history, to struggle to explain our bizarre and terrible times to us in memorable visual terms, and one of the most complex and rewarding of these talents, uneven though he can be, is surely Anselm Kiefer. No less so is Paula Rego, a painter I'd hardly heard of until a few years ago because she was scarcely known in the US - but how strongly put together, how viscerally and deeply felt, are her renderings of bad parental authority and of the psychic nightmares that lie just be low the supposedly sweet surface of childhood! Rego is a great subversive without a trace of the dull, academic conceptualism that renders the more approved American radical-feminists of the 80s-90s so tedious - and she draws superbly, which her sisters across the Atlantic have either forgotten or never learned to do. Like Kiefer, but unlike most painters at work today, she does art with a strong political content that never turns into a merely ideological utterance.

It used to be that media-based, photo-derived art looked almost automatically "interesting". It cut to the chase instantly, it mimicked the media-glutted state of general consciousness, it was democratic - sort of. The high priest of this situation was of course the hugely influential Andy Warhol, paragon of fast art. I am sure that though his influence probably will last (if only because it renders artmaking easier for the kiddies) his paragonhood won't, and despite the millions now paid for his Lizzes and Elvises, he will shrink to relative insignificance, a historical figure whose resonance is used up. There will be a renewed interest - not for everyone, of course, but for those who actually know and care about the issues - in slow art: art that takes time to develop on the retina and in the mind, that sees instant communication as the empty fraud it is, that relates strongly to its own traditions.

It doesn't matter whether the work is figurative or not. Sean Scully's big abstracts retain much more than a memory of experienced architecture, but they relate to the human body too, and there is something wonderfully invigorating about the measured density with which their paint brings them into the world. Not everything of value is self-evident and there is no reason in the world why art should be. Nor is it true that instantaneous media, such as photography and video, should or can deliver "more" truth than drawing. All you can say is that they offer a different sort of truth. This is an issue with which an artist like David Hockney has been struggling for years, and it's fascinating to see how he has given up on the photographic collages he used to make in favour of pure recording in watercolour, of which he is such a master.

Styles come and go, movements briefly coalesce (or fail to, more likely), but there has been one huge and dominant reality overshadowing Anglo-Euro-American art in the past 25 years, and The Shock of the New came out too early to take account of its full effects. This is the growing and tyrannous power of the market itself, which has its ups and downs but has so hugely distorted nearly everyone's relationship with aesthetics. That's why we decided to put Jeff Koons in the new programme: not because his work is beautiful or means anything much, but because it is such an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks. Koons really does think he's Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in America, who believe it. He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can't imagine America's singularly depraved culture without him. He fits into Bush's America the way Warhol fitted into Reagan's. There may be worse things waiting in the wings (never forget that morose observation of Milton's on the topo-graphy of Hell: "And in the lowest depth, a lower depth") but for the moment they aren't apparent, which isn't to say that they won't crawl, glistening like Paris Hilton's lip-gloss, out of some gallery next month. Koons is the perfect product of an art system in which the market controls nearly everything, including much of what gets said about art.

An interesting result of the growing power of the market is that artists and their dealers are looking for ways, through copyright law, to con trol what is written or broadcast about the work, so as to prevent critics who might feel less than prostrate admiration for it from saying anything about it at all. On TV, if you can't show, you can't tell. I have seen quite a lot of this in recent years; it is here to stay, and getting worse. Sometimes the results look merely silly, as when the American conceptual artist Mel Bochner, whose work (consisting of vaguely related words printed in capitals on canvas in various tasteful colours) we filmed in the last Whitney Biennial in New York, waited until a few days before broadcast to announce, through his agent, that he "did not wish to participate" in our film. Never mind.

Damien Hirst was another story. We were in London, hoping to film some of Hirst's work and perhaps a brief interview with him for The New Shock of the New. Oh no, absolutely not, came the word back. "Damien," said his gallery, "is very fragile to criticism." Could this fragile aesthete re ally be the Hemingwoid sheep-slicer, dot-painter and all-round bad boy? I had not actually written about Hirst's work (though I consider him a much more real artist than some of the lesser geniuses of our time) but it was clear he suspected he might be treated as someone less than Michelangelo or, for that matter, Richard Serra. The last message from him was that never, no-how, under no circumstances, could we film anything of his in the current show at the Tate, In a Gadda da Vida. Why? "Conservation reasons," it said. Better to discourage anything being said about the great work than risk the utterance of dissent or doubt.

I think the drift of such examples (and there are plenty of others) is clear enough. The art world is now so swollen with currency and the vanity of inflated reputation that it is taking on some of the less creditable aspects of showbiz. Hollywood doesn't want critics, it wants PR folk and profile-writers. Showbiz controls journalism by controlling access. The art world hopes to do the same, though on a more piddly level. No other domain of culture would try this one on. No publisher, fearing that an unfavourable review, would attempt to stop a book critic quoting from some novel. No producer would make a guarantee of innocuousness the price of a critic's ticket to the theatre. It just wouldn't happen. But in art, it can. And since it can, as Bill Clinton remarked in another context, it does.


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