Forever Contemporary: On the Entrenchment of Taste in the Art World
Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988. Collection SFMOMA, purchase through the Marian and Bernard Messenger Fund and restricted funds. © Jeff Koons.
1. How long can art remain “contemporary”?
Like the universe, the art world has been expanding a long while, with no end in sight. Growth for the modern art world came, early on, with befitting adolescent pains. The disruption of aesthetic, cultural and social norms that was intrinsic to the avant-garde’s ethos had to be concilliated with the degree of social conformity implicated in the art world’s maturing accomplishments. Thus, milestones such as MoMA’s founding a century ago also foreshadowed unpalatable institutionalization, bureaucratization, and commercialization for modern art. As it turned out, those growing pains further spurred artists’ explorations for a few decades, stretching the borders of what new art could be.
Growth had a different, rather self-ingratiating effect on what we’ve come to call “contemporary art.” The designation “contemporary” replaced “modern” at emerging museums by the 1980s, signaling that the art of the now had officially overtaken the art of the new. Globalism, both economic and cultural, tugged into this century an art world intent on moral rehabilitation following its ruinous market collapse in 1991. Surprisingly, that juncture set off a spectacular surge for the contemporary art world, ongoing to this day. Of lesser note was the subsequent entrenchment of the standard of taste. It was unforeseen, swift, and proved to be resilient. The entrenchment of taste shut the art world’s vents: the now of its art has been recirculating since. Auction houses, for instance, continue listing artworks dating back over 40 years as “contemporary.”
For contrast, recall how taste shifted apace during the artistically hyper-fertile and chaotic first decades of the 20th century. To be recognized in an art world as yet unbound by institutions, a modern artist had no other recourse but to address the expectations of fellow artists. The avant-garde was propelled by their mingling, emulating, and competing with each other. Successive artist-led movements were triggered by opposition to preceding or contemporary rivals, articulated from a philosophical or political principle that culminated in a shared aesthetic cause. They flaunted their programs in manifestos and public endorsements by allied critics and operated somewhat as political parties—each a congregation with a common agenda, a public purpose and shared enemies, but also with often rabid internecine struggles. While not every early modernist movement was politically active, together they represented the full gamut of political trends of their time, a genuine diverseness that fostered the adversarial dynamic which in turn led to the astonishing evolution of modern art well into the Sixties.
When I began exhibiting my work a couple of decades later, I got to face the last of those characteristic quarrels. By then, ensuing art trends led to the sorts of dramas once delivered by antagonizing artist-led movements, and the leading painting vogues—nowadays amalgamated under Neo-Expressionism—were being challenged by up-and-coming post-conceptualists such as Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, and Barbara Kruger. Echoing the veteran conceptualists they looked up to, their disdain for neo-expressionist painters derived from a conviction that art should not be valued as the demonstration of an artist’s inflated subjectivity, but as an instrument of scrutiny and criticism of the ruling system. Their much-debated moniker notwithstanding, the post-conceptualists’ coolly cerebral installations, objectual pastiches, video projections, and photo-text works looked fresh and provocative: The shared motivation to identify, legitimize, and embrace the latest inheritor of the vanguard’s baton had been triggered yet again, as had recurred throughout the 20th century among art professionals and aficionados. According to word on the SoHo streets, the post-conceptualist turn was at hand. The extent of its staying power was beyond anyone’s imagination.
As the new millennium approached, painting became, until further notice, effectively verboten. The post-conceptualist stance extended worldwide and projected itself back to the contemporary art capitals under the pretense of an inclusive “multicultural” style. In practice, it amounted to a loose overhauling of earlier countercultural tastes, with added flavors. The ascendant international style washed away proponents of alternative aesthetic stances, while submitting, in turn, to the “politically correct” etiquette that overtook the Nineties and restricted—as etiquette does—social behavior in regard to both content and form. That such etiquette should have impinged heavily on art is natural insofar as form and content are fundamentally partnered in its aesthetic articulations. Less natural was the unreserved complicity of the art market, art institutions, and artists themselves in espousing the politicized etiquette to the point it became inherent to the style. The forces that brought about this consensus may be queried retroactively, with a nod to the prominent art critic of the post-war period, Clement Greenberg, whose pivotal essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” announced an agenda for a progressive taste that remains a benchmark against which the present standard of taste may be assessed.
Clement Greenberg in 1976. Screenshot source.
2. Greenberg domesticates the avant-garde
By the early twentieth century, art historians established that an art period’s stylistic developments encode much more than the whims of changing taste—that such developments should be studied as markers of profound epochal significance. Accordingly, the radical stylistic shifts of modern art could also be mined for deep societal insights, even if the insights had to remain speculative until future confirmation. Clement Greenberg sought to contribute to that impulse by claiming to disclose tensions deployed between two opposing cultural forces within modern capitalism: sophisticated, elitist avant-garde art, and the crass, populist industry of kitsch. He intended to enlighten his own present in order to promote an agenda for the future, one aligned with the Trotskyite Partisan Review, where “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” would appear.
The essay declared the defining trait of the artistic avant-garde to be its defiance of capitalist cultural decay. Concurrently, Greenberg decided that the aesthetic principle stimulating modern art was exercised through the artists’ attention to process and medium at the expense of representation and narrative content. Thus avant-garde art marched inexorably toward abstraction. He convinced himself such a path was an instance of an “evolution of taste” that portended the triumph of socialism. His reasoning remained rather abstruse, but, at least, it could not be mistaken for politicized propaganda. For him, an artist’s open opposition to capitalism was neither sufficient nor necessary to belong to the legitimate avant-garde. He argued, for instance, that Picasso and Braque had been fighting the good fight, even if unbeknownst to them, by devising and forging Cubism (becoming rather wealthy in the process was of no concern). Breton and his Surrealists, on the other hand, could declare allegiance to communism all they liked, but their art remained mired in reactionary figuration. Greenberg would refuse to certify the avant-garde credentials of other modern movements as well, as though the acumen of his judgment showed that history itself erred in its manifestations of vanguardism.
Once the European modern art movements dissolved in the devastation of the war, Greenberg took the opportunity to seize the avant-garde’s mantle and secure his ambition as the activator, cultivator, and apologist of modern taste in the United States. His campaign for a unitary vanguard embodied by abstract art was mighty successful, cementing the reputations of painters such as Pollock and de Kooning. Remarkably, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” fared even better than its author—as it has remained in high esteem long after he became passé. A less quixotic Greenberg would later boast that his essay was full of holes. To be sure, the future did not concur with the younger critic’s prophetic enthusiasms. Moreover, the political validation of his criterion and the diagnosis of its cultural context now seem somewhat disingenuous.
The publication of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in the fall of 1939 overlapped with the invasion of Poland by the same Nazi regime that was already waging a campaign of annihilation against avant-garde art, among other better-known extermination efforts. For their part, Stalin and Mussolini had already finished off Soviet Constructivism and Italian Futurism. Greenberg himself noted that modern totalitarianisms espoused kitsch as official taste to fit their demagogic designs. The evidence underscored that the avant-garde came about not only by virtue of capitalism’s dynamic as he had argued, but also as a virtue of the competition and the freedoms involved in that dynamic. To even insinuate such an idea, however, would have brought upon Greenberg an immediate eviction from his intellectual circle. Fate would have him sidelined anyway, but his campaign for modern art as an esoteric harbinger of a redeeming future was embraced well beyond the critic’s milieu. The impulse was bequeathed to subsequent generations and, to this day, remains a fundamental conviction of believers in contemporary art.
Warhol at New York’s Stable Gallery, 1964. Photograph: Getty Images.
3. The avant-garde goes to school
Given the turns that led to the student revolts of ’68, the commercial and institutional success of Greenbergian formalism incensed nonconformist artists and critics. The triumphs of modern art’s progress toward pure abstraction ended up offering little to the study of art as progressive history in the making. For the politically inclined, visual art could regain its relevance by generating conspicuous friction and tension vis-à-vis the technologically mediated, increasingly consumerist, and seductively alienating capitalist establishment that prevailed in the American sphere after the Second World War. Those who stood up to Greenberg’s aesthetics—Pop, Minimal, Conceptual, Feminist artists—went on to inscribe the parameters of taste that transferred over to contemporary art.
The massive avant-garde wave of the Sixties reignited the inventiveness, diversity, and group rivalries of pre-war modernists, with a notable exception: the political options available to an artist with avant-garde ambitions shrank to fit the prevalent countercultural protocols. Canny artists assumed the task of producing suitable material to stimulate the analytical faculties of progressive cultural critics, who would reciprocate by certifying in print the significance of those artists—setting into play an extended (and ongoing) exercise in symbiotic legitimization. Fittingly, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes of 1964 inspired philosopher Arthur Danto to argue that artworks are best appreciated as “embodied meanings” waiting to be unpacked by an enlightened specialist.
Indeed, specialists engineered arguments to allow new art to pass political muster. While the chameleonic Warhol would be construed as a figure judgmental of consumer society, the Minimalists could be hailed as heirs to the Soviet Constructivists. Minimalism and Pop prospered by compounding coolness and criticality within the art market, by then well established, where the appropriate novelty produced commensurate profit. Artists with more uncompromising agendas turned to making art they trusted could not become merchandise—a concern common to Situationism, Fluxus, Concept Art, Performance, Body Art, and Land Art. Their creative activities needed to be provided for with income from sources other than the art market. This inconvenience would be mitigated once the social upheavals fizzled away and the cultural revolutionaries retreated to universities’ departments of the social sciences and humanities, spilling naturally into art schools, where they would welcome the institutional refuge and patronage while taking over the curricula.
In 1971, CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) renewed its entire faculty with militantly antiestablishment artists. By the time I enrolled in the early eighties, incoming students were subjected to a torrent of “Critical Theory,” where the word of Baudrillard, Derrida, and Foucault stood as divine revelation. Initiates remained unsupplied with the tools to bring the arcane canon into perspective but would learn to nod approvingly whenever someone alluded to the simulacrum, the différance, or the épistémè. A regime of intellectual co-option secured the students’ loyalty, guaranteeing, in turn, that sympathy for the cultural revolution got handed over from one professorship to the next. Unsurprisingly, the artistic models associated with such political aspirations remain unquestioned, admired, and emulated in MFA programs.
Jörg Immendorf, Deutschland Café XIII, 1982. Collection Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, purchase through the Horsley and Annie Townsend Bequest. © Jörg Immendorf.
4. The umbilical cord of gold
In “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” Greenberg expressed concern for how vanguard artists would sustain themselves during the terminal phase of capitalism—predicted in Marxist economic theory—when the wealthy, the class that bankrolls modern art, ends up being reduced to a handful of oligarchs. To boot, they might also succumb to kitsch. Despite his ideological extrapolations, the young Greenberg did not disregard the harsh reality that the production of art relies on an annoying “umbilical cord of gold” between artists and patrons.
Greenberg may be excused for failing to foresee the role universities would play in providing sustenance to radical artists. Nonetheless, his fatalistic economic forecast proved to be thoroughly amiss. Instead of shrinking, the participation of an ever-increasing number of players with purchasing power, including many oligarchs, boosted both the size and value of the art market by a factor of several hundred. For instance, in 1957 a Gauguin sold for $104,000 (equivalent to $930,000 today), the most expensive modern painting at the time; while in 2015 a de Kooning went for $300,000,000.
The market for new art hadn’t prospered quite as handsomely while left-wing politics flourished and took over academia. That is, not until gallerists and collectors bet aggressively on a range of revisionist figurative painters in the Eighties. Measuring up to the hedonistic urges of the decade, the newly fashionable art currency was minted in huge, flashy, and sloppily resolved canvases churned out by extroverted painters like Julian Schnabel, Jörg Immendorff, and Salomé. Their paintings went on to sell in the low six figures—then unprecedented for contemporary artists. In the public imagination, the starving artist was supplanted by the star artist, as some attained fame and fortune in the short term. Whereas art was becoming a somewhat reputable career, back in academia the “Return of Painting” was vehemently condemned. Still, the art boom paved the way for now-familiar art world players such as the globetrotting curator, the cosmopolitan collector, the transnational gallery, the art fair as a de rigueur date, and the high-flying contemporary art auction. The seeds of the contemporary art industry sprouted and took root.
Yet, there was a limit, at least back then. The flamboyant speculation in contemporary paintings came under imminent threat following Wall Street’s Black Monday crash of October 1987. Widespread insolvency exposed art auction prices, which, for a while, wound up—or so it was rumored—being inflated by the dealers themselves until they also ran out of funds. By 1991, the total of auction sales collapsed to about a quarter of their 1989 record high. With trust and faith in the contemporary art market shattered, a majority of galleries shut down for good (as did publications, fairs, and alternative spaces). The decade-long art party was over.
Today, the raucous output of painters at the crest of the Eighties wave has mostly remained off-limits even to dealers eager to re-launch long-neglected artists (Basquiat being one notable exception.) Yet one might still argue that, in demonstratively breaching all conceptualist and minimalist dogmas, theirs was the last generation of artists that genuinely rebelled against their predecessors within the adversarial dynamics of the avant-garde.
Daniel Joseph Martinez, Museum Tags, 1993. Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
5. The discreet charm of the antiestablishment set
Public repentance for past sins would be required from surviving art promoters—dealers, curators, critics—to rise from the ashes of the art market crash. They were soon lamenting in unison the outlandish voracity of previous years and declaring sympathy for the critical mantras long nurtured in academia. A scapegoat to soak up the evils of art’s so-called “commodification” would come in handy, and the baffling proneness of paintings to being bought and sold fit the bill. The crash was said to have disclosed painting as the corroding source of blatant profiteering, that painters had spellbound the art world into a rapacious trance. The exercise in moral laundering required that painting be extirpated like a cancerous tumor and given up for dead for the sake of the future health of art. It was a matter of saving face and getting back to business as soon as possible because the art-marketing machinery of the previous decade could still be serviceable, and its operators were eager to restart it. In 1993, at a famously politicized Whitney Biennial, only one out of ten artists selected was a painter, compared to one out of four as featured in 1989. And by 1998, neither shortlist of artists considered for the prestigious Turner and Hugo Boss prizes included a single painter.
As though providentially at hand, the loyal disciples of earlier conceptualists were already coming on strong right before the crash. Post-conceptualist productions in so-called New or Alternative media—meaning anything but traditional painting—had assumed a guise to fit the times, with a splash of Pop’s sauciness and a dash of Minimal elegance. The rivalries that had existed between those art movements back in the 1960s were conveniently set aside in the name of a reformed, purportedly sophisticated, and officially sanctioned taste, as Greenberg had done by consolidating avant-garde taste half a century earlier. The new art, however, had to sell, after all—that is, it had to be commodified. The conundrum was tackled by demanding that artworks convey a caveat emptor confession of their condition as high-end merchandise. From then on, moral liability would be excused from art that resorted to cheeky irony, raw cynicism, sanctimonious blame-throwing, or gloomy pieties intended to supply a patina of criticality and announce, literally or figuratively, the artist’s allegiance to the antiestablishment cause. All consideration that this newly devised moral shield might end up being just as fraudulent as a painting’s glow was pushed aside.
Artists that had previously put their faith in painting as a means to fame and fortune took no time in adopting the banner of post-conceptualism. Meanwhile, the prestigious commercial galleries that remained in business were soon scouting for artists trained in anti-market schools like CalArts. Even burnt-out collectors were persuaded that the regenerative route to follow would not only be world-altering and on the right side of history; it would also be profitable.
The doctrine that contemporary art must resist, expose, or, better yet, subvert and short-circuit the ruling order would end up being institutionalized at every level of the contemporary art ecosystem. Beyond the art schools, its inculcation could be carried out equally well at new curatorial studies programs in universities, at dealer training courses provided by the auction houses, and through art advisors who steer nascent collections toward respectability and facilitate the admittance of new collectors into a rarefied club by joining the chorus. Just as academia devolved into a partisan monoculture, an undivided ideological posture propagated throughout the art world. Once settled, the consensus managed to consolidate the interests of the remaining drivers of adversarial standpoints—the market and the academy. And, thus, the century’s recurrent rise of competing art stances came to a discreet and uneventful end.
Barbara Kruger, Untitled, 1987 (Detail) at ArtBasel 2009. Source.
6. Money talks
Over the past three decades, and to this day, the art world’s consensus has led to the creation of astonishing value—monetary value, that is. The auction houses’ sales of contemporary art had increased twenty-five-fold to nearly three billion dollars by 2021. The collecting base for contemporary art, previously limited to American and European wallets, spread to every place where great fortunes are made—Russia, China, Arab sheikdoms, India, and Latin America. Notably, contemporary art managed to remain mostly impervious to two financial crises (in 2001 and 2009), and, thereafter, its prices soared to uncharted heights, often reaching values in seven, and even eight, figures. Contemporary art has become an asset recognized by financial institutions, and complex investment funds have been devised to speculate on it, spreading the scent of 17th-century Dutch Tulipmania. Accordingly, any noticeable participation in the art world evolved to command substantial material and logistical investments. Both public and private collections of contemporary art compete to be housed in the latest architectural monument, while high-profile galleries have turned into sizable international corporations. For their part, successful artists employ dozens of assistants to satisfy demand while their product lines dispose of exorbitant manufacturing costs.
Whereas recognized artists might have lacked gallery representation in the past due to their work not being commercially viable, by now the market has demonstrated a startling capacity to thrive in the buying and selling of artworks that at any other time would have been unthinkable. Wealthy baby boomers now acquire “difficult” work as a gesture of self-pride, as though to own an artwork that rails against the establishment turns one into an accomplice of the resistance. The allure of belonging to the leisurely nonconformist ranks has given rise to some curious trends, ranging from the fetishism of collectors outbidding each other for the “archives” of radical conceptualist veterans to an extroverted sadomasochism in the exploits of artists the purpose of whose works is to ridicule or humiliate their sponsors—institutional or private—as performed in the brutally cynical lashings of Andrea Fraser and Santiago Sierra. The dichotomy of commodifiable versus non-commodifiable art as determined by an artwork’s medium has become effectively untenable. Instead, if Danto was right in that artworks are “embodied meaning,” the present state of affairs would indicate it’s not the body but the meaning of an artwork that makes it commodifiable.
With the hard times way in the past, old animosities have been forgiven and forgotten. Once more, paintings feature prominently in the picture, provided their “embodied meaning” is consistent with the standard of antiestablishment criticality demanded from the rest of visual art. And, once again, the price at which it can sell an artwork is the salient feature ascribing prestige to a gallery. This is all very convenient for successful artists who have no qualms about conjoining their noble causes with those of the highest bidder, and more so for collectors, who—having little else to go by—feel reassured that money spent at a top-tier gallery is a guarantee of quality. Of course, equating price to (the perception of) quality is hardly an innovation when it comes to art (or anything), but this formula is on public display today more palpably than ever.
Alfredo Jaar, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On…, 2019 at Edinburgh Arts Festival. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian.
7. Art shall be either Good for all or no good at all
During the 2019 Whitney Biennial, several participating artists became aware that a manufacturer of law enforcement and military supplies held a seat on the museum’s board. The presence of this patron was not merely an ethical breach for them; it was a fundamental assault on current art world doctrine, namely on the premise that to commune with contemporary art is to excuse oneself from the unjust and alienating system fate subjected us to live in. Their outrage was publicized with much fanfare: no amount of philanthropic largesse should have allowed such a villain to pollute the safe space provided by the art world. The artists duly followed by demanding from the museum, and obtaining, his summary expulsion and an institutional mea culpa. (Luckily for the now ex-member of the board, no guillotines were held in the museum’s warehouse.)
In the past, art patrons were not required to be paragons of moral rectitude. To be sure, the interrelationships of Beauty, Truth, and the Good in art were a source of deep, complex, and even conflicting ruminations that enriched the understanding and appreciation of artworks. These meditations, in turn, channeled the standards through which works of art would be assessed. When art was judged under the sheen of the Beautiful, as it was in the 18th century while aesthetics developed as a branch of philosophy, the quality of an artwork could be assessed through the beauty it generated. Alternatively, when judged by way of Truth, an artwork could be assessed through the particular truth it begot, a claim often advanced from the Renaissance through Impressionism. But the modernists demoted the Beautiful to the realms of interior decoration and garden design, and the appeal to Truth became but an underhanded ploy of the powerful for the ideological council of ’68. Lacking recourse to either Beauty or Truth as rationales for engaging with art, contemporary artists have been cornered into devoting their efforts to the advancement of the Good. Perhaps art could at least make this a less evil world. Of course, the Good here is a euphemism for all that may be sanctioned by the cultural revolutionaries’ slogans, most prominently that capitalism—until its awaited demise—shall remain the culprit of humankind’s misery. Regrettably, the art world does not, in fact, assess contemporary artworks through the good they produce in the real world, but merely as stand-ins for whatever messages can be construed as campaigning for a politically correct justice.
We can hereby make sense, for example, of Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International, a “social-practice” artwork funded by several museums and art foundations. Under the criterion described above, one must not measure Bruguera's “artivism” by the number of refugees it rescues, nor by the extent that it brings about a solution to the quandaries of refugees, but simply by empathizing with her concern for justice. As though to expiate their institutional complicity with the system, MoMA and the Tate joined in by hosting symbolic living tableaux set by Bruguera, while the artist welcomed in turn the museums’ crowning blessings on her career.
For all the theoretical criticality the art world professes, that such flagrantly opposite players as Bruguera and MoMA can come together to legitimize and celebrate one another demonstrates the art world is as unencumbered by self-criticism as religious zealots are. Faith can be stronger than reason, for sure. But the healing promised from buying into contemporary art is only as effective as the protection from evil spirits granted by a talisman or a fetish figure.
The trappings of religion are echoed in contemporary art’s acquiescence to a set of doctrinal articles, ritualized proceedings, and the sanctity of its spaces. Of course, art has long been created and deployed within the sphere of religion. But there’s been a fundamental difference at the core of our appreciation of artworks: Religion furnishes purpose and value by advocating for a particular elucidation of the Good; however, we are not required to experience the Good as a religion posits it to experience its art as art. As for contemporary art, commitment to its elucidation of the Good isn’t optional; it’s the entrance fee to witness its glories.
Ernest Meissonier, 1807, Friedland, 1875. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
8. Kitsch and beyond
A seemingly inexhaustible flow of contemporary artworks is gathering and lingering in ever-larger institutional and private art warehouses, sustained by the expectation that the art’s purported cultural value will hold and pay off in coin. It’s worth considering what may become of this staggering accumulation once the standard of taste moves on.
A warning to keep in mind: The most expensive painting privately sold throughout the 19th century is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1807, Friedland was meant to be an artistic, political, and technical tour de force for Ernest Meissonier, one of the most famous and successful artists of the French Beaux-Arts period. The battle scene had an evident pro-imperial bent when it was conceived, but once it was finished, after fifteen years and multiple revisions, Napoleon III had been deposed by the Third Republic. Although crestfallen, Meissonier managed to sell the painting for $60,000 in 1876 ($1.4 million adjusted) to an American magnate, for whom its subject was probably more glamorous than political. Today, 1807, Friedland hangs in New York as a minor and embarrassing counterpart to the Manets and Monets that exert the pull of recognition on multitudes of visitors.
Greenberg insisted that academicism winds up becoming kitsch. Sure, but he was half-right in alleging that in 19th-century academic art “the same themes [were] mechanically varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new [was] produced.” Meissonier’s paintings did incorporate thematic and technical innovations, though not of the sort commended by us. And before being outmatched by the modern upstarts, Meissonier was sidestepped by the bourgeois republicans who contended, against the monarchists in the Academy, for the limited space and subsidy allotted to art by succeeding regimes. The impassioned disputations on taste and aesthetics at the now-maligned Salons were disputations on ethics, morals, and politics. As in our art world, taste was an advocacy vehicle for the Good, if hardly for the same Good.
The entrenchment of taste in our contemporary art model also recalls the stylistic stagnation Greenberg condemned in the Beaux Arts model: Just as they persistently harked back to the Old Masters, we hark back to the countercultural vanguards. They wished to emulate Titian, Velazquez, and Rembrandt; we Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, and Robert Smithson. For both models, ongoing political incidents would furnish seasonal themes to stimulate the illusion of artistic progress. The analogy ends here: As opposed to the rejection Meissonier endured in his lifetime, contemporary artists enjoy the protracted benefits of their antiestablishment grandstanding thanks to the freedoms gathered from posing no effective threat to our governing regimes.
Interestingly enough, by replacing “kitsch” with “contemporary art” in the following paragraph from “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”—where Greenberg expounds on kitsch being essentially parasitic—we find an oblique but symptomatically accurate description of our overextended contemporary art framework vis-à-vis the vanguard art of the last century:
The precondition for kitsch [contemporary art], a condition without which kitsch [contemporary art] would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch [contemporary art] can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience.
The above exercise strikes a chord because contemporary art long ceased to be the rightful heir to the “perfected self-consciousness” Greenberg attributed to the avant-garde. Nowadays, for contemporary art, false consciousness could be a more fitting diagnosis.
The art world’s material and discursive economies remain entrenched and mutually hedged, but in due course a different art framework will come about, even if it’s impossible to picture now what that’ll be. Another financial meltdown might do away once more with the art market, but even that might not suffice to get the consensus dismantled if academia remains in the grip of ideology. Perhaps our fascination with the figures that demarcate the current standard of taste will start to wear off, but who would we look up to then? What’s more, there’s no guarantee that, when it arrives, the new art model will be less deceitful than the present one. The NFT craze is a case in point, though I doubt it’s the art of the future.
What to do while the spell of avant-garde kitsch propels contemporary art? My own suggestion is to take to art as Stoics and Epicureans took to friendship. Every work of art, regardless its quality, must be read and judged as the product of its age; a good artwork, regardless its age, can also be appreciated as a good friend. We already often value artworks as we do persons, such as when we recognize in them the correlatives of forthrightness, integrity, good faith, reciprocity, effort, insight, understanding, wonder, refinement, generosity, challenge, vulnerability, ingenuity, curiosity, cheer, humor. Once no longer subservient to the presently domineering Good, art may be steered toward a more modest and personable good, one well-tempered for beauty and truth to find their way back to the art.