The Dadaist breakdown of the distinction between "art" and "nonart," did not "democratize" art. It magnified the power of the institutional arbiters who cater to elite pretentions. When someone duct-tapes a banana to a wall and calls it art, validation depends on the concurrence of these arbiters. Avant-garde antiart gestures have always been expressly designed to offend common sensibility. Antiart manufactures uncommon art. The purpose of uncommon art is to make the people who consume it feel uncommon.
The myth of an anti-bourgeois avant-garde hides from view the collusion of the avant-garde with its bourgeois patrons to create a new class of luxury goods with no intrinsic value other than their snob appeal. If one wanted to be reductive, that would be the "real" meaning of modern art, but modern art also gave a wider audience new forms of elegance and aesthetic pleasure. The one myth that ought to be laid to rest is the myth of the subversive character of the avant-garde's output. The truth is that the notion of an avant-garde was always misleading, a fashionable mystification. The avant-garde did not lead, it followed. It supplied what a new upstart class needed to mark its cultural arrival.
When the bourgeoisie was revolutionary and heroic, avant-garde art was revolutionary and heroic. When the bourgeoisie degenerated, the avant-garde degenerated with it. We call this postmodernism.
The curse of the rich and powerful is that they raise spoiled feckless children incapable of appreciating or renewing the gifts they inherited. The contemporary avant-garde caters to these spoiled children, who first came to prominence in the 1960s. They like looking at bananas taped to walls. They like playing with gender and identity and inventing new pronouns. They and the artists who cater to them are incapable of inventing anything else. Contemporary art is silly because it caters to silly people.
Art delivers whatever is demanded of it. When serious people come around again, we will get serious art.
No comments:
Post a Comment