Art Theory and Heidi Klum

How naive do you have to be to think that any art theory is entirely adequate to anything? Never mind that the theories of, say, Rosalind Krauss or Arthur Danto may well be adequate to nothing except the desire to exercise the theorist's power, such as it is. So, staying with the improbability that any theory is entirely adequate, let us consider the further possibility that no theory of art, no matter how old or neglected, is entirely inadequate. Take, for example, the neoplatonic theory that art succeeds when it offers an image of some transcendent something that combines absolute Truth with absolute Beauty. Granted, neoplatonism is less rampant in the art world than in the fashion world, where Heidi Klum is being promoted as "the Perfect One." Still, there is a tinge of neoplatonism to any absolutist judgment about any work of art. My point? A theory of art has no power to render any other theory wrong. Theories of art do not supersede one another. They accumulate, and it is only those looking for shortcuts to wisdom who glom onto a contemporary theory as if it were all that is needed. So sad! To think that Kraussian or Dantesque or Buchlovian theory puts you in touch with the meaning of art is like thinking that, to get in touch with ordinary life, one should wear oven mitts.

The Horror, the Horror

There is a scene in Dragnet, starring Jack Webb, in which he wears snazzy sunglasses. Or maybe it’s an atypically stylish tie. Anyway, he has modified his usual dowdiness to a degree that delivers a severe shock to a female acquaintance, the other character in the scene. “You’ve gone hip!” she gasps, and drops her bag of groceries. Luckily, I wasn’t carrying a bag of groceries as I read Hal Foster’s “Precarious,” his most recent piece in Artforum.I definitely would have dropped it. Not that Foster has gone hip. He’s gone all touchy-feely, in the elegiac mode of an old-fashioned liberal. An amazing change. Foster praises Robert Gober for a 2005 installation evoking the awfulness of America's behavior on the world scene after 9/11—no explication of a thesis from the once hard-nosed theorist, just sympathy for the artist's horror. Jon Kessler conjures up the same subject with another installation, only the mood is even grimmer and Foster is even more sympathetic, and still more so, as the lugubrious parade goes on and on, right to the end of the decade.
.
I don’t want to exaggerate the degree of Foster’s transformation. He was never an October apparatchik on the Benjamin Buchloh model. Where Buchloh was nastily dictatorial, Foster was merely pompous and peremptory, misreading artworks in service to the great cause of reducing them to slogans. This policy gave off more than a hint of bondage fetishism, as Barbara Kruger, for example, cooperated with Foster’s need to tie her up in a single, extremely constricting role: lead prosecutor in the case against consumerism and the male gaze. Playing along with this bondage game was supposed to be empowering—and it was empowering, in the market place.
.
Now Foster is lamenting the horrors of the decade just past, as we all should, and praising the art that lamented those horrors when they were fresh. Gone is the October idea of the artwork as a finely honed, precisely targeted weapon in the ideological wars. In its place is Foster’s variation on the old idea of art as the mirror that moral sensitivity holds up to a cruel world. From artwork as active agent to artwork as passive reflection. As I said, an amazing transformation, and not entirely welcome, in my snarky view of things. I mean, if you are concerned with contemporary horrors, why not look them in the face? As if I didn’t know . . . as if I didn’t do the same as Foster and everyone else, looking away from current events, finding them bearable only second-hand, in the representations supplied by our more sensitive artists.