The High-End Art World-2

In an earlier post , I suggested that the high-end art world is a work of the imagination. Whose imagination? That is difficult to say, for this art world is the product of many imaginations working together—dealers working with collectors, collectors working with artists, artists working with critics and curators and museum directors. All them interacting in every possible permutation. For the high-end art world is an environmental niche where certain forms of life evolve and thrive, and it is through such interactions that such niches are created and sustained. So far, so good. The dynamics of the high-end art world are no different, in principle, from those of any social environment. But, here's the thing. If we view a social environment as a work of the imagination, a collaborative artwork, a question arises: what is its medium? A painter uses paints. A sculptor of a certain sort uses uses sheets of cold-rolled steel. What, then, is the medium of the high-end art world? What else but works of high-end art—pricey items by the likes of Jeff Koons. Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, et al.
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The problem, of course, is that works of art are difficult to see as raw materials, unformed globs of stuff equivalent to globs of paint squeezed from a tube. So the primary job of critics and curators—not to mention the anonymous functionaries who write press releases and wall labels—is to simplify the meanings of the pertinent artworks to the point where they can be seen as raw materials. In the high-end art world, interpretation is simplification, the more brutal the better. The goal is to produce a slogan that can be attached to an artist's oeuvre firmly enough to block the demand for any more nuanced response. So the policy of raising prices to nonsensical levels has a hidden cost. It reduces works of art to empty counters in an ultimately empty game.

Ghost Meets Manchurian Candidate

Robert Altman's The Player is one my all-time favs among movies, so I was happy to see it celebrated in The New York Times the other day. The clip posted by The Times includes the great opening scene, an unbelievably long pan that shows, amid all the other activity in this sunny ant farm, shots of screenwriters pitching movie ideas to producers. The movie biz demands, absolutely, that the new must be old. The innovative is the tried and the true remixed--Frankenstein reassembled or should we say resutured? So the writers talk of "Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate" and "Psycho meets Gidget Goes Hawaiian." And so on. The possibilities are so very endless that they have spilled over into the art world. Thus Richard Prince's one-line joke paintings are Henny Youngman meets Generic Monochrome. Jeff Koons's new paintings, mentioned in an earlier post , are Sue Williams meets Alain Jacquet, a Nouveau Realiste from the 1960s. As for Damien Hirst's new paintings, Nothing Matters, these are Early Francis Bacon meets Later Francis Bacon. What does it all mean? It means that in the high-end art world, art is product. But we knew that already. Old Thought meets New Examples. Insight recycled--or, shall we say, resutured?

Clement Greenberg and Kitsch

Clement Greenberg opposed art to kitsch, the mass-produced junk of popular culture. More than that, he proposed art as a means of salvation. Learn to love serious art and you will be redeemed. Your ordinary, unenlightened self will fall away and you will emerge as a superior person. No longer will you be seduced by the fads and fashions of the marketplace. The planned obsolescence of consumerism will be obsolete, at least in the vicinity of your hyper-refined sensibility. To get with the Greenbergian program, there was much to learn--lots of quasi-metaphysical jargon, a roster of artists to praise and another to revile, and a special brand of art-world snootiness. The more adept you became, the loftier your place in the hierarchy that put abstract painting at the pinnacle and consigned the movies, soap opera, late-model cars, and all the rest of pop culture to the nether depths. Needless to say, Pop Art was the lowest of the low, shameless kitsch parading as a serious aesthetic endeavor.
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The pay-off for your devotion was a vision of History with a capital "H"--History as the art critic's equivalent of Scriptural revelation. Truth with a capital "T." And what was this Truth? That there is an essence of painting and it manifests itself in successive styles--Impressionism, Post-Impressionionism, all the way onward and upward to color-field painting, in which the true adept could see painting's essence in all its redemptive glory. So far, this is no more than bush-league Hegelianism. To understand Greenberg's importance, you have to see that he gave the succession of styles in art all the allure, the kitschy glamor, of new styles in automobiles, fashion, pop music, and so on. He encouraged art-lovers to respond to new art with all the giddy speed of fans falling for the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1964. Not that the Beatles aren't great. But they're not great in the way that great art is great, and, these days, we tend not to make the distinction. Greenberg insisted on it, vigorously, and yet his lofty theories of aesthetic progress turned out to be compatible with the kitschy, consumerist idea that the new is inherently good, and--surprise, surprise--as that idea took hold in the art world the hottest art became kitschier and kitschier. Eventually, we arrived at the point of believing that Jeff Koons is great. Not just great for his moment but for all time, like Picasso or--why not?--Rembrandt.

The Utopian Mr. Koons

Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have a great deal in common. Yet they are not identical. One difference is that, unlike Hirst, Koons has made some terrific works—his Puppy, for example. It is indeed terrific but it is not a work of art. What is it? A great big endearing spectacle, beloved by the child in all of us. Like the Christmas Tree in Rockefeller Center or your favorite balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. . . a diversion, and why not? Just one more diversion will do no harm, surely, in a world swamped by diversions—a world where politics is entertainment and entertainment is a mindless flow of reality shows, cooking shows, celebrity interview shows. A world of schlock spirituality and tabloid fabrications.
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I know what you’re thinking. It would be nice if the aesthetics of diversion were not impinging so vigorously on the aesthetics of serious art. If galleries and biennials did not serve, so often, as outposts of the entertainment industry.
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But just a minute. What a society needs, first and last, is coherence. Piet Mondrian dreamed of a utopia built from the premises of avant-garde painting. The Mondrian world was to provide, in every detail, the redeeming experience of serious art. No entertainment, no kitsch, just art. Rather than forget this impossible dream, why not invert it? Why not work with utopian fervor for a world with no art, just entertainment? Just kitschy diversions and nothing else? We’re nearly there, and if we want to go all the way, we could do no better than to take guidance from Jeff Koons, author of the monumentally adorable Puppy.

The artwork as labor-saving device

The great thing about Jeff Koons's new works at Gagosian is that you don't actually have to look at them. Thanks to the artist's new, improved system of hieroglyphics, it's enough to read these images, which is so much more efficient. There's a hieroglyph for female genitalia and another for landscape or rock or whatever. Messy zigzags and loops stand for painting itself—far be it from Koons to neglect this traditional medium—and benday dots stand for lots of things: the Pop Art heritage, the commercial media, mechanical reproduction and the ghost of Walter Benjamin. There's not much else to read here, and that's a relief. In today's busy world who wants to get bogged down in a novel? Even short stories are not short enough. Because Koons understands this, he gives us paintings we can grasp as quickly as ten-second spots on TV.