The Tyranny of Art History in Contemporary Art
vulture.com
vulture.com
" Art history is generally thought of as a linear progression of one movement or style after another (Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, etc.), punctuated by the influence of individual geniuses (Delacroix, Courbet, Monet, Cézanne … ).
(...) The story Danto tells in “The End of Art” follows on from this model. According to Danto, the commitment to mimesis began to falter during the nineteenth century due to the rise of photography and film. These new perceptual technologies led artists to abandon the imitation of nature, and as a result, 20th-century artists began to explore the question of art’s own identity. What was art? What should it do? How should art be defined? In asking such questions, art had become self-conscious. Movements such as Cubism questioned the process of visual representation, and Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as an artwork. The twentieth century oversaw a rapid succession of different movements and ‘isms,’ all with their own notions of what art could be. “All there is at the end,” Danto wrote, “is theory, art having finally become vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought about itself, and remaining, as it were, solely as the object of its own theoretical consciousness.” Warhol’s Brillo boxes and Duchamp’s readymades demonstrated to Danto that art had no discernible direction in which to progress. The grand narrative of progression — of one movement reacting to another — had ended. Art had reached a post-historical state. All that remains is pure theory:
Of course, there will go on being art-making. But art-makers, living in what I like to call the post-historical period of art, will bring into existence works which lack the historical importance or meaning we have for a long time come to expect […] The story comes to an end, but not the characters, who live on, happily ever after doing whatever they do in their post-narrational insignificance […] The age of pluralism is upon us…when one direction is as good as as another."
People, even those who should have an ostensibly "humanistic" outlook, have largely forgotten the possibility of any activity that is not subordinated to utilitarian concerns. The fact that this question was asked in the first place betrays a certain level of insecurity and even guilt over the way one chooses to spend one's time. It is not asked out of idle curiosity, it is not an honest question that will follow the arguments where they lead, rather it is a question for which an affirmative answer must be manufactured if one is not forthcoming.
Healthier questions include "how can we change the world so there is more time for art?", "why doesn't everyone understand how great art is?", etc.
This may well be down to the media looking particularly for such things. It may be that what is lauded as the best of contemporary art is now so esoteric that appreciation of it only comes after years of immersion in it.
Or it might just be that people are philistines, or that most of it is actually shit.
The CIA itself was sponsoring abstract expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollocks. They thought it was great propaganda for individualism and personal freedom and that it would help fight communism in the world.
Post-modernism was the desperate attempt to avoid admitting that the classicists were right.
At some point The Artist will face up to it, and we can begin repairing the visual world.
When does your modernism start? What triggers it? Is it the Avant Guards of the late teens and 20's, unleashed by the horrors of the WW1? Is it the loosening of realism by the Impressionists in the 1880's set free by the early widespread use of photography? Or is it earlier with Gothic Churches, whose vast open spaces were structurally freed by architectural innovations like external flying buttresses, that allowed the insides to be illuminated by massive stained glass windows colored in new pallets by minerals imported from Asia and Africa?
Or do we start your modernism all the way back in 1420 and Brunelleschi's development of linear perspective? It was only in this time that the Classical Era was first defined as such -- retroactively, rediscovered thanks primarily due to its preservation by Islamic scholars over preceding centuries.
The forces of technological change, war, trade, and migration have always been at work. They were in Greece in 300BC when those Classical texts were originally written, in Constantinople during the sacking 4th Crusade in 1204, when they were taken from their ancient libraries and brought to Western Europe, and they were during the second half of the 20th Century, when what is now called Post Modernism emerged to critique key aspects of their organizing logic.
In all those times we were Modern. I don't think we have ever not been.
And before you dismiss those pesky, ugly Avant Guardists, especially since you are doing do in the context of networked computer machinery, I suggest you read this excellent article by Lev Manovich "Avant-guard as Software" https://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/espai/eng/art/manovich1002/mano...
I'm going to disagree on Modernism failing, It simply built a little too high and lost it's essence somewhere along the line. Post modern techniques and critique did a excellent number at deconstructing some of this artistic cruft but failed to sew the scars left by itself closed. We've been dealing with this critical based attitude for so long that it's become a cultural default, where we have a collective aversion to building modern-esque structures.
This history isn't linear though, the periods are only created upon looking back upon the collective history of works and mapping out what informs which and the majority cultural norm. The internet/access to history has had a strange way of making the concept of what is contemporary semi atemporal. Modernity isn't dead. Postmodernity sure as hell isn't dead. Renaissance painting is surprisingly still alive. There are painters working with egg tempura creating sacred icons still. Instead we have a crazy cross-referenced shitshow that we call the contemporary.
When we linearize and compartmentalize art history it's simple to reject avenues as being traversed already. At least in my practice I've found this to be the case. Mythos have been evolving and changing to fit contemporary society through the ages. The criticality of our times have destroyed the mythos. What is our collective cultural mythology? Jesus and company was a pretty close fit for mythos (assuming my cultural context, substitute other here). Why bother with creating a new mythos for contemporary society, we obviously tore it down for a reason. /s
We artists are facing this postmodern gash, and are searching for ways of using the deconstructive/critical tools while also constructing and pushing forward. We can't just return to the classical and bury our heads from the past 200 years of advances, nor can we continue along this bastard PM track. Metamodern artworks are an attempt to strive with naive idealism in the footsteps of modernity fully understanding that these advances can easily be pulled apart and dismissed academically.
In response to the narrowing of the definition of art, in my practice there is fine Art (that holds up to academic criticism and is supported by literature) and folk art which expresses and is usually dismissed by academics.
I don't know, I'm trying to recover from a cynical upbringing and this horrible aversion to sincerity. Painting is dead, long live painting. Vapourware is authentic, and that screws with me.
Modernism did not, and can not fail because it has already happened. You can't change what inspired people.
> At some point The Artist will face up to it, and we can begin repairing the visual world
Statements like that are scary. Sounds like a headline torn from the pages of the National Review's art and literature section. If you don't like the way modern art makes you feel or the way it is critiqued, pick up a paintbrush or open a gallery.
Art doesn't really have to submit to questions of "usability".
I wonder what name historians will give this period...
The irony of the article I was trying to point out is that even if there is a future where all media and styles are equally respected and not held as having any intrinsic value, historians will still need to come up with terms to describe the past and present; and whatever those terms actually are, they'll likely imply a narrative of progress.
Very well put.