Since the 1970s, it is very hard to see who the real great artists are now, and where exciting innovations and movements are. Yes, we know who the successful and bankable artists are, but we can scarcely say that Damian Hirst is equivalent to Picasso. Is this kind of evaluation misplaced? As the art world becomes more diverse and fractured, and as its trends come to look like fashion, maybe the answer to this question is that we're looking in the wrong place. Maybe the 'good art' is happening in spaces that have been treated as peripheral to the 'core' art world such as fashion itself. To give fashion its due is to give credit to many other tendencies occurring in the virtual online spaces.

Let’s Start with a Complaint

Let’s start with a complaint that was made around ten years ago now. It captures the problem quite well. And even if it can be taken as wrong or misdirected, it was made by someone whom I have always found courageous and astute.

In 2012, the Wall Street Journal, and reprinted in The Australian, the cultural critic and feminist theorist Camille Paglia mounted a frontal onslaught on contemporary art. It begins with the fiercely provocative opening sally:

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music, and dance are thriving worldwide, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No prominent figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and Minimalism's birth in the early 1970s.

This malaise is made more pronounced, she argues, by not only music but by architecture that has its influential high priests (she names Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry) whereas art continues to languish. In other words, things are moving and shaking creatively, but not in ‘art’ which is to say the places we go to see art such as galleries and museums.

Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry. 2010. Photo by Monster4711. 13 November 2014. Via Wikimedia Commons

This seems like reactionary flimflam, but it does not deserve to be discounted altogether. The 80/20 rule: the famous Pareto principle dictates that 80 per cent of effects come from 20 per cent of causes, which can be used in social analysis, marketing, and other enterprises. It is a theory that can also be transposed to the opinions of ultra-conservative commentators: they are wrong most of the time, but on rare occasions, they have an alarming grasp of the truth.

It just remains to uncover in what respect Paglia’s comment might be considered correct.

Camille Paglia achieved fame in 1990 as a literary and cultural commentator with her long, erudite and provocative book Sexual Personae. Here she took up the model developed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy that art as to be seen according to the conflict and complementarity of two opposing forces, the Dionysian (ecstasy and chaos) and the Apollonian (order and harmony).

According to Nietzsche’s influential thesis, art is born of these essentially pagan binary tensions. In a period when feminism in art and literary criticism was at its height, she received both praise and scorn for her defence of male artists, whom she sees as embodiments of, exceptionally creative and lustful urges. The book was swooned over by eminent writers and critics like Anthony Burgess and Harold Bloom, and its erudition is everywhere to see. From the start, Paglia set herself up as an unconventional feminist.

But already Paglia showed an aptitude for the quick swipe that is typical to editorializing. Easy shots, unqualified accusations. Critics who do not meet with her sympathies can be summarily dealt with, and she was also prone to fall under the spell of her brilliance. In her subsequent journalistic career as a self-styled public intellectual, Paglia again alienated many women by describing what she felt were feminism's adverse effects.

One of her arguments was that feminists, in their need to reset long-held gender norms, effectively robbed boys of appropriate role models, since the macho star and the superhero were viewed negatively, relegated to a suspect place of male aggression. Without these, Paglia observed, boys were inclined to waver in guilt and indecision, not knowing which the right identity path to travel.

Paglia was, once again, partly true. But at the same time, since she began writing there was never a stemmed flow of action heroes or types: action men and toys of this kind (many adapted as franchises from successful films) continued to be sold in shops and models of powerful male heterosexuality (were) have never been in short supply in popular culture. If these stereotypes were called wrong, this wasn't reflected in either sales or production.

The Death of the Critic

Nonetheless, the shrill note she sounds about the doldrums of the art world seems to be a sign of the times that has persisted until now. A week after her article appeared, The Observer reported Dave Hickey’s public statement of disenchantment with the art world. For him, art had become a subsidiary of the hedge fund business. The critic had begun to resemble a ‘courtier class’, advising the rich on acquisitions, and ‘works by artists such as Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn are the result of "too much fame, too much success and too little critical sifting" and are "greatly overrated"’.[1]

Marc Quinn in 2009 in London at the National Portrait Gallery with one of his ‘‘Self’’ pieces. Credit...Andy Rain/European Pressphoto Agency

This is probably true, but it is open to debate as to whether such artists represent art as a whole, to which there are two answers. First, they are since they are the artists that are much-collected and which garner the most attention. Second, the other answer is that they are not. There are thousands of artists and critics in continental Europe, in China (and other places where the cycle of opinion is hard to gauge) and wherever else who have next to no interest in them.

But with commentators as varied, as experienced and as influential as Paglia and Hickey expressing anger and disappointment at contemporary art, we might say it is a striking coincidence, a real problem, or we might ask for more detail.

Contemporary art, or some contemporary art, the art in their sights, might be superficial and disappointing, but what are the qualities that it needs? Hickey is well known for his defence of beauty, while Paglia blames the decline of artistic quality on the ‘expansion of form’ and the ‘contraction of ideology’. Translation: artists favor form over content.

The former—the priority is given to form, surface, look and effect—is put down to ‘the brash multimedia revolution of the 1960s and 70s’, while the latter—a lack of intellectual commitment and a blind acceptance of the status quo—is blamed on artists having lost touch with their audience.

Artists, Paglia complains, are in an enclave of 'upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery anti-establishment leftism of the 1960s'. Awash with emotive adjectives ('brash', 'fiery'), Paglia conveniently misses the fact that it was precisely this anti-establishment attitude that brought about the 'multimedia revolution' that 'dethroned painting'. And yet painting has not been dethroned, mainly because it is the mainstay for upper-class liberals to park their money. Painting has traction because it is still the much-prized 'unique object' instead of photography and other forms that are base don reproducibility.

Lamenting the End of the Avant-Garde

It is worth looking at some of Paglia’s comments in detail not because it is of any significant merit, but precisely because it is a graphic reflection of the kind of misleading posturing that diverts from the central issues. She laments the death of the avant-garde, which she sees as occurring after the death of her ‘hero’ Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol, "Self-Portrait," 1986, Polaroid Polacolor print. Collection of Helyn and Ralph Goldenberg.

The death of the avant-garde is certainly ascribable to the weakening of ideology, but it is a standard error to place the blame on art. Indeed, Paglia's diatribe is a symptom of a problem that has existed since the demise of the avant-garde, which is to make art a straw man for much broader social conditions that it reflects.

Art is by no means to blame for the loss of faith in revolutions, the power of art to change society, or the loss of faith in politics. In art and politics, there is no longer a positive, or plausible 'outside' that poses as an alternative to the status quo. As mirrored by the condition of art and culture, the current political condition is one of constant alteration, slippage but no change.

In the summer of 2011, the Islamists in Egypt smothered the emancipatory potential of their revolution. Occupy Wall Street did nothing in effect, and so on. Don’t blame art.

In a book from about the same time as Paglia’s essay, a riff on Fredric Jameson’s classic commentaries on Postmodernism, Post-Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of just-in-time capitalism, Jeffrey Nealon makes the point that:

Under postmodernism and post-postmodernism, the collapse of the economic and cultural that Adorno sees dimly on the horizon has decisively arrived (cue Baudrillard’s Simulations—where reality isn’t becoming indistinguishable from the movies; it has become indistinguishable) we arrive at that postmodern place where economic production is cultural production and vice versa. And I take that historical and theoretical axiom to be the (mostly unmet and continuing) provocation of Jameson's work: if ideology critique depends on a cultural outsider to the dominant economic logistics, where does cultural critique go now that there is no such outside, no dependable measuring stick to celebrate a work's resistance or to denounce its ideological complicity?[2]

It appears that Paglia may have taken on a much bigger issue than she may have thought. But it is important to recall that the title of her article is ‘How Capitalism Can Save Art’.

In fact, Paglia is not hankering after an avant-garde but rather the opposite. In an abstract and unsupported flourish, she claims that better creative work is being done in the field of industrial design whose products are shorn of 'ideology and cant’.

This sounds absurd, given her previous comment that art suffered from too little ideology. But there is still a percentage of truth in this.

Andy Warhol

Her citation of Warhol is relevant here. He ‘incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned’. A distinction needs to be made at this point since there seems to be the insinuation, in the highly presumptive final clause of her essay, that he was a visionary in this regard. Not so: Pop began in England with Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake.

I Was a Rich Man's Plaything. 1947. By Eduardo Paolozzi. Via National Galleries Scotland

Warhol’s contemporaries such as Lichtenstein, Wesselmann and Rosenquist were just as active in promoting mass culture. But what Warhol managed to do, unlike any artist before him, was to create a micro-culture of artists, designers, film-makers, hangers-on and misfits that not only were the audience-alibis to Warhol's role as artist-guru but who collapsed the boundaries between different forms of creative activity.

Warhol’s Factory, which moved to three venues throughout its history, was an ad hoc stage, in which art and fashion were no longer rivals, but active complements. His designs were intended to have the viral capacity to move from the canvas—which was only their provisional and commodity-approved support—to be fabric designs or wallpaper (one recalls his cow wallpaper).

Warhol never lost sight of his training as a designer of shoes in the 1950s, the illustrations of which he elevated into a charming sub-genre of their own that existed between commercial and fine art. It is this sense of fluidity in Warhol’s work that gives his discrete canvases, the large ‘major’ works that line the walls of the great museums and art institutions, a cool incongruity.

On the first and immediate level, and what is well known, the subjects of his work were meant as banal contradistinction to the 'higher' subjects that graced the traditional, historical idea of what a museum ought to display. On another level, his work's serial quality—the photo-serigraphy or photo-silk-screen—challenged notions of uniqueness, since at the start the image was driven my its replication. The motifs in his work were all about spillage and dissemination. The image could go on and on. But this proliferation came at the price of meaning since repetition has the power of annulment.

In this way, Warhol confronted the viewer with the grim truth about fame. Fame is occasioned by relinquishing one’s image for the sake of a small set of facsimiles that are then circulated with promiscuous rapidity.

The price of fame is death. It is of no coincidence that his portrait of Marilyn appeared after her suicide. Warhol's factory was an automatic fame-generating machine. It cranked out works that were genuine Andys, while at the same time it was a site for the Andy himself to play at being himself as the artist. Warhol played at fake celebrity, which could however not be separated from real celebrity. Warhol performed at celebrity, and the celebrity was his art, and his art was his celebrity.

Untitled from Marilyn Monroe. 1967. Andy Warhol. Via Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Meanwhile, everyone was trying to find the real Andy behind the hard carapace of the deadpan ingénu, a sort of mix between sage and village idiot. Warhol's example afforded the precious insight that the true self is indistinguishable from the false, made self. Was a human a fact, or was it a by-product of mass culture? Warhol certainly made us rethink what it is to feel (or not feel) in front of a work of art.

From around the beginning of the new millennium, Warhol came to be acknowledged as prophetic of what is becoming more and more evident in art, namely that we cannot just look at popular culture in art, but we must look for art in popular culture.

Unlike his contemporaries, Warhol did not just transplant popular motifs onto the canvas's support to defile the precious sense of high art. He purposely blurred the distinctions from numerous angles and with different media.

So again, Paglia is in part right with her assertion that better art is available in design than in the galleries, but with a sizeable caveat that does not permit of her conceptual bigotry. What we are facing – and which in hindsight is availably incipient in Warhol – is a shift away from judging art from the vantage point of art.

Toward a New Way of Looking and Judging Art

I have no wish to be cryptic here. However, it is customary within art theory to position oneself as viewing through the lens of the frameworks of art, genre and tradition. In other words, this-or-that work of art borrows from an aspect of popular culture, a work recasts concepts of design to render its function non-functional, and another work rethinks traditions of painting.

To a greater extent, this is the theoretical position taken from the Duchampian legacy, which shows that an object's identity is recast through its positioning within a gallery or its designation as art. So, a shovel or a urinal seen in a gallery is art first before it is a shovel or a urinal.

Bicycle Wheel and Snow Shovel. Circa 1913. By Marcel Duchamp. Via The Great Museum Marathon

In the right contexts, as in-state museums, the anchorage of an object as an artifact of art is apodictic, it is beyond dispute. One can dispute it, but such a dispute is always courted by the echo of the avant-garde; the disgruntled conservative critic, the outraged bourgeois. One is invited to dispute within galleries, and one is safe knowing that such disputes fall on deaf ears and are worthless.

The best one can do in such situations is to decide what is good or bad art. But it is all art irrespective of what you think. Your view is part of the unspoken cultural game you place in your head, but it does not and cannot lead to a work being thrown out of the gallery in a way that one might return a dish at a restaurant. This circuit is similar to the much broader social condition of political helplessness, and the absence of an objective outside (the anti-establishment to the establishment).

But what if we, following the cue of Warhol, were to look for art within other frameworks? The word 'within' is crucially operative here. This suggestion is not that closely related to (the) land art or happenings, except in the respect that these genres could be conscious of their artistic brinkmanship and could at best be audaciously willing to let the work dissipate and fall back into so-called real life.

But on the other hand, the reformulation of these practices into the highly self-conscious and packaged form of Relational Aesthetics suggests that the prioriness of art—seen from the standpoint of critique and evaluation—be maintained. Instead, what if we look for art within music video, fashion design, street art, and commercial photography?

What is it We Look for Art Outside of the Art World?

This suggestion is slightly more complicated than it sounds. Since the 1970s, it has become increasingly acceptable to have commercial photography and fashion exhibitions within art museums. There is also now the relatively new phenomenon of the discrete fashion museum (the largest of its kind is currently in Antwerp, Belgium).

In the late 1980s, when visitor numbers became an indicator; when popularity was conflated with the commodity in the name of museums' rationalization to make them 'viable', such exhibitions became a popular staple. And it is as a result of this that pieces by Yves Saint Laurent and Vivienne Westwood unequivocally form part of art collections from the National Gallery of Australia to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; it is also thanks to this tendency that no-one would dare question the art status of a photographer such as Helmut Newton.

French Vogue Paris.1969. Photo By Helmet Newton. Via Pinterest

But again, the action of placing an object or image from one station (design, popular culture) to the status of art is to perform an act of raising-up, like the conferring of a knighthood (on someone). With the museum’s approval, such objects and images are relieved of the ‘is it really art’ debate. We look for ‘artness' in the object or image with the satisfaction that the institution has ratified, and by implication, history.

Where We Might Go for ‘Artness’

My suggestion is different: looking for ‘artness’ within popular culture outside of the gallery framework. It is perhaps best, to begin with, the example of popular music, which is generically identified as classical music's other.

Just as fashion is the ephemeral other to art, popular music is also limited by its impermanence, pre-packaging, and commodification. Yet within pop music—used here for convenience to embrace all the sub-genres from indie to hip-hop—there is work of inventiveness, complexity, and lasting merit. Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and The Beatles’ The White Album spring to mind. While Justine Bieber will be remembered as a solely widespread phenomenon, perhaps some Paul Oakenfold or some David Guetta will survive as music.

The designers Viktor & Rolf have featured objects – such as their empty perfume bottle – equivalent to art, that are non-functional, but which exist within the functional, wearable items within their ensemble.

Alexander McQueen's work has received growing recognition for its status as corporeal and living sculpture – and while it now graces art museums, his work was never expressly intended for them but the catwalk and the fashion world.

So too, Lady Gaga in certain videos, notably the Grammy Award-winning Bad Romance brings to her visuals a fusion that is worthy of Matthew Barney and would have put the Surrealists to shame. And a note on Matthew Barney: his Cremaster Cycle, which was hailed as a new direction for video art, drew directly from McQueen and fashion photographers such as Nick Knight.

The extent of the acclaim of Barney’s works as a new beginning is due in part to (the) much of the art world’s ignorance of what was being produced in the fashion world because it was, simply, not deemed art and therefore beyond the horizon of interest and scrutiny.

While Barney's work claims and holds status as (great?) art, Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance makes no such claim, nor wishes to. It is a commercial product used to promote the song and herself as the latest pop icon.

But it is within this whole that we have glimpses of art; it exists strikingly but somewhat immaterially bound within the product's tireless flow. Perhaps more discernibly, we can also cite street art.

We need not go into the interminable debate about whether street art is 'really' art, rather than some street art discernibly is. Amidst the generic muck of iridescent blobs, we make out an image that we find well-achieved, stimulating, charming, or jarring – it stays with us.

What amounts to 'discernibly' is the next question. In the eighteenth century, two qualities were highly prized: wit and taste. They were both indefinable, but they were incontrovertibly existent. Given that the enlightenment had by degrees entrusted the powers of judgment away from a godhead to that of the freethinking individual, its discriminatory powers were highly prized.

Taste

In the eighteenth century, taste had a far deeper resonance than it does today, which is largely confined to one's taste in clothing, music, friends, and how an interior is decorated, all indicators of an individual will and are watered-down versions of the earlier incarnation. For taste in the eighteenth century had a moral gloss: it was a sense of refinement that extended to how to act in particular situations; with dignity, discretion and compassion.

We see today in the taste values are implications of the same but in the faintest form. It is also true that the ability to discern in matters of aesthetics and morality has become debased by the higher value given to its economic counterpart; the ability to judge quantifiable value.

One of the undeniable characteristics of the artwork in the heyday of postmodernism in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was the very absence of taste. Some of us (still remember) may still remember the special issue of Artforum published at the end of the ‘80’s decade, which included the reflection that the most commonly used word in the critic’s lexicon was ‘banal’.

Ushering in Banality. 1988. By Jeff Koons. Via Jeffkoons.com

Of course, the unrepentant culprit of this was Jeff Koons, who openly saw himself as the successor to Warhol, who no doubt started the ball of banality rolling. The age of kitsch was a celebration of capitalism at its most aggressive and rapacious. Consumption and excess were so overheated that it had no room for the containment implied in the practice of taste.

While kitsch was more commonly discussed than taste or the deeper historical concept of taste per se, it was the devaluing of taste that gave way to many critical jeremiads about the loss of art’s social conscience and art in a state of inglorious decline. According to this way of looking at things, art had relinquished its ability to offer us reprieve from the images preferred by the multitude by doing these images better than popular culture itself.

What separated art at this time from similar images of seduction in popular culture was that its products were not only to the service of pleasure; they were laced with irony and sometimes ridicule. In this respect, art was doubly alienating.

But in this regard, art was blamed for a condition of which it was the visual representation. For its patent cynicism was little more than the cynicism of global corporatization and its hold on government policy, which (is) led to the deadlock of power in contemporary politics, the dissatisfaction with democracy, and the impotence felt by the person on the street, impotence whose temporary antidote is apathy.

We now need to ask ourselves why some art and the capsules of artness that I contend exist embedded within popular culture continue to hold our attention. This is not a simple matter of rapt desire or the lure of the fetish in which we require an ever-renewing train of substitutes to interest us.

Rather, good art supplies the perennial function that offers us assurance and release in a certain goodness in the world. It is not conventional goodness as in some dull Christian benevolence, but more the reminder that excellence and something truly' worthy of us.

If these qualities and glimpses no longer inhabit the fringes, or the outside zones of art, but only within it, they need to be prized out.

We Haven’t Lost Our Gods, We Just Need to Know Where to Find Them

So here is the answer to Paglia’s forced and clumsy conundrum. It is not that we have lost our gods, but we must know where to find them. Much like Walter Benjamin's angels of history hidden furtively within popular culture's thick and erratic texture, art now resides within popular culture.

With globalization, popular culture is a far more expanded entity than it was in Warhol’s time, or even when Koons began his career. Social media and digital communication mean that popular culture is folded organically into our lives.

That art is not the refreshing and objective alternative is, once again, not the failure of art but an indicator of more complex weaves of social organization, communication, and the economies that accompany them.

For those who complain and worry about the state of art might be alerted to two things: one, since the beginning of the independent artist and the independent critic in the eighteenth century, art has always been moaned at, and the fates have always been called to witness. Two, it is essential to know where to look. The economic constraints of overpopulation and urbanization mean that potential artists move into film, graphics and decoration.

This is not in any way to say that film or interior decoration is art or brings back old debates about the extent to which craft and design are art. Rather there are regions, pockets, enclaves, and exceptions within these practices worthy of critical attention.

This is all a matter of making peace with the old opposition between fine art and popular culture in a manner that goes well beyond Warhol. However, it was Warhol who motioned to the fact that art and popular culture are not interconnected. Instead, that art is a superior quality of attainment within the expanded field of popular mass culture. And for finding that quality, we need to expand our capacity for discernment.

References:

[1] Edward Helmore and Paul Gallagher, ‘Doyen of American critics turns his back on ‘nasty, stupid’ world of modern art’, The Observer, 28 October, 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/oct/28/art-critic-dave-hickey-quits-art-world. I am grateful to Jacqueline Millner for pointing out this reference to me.

[2] Jeffrey Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of just-in-time capitalism, Stanford: Stanford U.P. 2012: 176-177

Is Contemporary Art out of Touch?