568
BARBARA ROSE
ego. The rhetorical and hortatory tone of what has become critical apology
rather than critical evaluation accounts for the reader's sense that these ac–
counts, replete with
mini-chronolo~y
and other appurtenances of a pseudo
art-historical approach, resemble a form of promotion rather than the conven–
tional value judgments of past criticism.
The rejection
of'~udgmental"
criticism by the new critics of the seventies
can be seen as part of the general rejection of authoritarian attitudes that
characterized the collapse ofleadership in all areas at the end of the sixties. The
relativity of aesthetic judgments is an obvious analogue to the relativity of
moral judgments, a possibly inevitable development exacerbated by the expo–
sure of the excesses of authoritarian personalities. That the leaders have clay
feet decimates the ranks of followers. For example, the recent documented
revelation that Clement Greenberg wilfully changed the color of David Smith's
sculptures after the artist's death has diverted focus from the contribution of
Greenberg's evaluative criticism to his shortcomings as an authoritarian per–
sonality, adding to the skepticism regarding any criticism based on distinctions
ofquality. Without Greenberg as a figurehead, the circle ofcritics who unques–
tioningly accepted his premises has been eclipsed, to be replaced by anothel'
group of critics whose point of departure seems to be that no further distinc–
tions can be made between good art and bad art and that, as Don Judd put it, a
work need only be "interesting."
To an extent, I must agree that at present it is extremely difficult to qualify
art. There is a general level of competence among younger artists who con–
tinue to practice the traditional arts, and an even higher level of technique,
especially in terms of drawing, currently emerging as an important medium.
Yet there are no towering personalities that cry to be singled out. It is even
more difficult to make distinctions among artists using new media, who specifi–
cally disavow any interest in quality. There are two ways of looking at this
situation: either it takes artists longer to mature than we have been willing to
admit, and the present moment is one of fertile if slow incubation, or else we
are experiencing a decline from the Golden Age of the School of Paris to the
Bronze Age ofthe New York School,
to
the present Iron Age, and are destined
to sink back into the primitivism of a new Dark Age, in which the traditional
artistic skills will be lost along with literacy, as they were at the end of the ancient
world. I prefer to believe the former.
Since we do not know the outcome of our current process of obvious
cultural upheaval, statements regarding the future ofart by responsible people
tend to be hesitant and moderated. Museums are, as William Rubin points out
in a recent interview in
Artforum,
nineteenth-century institutions, compromises
between private and public patronage invented by the bourgeois democracies.
The publication of this extended two-part interview underscores the intimacy
of
Artforum's
curious love-hate relationship with the Museum of Modern Art.
