572
BARBARA ROSE
conceive of themselves privately as individuals working within their own com–
munity of outsiders, in relative anonymity; now the rewards of art seem
insufficiently gratifying and the artist competes with the porno star or the
sado-masochistic rock entertainer for attention. Ofcourse Warhol initiated this
direction, but one has a sense that his actions and words are still commentaries
on a situation, not merely extensions of it. Sex, as Duchamp once again was the
first to notice, will inevitably excite a public, any public. Warhol maintained his
distance from his subject matter by managing to make pornography boring.
The new art pornography of Photo-Realism or the promotional advertise–
ments of would-be Superstars no longer have any distancing mechanisms.
They have become what they presume to be about: pornography and sado–
masochism.
If there is a conscious aim in such publicly degraded behavior, then it must
be the degradation of art. For some time I have felt that the radicalism of
Minimal and Conceptual art is fundamentally political, that its implicit aim is to
discredit thoroughly the forms and institutions of dominant bourgeois culture:
to demoralize the public, preparing it to renounce the official culture, which is
shown to be meaningless and consequently not worth perpetuating. This is
certainly revolutionary strategy-a kind of abstract Warholism-although one
cannot see how it prepares the way for the triumph of proletarian culture. On
the other hand, weakening public trust in art may as easily pave the way for
fascist counterrevolution, for a mass culture in the service of totalitarian ideals.
Whatever the outcome of this strategy, one thing is certain: when an institution
as prestigious as the Museum of Modern Art invites sabotage, it becomes party,
not to the promulgation of experimental art, but to the passive acceptance of
disenchanted, demoralized artists' aggression against art greater than their
own. Once the Canon, the standard ofexcellence, the Museum seems prepared
to join the ranks of those who have decided cultural standards are no longer
worth defending, engaging in what amounts to a suicide pact of collaboration
with forces that would annihilate excellence, replacing the criteria of sustained
achievement with the transient overnight flash of meteoric Superstars.
