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PARTISAN REVIEW
art. Also, there is much more fashionable art. Fashionable
contemporary art is the most visible. new art, the most exhibited,
discussed, and reproduced.
It
is the most expensive new art,
dominating the auctions as well as the shows and acquisitions of
most of the museums that deal with contemporary art.
It
dominates
the literature on recent art, and the salons, the official survey shows
of contemporary art such as the famous Paris salon of the nine–
teenth century. Today, the salons are the Whitney Biennial, the
Documenta, the Hayward Annual, the Venice Biennial, the Sao Paulo
Biennial, the Carnegie International, the Rosc, and phenomena like
the "Zeitgeist" show held recently in Berlin. What we see in the
salons is what the professional audience (critics and curators) thinks
is important, and this audience, or at least the great majority of it, is
just like most
of
the nonprOfessional audience: it likes fashionable
new art best. Sometimes good new work does get into the salons, but
it never amounts to more than a tiny minority of the work exhibited.
Fads and fashions prevail.
The most successful salon art-the most fashionable of
fashionable art-always makes a big assertion and is offered as a
candidate for "important" or "serious" art, but it inevitably be–
comes a period piece when things get sorted out. A period piece is
mainly of sentimental appeal and charm.
It
has "historical
interest." At the opposite pole from the period piece is the
masterpiece, the great work by the great artist. No one would ever
call a great Rembrandt or a great Cezanne a period piece, but we
experience the typical pictures of Rosa Bonheur, Bouguereau, and
Alma Tadema, salon stars of the late nineteenth century, prima'Nly
as period pieces. They don't transcend their time, but succumb to it,
and we're amused. But as art, as personal expression, a Bouguereau
is banal and obvious. Indeed, its sheer obviousness is exactly what
made it so popular in its time, and what makes it "camp" today.
Jasper Johns's famous paintings of targets and American flags
are typical of today's successful salon art. Like Bouguereau's
pictures, they are painfully obvious in their conception and lifeless in
their handling, drawing, and color. Artistically, aJohns is very like a
Bouguereau; it has only a different period look. The Bouguereau
wants you to associate it with the old masters like Raphael, while the
Johns is abstractly up to date. Today's fashionable art wants to look
modern, and
modern
here means recent abstract art. Our salon art is
a popularization and vulgarization of the best recent abstract art,
just as in the nineteenth century salon art was a popularization and
vulgarization of Renaissance and baroque art. Salon stars like Johns
