KENWORTH MOFFETT
261
Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, or Agnes Martin. (Ad
Reinhardt belongs here too.) Compared with the works of our best
abstract artists, the works of these salon abstractionists are coarse
and brittle parodies, pedantic expositions of the obvious . But the
insistently simplistic is characteristic of successful salon art; this is
what makes it so visible-and recognizable-to today's art audience.
Taste for the trends took shape in the late fifties and early sixties
and now dominates the contemporary art scene .
It
is part of the
expansion of the audience for modern art that began at that time.
It
was the time when historical modern, the modern art of the
pre-World War II period, became blue chip, and the time when the
abstract expressionist generation was first recognized by the art
establishment here and abroad . As earlier modern art became
popular, so did American contemporary. Thirty years ago New York
had only five or six galleries that regularly showed contemporary
art; today it has nearly two hundred. The number of museum
exhibitions, periodicals, and college courses devoted to contempo–
rary art increased
geomet~ically
during this same period. The huge
new audience is very broad and unsophisticated .
It
wants easy
excitement and obvious kinds of activity and diversity. Serious mod–
ern art (art that takes itself seriously) comes in relatively small
quantities and develops over generations; it can't hope to satisfy an
audience that wants so much so fast. The result is a " middlebrow"
modern art, a popularized version that has an obvious kind of
variety and that moves quickly.
Of course, it is a wonderful thing that so many more people are
now open to the art of their own time .
It
stands to reason that any
broadening of interest into a highly sophisticated area of culture like
ambitious painting and sculpture would initially result in a decline
of standards. Our middlebrow modern may turn out to be a
necessary stage in the acceptance of abstraction. But once people
develop a taste for our best contemporary art, today's salon modern
is pretty hard to take .
It
looks like a terrible decline of taste. Was the
salon art of the nineteenth century as bad as today's salon modern?
Probably not. Craft and tradition guarantee a certain level of qual–
ity. Now anything goes, so long as it is "in." Never has fashionable
art been so amateurish and dilettantish.
This is not to say that today's salon art doesn't have its small
merits and minor triumphs just as nineteenth-century salon art did.
At its best, pop art is lighthearted decoration, more at home in a
disco or a chic hair salon than in an art museum. As pictorial art, the
prints of pop artists like Rauschenberg, Johns, Dine, Oldenburg,
