Kenworth Moffett
ABSTRACT ART
AND MIDDLEBROW MODERN
New art is always hard to see at first. In general, the
newer it is, the less likelihood of its being rightly seen. It's just too
unfamiliar. To become familiar it needs exposure and to be focused
on. But this can't happen right away because a more available and
fashionable contemporary art attracts the art world's attention . This
has been true throughout the entire modern period . Until the
eighteenth century, the audience interested in art was usually part of
a small, cultivated, upper-class elite, and it usually liked the best art
of its time. Exceptions were rare. The "fashionable" usually
coincided with the best . Abbot Suger, who built Saint Denis and
created the Gothic style , knew where to get the very best. So did
Julius II and Urban VIII and Lorenzo de Medici .
But then art was thrown onto the open market; its audience
became anonymous and much bigger. This changed audience has
tended to like .the fashionable
to the exclusion
of the best. Sometimes
the best work receives attention and sometimes it sells moderately
well, but it rarely becomes fashionable until it has been around for
years. For it to be truly valued-to be recognized as the achievement
it is-the merely fashionable or popular contemporary art that
accompanies it must be reduced to its proper proportions . The
major personalities have to be distinguished from the merely
fashionable ones (Cezanne rather than Rosa Bonheur) . For this to
happen, the audience must attain the distance to be able to tell the
really new from the merely fashionable. By then , however, new
fashions have come along to obscure the best of the newest
contemporary art. So the audience, or at least the overwhelming
majority of it, is always behind , and this seems to be a permanent
situation. It has already been with us for more than one hundred
fifty years . This audience liked Carlos Duran , Cabannel, and
Bonnet instead of Monet, Renoir, and Degas .
It
liked Henri Martin
instead of Henri Matisse , Ben Shahn instead of Jackson Pollock,
Henry Moore instead of David Smith. Modern audiences never
seem to get it right when it comes to contemporary art.
Fashionable art , then , crowds out and obscures the best .
Fashionable art is simpler and more familiar than genuinely new
