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PARTISAN REVIEW
pIes to the reductive absolutes of minimal art. Since the cultural
disturbances of 1968, European mentors like Joseph Beuys,
whose political art has always had expressionist and nationalist
leanings, have become increasingly important sources of signifi–
cation for younger artists. As with romantic art, neoexpression–
ism and its attendant sensationalism issue from a combative atti–
tude towards waning classicisms, and so admit of all that is in–
clusive, instinctual, and excessive.
In our postmodern milieu, sensationalism has flourished by
researching its own tradition. We do not normally consider sensa–
tionalism traditional, but, as in romanticism, it is apparent that
this enduring value is quite revered. Moreover, it permeates our
cultural history and successive interpretations of that history, and
in some sense attempts to reconcile our past, whose attitudes and
achievements we admire, with our present, which looks askance
at its own record of cultural homage to the past in neologisms of
styles that are today's embarrassment. Why sensationalism is
again in ascendency may then be explained by the artist's peren–
nial search for stylistic identity in a history of style saturated with
modes of being. Artists who reject minimalism's formalist and
futurist outlook but believe they cannot repeat the past, only re–
conceive it, may, for instance, insist that the romantic notion of
childhood innocence as the wellspring of creativity cannot
be
ap–
proached except through its displacement: through childishness
or punk adolescence, perversions, so to speak, of the original val–
ue, to capture the unruliness of creativity before it settles into art
and artifact. Meanwhile, they intend that their perversity or ex–
cess be read esthetically, not as the inadvertent by-product of
artistic inexperience.
Indeed, the spontaneity that sensation implies in sensation–
al painting is in increasing competition with a self-conscious ap–
proach to style. Thanks to the semiotic glorification of the repro–
duction and the copy, and to the postmodernist conflation of
styles garnered from the past, artists can now calculate their im–
purity quite subtly. Again, in a kind of reflex action against mini–
malism, but also because many persuasive cases have been made
on its behalf, postmodernism has convinced many observers that
it can borrow from tradition and recuperate the past in a timeless
present, stocked not with transcendent memory but with rote
