WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARTS?
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almost fell to the floor. I thought then, and I may still think, that it was
the most beautiful painting I had ever seen, that was ever made.
It
is evident that quality, the very quest for quality, is under siege. The
word
beautiful
is considered something for the wealthy, the elite, who
can afford the leisure to develop taste. Hence it is capitalistic, imperial–
istic, elitist, and one risks being called a fascist for seeking excellence
and having pleasure in the beautiful.
It
simply isn't democratic.
It
attacks the modern perception of equality, diversity, multiculturalism,
and God knows what else. We are all, they tell us, we all should be, must
be, in the same box.
I come now to the question of "What Happened to the Arts?" the
topic of this panel. Thanks to a commingling of conceptualists, decon–
structionists, feminists, and the scourge of political correctness, the
Philistines, as Arlene Croce once said, rather famously, have now become
the artists. All that formerly was unacceptable is now celebrated. Some
examples: Gilbert and George, a playful British couple, exhibited pho–
tographs of two months of their feces. Wait, it gets worse. The event was
celebrated at the prestigious Royal Academy in London. Impatient
crowds encircled the Academy, not to tear the place down, but to get
inside and see what Gilbert and George had come out with. Abomina–
tions are the order of the day. Like the Roman circuses of old, the pub–
lic must be fed its daily outrage. Daniel Kunitz in a recent review in
The
New Criterion
writes, "Of course we now know that, with notable
exceptions [I wish he'd named them], the artistic mindset of the latter
half of the twentieth century was dominated not by Greenberg but by
Duchamp." Greenberg is out, because he stood for quality in art and had
the temerity to point and say, "This painting is better than that one."
Marcel Duchamp is at one and the same time the Che of postmod–
ernism and its Bouguereau, the celebrated and fashionable French painter
in the Paris of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Duchamp came to
the public's attention in the famous Armory Show where he exhibited a
sculpture, a urinal signed R. Mutt, which pointed the way, in more recent
years, to Andres Serrano's
Piss Christ,
a photograph of a crucifix in a bot–
tle of the artist's own special urine. Andy Warhol had already been cele–
brated for inventing what he called his "piss paintings." I need not
describe the technique. At least Bouguereau had some talent for painting.
Granted, Duchamp's urinal could rightly be termed a sculpture.
It
had volume; one could traverse it. But is it a good sculpture by any aes–
thetic measure? Of course not. It's low art, which was Duchamp's point.
It's anti-art, meant to sneer at taste, high art, and aesthetic quality.
