A World Beyond Cherished Concepts

Twentieth century art has taken a pretty wild ride. At the beginning was the stunning rise of abstraction, followed closely by the cheeky contradictions of anti-art. At the end, a global Conceptualism has emerged--an art oriented toward ideas rather than objects that is encountered not just in Europe and the United States, the way early abstraction was, but also in the work of artists around the globe.

The millennial emergence of global Conceptual art has many causes, but two related ones are less than sanguine. One set the very stage for the century now drawing to a close, while the other has pretty much defined it.

The 20th century was preceded by the destruction of a lot of long-standing art traditions that once flourished independently of one another around the world. To cite two familiar ones: An array of formerly vigorous pre-Columbian art traditions virtually disappeared in the wake of Cortez and Pizarro, while westward expansion at the end of the last century largely destroyed North American tribal art.

By clearing the field, historical imperialism has thus done its share in bringing about conditions hospitable for millennial artistic homogeneity. Still, nothing has been more decisive than the second cause, which is the galloping triumph of technology. The evolution of high-tech society virtually defines the unfolding of the 20th century, but its ramifications will largely play out in the 21st.

High-tech society is important to art for many reasons, not least because it has transformed (and is still transforming) our way of seeing. One example is the extraordinary public popularity today of Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings.

In 1875 or 1890 the general public had scant affection for either one. They saw Monets and Van Goghs in a different way than we do today.

Following on the grimy and disruptive heels of the Industrial Revolution, which set the modern technological shift into high gear, artists began to depict its extreme opposite--a serene and light-filled world of harmony and leisure, played out among the flower-filled fields of a supposedly untrammeled nature. Impressionist and Postimpressionist art was radically different from the church- and state-sponsored art that had come before, and it was thus highly controversial in its day. Now that the Industrial Revolution has been usurped by an electronic one, these paintings provide a most comforting form of pictorial nostalgia.

Another example of the way high-tech society has driven transformations in our way of seeing is the late-century appearance of astounding prices paid for artworks--of $40-million pieces of cloth smeared with oily pigment. Super prices, once rare, are now common. Their ubiquity has even helped fuel an explosive market for lesser collectibles, vigorously touted on myriad public broadcasting and cable television shows, in which “old stuff” once consigned to the attic is now carefully examined and consigned to the auction house.

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Diminished supply and increased demand are the immediate explanation for super prices. Yet, as historian of art collecting Joseph Alsop noted almost two decades ago, the huge sums more profoundly reflect the progressive and rapid disappearance of the mark of the human hand from the things human beings need for use and ornament--from their clothes, kitchens, buildings and other circumstances of daily life. The public fascination with exquisitely made high fashion, bought in couture houses by few but followed in mass media by millions, or the home-craft empire built by Martha Stewart, are related phenomena.

“As the mark of the human hand has grown rarer and rarer,” Alsop observed, “this vivifying mark has come to be more and more cherished, and more and more for itself alone.” It’s no accident that the paintings of Rembrandt and Monet, Van Gogh and Picasso, cherished by the mass public and the rarefied art market alike, are also distinguished from much other art by the extreme emphasis they place on the human mark of the artist’s hand.

Twentieth century art has been by turns amazing, disheartening, ludicrous and sublime, but its millennial moment is certainly a peculiar one. If you’re packing an art bag for next year’s trip to the 21st century, be sure to take along the following 20th century ideas, issues and unresolved problems. Some are questions, requiring further consideration. Others are more along the lines of commitments--once made, they’re best not broken. In either case it would be a shame if they got lost in the shuffle.

Notice that specific works of art have been purposefully left off the following list. Since great works have a way of sticking around on their own, both shaping and responding to changes in our way of seeing, I’m fully confident that most of the truly compelling art of the 20th century will calmly meet us on the other side. So, in no particular order, here are a variety of things worth bringing into the next millennium:

Art is experience.

Although ideas and objects are important, art is neither an idea (as is the currently fashionable assertion) nor an autonomous object (as the claim once was). American Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, whose 1934 book “Art as Experience” remains the major 20th century American philosophical work on aesthetics, understood the crux of the matter: Art’s causes might be fascinating and useful to know about, but in the end, art’s consequences are more important.

Culture is nice, art is better.

Culture and art are not the same thing. (Even art-poor societies have a culture.) The end-of-century encroachment in universities of something called “visual studies” on what has hitherto been known simply as visual art is one symptom of the common confusion. Keep an eye out for others.

Cheap rents in urban settings are necessary to art.

Cities that price young artists out of habitable space choke off the influx of creative blood, which is essential to a healthy civic art life. Manhattan boasts a robust marketplace for art, but one reason it’s on the wane as a center for the production of lively new art is that disaffected kids who choose to go there end up huddling together in Brooklyn and Queens, where they divert energy toward figuring out how to get across the East River. One reason Los Angeles continues to rise as an artistic production center is that disaffected kids from all over just move here and make art. Cheap(er) living makes it possible.

The United States might be the only superpower left in the world today, but civilization eludes us.

Why is that?

Art requires public funding, although we certainly have yet to figure out many appropriate and functional ways to do it.

The governments of every major civilization in world history, without exception and regardless of type, have always been principal patrons for the art of their time. For American democracy to refuse to recognize that irrefutable fact is simply youthful arrogance. Maybe one place to begin is by no longer thinking in terms of public subsidy, and starting to think in terms of public patronage. Subsidy means to make a grant to private enterprise for public benefit. Patronage is more direct: Buying the work of artists is itself a public benefit.

Commerce is not art’s enemy.

Commerce is a form of social intercourse. So is art. “Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics” (1992), by legendary independent scholar Jane Jacobs, unties the tangled knot.

Quit trying to revive either the avant-garde or the counterculture.

Both had their uses earlier in the century, and some remarkable art certainly came out of their struggles. But binary cultural systems finally can’t escape the divisiveness that results from pitting us against them. Polymorphous culture, on the other hand, which recognizes the simultaneous legitimacy of a wide variety of possibilities, is far more engaging, surprising, mysterious and politically hopeful. It’s also a heck of a lot more fun.