Art in 20th Century Has Always Been ‘Shock of the New’

New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani punishes the Brooklyn Museum of Art for offending his sensibilities, and suddenly players on all sides take up their scripts in one of the longest-running drama of the century. Politicians fulminate, picketers demonstrate, the courts brace for suits, cultural institutions close ranks and we all mouth our perennial lines. After more than a decade of culture wars, how is it possible that the play is good for another run?

Virtually every masterpiece of 20th-century art began as a social outrage, a moral and representational transgression that shocked both the senses and the sensibilities of “ordinary, right-thinking people,” or at least the officials who purported to represent them. James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” a landmark in modernist literature, was also a landmark in U.S. pornography law, as was D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in Britain. In the 1910s, Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” caused rioting in the streets of Paris, though eventually Walt Disney built an animated classic around it. Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” continues to be banned and vilified, though its prestige as a literary achievement could not be higher. And in the recent round of culture battles, Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe carried photography into the realm of triumphant scandal, “bad” pictures, maybe, but pictures officially protected as art. Now the “Sensation” exhibition has become the newest battle front.

As a work that was once greeted with horror becomes a centerpiece of 20th-century high culture, an emotional amnesia sets in that makes it hard to understand what all the fuss was about. The speed with which shock becomes acceptance can in itself be shocking, and it is not surprising that art experts, bombarded by assaultive art on a daily basis, are beyond shock altogether.

But it is by no means the case that art has always dished out this “tough beauty.” “Throughout virtually all recorded history, the makers of high culture were fully integrated into their society,” writes the historian Peter Gay. “Then, toward the end of

the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, this tacit, durable cultural compact was radically subverted . . . Painters, composers and the rest formed avant-gardes to fight lively and implacable pleasure wars in which they confronted the dominant, hopelessly conventional middle class with all the energy at their command.”

We might add to this picture Immanuel Kant’s hugely influential definition of the judgment of beauty as a state of “disinterested interest.” Any art in which an appeal is made to the audience’s self-interest--an art of allure, of pleasure, of charm, of satisfaction--subverts the aesthetic transcendence required for the judgment of beauty, this suspension from our interested being-in-the-world. The 18th-century Kant cast his shadow over the whole subsequent history of aesthetics, and as normal experience became synonymous with middle-class consumerism, 20th-century artists expressed their “purity” either by withdrawing from everyday experience into abstraction or by subjecting everyday interests to violent disdain. The Dadaist Tristan Tsara wrote in 1918, for example, that “every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada.” The offensiveness, the absurdity are intentional. How can you propel people out of a world of getting-and-spending without putting an aesthetic gun to their heads?

After a century and more of such tactics, we are now at a point where we believe that art is confrontational by definition. When the Brooklyn Museum facetiously issued a warning that some works in the “Sensation” exhibition might cause “shock, vomiting and confusion,” it, in effect, warned us that it was showing 20th-century art.

In such a mind-set, an art that engenders trust, optimism and comfort would be hopelessly retrograde. That is why so much 20th-century art seems ugly, offering a tough beauty meant to challenge our desire for peace and pleasure. The logic of the “Sensation” show is typical in this respect: We live in a culture of sensation and sensationalism, in which we thrive on a steady diet of shock and scandal and sensory stimulation, the meaning of which we do not examine. Wars, the clash of cultures and cataclysmic disasters are the standard fare of the evening news, watched at the dinner table with no apparent digestive strain. But when artists portray these same phenomena, some people are outraged, and rather than thinking about the problems art poses, they attack it for posing them indigestably. Artists might be excused for a little self-righteous glee at this response.

But here we come to the reason why the culture wars can reach no armistice. They are based on a fault line in the fabric of democracy. For a religious or ideological fundamentalist (an extremist Catholic or Jew or Muslim or communist or feminist or white supremacist or black nationalist, along with a whole lot of other good people), symbols have direct efficacy in the world. To desecrate a symbol in words or images is to damage what the symbol represents. Tolerating this damage goes against not only fundamentalists’ allegiances but against their understanding of how symbols operate. Civility and good taste are meant to forestall this problem, but since artists have defined themselves as uncivil for the past two centuries, art frequently rubs fundamentalists’ noses in their split allegiance as believers and citizens.

In contrast, for nonfundamentalists, symbols and actions are distinct. One can say anything, however outrageous, and not effect any change in the world by the act of speaking. Of course, people could act on these meanings, but if they did, their actions would be their own responsibility. Exposed to all the meanings that float about in a democracy governed by 1st Amendment freedoms, people may base their actions on a vast choice of ideas. As often as not, the authors of those ideas may have had very different responses in mind when they launched those meanings.

The middle classes have been trained to accept their humiliation in avant-garde art as a condition of the very freedoms, ironically, that permit individualism and the accumulation of wealth. But that does not mean they wish to pay for art that insults them. This fact provides an opening for a delicate alliance of bourgeois and fundamentalist opinion: the claim that taxpayers’ money should not be used to exhibit art that taxpayers would find offensive.

This is a piece of consumerist logic that requires the conjuring up of “the people’s taste,” almost always without corroborating evidence. Moreover, it is an argument deployed capriciously, since no politician would argue that pacifists’ tax dollars should not be spent on weapons, isolationists’ on foreign wars or (outside of Kansas) creationists’ on the teaching of evolution. Giuliani is betting that consumerism will trump the 1st Amendment over the issue of public support of the arts, allowing freedom of speech to be punished as a violation of alleged freedom of consumer choice.

It might seem, then, that the culture wars will never be resolved, since they arise from irresolvable problems. Freedom of expression postulates the separation of symbols and acts, and fundamentalists cannot accept this separation; the 1st Amendment protects freedom of expression, but taxpayers can elect candidates who spend their money on institutions that exhibit only inoffensive art. Though the dialectic of shock, assimilation and new shock may thus seem inescapable, many people, even proponents of artistic freedoms, are getting fed up.

Art can do a great deal more than make us flinch, even some of the works in “Sensation.” For example, Rachel Whiteread’s “Untitled (One-Hundred Spaces),” is a roomful of sculptures molded in colorful, translucent resin from the underside of furniture. By turning empty spaces into solid shapes and repeating them in ranks and files, Whiteread stimulates our thinking about volume, seriality and containment--and produces a beautiful, whimsical panorama.

Works such as this do not make for scandalous headlines, but they answer to a hunger for beauty and calm thought that will eventually push us beyond the knee-jerk skirmishes of the culture wars. We should fight to preserve the right of institutions to choose their exhibitions without government interference; but a new page is being turned in the history of art, away from the purity and sterility of antibourgeois aesthetics and toward the exploration and enhancement of our being in the world. It should be possible, in art as in life, to experience both freedom and pleasure. *