Back to the drawing board

After delivering a lecture at Yale a few years ago, art historian and critic Donald Kuspit strolled through the university’s art studios, as is his habit when traveling, to see what students were up to. One encounter that day summed it up:

“I went into the studio of a young woman and asked to see her work,” he recalls. “She said: ‘I have no work. I’ll show you a tape of my professors criticizing me for not working. That’s my work. They came to my studio and asked me why I wasn’t doing anything. But I said: “I am doing something. I’m filming you.” ’ “

Get Kuspit started, the way he was before a packed house at Hermosa Beach’s Gallery C recently, and he’ll give example after example of what he calls “the end of art.” The cover of his newest book, by that title, bears a photograph of an ashtray filled with cigarette butts. It’s not just an emblem of something used up and snuffed out but another illustration of Kuspit’s claim that too much contemporary art merely throws the banality of everyday life right back at us, unexamined, untransformed. The image is by British artist Damien Hirst, who made art world headlines and elicited rest-of-the-world chuckles in 2001 when a janitor swept one of his installations of deliberately strewn debris into the trash.

“Making art,” Kuspit grumbles in his book, “has become a case of putting on the emperor’s new clothing and getting away with it -- calling raw life interesting art and convincing people that it is.”

Kuspit, 69, is not a straggly-bearded outsider wandering barefoot with a sign proclaiming that the end is near. He’s a tweedy-looking professor of art history and philosophy (State University of New York at Stony Brook) with a handful of doctorates to his name and more than 30 books to his credit (“The Rebirth of Painting in the Late 20th Century” and “Psychostrategies of Avant-Garde Art” among them) proclaiming that the end is here.

Art, he says, has become a decadent farce. He cites work such as Hirst’s and the episode with the Yale student as persuasive proof. This kind of “postaesthetic art” -- art that repudiates beauty, that takes its inspiration from the street rather than the studio, from popular culture rather than the unconscious -- demands to be taken on faith. Its dominance now, he asserts, is evidence that the contemporary art scene functions like a cult. Whether Kuspit fancies himself a deprogrammer or the authoritative leader of an opposing sect is a matter of interpretation.

Some hail his literate rants against the status quo as brave.

“I think it’s a really important corrective,” comments artist Ruth Weisberg, dean of the school of fine arts at USC and one of a dozen or so artists singled out for praise in Kuspit’s book and included in a Gallery C show that Kuspit curated. “The art world gets extremely self-involved and sometimes loses a wider perspective, both human and art historical. [Kuspit’s argument] is healthy and provocative in a good way.”

Others laugh at Kuspit’s psychoanalysis-steeped traditionalism.

“You mean there’s another end-of-art book out there?” scoffs Dave Hickey, a teacher, curator and critic. “He should write about the end of Freud. That’s more likely to happen sooner. Donald’s crazed.”

Kuspit’s views on where we are, art-wise, how we got here and especially on where we ought to go from here are passionately declamatory and usually spicily defamatory too. Tossing them into conversation ensures a lively joust. They highlight divisions that already exist within the art world, though people who hear him out don’t necessarily fall neatly along party lines. Even some who dismiss Kuspit’s conclusions find themselves agreeing with some of his premises, especially his assertion that postmodernism has played itself out.

“I’m in agreement with him that things are kind of boring right now,” says Hickey, who teaches writing at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and is a guest professor and curator at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles this year. “How could you disagree with that? You know how army ants sometimes go around and around in a circle until they all die? I think we may be in that situation.”

Architects of the end

Kuspit points to Marcel Duchamp as the original leader of this suicide brigade. His “readymades,” common objects such as bottle-drying racks and urinals taken out of their functional context and presented as found sculpture, dissolved the difference between art and nonart. That difference is crucial, according to Kuspit. Without it, the whole relationship between artist, artwork and spectator turns farcical. Owing to Duchamp, the act of making art shifted away from the hand to rest entirely in the mind. Duchamp discredited and undermined the aesthetic. His doing so, Kuspit writes, was “a triumph of destructiveness that has corrupted twentieth century creativity.”

After Duchamp, in Kuspit’s chronology of culprits, comes Allan Kaprow. His “happenings” of the late 1950s and early ‘60s launched the broader practice of performance art, kin to conceptual art and embodiment of the belief that life is superior to art -- or as Kaprow has written, “nonart is more art than Art art.” Kaprow’s influence has been damaging, Kuspit says. He wrote “some very important essays about what he called ‘postart’ and the ‘unartist.’ Very brilliant mind, but wrongheaded. Postart blurs the boundaries between art and life, to the detriment of the aesthetic. His position is that if you look in the mirror and brush your teeth in the right way, it’s art.”

Artists from the ‘70s to the present have been schooled more in the basics of conceptual thought and theory than in the fundamentals of drawing and painting.

So here we are, in the early 21st century, reaping the harvest of Duchamp’s and Kaprow’s legacies -- mopping up the dead ants.

If modern art was characterized by a sense of breakthrough and experimentation, postmodern art, laments Kuspit, is its exhausted aftermath. It’s all about irony, apathy and disillusionment. It has become all business and entertainment. He longs for artists who have a profound faith in art, who see it as a lofty calling rather than a cynical career.

“It sounds like he’s having an old-fogy response,” says Lynn Zelevansky, curator and head of the modern and contemporary art department at the L.A. County Museum of Art. “It’s still very, very hard to be an artist, and you couldn’t sustain that without believing in it. It’s still a very hard life. The only reason to do it is because you have to.”

Of Kuspit’s position, she adds, “One gets to a point when one’s no longer in sync with the culture, when one’s out of touch with today’s younger culture-makers. For some people that happens before they’re 40, for others, not till they’re 70. We all have to be careful about that. I’m sure in [Kuspit’s] youth, there were older people telling him that the art he believed in was the emperor’s new clothes.”

If, as Kuspit claims, art has been trivialized, how can it be reinvested with meaning and potency? By dealing with the beautiful and the important, he says. “Coleridge said that what the artist is about is finding the moment of transcendence in the everyday, the moment of the lyrical in what looks banal.”

In his book, Kuspit names a number of artists he thinks defy postaesthetic art’s rampant cleverness, among them Jenny Saville, April Gornik, Lucian Freud and Julie Heffernan. He credits them with helping to restore humanism to art and reaffirming the value of technical skill. He’s dubbed them “New Old Masters” for their synthesis of critical sensibility with traditional training.

Kuspit has also identified two dozen “New Old Masters” working in California and gathered their work -- mostly painting, drawing and prints -- in a show at Gallery C. The selection includes Dan McCleary’s contemplative portraits, Sandow Birk’s contemporary history paintings, Weisberg’s fusion of art history and lived experience, Marc Trujillo’s distilled urban scenes, Robert Schwartz’s allegories, Masami Teraoka’s updates on Japanese woodblock prints, the late James Doolin’s Southern California landscapes, Enjeong Noh’s figurative scenes, Guy Diehl’s still lifes in homage to earlier artists, and more.

Kuspit flew in from New York for the opening in late January and lectured to the standing-room-only crowd about how this art is “the new frontier of innovation and artistic thoughtfulness.”

Ron Rizk, whose meticulously painted narrative still lifes are in the show, heard Kuspit speak. “It takes a lot of guts to say some of the things he’s saying. Major writers and critics are not very likely to say that figurative art or representational art is still a main force in painting.”

Of the “New Old Master” designation, however, Rizk says: “I think it’s absurd. I’m not dead.” Regretfully, he says, the title just gives reinforcement to those who would indict work like that in the show as old-fashioned.

Indeed, Kuspit’s endorsement of traditional academic skills doesn’t convince everyone.

“I’m all in favor of people knowing how to do what they do,” Hickey says, “but whenever people talk about returning to art, they’re talking about going back to drawing from casts. I think that’s corny.” As for the “New Old Masters’ ” fusion of traditional skills and critical sensibility, Hickey finds it self-evident. “It’s my opinion that most professional artists have that.”

Counters Kuspit: “I’ve gotten a fair number of letters from artists saying they’re very glad I’ve said what I’ve said. Often they’re young people who want the skills. Some students think they’re being sold short. They want to work from the model.”

Kuspit laments that younger artists don’t know how to master a medium, but perhaps, says LACMA’s Zelevansky, he’s defining his media too narrowly. “Maybe they know other things that he doesn’t know. Knowing how to draw is a kind of intelligence; you can’t dismiss that. But on the other hand, the world has changed a lot, and young people today have skills and abilities that are different, with computers and other things, and that will be its own technique eventually.”

Kuspit savors the contradiction in his role as well-amplified voice in the wilderness. It comes as no surprise to him that the kind of work he’s championing is not on the top of many museum curators’ “must see” lists.

“Our art scene is supposed to be so innovative, but it’s an inertial system with vested interests,” he says. “It’s not so open. Curators and museum directors are on the avant-garde treadmill. It used to be that avant-garde art was outsider art. Now it’s insider art.”

All the more reason for artists such as F. Scott Hess, whose emotionally charged paintings are in the Gallery C show, to be grateful for Kuspit’s attention. “LACMA and [the Museum of Contemporary Art] are not going to look at this stuff unless they get some sort of impetus from outside of L.A. When Kuspit talks, people are going to listen. It’s not as if he’s approaching art in a light way or is trying to score political points. He’s coming to this art after looking for so long.

“The strength of the work is that it connects with human beings in a very direct way. It’s not ironic. It’s meant in a quite sincere fashion, and that’s maybe what he responds to. He’s sick of the cheap joke. These are people nailing their hearts to the wall, and that takes some courage.”

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‘California New Old Masters’

Where: Gallery C, 1225 Hermosa Ave., Hermosa Beach

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays and until 8 p.m. Thursdays; noon to 5 p.m. Sundays; closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Ends: March 26

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 798-0102

Contact Ollman at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.