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Tag: Harold Rosenberg
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Behind the Times
This blog explores ideas around art and the times in which an artwork is created. It questions whether art must somehow, or for some reason, “keep up with the times” in order not to be “behind the times”. Next, the concept of time itself is touched on and whether artists can step outside of time or become timeless. In other words, can the process of creation transcend time?
Time’s Arrow
The assumption that artists must produce work that reflects the time in which they live is a widely accepted and unquestioned truism. This is part of the paradigm that, as time is moving forward, we must all keep in step, or that art, like technology, must progress. Otherwise, we may become “behind the times”, believed an undesirable place to be. This means that artists whose work is considered daring, cutting edge and contributing to a progressive understanding of art, are constantly supplanted by the next wave.
An example of this was enacted in a play produced many years ago called Red, by John Logan, directed by Kim Collier and performed at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre. It was one of the last main stage plays the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company performed before it closed in 2012. What a delight it was to see such great acting, dialogue, direction, & sets. Classical, full-on theatre such as this is scarce these days in Vancouver and elsewhere, as there seems to be less and less funding for the arts. Available performance space is increasingly devoted to “multi-media performances” with video, photography, sound (as opposed to music) and as much new media as possible, perhaps to appear contemporary & relevant to the Tweet generation. Not that Red didn’t use video & stills, but they were used in such a way that they didn’t clutter up the play unnecessarily.
Four Darks in Red, Mark Rothko, 1958 The play, taking place about 1968, foreshadows artist Mark Rothko‘s suicide in 1970. The visual metaphor is that of the colour black, symbolizing death & destruction, gradually engulfing the colour red, symbolizing life in all its beauty & horror. It was an apt penultimate play for an excellent theatre company about to be scrapped.
The play suggests that much of Rothko’s mental anguish was caused by his feeling of growing irrelevance as the art fashion of the day moved to Pop Art as defined by such artists as Roy Lichtenstein
Artists who follow their inner direction and volition with luck can find themselves on the crest of the latest fashion in art. Then, when the tide turns and brings the next wave of young artists, influenced by a new set of circumstances, the formerly fashionable artists are considered behind the times. As the critic Harold Rosenberg said, Rothko and his contemporaries tore down “…unlimited formal experimentation and parody and fragments of radical ideas” only to have their own ideas derided as egotistical and outdated by the next generation of artists.
The following is a quote that I wrote down without noting the source.” The rhetoric of isms and counter-isms has vexed the art world since the Second World War with new stylistic trends set up every few years to oppose whatever has become fashionable (postmodern succeeding modern, deconstruction succeeding that, and so on). The superficial theoretical pretensions of the various after-modern “schools” use cheap pronouncements cribbed from works of philosophy or literary theory. Art enjoys an oedipal energy in which creation is always destruction, usually of one’s most intimate influences.”
This Oedipal energy is as integral to art as it is to the culture of consumption. We are constantly reminded that we must have the newest, best, most fashionable and most cutting-edge of everything, from electronics, to hairdos, to art. God forfend that we should have last-year’s, let alone last decade’s, version of anything. More profoundly, this is a belief that we are moving ever-forward on a trajectory of constant improvement. In this view, we are ever-striving onward & upward toward social & individual perfectibility in which all wrong thinking & wrong acting will be eradicated. So the clunky cars of the 50,s, the horrendous politics of the 40’s, the economic errors of the ’20’s, the stultifying social mores of the 1900’s, and all the ignorance and pestilence that went before is being left ever-further behind us. And the more recent & contemporary the art movement, the more likely it is to be closer to the goal of full understanding and intelligence. It’s a view solidly ensnared in the belief that time’s arrow moves in only one direction – forward into the future and we must be constantly changing with it. The type, quality or direction of change is not important, as long as we are not left behind the times.
ARROW OF TIME, Vladimir Kush, (undated print) 10.5 x 21.5 Recent thinking is that time moves not only forward but also sideways (backwards is disputed). We are programmed (no doubt for our own sanity) to only perceive the forward motion of time, but it’s sideways mobility accounts for the frequently reported non-linear temporal events. This has implications for our attitude toward not only art but all human creative activities throughout time.
unattributed image. Anyone claims it let me know. 
Found on Quantum Art and Poetry by Nick Harvey. Transcending Time
An excellent website called Art History Unstuffed provides a meaty discussion of Abstract Expressionism. In the section called How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art: Abstract Expressionism and Meaning, the author, Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette, states that, “The Abstract Expressionist artists translated “meaning” from subject matter to the broader and deeper intent of the word. For these artists, “meaning” had to be profound and transcendent so that art could rise above the rather minor role it played during the Thirties as handmaiden to politics.” She sums up her section of this discussion on Abstract Expressionism by saying:
“With Abstract Expression the primary moral act is the decision to paint, followed by the question of what to paint at the time of the end of painting. In a world that has experienced an all engulfing war and a horrifying holocaust and a brilliant blast of annihilating light, painting becomes a moral activity, one of the last possible ethical gestures. Abstract Expressionism was an art of pure idea, considered to be sublime, even transcendent and thus reconnected with the early Romantic tradition of landscape painting in America. Nineteenth century American painting had sought God in Nature, but in a universe that had be denaturalized and had been scourged of God, the only transcendence or saving grace was art itself, the last refuge of godliness.”
On the one hand, this assumption appears to be the epitome of hubris – the idea that we can attain spiritual transcendence and godliness by playing with colour & form. And it suggests arrogance and egotism to assume that the arduous discipline necessary to find God, as taught by the world’s major religions over thousands of years, can be cheerfully circumvented by picking up a paintbrush and going at it.
On the other hand, as Barnett Newman said, “The artist expresses in a work of art an aesthetic idea which is innovate and eternal.” This idea captures the essence of abstraction as the artist seeks to remove all vestiges of identification with a particular place & time and creates a work that is universal. In this there is an element of spiritual transcendence and some abstract art could act as a bridge between the spiritual and the worldly. This appears to be the case for the Rothko Chapel, in Houston, Texas. As the magazine, Texas Monthly says: “To its devotees, the chapel is sublime: a darkened cosmos that facilitates powerful spiritual experiences. The space, which features fourteen dark paintings by Rothko, is famous for being dim and moody. It’s a sensory deprivation chamber that also functions as a theological deprivation chamber. Many customary signifiers of religion—statues, altars, stained glass—have been stripped away. It is, as Houston architectural historian Stephen Fox puts it, “a space that seems sacred for a post-religious world.””
Interior of the Rothko Chapel, Houston Texas.Interior of the Rothko Chapel, Houston Texas. Murals range from 134 7/8 in x 245 ¾ in to 180 in x 297 in. But transcendence in abstract painting is not easy to achieve, and much of it is either a substitute for the ability to draw and create realism, or is a lifeless copy of a fashionable abstract painting style.
Impact of a drop of water, a common analogy for Brahman and the Ātman. Photo by Sven Hoppe, 2005 But to imagine that one artistic approach, such as Abstract Expressionism, can replace the search for spiritual enlightenment is suspect, since some of the most brilliant artists found more solace in drugs or the bottle than in their work. For Mark Rothko, a successful career of creating powerful paintings was not enough to defeat despair. To imagine that we can replace God, however understood, with Art is like assuming we can replace the signpost for the road, or more accurately, the road for the destination. Art is a genuine bridge between the spiritual and the worldly, but not the only one, or the one that works for all artists. Art, like yoga, prayer and other disciplines can lead toward spirituality, but surely the guidance of tried & true religious practices is needed. Art alone is too amorphous.
Conclusion
If there is a point to this discussion, rather than just being a ramble about the mysteries of Art, it is this: art is not, and should not be, time bound. There is no overarching need for artists to be limited to expressing the fashions or paradigms of the culture of the time in which they live. Artists can work with what Wllette called, “an art of pure idea“, or can build on the best work of past eras, confident that time is elastic and art can transcend time. There is more on the topic of art and the time in another blog.
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This is not an Essay
This blog is part of an ongoing investigation into the visual arts, primarily painting, and with a side interest in why important public galleries feel obliged to exhibit work that alienates all but those initiated into the world of artspeak and arcane discourse. But trying to make sense of the art world is like trying to nail jelly to the wall – as soon as you think you’ve pegged it, a later re-think makes the whole thing slide. So this is not an essay because, as I often say, I’m not a scholar or an essayist, but a mere artist trying to make sense of the art world and my place in it.
So I look for ideas from writers that have tried to capture a sense of what is happening in and to the Western visual arts. This is a daunting challenge as it is impossible for anyone living in a period of time to stand outside of it and look objectively and from a future perspective to say that this or that phenomenon, philosophy or paradigm represents the times. Harold Rosenberg was just such as writer who tried to see where art was going in his time and what might be expected in the future.
Though written 50+ years ago, Rosenberg’s early 1970’s book on art criticism Harold Rosenberg was prescient. At first I was put off by his use of terms like “the artist is a man who…”, but I came to overlook his gender insensitivity. Rosenberg’s primary concern is that art, and he is primarily concerned with painting, is in danger of going over the edge that separates it from crafts, commercial design and the mass media. This concern no doubt grew out of the success of artists like Andy Warhol, a former commercial artist, who wholeheartedly embraced popular culture and commercial processes.
Marilyn Monroe, 1967, Andy Warhol, Printed by Aetna Silkscreen Products, Inc., NY What’s interesting about Rosenberg’s views, is that, though he is deeply immersed in the art world, he is not aware of the term, or the fact, of post-modernism. He is writing at a time of huge changes in attitudes toward art and he is documenting this change as it is taking place. Thus he is able to report on the transition between the philosophical endorsement of modernism that was widely accepted by the art establishment, and the shattering of this consensus through emerging artwork critiquing that philosophy.
In many ways, his writing was prescient as it can be said that art has since gone over the edge he described. But this jump was a conscious choice by the artists involved and made out of a sense of necessity. That felt necessity was to rebel against the commodification of art and the modernist illusion that the art object could meaningfully convey a response to a world that was capable of creating two devastating world wars and weapons of mass destruction. The jump was also motivated by photography that could record life much better that painting and had replaced it in many ways.,Instead of making irrelevant art for money, artists such as Marcel Duchamp were making art as criticism through parody, irony or subversion. Artists like Troy Emery continue that tradition today. though one has to question whether using parody, irony and subversion has become an avenue to sure commercial success. Whereas Duchamp only made one Fountain, like Jeff Koons, Emery makes dozens of pieces, with slight variations. He has fully embraced the post-modern acceptance of commercialization as a defensible and even central aspect of an art practice.
Marcel Duchamp Fountain, 1917, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz 
Woolly Woofter, 2013, Troy Emery, 62 x 45 x 37 cm 
Titi, 2004–09, Jeff Koons, High chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating. Perhaps one of the reasons that painting has been considered an outdated art form is that it is difficult to crank out paintings at an industrial/commercial scale. While it is accepted that sculptors will farm out the actual casting or fabrication of their artworks to artisans, there is no similar tolerance for painters. Sophisticated collectors of paintings expect it to have been the work of the artist that signs it, not a painting factory. Of course there were the screen prints of artists like Warhol, and currently there are Gicleé prints of paintings, and paintings that have clearly been mass-produced. But these never have, and likely never will, achieve the recognition and respect given to mass-produced sculptures.
Rosenberg’s primary concern was that painting would become commercial design and mass media, but this has not happened. Instead, it became somewhat irrelevant to the art establishment and by extension, the art market and many artists. Rosenberg’s insensitivity to gender issues reflects his lack of attention to other important issue that created the post-modern revolution. Though he touches on the fact that taste in art, especially modernist painting, was set by an elite made up of white, middle & upper class males. They in turn found they most admired the work of white, middle-class male artists, so that women & visible minorities were excluded from exhibitions & sales.
There were many other artists who did not accept that there were insurmountable problems with making artworks such as painting. For instance, Rosenberg suggests that “…if Miro had a “problem” it was how to reach a state of creation unhindered by problems”. And as Rosenberg says, many artists saw the only other alternative to be making art for oneself.”For Barnett Newman, painting was “…a way of practising the sublime, not communicating it
Others such as Piet Mondrian, believed that it was possible to “…conceive of a grand vision such as the salvation of the human race.. that could be expressed in paint.” He believed his work was a “plastic vision” that would help to set up ” …a new type of society composed of balance relationships”.
Mondrian was aware that his work could not speak for itself without a “new phase in human development” so he wrote statements and manifestos explaining his ideas. The irony, for Rosenberg, was that in contemporary art, the meaning of artworks is not in themselves, but in the personality of the artist, “…his ideas, his role, his pathos.” He saw with clarity that what would become post-modernism would replace ideas in art altogether.
Modernist painters wrestled with the issue of content and the reaction against using recognizable images. Rosenberg refers to “pre-formlist abstraction” as that which has an unmistakable subject but “…projects a content that is implicit in but not restricted to the marks on the canvas”.
Abstraction, Willem de Kooning,1949 – 1950, oil on canvas, 46 x 37 cm, In this approach, a painting “…comes into being through unanticipated responses to what is taking place on the canvas”, as Rosenberg describes the work of Joan Mitchell. Whatever has gone on before provides the clue & the motivation for the next move.
The “meaning and emotional intensity of Mitchell’s pictures] are produced structurally, as it were, by a whole series of oppositions: dense versus transparent strokes; gridded structure versus more chaotic, ad hoc construction; weight on the bottom of the canvas versus weight at the top; light versus dark; choppy versus continuous strokes; harmonious and clashing juxtapositions of hue – all are potent signs of meaning and feeling.”(1)
Joan Mitchell, Wood Wind, No Tuba, 1979, Oil on canvas, two panels, 9′ 2 1/4″ x 13 1 1/8″ Rosenberg describes these as pre-formalist modernist painters as differentiated from the formalists who conceived abstract art in terms of “…a grammar of dimensions, edges, and color relations”. Formalism also focused on eliminating metaphorical references, perhaps in reaction to what had become a cloying use of metaphors by some artists in earlier periods.
But the ultimate destination of this formalist direction were paintings that eliminated not only metaphor, but dimensions, edges, and colour relations as well, to become a flat plane of one colour. My question is, where’s the fun in that compared to Mitchells’ aim and method: to express delight at having been taken by surprise?
This is not an essay in that it does not attempt to wrap up an argument with a neat conclusion that summarizes previous rambles but is an ongoing exploration that can be continued in another post.
1) Nochlin, Linda (2002). “Joan Mitchell: A Rage to Paint”. In Livingston, Jane. The Paintings of Joan Mitchell. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. p. 55. ISBN 0520235703.
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Even more on Painting
This and other posts that discuss painting, more on painting and even more on painting, are an effort to understand how painting has become a suspect art form. How had it become assumed, among the cognoscenti, that painting has an irredeemable connection to everything that was wrong with art and society before the post-modern revolution? These blogs also explore the role of painting in the wider Western socio-political realm outside the arts. Modernist painting (and less so sculpture) has been singled out as representing the cultural sins of the current epoch and its repudiation was to be an expiation. However, radical changes in painting, how painting is defined and ways paintings are evaluated, have made no improvements to Western society. It could even be said that the current place of painting and other arts, is worse than at any time in history. This is because, in the last half-century, the culture of getting and spending has come to dominate most areas of life including painting and the arts. The commodification of the visual arts is such that it is now the second most lucrative area for investment after real estate and this has had a deleterious effect on Western culture.
The question is whether painting is relevant and can have an impact on the wider society, or whether it is an art form that is only about the painters’ connection to the painting and the viewer’s personal connection to the painting. Is it a passive art form or can it make the leap from canvas to galvanizing political action?
Paintings in History
In many periods of history, painting has played a powerful role as political propaganda. Earlier civilizations such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks and Romans used murals, bas-reliefs and sculptures to celebrate political triumphs and the power of the elites. This tradition continued through the 20th century with the commissioning of paintings and sculptures commemorating battles won and their victorious winners. As the last centuries’ winners have been outed as ruthless and immoral by any standards, there has been demands for removal of these sculptures and paintings from the public realm. So in that sense, paintings depicting the triumphs of ruthless men have had a strong political impact even in the present day.
Napoleon Crossing the Alps, oil on canvas, Jacques-Louis David, 1801. There have been powerful paintings that generated controversy and influenced public attitudes and even political outcomes that were not sanctioned by ruling elites. For example, the painting below, Raft of the Medusa, had scandalous political implications in France; the incompetent captain, who had gained the position because of connections to the Bourbon Restoration government, fought to save himself and senior officers while leaving the lower ranks to die, so Géricault’s picture of the raft and its inhabitants was greeted with hostility by the government. As Jake Hirsch-Allen says in his analysis, “the power of The Raft as a political tool of propaganda was immediately apparent and has been its most enduring historical facet. As the story of the Medusa became a cause célebré, embroiled in the complexities of
Bourbon-restoration politics and tensions between the Liberal and Royalist factions…and, as
events progressed, with the highly emotive subject of the slave trade, the Raft of the Medusa
itself became a symbol these debates.”Though Géricault’s painting was still part of in the heroic “history painting” style, this muscular work was transformative in re-defining the scope of painting’s subjects and impacts.
Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19, Théodore Géricault, oil on canvas, 4.91 x 7.16m The Impressionists
While Impressonists such as Claude Monet and Edouard Manet are not usually associated with shaping political attitudes, their work had influence. As art historian Nancy Locke said in transcripts of her talk to students at Penn State University, “By painting the homeless, for example, Manet depicted the social implications of poverty. Similarly, by painting scenes which blurred class lines (like many subjects of the Impressionist canvas), artists influenced shifts in society.”
The Ragpicker,1865-1870, Eduard Manet In his paper on Intersections of Art and Politics, John Kim Munholland, argues that Monet also communicated a strong political message, “The Rue Montorgueil, Celebration of June 30,1878 and its twin The Rue Saint-Denis, Celebration of June 30, 1878, in which the words “Vive la République” appear on a flag…blurred class differences with their patriotic, republican messages. Set in the streets of a popular quarter of Paris, they reminded viewers that the Commune uprising also had been an expression of outraged and frustrated nationalism among the people of Paris, who had held out against the Prussians during the siege, but had been forced to capitulate by the Versailles government.”
Rue Saint Denis, Fête du 30 Juin, 1878, Claude Monet Early-Modernism
The “history painters” and Impressionists sought to influence the direction of their societies through content, or depiction of their subjects. The modernists scorned content and expressed themselves only through form. For instance, Piet Mondrian, working during the appalling upheavals in Europe during the 1930’s & 40’s, believed that his work was a “plastic vision” that would help to set up ” …a new type of society composed of balanced relationships”.
According to the online Encyclopedia Britannica, Mondrian’s artistic direction was “Rooted in a strict puritan tradition of Dutch Calvinism and inspired by his theosophical beliefs, he continually strove for purity during his long career, a purity best explained by the double meaning of the Dutch word schoon, which means both “clean” and “beautiful.” Mondrian chose the strict and rigid language of straight line and pure colour to produce first of all an extreme purity, and on another level, a Utopia of superb clarity and force. When, in 1920, Mondrian dedicated Le Néo-plasticisme to “future men,” his dedication implied that art can be a guide to humanity, that it can move beyond depicting the casual, arbitrary facts of everyday appearance and substitute in its place a new, harmonious view of life. This kind of magical thinking is like a poignant glimmer of a previous era’s optimism about art and the human imagination. Mondrian’s philosophy could be thought of as self-indulgent navel-gazing, except for the fact that it produced these astounding works of art and revolutionized thinking about painting.
Modernism
From a twenty-first century perspective, the conviction that rigidly controlled lines and blocks of colour could contribute to world peace seemed laughable. Modernists, like the Minimalists who came after Mondrian, did not share his belief in the power of art to transform society. Like Frank Stella they had a reductionist approach to art, wanting only to demonstrate that every painting is “a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more”, and rejected the idea art as a means of expressing emotion. He summarized his apolitical and anti-social approach by saying, “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object… All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion…. What you see is what you see.“
So with Modernism, painting became what in another blog is described as “self-reflexive”, or concerned only about itself. This could be considered to be a political statement as it is in keeping with the growing individualism of the second half of the twentieth century. Ties to community were weakening and western governments pressured their citizens to become individualistic consumers to bolster the economy.
The drive for purity by Modernists like Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Kenneth Noland influenced, and was strongly influenced by, the thinking of the American art critic, Clement Greenberg. His theories could be said to have built on the ideas about purity that inspired Mondrian, but lacked the painter’s Calvinist & Theosophical zeal.
Frank Stella – The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II, 1959, Enamel paint on canvas, 91 x 133 in. Greenberg believed in progressively purifying painting of all representation and illusion and promoted the hard-edged and colour-field abstractions of his favourite artists. Mondrian believed that his painting would contribute to a more harmonious and peaceful world. The only rationale provided by the Modernists for cleansing away any spatial depth or sculptural qualities in painting, was that it is ridiculous to try to create spatial illusions on a flat surface. Modernists did not feel that art should play a role in the larger world, but believed in “art for art’s sake”. The rise of a consumer culture and the commodification of art during this period was not a concern.
Post-Modernism
The Postmodernists were more aware of consumerism and the emerging role of the art market but the movement tried to neutralize it by absorbing it. Postmodernists reversed the Modernist contempt for popular culture, the mass media and mass consumerism and looked for inspiration in the everyday. In his blog The Postmodern Revolution, David Adams comments that this approach “…seemed much more vital than modernist art. (See for example fig. 7, which also suggests the revival of painting that took place).”
Adams goes on to say, “…postmodernism refers to the end of an epistemologically centered philosophy based on the efforts of a knowing subject to know truth by achieving a true mental representation of objective reality (the Cartesian subject-object dualism). It argues (among many other things) that there is no temporally invariant truth since human understanding is always historically-based (or “contingent”).
Post-modern relativism, which has been discussed in other blogs, was a direct outgrowth of the individualist and anti-social introspection of the Modernist era. In this approach, not only does painting have no relation to anything outside itself, it assumes that there is nothing outside itself that is true – only what a particular individual might happen to believe. This brings us to the present day where relativism is widely held and could be called the dominant paradigm. Part of this paradigm is that there can be no possibility of an authoritative assessment of artistic worth or quality as everything is only relative. Anyone’s taste in art is equal to anyone else’s as there are no absolute or even conventionally accepted criteria. Into this moral and authoritative vacuum, the market has taken on the role that used to be held by what used to be called experts on art.
The Market Monster
In a culture of getting and spending where there are no other standards for gauging excellence in art, the marketplace is the logical arbiter. A painting is worthwhile if it can obtain a high price. A previous post, On Theories of Art, suggested that objective assessments of art are difficult to attain because art is about feelings rather than reason, but feels the need to be justified by some form of reason other than marketability. As in all aspects of life in a capitalist society, the market has skewed relations between artists and their work and between artists and viewers.Though written in 1975, Harold Rosenberg’s Art on the Edge, contains many ideas that remain highly relevant. Rosenberg calls the influence of the marketplace on the direction of contemporary art “…a process of transformation whose end is not in sight” (p.8) and over 40 years later, this transformation continues to mutate. For an artist, alternatives to the market are either art-as-criticism, (parody, irony, subversion) or making art for oneself. The irony is that ironic, subversive, parodies of art have been absorbed by the establishment so that they happily sponsor shows that are opposed to them. “To create the illusion of an adversary force, everything that has been overthrown must be overthrown again and again”. (p.90)
This relates to a discussion in the previous post describing the current epoch as not a changing culture but a culture of change. The ideology of constant change has, like the end of history, eliminated real change. It will not be possible to rescue art from the market’s perverse influences through renunciation of artistic sins that went before. And it is naive to believe that one art form or another can have an effect on a pervasive economic system that manipulates every aspect of life.
The Contemporary Era
As I am an artist not a scholar, this is a necessarily brief and sketchy overview of the social and political influence of the visual arts, especially painting, over the last 100 years. I have divided art history into three major art movements: Pre-Modernism, Modernism and Post Modernism. These divisions are only visible from historical perspective and the current era is made up of many disparate schools such as Post-Post-Modernism, Anti-Art, Conceptual Art, Site Specific Art, Installation Art, etc. Their commonality is the assumption that easel painting is dead, or at least irrelevant. But as I have argued here, jettisoning easel painting and conventional concepts of aesthetics, has done nothing to bring greater harmony or halt the commodification of art. Western societies teeter on the brink of instability and the art market continues to go from strength to strength. As I update this blog in April of 2024, I include the latest figures for the art market in 2023 from Artsy:
“The art market experienced a down year in 2023. Total sales in the art market fell by 4% year over year to $65 billion. The figure represents the lowest since the COVID-blighted year of 2020, but is still higher than pre-pandemic levels when sales were $64.4 billion”.
However, their good news for art market was:
“Most dealers and auction houses expect stable or improving sales in 2024, and those predicting lower sales were in the minority both for their own businesses and with their peers.“
This is not the Utopian, harmonious culture that Mondrian hoped to bring about through an extreme purity, superb clarity and force in painting. The modernists and post-modernist that followed, and the elimination of aesthetics and painterly painting they endorsed, have been happily absorbed by the market. So where does this leave contemporary art and artists? This is a topic for future blogs about even more on painting.
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What is Good Art?
I’m always looking for readable theories on what is good art as opposed to non-art, mediocre art or art that is not worth talking about. So I’ve been reading the third in a series from the Routledge & University College, Cork, called Doubt, by Richard Shiff. This book is also discussed in another blog .Though it’s a critique of critics, it has interesting ideas for me as an artist. Referring primarily to painting, Shiff suggests that interpretation has replaced an understanding of the painting itself – what he call the “materiality” of the artwork.
text interpreting the textual artwork “High Price” by Ron Terada. But the focus of his discussion is the perceived conflict between absolutism and relativism, though he does not frame it in these terms. He begins with the concept of identity – something that many contemporary artists find of interest. But in the face of all the other crises and disasters in the world today, identity may not merit the attention it is given. Shiff explains that this concept is more than what is commonly referred to as “identity politics” and encompasses a wider philosophical issue.
This wider definition of identity has to do with an understanding of the self. Is the self a constant, or is it situational, differing according to outside stimuli? This difference is described as one between the “temporalized” self and “all-at-onceness”. He believes the assumption of the “temporalized” self is the crux of the post-modern approach to criticism. Because their critiques are based on this assumption, Shiff describes the lengths critics go to avoid the extremes of absolutism and relativism. This is achieved by, for instance, providing criticism as a subjective exercise of simply giving the critic’s personal views.
He also attempts to address how this dichotomy has influenced the post-modern approach to art-making. For instance, he uses the example of the artist Robert Irwin, who refused to have photographic representations of his work made as they would set up a duality by “explaining one thing in terms of another”.
Robert Irwin: Scrim Veil, 2013—Black Rectangle—Natural Light
This duality or “self-difference” (where the self differs from itself) is what Shiff assumes artists must struggle to avoid. He suggests that the goal is to “resist the gap between reason & emotion, mind & body, identity by name & identity by feeling”.
Some would argue that self-differing is an aspect of the human condition, and that it is impossible to attain any “all-at-onceness” that suspends the temporal dimension. And many in the secular West would say that religion is not the remedy. To post-modernists for whom there are no absolutes and everything is relative, religion is a remedy that worked in the middle ages, but is irrelevant to materialistic contemporary society.
So it is left to artists and critics to explain how to overcome “self-differing” or the condition where there is no integration between mind & body, body & self, self & consciousness. The results are sometimes elegant but tortured thinking about why artists make art, what the higher meaning of art should be, what artists should be creating, what is important and so on.
This is not to disparage the role of art criticism, and, as discussed in another blog, Harold Rosenberg’s early 1970’s book on art criticsm Art on the Edge makes a good case for it’s importance. Rosenberg argues that artists, critics, writers and thinkers need to be working toward over-arching theories to explain what is good art and what differentiates good from bad. Otherwise, he says, it will be left to the market to decide.
But in the field of art criticism there seems to be uncertainty about the legitimacy of developing theories. In other fields, it is accepted that the critic avoids accusations of subjectivity, absolutism or relativism by stating values, assumptions and objectives at the outset, carrying out a review and presenting the findings. Some would say that this type of objectivity is unattainable in art criticism because art is about feelings rather than reason. But theoreticians in every field likely have strong feelings about their subject that do not deter them from stating their views.
As Rosenberg says, someone needs to develop an over-arching theory as to what is good art and what is not. Otherwise the market happily decides and Western culture declines. It’s a challenge that few contemporary art critics seem willing to accept. Where is someone with the self-confidence of a Clement Greenberg, but a more rigorous and rational approach?
