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Tag: relativism
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Identity and Neo-Liberalism
This post continues the exploration of the philosophical currents that shape current art practices, in this case the issue of identity and Neo-Liberalism.
A previous post, More on Painting, touched on the issue of identity, in terms of “self-differing”, or the self as a collection of “innumerable configurations of personality and emotion” as opposed to an “all-at-oneness”. This is a more esoteric aspect of identity than what has become known as “identity politics” in which various groups who define themselves by gender, sexual orientation, or level of ability, rightly demand greater recognition, respect and a share in social benefits.
While these demands warrant attention & positive societal action, the issue of identity and its implications for art has become a confusing areas for artists and critics in the post-modern era. The issue has ballooned into something out of all proportion to its importance as a focus for the arts. While in its original form, the exploration of identity presented some social challenges and critical philosophical questions, it has become an ideology with all the attendant dangers of wildly popular but poorly understood ideas.
The first victim in the art world, especially with regard to painting, has been an understanding of self. As I understand it, the idea of self-differing, or the self as a collection of personal and emotional reactions, is a re-stating of the relativist philosophy that Socrates opposed.
A marble head of Socrates in the Louvre c. 470 BC The Sophists believed that “you can never step into the same river twice” because every moment is different and there are no constants. They extrapolated from this that, because there are no constants, there can be no right or wrong, so every person should act in their own interests. Today’s neo-liberals are the modern version of this thinking.
Socrates countered this with a belief in ethical virtue as something that should be aspired to and is immutable, permanent and unchanging. As such he was the father of absolutism that continues in today’s religious traditions and other groups with unswerving beliefs in moral absolutes.
A definition of the self as a collection of “innumerable configurations of personality and emotion” is a pillar of post-modernism and revives the sophistry that Socrates opposed. A widely accepted modern version of sophistry has facilitated imposition of the Neo-Liberal agenda which has been accompanied by the rise of “identity politics”. While having no wish to detract from the justified demands for equality made by disempowered and disadvantaged groups, the cost of identity politics has been a fragmentation of what might otherwise have been a unified opposition to unfettered capitalism. The popularity of a relativist perspective and fragmentation through identification with smaller minority groups may be responsible for low voting numbers and a general lack of participation in organized political groups, especially among younger voters (or non-voters).
The relation between identity politics and relativism is described by writer Ian McEwan in his novel, Nutshell. He describes the young as “…on the march, angry at times , but mostly needful of authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. …I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close…I’ll feel, therefore I’ll be. Let poverty go begging and climate change braise in hell. Social justice can drown in ink. I’ll be an activist of the emotions….My identity will be my precious, my only true possession, my access to the only truth.” This captures the naïveté of identity politics and suggests why it has been nurtured and embraced by neo-liberals.
In the visual art world, more so than most, the primacy of identity has had a schizophrenic effect. On one side, artists who create large, grand or durable artworks are suspected of egotism. This potent charge has encouraged a generation of artists who ensure that their works are small and self-effacing, or if not small, constructed of recycled waste products. In this view large paintings are a throwback to the modernist era when gigantic artistic egos created giant canvases.
The flip side of the current obsession with identity in the visual arts is the unprecedented importance placed on the personality of the artist rather than the artworks themselves. Artists are brands, marketed on the strength of name recognition, rather than artistic excellence.
Nutshell: McEwan, Ian, Vintage Publishing, London, 2017
Titi, 2004–09, Jeff Koons, High chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating. Who can judge excellence in a world without right or wrong, good or bad? The last absolutist critic to have any influence, Clement Greenberg, based his judgments of excellence on his own good taste, rather than any more fulsome philosophical rationale. Having been discredited in accordance with the current relativist world view, along with the modernist artists he championed, the market has become the final arbiter.
That we have become a culture of change, rather than a changing culture also lends itself to the neo-liberal agenda. Where the only constant is change, it has become the only absolute and almost a religion. The most damning accusation that can be levelled against those who oppose any change is that they are “afraid of change”. Thus changes, no matter how harmful or ill-advised, are protected from critiques and in every election, all parties claim, “it’s time for a change!” as though it were an ethical virtue. But the change brought about by victorious Western political parties has been an intensification of Business-As-Usual policies that enrich some and impoverish an increasing number of people and the natural world. The climate change crisis can be directly linked to the policies of parties calling for change, such as the two Canadian examples, below.
In conclusion, the effect of identity politics has been to make most people in Western cultures more aware of, and tolerant of, differences. However, the melding of Identity and Neo-Liberalism has been used by elites to deflect attention from pressing issues of environmental degradation and economic disparities. In the arts, the focus on identity has encouraged a self-reflexive culture, where art is all about itself rather than a mastery of the medium and its aesthetic potential, which has contributed toward commercialization and stunting of Western culture. While contemporary art products can be whimsical, clever and highly original, they lack commitment. Much of what we see is unconnected to the artist’s soul, expressing ideas mainly from the busy, market-oriented mind.
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Anti-Art
Since the 1970’s, painting has been declared dead, defunct and irrelevant. This blog explores the anti-art (school? movement? philosophy? fad?) phenomenon and likely reasons for antipathy to art, especially painting and in particular, painterly aesthetics.
As a place to start this exploration, we can use the 2017 Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition called Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting. A review by Robin Laurence titled, “Entangled shows contemporary Canadian painting is alive and well” said the painters exhibited, “found ingenious and sometimes revisionist ways of revitalizing the object and justifying their medium”. But the paintings, such as the those shown below, uniformly rejected the notion that beauty has any role to play in painting. As this show was designed to represent the cutting edge of contemporary painting in Vancouver, why was it so clearly adverse to aesthetics? Is this anti-art or simply a redefinition of art, especially painting, as a discipline that must eschew aesthetics in order to be contemporary?
Sandra Meigs, horse tack 2013, acrylic on canvas 
Sandra Meigs, pile by furnace, 2013 acrylic on canvas While Laurence’s review agreed that painting is considered a dead art form, he describes the painters of Entangled as not entirely convinced of its demise. “Human beings, after all, had been applying pigment to receptive surfaces for tens of thousands of years.”
Why do painters continue to paint if the medium has been declared “dead, defunct, or worse, irrelevant”? One good reason was given by Gamlin, the maker of oil paints who describe painting as the most complicated, all-encompassing, and rewarding experience, “because painting requires us to see, think, feel, and perform complicated physical tasks all at the same time, striving for something meaningful, striving to make order out of the very raw material that is oil colors” and because painting makes the painter “feel so good to be so alive.”
Clearly other art forms offer the same experience, which is why artists persist despite a general lack of pecuniary benefits and worldly disinterest. In his book, The Blue Guitar, John Banville‘s goal is not narrative but “linguistic beauty …pursued as an end in itself “. In one passage, he describes what happens to the painter protagonist as he “…sank steadily deeper into the depths of the painted surface, the world’s prattle would retreat like an ebbing tide, leaving me at the centre of a great hollow stillness…In it I would seem suspended at once entranced and quick with awareness, alive to the faintest nuance, the subtlest play of pigment, line and form”. Banville hints that in much of writing or painting this state of hyper-awareness eludes us. “How treacherous language is, more slippery even than paint.”
So why was there so little attention to visual beauty …pursued as an end in itself, in the Entangled show? No artist wants their work to be irrelevant, so the works shown were largely concerned with challenging modernist ideas of aesthetics rather than breaking new painterly ground, with the possible exception of a few works such as this one:
The primary goal of most of the exhibition’s painters appeared to be to challenge the idea of paintings as objects of beauty, value or egotism. While clever and in some cases original, many, if not most, paid no attention to visual beauty …pursued as an end in itself.
Some, like the piece to the right are a replay of ideas that have been done many times over the last half-century. Such works reflect the dominant art paradigm in which emotions or any feelings other than amused irony are part of an outdated modernist sensibility and strictly renounced.
So why has visual beauty, pursued as an end in itself, become an unacceptable pursuit for a self-respecting contemporary artist? And is the Anti-Art movement a logical culmination of the antipathy to aesthetics? The following investigates a number of very good reasons why aesthetics and art itself have become suspect.
1) Looks Good Over the Couch
The most obvious reason for disavowing aesthetics in painting is its use as decoration. Paintings are generally chosen not for their technical skill or visual discoveries but because they complement the decor. Painters at the beginning of their careers often strive for stereotypically beautiful paintings of landscapes, bunches of flowers, nubile nudes etc.
Those who persevere realize that beauty is a snare and a delusion – the more a painter strives for beauty in a familiar form that has been portrayed by other artists and recognized as such, the farther s/he gets from it. Those who make a profession of creating “beautiful” paintings that look good over the couch never set out on the life-long journey to scale painting’s insurmountable cliffs, at the top of which is another insurmountable cliff and so on.
2) Artwork as Investment
The second most obvious reason is that paintings exemplify the commodification of art. As in this article in the Huffington Post the wealthy looking for safe investments are advised to buy real estate and artworks, especially paintings.“The art market rebounded quickly after the last recession, faster than traditional investments. High net worth individuals (HNWI) with a portfolio diversified into art assets were not as greatly affected. Additionally, rather than investing in stocks or bonds, art provides investors with an alternative, tangible opportunity.”
They are not, of course, buying paintings they like, but works attached to a highly valued brand (aka artist). Artists have always had to deal with the philistinism of the market, but there has likely never been a period in history when the art market, with its focus solely on profit, has so dominated artistic production and public understanding of the value of art.
3) Art & Big Egos
In the contemporary visual art world there is the belief is that artists who create large, grand or durable artworks are egotists. To avoid this damning charge, a generation of artists has been careful to ensure that their works are small, self-effacing, unserious and/or constructed of waste products.
Yu Qiucheng, The Re-painterly Nature of Found Objects, 
Takashi Murakami (photo by Maria Ponce Berre Large paintings are viewed as a throwback to the modernist era when gigantic artistic egos created giant canvases.
In an attempt to democratize art, especially painting, the post-modernists discarded distinctions between “high” and “low” art. Into this aesthetic vacuum stepped the phenomenon of the artist as personality and the unprecedented importance placed by the market on the personality of the artist rather than the artworks themselves.
Artists such as Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami, are not so much artists as brands marketed on the strength of name recognition.
4) Relativism
An offshoot of identity politics has been a revival of the relativist philosophy that Socrates opposed. Socrates believed that virtue was something that should be aspired to and is immutable, permanent and unchanging – a moral absolute.
His antagonists, the Sophists, did “not offer true knowledge, but only an opinion of things” and held a relativistic view on cognition and knowledge. In a relativist universe where there is no right and wrong or standards of excellence, every person can only act in their own interests and neo-liberalism is the modern version of this thinking.
The implication of relativism for the arts has been that, since Clement Greenberg, no one feels they can say whether an artwork is good or bad, or even if an object can rightly be called art. Who can judge excellence in a world without right or wrong, good or bad? So for contemporary artists it is safer not produce something that clearly strives for excellence but to produce works that abjure technical skill and aesthetics .
5) Truth is Beauty & Beauty Truth
Our culture and its tools have changed more in the past 30 years than in the previous 1900, so that it is no longer a changing culture but a culture of change. It is a culture where change has attained a god-like status of inevitability and determinism.In this philosophical climate, there is no potential for art to reveal truths as there can be no absolute truths , so what is the point of art? If painting is not metaphysical or about making money or beautiful objects to please the bourgeoisie, it can only be an in-your-face repudiation of all pretentious, presumptuous, egotistical aims and a reminder of all that is wrong with society. Thus contemporary artists produce works that eschew aesthetics.
Joseph Kosuth, ‘Clock (One and Five) 6) Art & Gentrification
A new argument against aesthetics, art & culture has surfaced that goes a long way toward explaining the hostility to art and the rise of an anti-art sensibility. This argument appeared in an article by Dorothy Woodend in the online journal The Tyee.The article states, “Beauty doesn’t need any help. How about we fight for ugly?” This statement is odd because, after 30 years of exploitative, poorly planned, free-for-all growth, beauty in Vancouver has been effectively expunged. However, Woodend was referring to a PR campaign by one of the more neighbourhood-unfriendly developers in the city. They are running a marketing bonanza under the guise of an art exhibition featuring giant pink billboards, transit ads, posters and pink cars emblazoned with the words “Fight for Beauty” that are currently everywhere.
This PR campaign highlights a debate about art & culture that is gaining momentum in all cities where housing is an international commodity, locals are displaced and artists who remain are forced to scramble for studio space and affordable housing. The displacement is a result of gentrification where local governments allow the demolition of affordable dwellings and their replacement with unaffordable condos. In the cities where this is taking place, activists rightly term it class war as the less wealthy are replaced by higher-income earners.
The Mainlander One of the tools local governments and developers use to create acceptance of this process has been termed art washing. The Vancouver Mural Festival amply demonstrated this approach. In the same way that condominium marketing campaigns re-purpose words like “community” and “regeneration” to sell boxes of air, art is used to divert attention away from the gentrification and displacement taking place. As Woodend says, “..it is difficult not to lose respect for the very idea of art itself”.
All those pretty murals, full of blandishments like “The Present is a Gift” were a quick way for the city to run with a branding scheme for neighbourhoods in a way that ultimately served the interests of developers, realtors, and property owners – stakeholders the then ruling municipal party, Vision Vancouver is beholden to more than working class residents who live in these areas.
Ironically, given Vancouver Mural Festival’s message of improving neighbourhoods and communities, their flagship mural, titled “The Present is a Gift,” adorns The Belvedere and its painting was the catalyst that began the renoviction process of the dozens of artists who lived in the building some for over the last 30 years.
Conclusion
The reasons above provide convincing arguments for contemporary painters to eschew painterly aesthetics. Painting has been commercialized and successful painters are entrepreneurs. The connection between art & gentrification overshadows all other concerns about the arts as it is a scourge in every major city in the world. This issue warrants further exploration and research.
However, the nagging question remains – why anti-art? The commercialized consumer culture touches every aspect of contemporary society from food to games, so why have visual artists felt their disciplines must not search for visual beauty, “pursued as an end in itself “? Clearly this question deserves further study so I have continued the discussion in my next blog.
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Postmodernism, Now What?
Along with many others, I have written several blogs on modernism and postmodernism, what defines them and differentiates them in an ongoing effort to make sense of the relevance of art and artists in current Western culture. This blog asks, having made the transition to postmodernism, now what?
I’ve revisited a New York Times article about Hilton Kramer, who died at age 84. As the New York Times stated: “Mr. Kramer made it his mission to uphold the high standards of Modernism. In often withering prose, he made life miserable for curators and museum directors who, in his opinion, let down the side by exhibiting trendy or fashionably political art.”
The Whitney Museum of American Art, in particular, felt the full force of his scorn every time it raised the curtain on a new biennial, whose roster generally favoured installation, video and performance art, usually with a political message and an emphasis on gender and ethnic identity.
Mr. Kramer would have none of it. “The Whitney curatorial staff has amply demonstrated its weakness for funky, kinky, kitschy claptrap in recent years,” he wrote in a review of the 1975 Biennial, “and there is the inevitable abundance of this rubbish in the current show.”
Two years later, he threw his hands up in despair. The biennials, he wrote, “seem to be governed by a positive hostility toward — a really visceral distaste for — anything that might conceivably engage the eye in a significant or pleasurable visual experience.”
Mr. Kramer was impassioned in his praise when art met his high expectations. He was a high Modernist, but he embraced a rather diverse lot that ran the gamut from Richard Pousette-Dart to Matisse to the Russian Constructivists.
‘Symphony No 1, The Transcendental’, oil on canvas, Richard Pousette-Dart,1941-42 
“No. 5”, Jackson Pollock, 1948 
“Woman with a Hat”, Henri Matisse, 1905 
Lyubov Popova, “Air + Man+ Space”, 1912 He could surprise. Julian Schnabel, precisely the sort of artist one would have expected him to eviscerate, won qualified praise.
St. Francis in Ecstasy, 1980, Julian Schnabel, 96” by 84”, oil, plates, wood putty And the work of the highly eccentric Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum.
“Early Morning”, Odd Nerdrum, oil on canvas, 206cm x 175.5cm I too consider myself a Modernist and an advocate for mastering technique in an era of novelty art, video and installations. However, where I differ from Kramer is in scorning art with a political message. Indeed, I’ve argued that art SHOULD be political. By this I mean art should come from an internal source of values, assumptions and beliefs that serve as a moral rudder. This doesn’t mean it can be kitchy or amateurish. For arguments supporting the role of politics in art, see my blog on abstract art.
But where Kramer & others are misled is in characterizing the current worship of “funky, kinky, kitschy claptrap” as “political” rather than the result of a profound philosophical shift in thinking over the past half-century. This shift has been described under the catch-all phrase “postmodernism“, but in fact, the values, beliefs & assumptions of this perspective have been around for millennia. In previous centuries, this philosophical approach has been called “Relativism”.
Wikipedia defines Relativism as the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration. The term often refers to truth relativism, which is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture . Wikipedia describes the Sophists as the founding fathers of relativism in the 5th century BC. The thinking of the Sophists is mainly known through their opponents, Plato and Socrates. In a well known paraphrased dialogue with Socrates, Protagoras said: “What is true for you is true for you, and what is true for me is true for me.”
Sophistry has been around for 2500 years and its current incarnation, called postmodernism, extends the idea of truth to any assumption of expertise. In the arts, this has meant the end of the “artist as seer” or the popular perception of the artist as an individual somehow uniquely blessed with talent. In the postmodern world, it is the idea rather than the execution that is important and everyone can have ideas even if they are not able to express them with technical expertise and a highly developed sense of aesthetics.
Postmodernism has instigated its own cultural revolution and like revolutionaries everywhere, the targets of revenge are images that represent the ancien régime. As the Christians did to statues of ancient Greek gods; as the Protestants did to Catholic religious icons; and as the Chinese Cultural Revolutionaries and later the Taliban did to Statues of Buddha; adherents of postmodernism have metaphorically smashed the noses off earlier artistic and aesthetic values. And just as the former experts in every field were vilified & made to wear dunce caps s during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, so the experts in every field in the West have been discredited by the Postmodern Cultural Revolution.
three young Chinese Red Guards from the Cultural Revolution. The book’s title is Máo Zédōng. Just as in China there was a perceived need to tear down the established order, so in the West there was a perceived need to destroy an art establishment rife with race, class, gender & sexual biases. A quick net surf reveals the following snippets that indicate the continuing existence of an art establishment that defends against outsiders. For instance, Wikipedia includes an article by writer Jennifer Weiner who has been a vocal critic of the male bias in the publishing industry and the media, alleging that books by male authors are better received than those written by women, that is, reviewed more often and more highly praised by critics.
In addition to the exclusionary tendency inherent in it, Modernism, had its basis in Enlightenment beliefs in the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation. At the core of the Enlightenment was a faith in human progress toward a higher level of civilization . For instance Spinoza, felt that through the application of Enlightenment thinking, human society could achieve “democracy; racial and sexual equality; individual liberty of lifestyle; full freedom of thought, expression, and the press; eradication of religious authority from the legislative process and education; and full separation of church and state“.
After two world wars, economic depression, the rise of fascism, totalitarian regimes and the eclipse of democracy by capitalist oligarchies the optimistic views of Modernism were abandoned. Many described Modern Art as the institutionalized purview of an established elite so that modernism lost its appeal to progressive thinkers. This transition is described in detail in the first chapter, Typologies & Twists, of the the book, Modern Art Despite Modernism, by Robert Storr, published in 2000 by The Museum of Modern Art.
In the 1960s the anti-modernist movements began to take shape and pave the way for the emergence of postmodernism. Thus postmodernism evolved as an antidote to an established elite and institutionalized bias against those of the wrong gender, race, class or sexual orientation. In some ways the postmodernist critique has furthered its aim of widening the definition of who could make art that would be seen. However, this has come at a cost of quality control. Now everybody is an artist.
I ran across this quote in The Walrus magazine by Adam Gopnik, a bestselling New York writer, as saying, “My work at this point is about the longing for modernity in a postmodern world.” He said he is moving on to the larger, humanist, even spiritual themes and that much of his recent writing is driven by a need to find meaning and purpose within a radically secular world, to find powerful and grounding symbols of order. His current writing is about “finding a sense of home and rootedness and meaning in a fragmented postmodern world.”
Postmodernism has done a disservice to Western culture through its lack of any point of view, moral or otherwise, or even the assumption that an artist should have a point of view. This has led to the current culture of ethical & intellectual fragmentation. The postmodern revolution was a necessary step in freeing Western culture from the iron grip of an institutionalized elite. But once that grip has been slackened, the next step in any revolution is one of re-building. And this is the step that we are not seeing in contemporary Western art, as the imperative to be outrageous, shocking, irreverent or irrelevant continues to hold sway. Now the difficult role for artists is to find a sense of rootedness and meaning in a fragmented, postmodern world. Having made the transition to postmodernism, now what?
